It was the summer of 1990. I had just completed school and was at Faridabad with Rohit Shorey when we decided to come to Delhi for a quick visit. We hopped on to the Parikarma Express, the green local trains which connected suburbs to Delhi. Seeing the seats taken we decided to sit in the door.

Parikarma Express has wide doors, to ease the movement of passengers. They stop often and passengers embark and disembark at a quick pace between the numerous stations such a train touches. We sat down holding the firm bar between us, our legs, knee downwards, dangling from the train. We were chatting animatedly. There are so many things adolescents talk about. Hazrat Nizamuddin Station was approaching. We could see it at a distance. The train was slowing down.

Suddenly, we felt a hand on our necks. I could see the fingers on Rohit’s neck. I felt one gripping my collar too. We tried to turn, but could not. The grip was strong. Then it tugged, pulled us so hard that we both fell into the train. We brushed ourselves, checked our purses, and stood up to confront who had humiliated us. It was one man who had pulled both of us. He was tall and very well built. Guess a pehelwan, wrestler.

The train was stopping. When we confronted him, he only said, ‘Look.’ We wanted to punch him on his face but we looked. The platform was not more than four inches from where we were sitting. The Railways had started raising the heights of platforms on its stations. While we recovered the man got down and walked away. He had saved our legs. They would have been crushed that day.

Standing on Varkala beach in Kerala, which is a couple of meters above sea level, one can see far into the sea. A couple of kilometres that are normally not visible from a beach which is at the level of the sea’s surface. When I stood there I felt I was seeing huge pages of a grand book, nature’s, and the waves were the inscriptions written on it. As the water changed form with the winds and the sun and moon’s gravitational forces, I felt words were changing form on the pages of the sea.

The more I work with words, the more I feel how they are like wrinkles on a fine sheet of cloth. Words are the beginning and end of the tools a writer or a novelist has at his disposal. The writer can make the words stand up, swirl, form myriad patterns, or dissolve. Unlike film-makers who can use visuals and sound, all a writer can use is words. Those words too are at the mercy of the reader. It can be argued that if a piece of writing is good the reader will continue reading. Still it is not the equivalent of sitting in a dark hall with a big screen in front, all your attention on it.

Yes, the best movies are based on well written scripts but here we are talking about the way a work of art works on our senses. One can make bold and underline words, use exclamation marks, but that is of little use. Someone once reviewing a technical manual for me said, ‘If everything is a note, then nothing is important any longer.’ We have a tendency to put notes and tips and important in such manuals. Like we put space, and drop letters, and embellish dialogue, and give second or third level titles to regular prose.

The basics remain: it is words, only words that make up writing. It is within these words that one has to create effect.

For instance, take Jose Saramago’s Seeing. He does not even put quotation marks for dialogue. Yet, when you read about the rain on polling day, you cannot escape feeling the overwhelming sense of water everywhere. Insidious.

A section of words is like a fabric. Like a painting. Like a piece of music. Like a sea, or a desert. They are all flat, two dimensional. In them the undulations come from making the elements respond to what you want to say, cover and expose, show, and make heard. That is how you develop the third dimension, through the variations you create through what lies in between the two dimensions.

Take the reader deep into the waters or sand-scapes and then jolt them through the structures you lay for them. Never too much that they lose interest, never too little that they are not affected. It is a thin fabric – Jhini Chadariya. Tie it up such that it wards off the cold and keeps the reader warm through a experience of their own sensitivity.

A while back I wrote a review of Sam’s Story by Elmo Jayawardena. It has appeared, shortened, in a recent update of the Businessworld website. Towards the middle of the page here …

I also saw the full review here.

Taking advantage of the internet, I am posting the full review:

A poignant story from war torn Sri Lanka

What I liked most Sam’s Story is the point of view and the ease with which the book flows. The book is in first person and Sam’s voice resonates throughout the book. I read Elmo Jayawardena’s book with curiosity because I have not read much fiction from Sri Lanka. I wanted to learn more about the place where one of the longest wars in history has just got over. The war in the northern peninsula is central to the story, but more than that, what the book highlights is the poverty that plagues its people and how the people are exploited in different ways by war mongers, the rich people.

Something is not quite right with Sam. It is either his inability to study at school, or to remember things, or to communicate, and be coherent to the world. These are the reasons why the world thinks he is stupid and is either merciless towards him or patronizing. Yet, Sam can think, he can make sense, he does connect the dots, only he does not know how to express his understanding.

I never could figure out why people asked me so many
questions. Maybe they thought I knew all the answers to life.
… I think people like to ask questions. I don’t mind that so much.
But why pick on me? I don’t like questions. For as long as I can
remember, it has been this way with me. My life has always been
simple. No questions, no answers. Just take it as it comes. I have
never looked for answers in life. What’s the point?
… No, I have never worried about knowing what the answers
were. Maybe that is why I do not like questions.

Assuming, from the book’s acknowledgement, that Sam is real, Jayawardena lends voice to Sam’s experience in a region torn by war for fifteen years. Through wry humour and an ability to focus on the immediate situation of the victims of war and greed, Jayawardena tells the story of how the war ravages the common people.

The book has hardly any dialogue and is mostly Sam’s interior monologue. The story starts with Sam landing at the master’s house (Big boss), encountering the River House, befriending the people there, especially the master’s son and dog, hating the cook for he is not only ugly but is also from the other side – whose people are fighting with Sam’s people – and ends with a tragic incident in the master’s family. In between the story goes back to Sam’s village, his earlier appointment near Colombo, and how he got his name.

Unlike Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Sam tells the story not only of his present but also his past, seamlessly moving through the time zones. The book is located in two locations: the River House and Sam’s village, and a little bit in Colombo. They are not one and the other to each other. In both Sam is marginalised, in both he knows only the periphery of the happenings, in neither place does he ponder deep on the situations because he is sketched as someone who can’t, in none of these places does he find any chance of betterment of his life. The past lends fullness to Sam’s character. When we learn of how Sam came home from school to tell tall stories about sweets he ate when he got only wrappers, how his mother took care of the six of them, how the elections promised them everything but gave them nothing, how Sam lost his friend Piya in the floods, we understand that Sam comes from an unrelenting harsh place. One of Sam’s brothers dies in the war, the other deserts the army. Like Mother Courage, for Sam’s mother it is only the loss of her children. When the country becomes poor, Sam says:

It was beyond me to understand what this no-money business
was all about. I knew what it was like to be poor. Back in the
village we had always been poor. My whole family was full of
poverty experts. I mean we had been like that our entire life
and we knew a lot about what it was like to be really poor.
We ate poor, we slept poor and we lived poor. We certainly
knew what it meant to be dirt poor.

The understated voice and tone of the book uplift it, leaving the reader with knowledge of a place and its people who remain resilient in the face of horror. Jayawardena also achieves this by infusing a simple hope in Sam, which in some ways survives his harsh life. Sam strength comes from his living in the here and now, and unflinchingly calling a spade a spade.

The strength of the book is also its slight weakness. When Sam is created as such and the book talks of his experience in first person, the writer is left with no scope to pad the story with insight into the events, or provide a larger picture. That makes the book a loosely episodic, series of occurrences of Sam’s life in Northern Sri Lanka, but does not give the reader a plot or a link to answers of questions that the book raises. Our narrator is incapable of looking beyond his circumstances, we are forever stuck with his eyes, but he can connect the dots.

There were always so many stories about how the war was going.
I heard this talk whenever I went to the market. About them
winning and us winning, news like that. Sometimes there were
more details. Some road taken and some town lost and some
boats sunk or some aerobblane brought down in the jungle. …
The real truth, I think, was that both sides were losing. But
nobody wanted to say that.

The wit of the book pushes us to read on and think, but that thinking is also shaped by what we now know of the land: through media and other commentaries. I picked up the book wanting to know more about the land, what I got was a human account of a great tragedy, from the periphery.

Notice that the book was written while the country was in the middle of the war. Many years of trying for peace had come to nought. The chance of peace was slim. In such circumstances Jayawardena did not have the privilege of hindsight. He could not write about how the war ended, how peace was restored. He had to create hope in the midst of an ongoing struggle. He has done that well. I can never forget Sam.

Last Saturday, Makhan wanted to meet me at Masi’s hospital. He just finished a four-year jail term. Masi’s training had helped him. At jail he proved to be a worthy medical attendant. He served the inmates and even the jail authorities. No one is tough with their doctor and he was exempted the tough grind. Makhan talked to me for a while, enquiring about my well being but did not say anything important. Something I thought he wanted to do when he asked to meet me. His shift was over and he left abruptly. When he was leaving I saw his eyes. They were vacant, as if this world did not matter to him.

For a long time I have been seeing people’s eyes. They say the eyes are the index of the mind. In the eyes I see, I notice some look like they have confronted their deepest lonely self. Eyes like Makhan’s. There is shiftiness in them, as if bewildered. In the black of the eye one can glimpse the unfathomable cave of the soul. The bewilderment is at oneself: I thought the world was a wonderful rich place, how come I find it so hollow? Why am I empty?

Some time or other in life, many people glimpse their inner Zen. However, most try to cover it up with a shadow of belief (Maya). Their eyes too look covered. The cover could be of a relationship, material things, desire for fame, and mostly of being satisfied about the image one sees of oneself in other’s eyes. Yet, some keep the vulnerability naked, like Makhan. Maybe it is a matter of time, he will cover it up. Some like Mamman go the other way, down the abyss. Lose touch with how their eyes look to the world. They make their own world even if it does not make sense to the rest of the world. To their near and dear ones. Those people have stopped caring.

There are some, very few, who actually accept the cave and move beyond it. To a place where they seek to know their emptiness. Those are the seers. They have found belief in a system of thought.

To see someone, you need to see is their eyes. Check out the beggar on the street next time, check out you loved one. Do the eyes match? Then see the eyes of the blind Prophet Tiresias, from Antigone: ‘we have come with linked steps, both served by the eyes of one; for thus, by a guide’s help, the blind must walk. Thou standest on fate’s fine edge.’

Maybe those eyes, in their similarities and differences, and uniqueness will tell you something.

Got this in a mail from a friend in Bangalore. Janet and her team is doing a wonderful job. I say that because I saw Bangalore losing around 800 trees in storm in May 2006. That is when thousands of fish died in Puttenhalli lake. All related to mis-management of the environment by us humans. I am sending a cheque.

The problem:

Over the last 4 years, Janet and her volunteers at treesforfree have planted 12,896 trees across Bangalore City to restore the vanishing tree cover. All in an old Maruti car.
Now the car has broken down. And the planting has stopped. But the tree felling continues…and with it, the global warming, failed monsoons, climate change…and a host of other problems that affect all of us.

The solution:
If we can raise enough donations to buy a new vehicle, we would be back on the road again, planting trees, cooling the globe and healing the earth. The vehicle ideally suited for our operations is a Mahindra pickup. It costs 4 lacs. If 4000 of us gave just 100 rupees each, then the planting can start again.

How you can help:

Donate as much as you can. All donations are tax exempt under 80 G and you will be given a receipt. After you send/transfer money, please send a mail to vinod.eshwer@gmail.com with the amount sent/transferred and the names of people who donated + address where you want the receipts to be delivered.

1. Bank transfer. The details are:

Beneficiary: Rajanet Yegneswaran Charitable Trust

Beneficiary Account 9942500102168101

Bank: Karnataka Bank Koramangala Ext., 17th Main, Bangalore, India

Code: KARB0000094.

Or

2. A cheque in favour of ‘Rajanet Yegneswaran Charitable Trust’ and send it to

Rajanet Yegneswaran Charitable Trust

No 11, 20 L Cross, Sri Rama temple Road,

Ejipura, Viveknagar Post, Bangalore-560 047

Tel: +91 9845449703

Thank you in advance from all the babies, birds, bees and other beings to come

Blog: www.treesforfree.blogspot.com
Website: www.treesforfree.com
(Today the site is down, but guess it works. Check the blog.)

Janet -rajanetyeg@gmail.com

All through my childhood and teenage, our small family used pass through Nizammudin Station. It was our halt between trains, from Rourkela to Punjab and vice versa on our way back. Sometimes it would be bright summer at Nizammudin, the hot sun roasting Mamman, Baba and me; at other times it would be freezing cold, with us layering ourselves with as many clothes as we could, but still chilled to the bones. The Rourkela to Punjab wait was a long evening, the Utkal Kalinga Express came in at afternoon and Chattisgarh Express left late at night; the Punjab to Rourkela wait was a long morning, Chattisgarh Express came early morning and Utkal Kalinga Express left late afternoon. On both those halts Mamman would sit on platform chairs and Baba would take me to Delhi to show me monuments and places. My discovery and understanding of Delhi started from Nizammudin.

I must have been seven or eight years old when one cold morning we got down from the train. It was foggy; we could not even see the banisters of the steps we were taking from one platform to another. On Platform One we warmed our hands on the hot tea cups. The fog intensified, as if thick cotton had engulfed the station. We put our hands on our suitcases which we could not see. Someone could have walked away with one. That morning my Delhi trip to Jantar Mantar was cancelled. The fog rose with the sun. Suddenly the shining railway tracks winked at us. Those were days of low platforms. I went to touch the tracks, planning to place a rupee coin on it to see how the next train flattened it. As I neared the track, a huge black demon appeared to approach me. Baba pulled me by my hand, away from the tracks, and the engine rode by. The carriages followed it. The train stopped, people got down, people climbed, the small business hawked tea and biscuits and bread pakodas. The train left. With it went the fog. As if the train had pushed it away from the tracks and adjoining platforms.

I looked back at the tracks. It was full of disposed food, eatable and from toilets. The tracks no longer winked at me; instead they were covered with black rats that came up from beneath them to devour the goodies. I guess they did not distinguish between the two kinds of food. Or maybe they did.

There was another black form amongst them. Bigger. A man. Fighting with the rats, pushing them away from a half eaten piece of bread, a smeared with curry paper plate to lick. Picking morsels that rats would have eaten and putting them in his mouth. His eyes were sharp. Astute, penetrating, looking where no rat could look, on either side of the track, lining him up for the attack, where he was a rival to the regular contestants. He had a black pyjama on, maybe it was white once, he was wearing a torn banyan, this must have been white once, his hair was matted, and his beard was unkempt. He was a human being. No, he was a rat, a scavenger. His eyes stayed with me ever since. Eyes that searched for the meagre remains from moving trains. I had never seen a contest go as basic as that. Hunger can make rodents out of humans.

Now I live in the National Capital Region. I often go down to Nizammudin Station at nights and sit on the platforms. Later I heard of someone brilliant from advertising who used to spend long hours doodling at Nizammudin Station. I hoped one day I would live near Nizammudin Station and write. My hunt for a house has narrowed down to the localities Nizammudin and Jungpura, from where I would not have to drive back an hour to reach home at night. Which are not more than ten minutes by walk from Nizammudin Station and Ashram.

When I was to start for Delhi from Bangalore, a year back, I asked my friend Aditya to help me find a place to live. He offered me his flat in Indirapuram. I shifted, set up the flat and started my life in Delhi. Slowly I realised that though Indirapuram is next to Noida, and my office is on the other end of Noida, it takes me up to an hour to reach office. I have to cross two urban villages, and a number of red lights. The traffic is chaotic. Through the year when I went to meet friends in Delhi from office, through the Taj Expressway and the DND toll bridge, I reached Ashram in half an hour.

When I met people in Delhi and told them I lived in Indirapuram, they said, ‘Indirapuram, where?’ When I came home from Delhi, at 11 PM, 11.30 PM, I still got stuck at the Gazipur border on National Highway 24 for up to half an hour. Indirapuram is a concrete colony. A corporate ghetto. Current fails here so often that one cannot even watch videos on a website like YouTube in peace, forget downloading anything. One morning, I argued with the owner of the dairy booth in my complex. The milk had not arrived until 8 AM. He said, ‘If you want milk early live in Delhi.’ That is when it hit me that I did not really live in Delhi. Indirapuram was not Delhi, at least not perceived to be part of Delhi.

I have started my hunt for a small place in Delhi, some where 10 minutes from Ashram. Technically, according to people who live in Golf Links and Hauz Khas, even that is not Delhi. Too far, they say. A friend suggested web sites. Yet, when I search for individual postings on 99acres.com or magicbricks.com, I find no listings. All listings pint to brokers. So brokers is the way I go.

‘Sir, can you make a visit to a site on your own? Our New friends Colony area manager is busy today,’ asks a voice from one of the real estate agents.

‘Yes, sure,’ I say.

‘Can you talk to the house owner now? He wants to speak to you. I’ll conference you.’

My, I thought. Is this a real estate agency or a Multi National Company? Area Managers and Conference Calls. ‘Yeah sure.’

An old voice comes up on the other side, ‘I do not understand your company name. Who is the head of the company? What does it do?’

‘Cadence Design Systems. We are an EDA company,’ I reply. Thinking I must say we help make the chips which runs the telephone from which you are speaking.

‘Where is it located?’

‘San Jose,’ I say, stressing the J as an H.

‘Where?’

‘California. USA.’

‘Who is the head?’

‘A certain Lip Bu Tan.’

‘Who?’

‘A Singaporean immigrant to the United States.’

‘Oh American company.’

I wonder to myself if it is me who is going to stay there or Mr. Lip Bu Tan. The agent gives me the address. I go visit.

A posh house in a posh locality. Statues of Ganesha and Sai Baba in the garden. A man ushers me to garden seats. The man sits down. His father, the old man comes out and takes another seat.

‘What does your company do?’

I tell the man. ‘EDA stands for Electronic Design Automation. We make software that helps companies design chips which are used in everything: mobile phones and super computers.’

They do not understand.

‘Your name is Aman. What is your religion?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Your father. What does he do?’

‘He is with God.’

‘Your mother?’

‘She too is with God.’

‘Brothers and sisters?’

‘They never came down from God.’

‘Oh! How old are you?’

’36.’

The man showed me the shabby room, with pink tiles in the bathroom.

‘What is the rent?’

‘Actually, with the Commonwealth Games coming up, we were looking for a foreigner. Someone younger.’

And hotter, I thought to myself.

‘Would you stay alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘No friends please, no overnights.’

I smiled and said, ‘Do not worry. I do not have a hectic social life.’

I left, knowing prejudice exists in many forms.

Soon after I finished my formal studies at my university I stopped going for public meetings, protests, morchas and dharnas. I believed in protest, but was caught too deeply in the work life, and by the time I could strike a work-life balance, I had started writing my novels. My novels are protest pieces, because I believe that within an individual lies the site of protest. I might be over generalising, but it is through an individual that I find the scope to create space for an individual’s thinking which might be contrary to a world view. Hence it is a protest.

When I received an invite to the 2009 Queer Pride parade in Delhi I was not sure whether I should go or not. I thought it was on a Saturday, a day I had reserved for my own work. Then the friend called and reminded me that it was on a Sunday. I was elated. I decided to go. For long I have believed that Gays and Lesbians, Bi-sexuals, Trans-gendered and Trans-sexual people are like us, in fact in many cases sharper and more sensitive because they have had to survive on the other side of the stigma that the society has imposed upon them.

I had just been a few minutes at the parade when the organisers unfurled a long, multi-coloured cloth, the symbol of the movement – the rainbow. When I was a child, on summer nights, my father, mother, and I used to sleep outdoors in the garden. Some times it would start to rain in the middle of the night. We would rush indoors but I would insist that my father and mother open a turban, hold its open ends in their two hands to make a canopy, and I would proudly walk under it. I would imagine I was a king, and my procession would wind its way through the small hedges and brick paths to reach my palace, my home.

When the rainbow was unfurled on Tolstoy Marg I remembered the protection that I used to seek under the turban canopy of my childhood. The rainbow seemed to be like that, a cover under which each person was free to be, free to choose how to live, free to dream, and be accepted. It took me a while to muster my courage to walk under it. But I did walk, it was my baptism, in the midst of a cheering and dancing crowd, I alone walked under the curtain. No one noticed me, no one knew it was my baptism, but when I emerged from under it a banner stared me in my face: walk together, to walk alone.

It was a lovely parade.

Most parades that I have attended in life have been sombre affairs. A tragedy occurs and people protest for rights, for redressal. In this parade, an ongoing tragedy is unfurling, but everyone was dancing, chanting slogans, talking with each other, and laughing. The police was extremely polite. A wonder. All my life I have heard the police abuse criminals and offenders by using terms which stood for all the labels by which people in this parade are known. They are ugly words, bristling with prejudice: chakka, gandu, and such. Yet, that day, when those who are known by those words, were out in a demonstration of their being together, the police was so polite towards us, only requesting us to speed up and not block traffic on Janpath.

What an inversion of power, I thought.

Soon after, the Delhi High Court scrapped Article 377, which mentioned homosexuality as a crime, and treated LGBTI people as criminals, use the law to arrest, prosecute, terrorize and blackmail sexual minorities. I recently read that 2 to 13 percent of India’s population might be gay, or interested in gay rights. That means the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Intersex people are a prominent vote bank. No wonder Indian politicians are reluctant to voice their opinion against the community. Cheers! Queer pride has arrived, and it is here to stay.

I enjoyed myself at the parade. Come next year. It is fun.

Just came back from Ladakh. Last week was my parents’ anniversaries and I could think of nothing better to do than visit Ladakh, to keep alive what my parents expected of me: travel to see the world. Ladakh had been a dream I dreamt when I was a child. I am glad I fulfilled it. I will write about it in greater detail, but here is a snippet of imagination.

At one time, many hundreds of years ago, there was a tectonic shift in the plates that form the Earth. Ladakh was created when it was thrown up from the bottom of a sea. I had not imagined Ladakh to be the desert it is: brown, barren, cold, remote, and even lonely, expansive, stupendous, beautiful.

On the way to Pangong Tso, through Chang La at 17586 feet, and to Nubra Valley through Khardung La at 18380 feet (the highest motorable road in the world), I survived on the pods of garlic my driver Dorje fed me an hour before we reached those heights. The home recipe is amazing, no sickness, just a little airy feeling on the heights. As we drove over tracks cut through the sides of the mountains, through the snow, I wondered if all this was once below water.

If I were a fish. I would then not have had to drive so hard and so far. I would have merely held my breath and started floating, moving my fins in the general direction towards where I would have wanted to reach. When my head went airy on those heights, I just had to look around and I could see school of fishes, crossing the peaks. Multi-coloured, all quiet as we were there. The peaks humble you, silence you. Enchanting!