Shehan Karunatilaka’s unusually plotted novel Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew delivers an interestingly unorthodox experience of reading. See review here …

Tags: chinaman, cricket, Pradeep

Blue Blood, I liked this collection on how Indian royalty has changed over time. Read here.

Tags: Royalty, short stories

Publishing Note: Around four years back I started on a journey, with able guides and pointers. This piece was written for a Kabir project blog in 2011. I can’t find the blog now so posting it here from the piece I sent via email to the admin of the blog.

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Learning to close my eyes

My journey towards understanding the fires that had until then driven me into clinical depression started when Nilanjana sent me two music files by a singer named Prahlad Tipanya who sings Kabir.

It was the summer of 2007. My mother lay dying in a small town called Mandi Dabhwali in the Malwa region of southern Punjab. Prahladji is also from a region called Malwa but his Malwa is in Madhya Pradesh. His language was alien to our ears and my laptop computer had no external speakers. Still, from time to time, mother asked me to play the songs to her. In spite of the two Malwas, in spite our different languages, in spite of the two thousand kilometres that separated us, his message of submission and humility permeated into our ears.

While cancer spread in my mother’s body a fire raged in our Malwa. Mandi Dabhwali was at the centre of a violent battle between the Sikhs and the head of a sect called Sachha Sauda. The Sikhs were angry because the head of the sect, Gurmit Ram Rahim, had appropriated icons from Sikhism and had attracted a certain caste of Sikhs to his fold. The reasons for the fight are complex but the gist is that Sikhism, which was conceived as casteless by Kabir and contemporaries Guru Nanak and other Sikh Gurus, had actually discriminated against its own lower castes who had in turn sought salvation in other sects which were more inviting. As a result the Gurdwaras were missing out on donations.

My mother’s death was simpler. She was a life-long Schizophrenic, who had developed severe cardio-myopathy, and was now in breast cancer Stage IV. The secondary’s spread to the rest of her body.

Mother died. Punjab burnt as vote bank politics and monetary gains stroked the fires.

I came back to Bangalore and Nilanjana told me she goes singing Kabir with someone called Shabnam Virmani who, every morning, opens her home to anyone interested in singing or listening. In February 2008, Nilanjana told me Shabnam is singing at the annual cultural festival on the outskirts of Bangalore – Fireflies. I went to listen. For years I had been listening to a Kabir cassette by Madhup Mudgal but again the language was slightly alien to me. A friend’s mother had told me there was someone called Kumar Gandharv who used to sing brilliantly. I had never heard him.

At Fireflies I could understand Kabir. Shabnam’s translations in a mix of simple English and Hindi and her singing made the songs so easy to comprehend. After the concert I told her that couplets from Kabir open my first book of fiction and thanked her for giving me an opportunity to listen to Kabir live. She looked at me kindly and asked indulgently: ‘Have you never heard him live before?’ I said no but in that question of hers I knew that I had failed to access the 500-year old poet who I had only encountered in school text books, on thin shabby pages. He had survived the oral and written traditions and has existed alive and available to us. Now the question was what route should I take to access him?

I heard Shabnam thrice before her festival in Bangalore in 2009. But it is at that festival when she sang Munn mast huaa re phir kyaa bole … that I closed my eyes. Now I tend to close my eyes every time I listen to music. It does hamper my work or even life at home. But it happens and I lose myself. Then I saw the documentaries Shabnam had made through her Kabir Project and picked up Kumar Gandharv’s Avdhoot. Since then, in the last two years, every morning I have listened to any one of the Kabir singers collected in Shabnam’s Project or to Kumar Gandharv and I just recently discovered MS Subbalaxmi. I do not have any knowledge of the terms of music. It helps me that Shabnam claims even she had never sang before she got onto the Kabir Project. I, in fact, know nothing about what has invaded me so beautifully for the last two years that now I have found newer loves – classical music.

Yet, through all the music and the films I learnt something that comes up fairly early in Had-Unhad when Prahladji asks a young man who hates idolatry and leans towards the formless to explain if his own body is not a form and towards the end of Koi Sunta Hai when singer Dhulichand, a rustic villager, flips his hand and says that what we are all looking for, the ‘word’ that denotes it, can only be found if one turns one’s focus to the inside rather than looking for it outside.

This was my conflict. Until then I had looked at events and phenomena through the labels I had learnt. When they clashed with each other I felt the fires burning me. I learnt that not knowing that these are mere labels makes the fires blaze and knowing that these are ‘mere’ labels gives you a sense of being able to harness the fires, channelise the self. In my case, finish my second book, which again opens with a couplet by Kabir.

My journey led me to Kumarji’s home in Dewas in 2010. I had learnt of the Kabir Mahaotsav in Lunyakhedi, Prahladji’s village near Ujjain. Nilanjana had once said that thousands gather for the festival. I wanted to be there and I had wanted to see Ujjain. I was experiencing the ease of the state without external labels (Nirgun) but I was still interested in Matsyandar Nath and the Mahakaal temple (Sagun). The temptation to see Kumarji’s home where he had lain for many years, stricken by Tuberculosis, and listened to beggars sing Kabir and wanting to see the Sheel Nath Dhooni where Kumarji had seen written on a mirror Ud jayega hans akela… pulled me to the festival.

The festival was a miracle of sorts. Lunyakedi did not have metalled roads yet people from nearby villages and far off cities had gathered and with them had gathered the modern power paraphernalia: IAS and IPS officers, and politicians and Kabir Panthis. This was realpolitik. Through all this, cutting through symbolism and iconography, one singer after another touched our hearts. This was Sat Sang, the concept that is a recurrent motif in all of Kabir’s and Shabnam’s work, as Shafi Mohammad Faqir, from (now) Pakistan says: mil baithna, saat suron ka sangam.

After the night long singing I went to Kumarji’s house and was admitted to the room where he lay ill and where he regained his voice and sang so wondrously. Coming out of the room I spotted a tobacco box and asked how it had reached the pious room.

Kumarji’s grandson replied: ‘Kumarji kept chewing until the end.’ This was how the great singer who dealt with TB kept feeding himself the poison that caused the mighty illness. He was once a patient and then a healthy body, he found and sang the essences of life, but perhaps the poison became the reins that harnessed his creativity by pushing him to live on the edge.

Kumarji once said: ‘jo sunta hoon, wo gaata hoon.’ He did it by seeing what each state was and then by going beyond them.

That evening, behind a tent, in the light of one yellow bulb at Lunyakhedi, I told Shabnam, ‘Seven times I have heard you sing a song about a forest on fire in which a bird keeps going back to sprinkle water on a burning tree that has earlier housed her. Each time I listen to it, it reconfigures my associations. The characters in the song: the tree, the bird, the fire, the lake take on ever shifting personas in my personal life. Sometimes I feel I am the bird, sometimes I am the tree, at other times I am the fire and I look for the lake.’

If I am rooted in the tree I find myself burning and if I fly like the bird I feel self-righteous. Both of them are ego states. Beyond the forest and the lake lies the experience of the story. That experience is beyond words. It can be found, as the singer-villager said, when you turn the knowledge of the story inwards. I now recognise that my own experience is ever changing, ever informing. This knowledge liberates me from the explicit need to label it. What right do I have on an emotion I feel in a moment which the next moment will alter? My journey with Kabir has been one of recognising the value of the markers of my identity, questioning them, and then stripping down these markers and finding myself shorn of them. I try to walk this path with my mind aware and my eyes closed, in faith.

Amandeep Sandhu has no permanent address. These days he is a neighbour of Amir Khusro in New Delhi where he feeds birds on his terrace. He is the author of Sepia Leaves (Rupa, 2008) and a to-be-published novel Roll of Honour.

Tags: Kabir, Kumar Gandharv, Nirgun, Prahlad Tippaniya, Sagun, Shabnam Virmani

Siddhartha Gigoo’s debut novel holds attention. Read review of The Garden of Solitude.

Tags: Garden, Kashmir, Siddhartha Gigoo, Solitude

A murder mystery set in North East India. Read here

How does one write about the 80s in India? That decade when everything crumbled. For years I have struggled with writing about it. Sudeep does it, here is the review of Avenue of Kings.

Tags: 1980s, Avenue of Kings

Here is recent review of a collection of short stories. Many of us write short stories, so few get published, at least in English language in India. See review of Why We Don’t Talk.

Tags: India short stories

E had told me if I have a day I should go to Cape Finisterre. I was to leave the next afternoon for Frankfurt, so I had a whole day. I decided to visit the place which, before America was discovered, the medieval world considered the end of the world and associated with Celtic rituals in pre-Christian times. E had told me that is where pilgrims burnt their shoes. I had only one pair, but I decided to go see. The problem was the previous day I had twisted my ankle.

So I go to the bus station where no one speaks English. I buy a ticket I can’t read. I wait for a bus which I can’t identify. Yet, the bus comes, I hop in and we start. The view starts changing. Hills roll out, the Atlantic begins showing itself. The trees become orange-red. My eyes were stuck to the bus window as the bus moved closer to a full view of the immense Atlantic. We reached Finisterre and I started on my walk to the lighthouse. I hobbled rather, I was in pain from my ankle. As the water shone in the setting sun, as the sheer brilliance of nature overwhelmed me I was singing Kumar Gandharv’s: ‘Udd jayega hans akela, jag darshan ka mela.’ (The swan shall fly alone, this world is a festival of sights.)

At the Cape before the magnificent lighthouse, just after the Cross, I saw the milestone that said: Santiago 00.00 kms. This is where my journey ended, or began. I have no words to describe the view except to say that I got a sense that how, before organized religion started its influence on the world, humans here might have felt this was the beginning or the end of the world, of life on this planet. I kind of knew why I did the journey. For this, for this! To be here! Traditionally pilgrims burn their clothes and shows at this shrine. I had already divested myself of excess baggage, I removed my shoes and touched the water. They waters were cold, but they gave me warmth.

As I waited for the bus, Sam tapped me on my shoulder. ‘I am from Sweden. You?’

‘India. What brings you here?’

‘I am going blind.’ I stayed quiet. ‘I was a coach driver, drove for 35 years across Europe. Then last year I was laid off.’

‘Because of recession?’

‘No. because doctors detected Glaucoma. I am blind in the left eye by 90% and in the right by 60%. I take 10 drops and 5 pills each day.’

‘Then here?’

‘I wanted to do Santiago before I go completely blind. I started from my home, my doorstep. I am going to Portugal.’

‘What?’

‘Yes, three months. Across the Alps. 2400 kms.’

I had nothing to say. The bus came, I patted his back. We came back in silence. On different seats of the bus. That is a Camino, I thought to myself while my foot throbbed. What have I done?

The flight from Santiago to Barcelona to Frankfurt was delayed by three hours. I missed my train to Cologne. Then I discovered my baggage hadn’t arrived. When I finished filing my complaint with Lufthansa it was 11 PM. Though I had no place to go to, and it was night, and I had no friends in town, and I was hungry and tired, the only thing that I was concerned about was Edith’s bag and the Compostella certificate. Less the certificate, more the bag. Else, I had been here many times this week. I knew nothing, but I felt safe.

I came out and started chatting in Punjabi with some brown skin taxi drivers. It took us 5 minutes and a cigarette to discover that they and I, if in soldierly uniform, were supposed to be enemies, from across the border: Pakistani and Indian. But here we were human, just like each other. We talked politics, we talked floods in Pakistan.

A Turkish taxi driver joined us with a bottle of Raki. At oo.30 AM I told them I had no place to go to for the night. It was much colder here than in Spain. They took me to Hotel Ramada where I slept in a suite with 8 pillows in Euro 50.

Luxury! One week from my life. Luxury!

Thank you Santiago! You showed me something in my own heart – faith!

I had not known why my heart had desired to walk. I could give myself no logical reasons. Yet, I had walked and in the walking I had found my reasons to walk. Follow your heart and keep your faith, even in adverse times. Who knows you may find yourself blessed.

For Finisterre pics see …

Tags: Buen Camino Santiago

D taught me how to roll and smoke cigarettes. This was the day we would reach Santiago. The walk seemed a little tame. I felt I was just getting warmed up and the walk would end. Then I spotted a big blue dustbin on the side of the path with a yellow arrow on it. The arrow pointed the way. If the dustbin were turned, the arrow would have pointed the other way and would have faced the trees. That was wrong. If the dustbin were placed with its opening on the ground, the arrow would again be in the opposite direction. I mock asked myself: was this my Nirvana moment? Was I learning a lesson from a mere dustbin? But, it did teach me, that to point the way, one needs to be in the right position.

Since were walking through open fields, we had the company of cows, pigs, sheep, chicken, ducks. P came up to us as we gathered for a juice at a cafe. She said, ‘The cows look so happy. Happy Cows!’ Now was this another epiphany? I stopped musing and we took some cow pictures. We walked on. I was surprised that the milestones had vanished. Earlier every half kilometre was marked, now nothing. I lost a sense of how much I had walked, after all the walking today was a mere 16 kms. Yet, it seemed unending.

It became 2 in the noon and we reached a monument. Two curved embracing half S shapes with a tall stand behind them for pilgrims to hang their water bottles. Okay, so that meant we were almost, casi, there. I turned and took the road again, the town spread out below the hill.

Red roofed Santiago. I could not see the spires of the church. After the Gothic churches of Barcelona, I did expect a big Cathedral. Then I thought it might be just hidden from view. Enough had happened on the journey for me to believe in miracles. I even thought maybe the more than a 1000 year old St James Church is small, very small. After all God lives in the heart, the walking had reinstated my faith. As I walked, calculating time I had walked with expected kilometres, adjusting for fatigue and slowness, I reached the outer edge of the town and was completely disheartened. Not here, not again! So many Information Technology companies that increased the walk into town by more than seven kms. That is why the milestones were missing on the last leg. Where is the Cathedral? The material world has come in between the pilgrim and his Mecca.

Walk. walk. Walk a little more. Walk some more. I reach the edge of old town Santiago. That is when the atmosphere changed. It goes back in time, towards a medieval world. Narrow winding streets and even the air. The light changed from white to glowing. I saw the twin spires come up as I turned into Ruis Das Casas Reais. I approached the Cathedral through a path next to which stood a man in kilt playing Scottish tunes on his saxophone. I turned left and was in the presence of the Cathedral Santiago de Compostella. My eyes couldn’t see its top, I backed away, and some more. European people are taller, but by the edge of the courtyard I got a full view of the Church. Wow!

I registered for the Compostella certificate and asked, ‘How many Indians so far?’

The lady at the desk tells me, ‘None from India. Over a hundred thousand people came here this year. No one gave their address as a place in India. Over all seventeen Indians, but from the US or Australia or Europe. Come again!’

I said, ‘I will. and this time the 750 km, 31 day walk.’

I forgot to ask for a statue for myself. The certificate was my statue. That I was here, that my body was exhausted but had held up, that my spirit had soared, was enough for me. Next day at Mass I remembered the last Church I had visited over ten years ago in Vijaywada. I met N, who said she had had wine. I met many fellow walkers. I did not see Jo. Outside, in a souvenir shop I met Michael. He held a toy duck in hand for his child. He smiled ear to ear. I thanked him for showing me the path – for being my Archangel. The Museum behind the Cathedral maps all the pilgrim walks all over the world. It had all that I know from India. The upper stories depict the story of the iconography of St James. Thank you Sir! You walked a long time back what I walked now. But, you created the path. I only followed your St. James Way.

The next day was a strike. As forbidding as it is in India. The TV screens showed fires and violence. The world was in strife, will remain so perhaps, but one can do one’s job and have a peaceful meal. Someone would open a shutter and smile at you. This time it was a Russian matron. P and D had to reach Madrid for a connecting flight. Nothing was moving, but again, in pure faith, and on moving, we found a car service. I hosted dinner that night for us. The bottle of beer had the image a pilgrim with the walking stick. The bottle said: Estrella Galicia Xacobeo. Roughly translated it means: The Jacobean Star of Galicia.

My Camino was not yet over.

Tags: Buen Camino Santiago