Favourite Stories (Part 3)

 

Sharing a few thoughts on a favorite story from this book. The story's titled Birdsong at Twilight. 

“I have never heard of this odd hobby for women. Do embroidery or baking, not this silly bird-watching. People will think you are strange. Don't start bird watching and forget about the children.”

Naina, mother to nine-year old twins Radha and Ravi, gets scolded by her mother as she tries hard to catch a glimpse of a verditer flycatcher. Naina loves to watch birds, and is always armed with a pair of binoculars. The orchards with plum and peach trees washed clean by the rain, the dense forest of deodars and pine beyond her home in the mountains are very inviting, so unlike their tiny apartment in Delhi. Naina decides to take her children for a walk into the forest before it gets dark. She hopes to spot a kalij pheasant that has constantly eluded her. Her friend, single and carefree, had managed to not only spot one but capture photographs of so many other birds. Oh! how she wished she had just a day for herself, all the time bird watching and doing nothing else!

Naina turns lucky that day for she spots a kalij pheasant. But as she turns around to share her excitement with her children who had been following her, she finds herself alone. Her children are missing. Where could they go when they were behind her all along whispering things to each other? Suddenly, the emerald fortress of the forest feels incarcerating. Did the kids fall in the ravine, was there a leopard or a bear around? Extremely anxious and drenched by a wave of panic, Naina sees a male kalij pheasant walking with a female and little chicks behind him in front of her, in her full view. It feels like the bird family was mocking her.

The Himalayan barbet and whistling thrush too make an appearance before her, the bird song gets louder. All this that would have given immense joy to Naina, only feel intimidating now. She wants her children safe and back, nothing else. Of course, she spots them after a few minutes, a period that feels like a lifetime,  eating juicy wild plums merrily by the stream. And, everything ends well.

How many times have we moms wanted to have some time for ourselves, yearned for it with all our heart to do something we like? And yet when stars align or luck favours, we wish against it and want nothing of that sort. We try to cling to our interests carefully as we know how difficult the path is that separates it from our responsibilities. How hard it is, to master this act of jugglery, right ?

Favourite Stories (Part 2)

 

Have you ever made a wish while blowing away a stray, fallen eyelash?

In Swimmer Among The Stars, a collection of stories by Kanishk Tharoor, the story ‘The Fall of an Eyelash’ has a protagonist Forough who leaves her country while she is a college student and reaches a foreign nation, her place of refuge, after a long journey of crossing many borders. 

“Most people were kind to Forough, but kindness is sometimes easier to give than to receive. They found the story of her voyage so courageous that they insisted she tell it over and over again. This exhausted her and offered further proof, as if she needed it, that while an exile can escape her country, she can never escape her exile.”

She studies and later teaches medieval poetry of her homeland, this makes her miss her home every single day until she marries Jonas and settles down to a predictable, comfortable and a nearly ‘no-complaints’ life in the foreign nation that embraces her. Going back to her homeland to visit her family wasn't just a distant dream but an impossible one, and she knew it. 

One day Jonas teaches her a little superstition - make a wish and blow away an eyelash when you spot a fallen one. Forough’s big dreams of seeing her family and homeland couldn't obviously rest upon an inconspicuously tiny, thin eyelash. But one day, after the superstition becomes a casual and routine affair, she wishes to meet her brother. And the next day she receives news that her younger brother would be sent by the desert route across the border and reach her eventually after a week's time. 

Can a small eyelash have so much power? Why didn't she realise this before, why did she waste many an eyelash wishing for insignificant things like a cloudless sky or a favourite football club win. Can the country that offered her asylum be her brother's too? Can wishes riding on fallen eyelashes unite families displaced and distanced by war and political turmoil? 

The Fall of an Eyelash is probably one of the most ordinary/very plain stories one would have read, nothing clearly gut wrenching or supremely tender about it that leaves a lasting impact. But as a person who practices this little superstition of blowing away fallen eyelashes and making wishes with closed eyes, convincing even family members to do the same, this story has stayed with me since I read it years back. 

Swimmer Among The Stars is a bundle of stories that boasts of elegant writing. At places, it runs the risk of getting tedious too. But what's undoubtedly impressive is the sheer range of topics/themes the collection encompasses, with each story offering something very different.

Favourite Stories (Part 1)

 

“In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We tread out the grapes, and another drinks the wine. We sow the corn and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and we are slaves, though men call us free. Misery wakes us in the morning, and Shame sits with us at night”. (from the story ‘The Young King’ in this collection).

On the night before the day fixed for his coronation, the young King, just a lad of sixteen whose birth and growing up years have given the whole country many tales to whisper about, dreams - not once but thrice. In his dreams, he sees pale, sickly and famished children, haggard women sitting at the table sewing, naked slaves in ragged loincloth chained to each other, diving into the waters again and again to retrieve pearls, Death and Avarice wreaking havoc in the woods.

And in one of the king's dreams, one of the weavers preparing the robe of tissued gold for the King’s coronation utters the above lines. Shattered at what he witnesses in his dreams, the young King refuses to wear the robe of tissued gold, crown studded with rubies waiting for him and carry the scepter with rows of pearls on it on the coronation day.

When the council arrives, says the king – “Take these things away, and hide them from me. For on the loom of sorrow, and by white hands of Pain, has this my robe been woven. There is Blood in the heart of the ruby, and Death in the heart of the pearl. Shall Joy wear what Grief has fashioned?” 

Instead, he wears a leather tunic and a rough sheepskin cloak, adorns his head making a circle out of a spray of wild briar. The young King is ridiculed and reprimanded by his advisors. Wise ones remark that the day of coronation is a special one, a day of enjoyment for the king and his subjects, not a day of abasement. Naïve is the king for he doesn’t understand that the world works in certain ways that cannot be changed, that the burden of the world is too great for one man to bear.

People mock at this dreamer of dreams, refuse to accept this king who’s appareled like a beggar. They deride him saying, “.. out of the luxury of rich cometh the life of the poor. By your pomp we are nurtured, and your vices give us bread. To toil for a master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.” The young King quizzes naively, “Are not the rich and poor brothers?” They are eager to slay this king who they think is a fool.

What happens to the young King, a noble soul who believes in kindness and not in power, who wants to walk with the masses as one among them rather than rule over them? With a glowing and memorable climax, The Young King is one of my favorites in this collection of stories by Oscar Wilde. 

It is said that the author told these stories to his son at bedtime. Though the steady drizzle of thou and thee in the story may lend an archaic, classic feel, there couldn’t be a better instance of all-time relevant story. In a world where the rich are getting richer, the poor even poorer, the gnawing gap between have s and have  nots  widening like never before, this story makes us ponder if the rich and poor can be brothers, is an equitable distribution of wealth really feasible? 

So much to unpack, think and debate about in this story that's labelled meekly as a fairy tale or story for children. 

Fiction Reveals Truths that Reality Obscures

"Change is always occurring. In a slow, silent and beautiful way, change has been occurring and it will continue to do so. But you're all meddling with its process. And because of the interference of you nagariks, not just humans but every other being on the planet- the water bodies, the trees, the mountains  alike are suffering too. Everything and everyone is subjected to violence. I'm simply asking you to try and stop that intrusion. Thus far, nature has prospered only through collaboration. Instead, the civilised ways are driven by force and hostility, and everything integral to nature is being looted" . 

Sabari, an old tribal woman, born in the lap of forests who knows it like the back of her hand, says the above to Lord Rama when he visits her. The open and gentle dialogue between the two characters in Volga's On the Banks of the Pampa, translated from Telugu by Purnima Tammireddy, discusses many questions, all of which are both contemporary and urgent.

In the wake of all that has happened and is still happening in Jammu, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab - flash floods, landslides, cloud bursts, destruction and loss of life on an unprecedented scale - the toll of our unscientific development and mindless avarice is explicit. It's  immense and incalculable that we cannot turn a blind eye anymore. As rivers rage with a brown fury and logs of wood pile up and choke the gates of dams, it's time we stop and ask - Is this what we call 'being civilised'? What does urban or developed mean?  What's the cost at which we earns these tags?

"We forget the original sequence - observe, marvel, understand, respect, love. A new order has emerged in its place - observe, loathe, ridicule, attack, control". 

On environment, civilisation, development, the road to change and associated costs, on state and citizenship, borders and boundaries, this slim novel, an imagined extrapolation of a very ordinary event in the epic Ramayana portrayed with a bold feminist stroke, is a proof of how fiction mirrors reality closely, often unraveling truths that reality 'coyly' obscures.

Mina's Matchbox

 

Looking back at one’s life, recalling a special phase from it with the larger history of a city or country set in the backdrop, a little like James Hilton’s Goodbye Mr. Chips or Neela Padmanabhan’s Where the Lord Sleeps, that’s Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder; I would tell a friend who asks me what the book is about. 

The book opens beautifully with Tomoko recalling the first vehicle she rode, an elegantly designed baby carriage sourced from Germany, trips on her father’s bicycle clinging to him tightly until he died from stomach cancer. As a 12 yr old she’s sent away from home to stay with her maternal aunt and begin middle school and Tomoko recollects all that happened during this period 1972-73 when she stayed with her cousin Mina and her family in a big mansion at Ashiya. Though 30 years back in time, her memories of this year stay fresh and clear.

Tomoko’s quiet aunt who corrected typos, her half-German uncle who owned a beverages company, her frail and asthmatic cousin Mina who collected matchboxes and had a pygmy hippopotamus named Pochiko for a pet are interesting characters. Along with grandmother Rosa who is German, Yoneda-san and Kobayashi-san who are more of family than mere caretakers, this endearing bunch gladly welcome Tomoko into their lives. Each one of them with their quirks, stories to share and secrets to safeguard make Mina’s Matchbox a character-driven, slice-of-life narrative marked by a sense of atmosphere and slow world build up.

Japanese author and Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata’s suicide, 1972 Munich Olympics and Giacobini meteor shower unravel in the backdrop. Quite a few reviews have lambasted the author’s treatment of the Munich Olympics massacre but from the viewpoint of two pre-teen girls who are passionate about volleyball and keen on seeing their national men’s team clinch Gold, I felt the references made here were in-place. 

The prose is lulling and the pacing remarkably slow in the first half but it turns incisive and agile respectively in the latter half. About two girls who are friends-for-life than cousins, not just their wallowing in nostalgia but as a coming-of-age journey, Mina’s Matchbox is both heartwarming and wholesome. 

Yoko Ogawa was born in Okayama and now resides in Ashiya (Tomoko shifts from Okayama to Ashiya for a year to stay with her cousin Mina's family) and would have been 10 yrs old during the 1972-73 period detailed in the book, so does the book tap a little into the memories of the author's childhood? 

Mina’s Matchbox is my first by Yoko Ogawa. I read a lot of reviews that stated how this book is different in terms of theme and tonality from the rest of her works. While a few who have read The Housekeeper and The Professor, Hotel Iris and The Memory Police have found this underwhelming, I felt it was a great starting point and I sure want to read the author more (And of course, the translator more). You may not highlight sentences and paragraphs as you read this book but the cumulative effect of the prose is gently illuminating. 

Sharing below a few favorite passages from the book - 

“If you wanted to describe Mina in a few words, you might say she was an asthmatic girl who loved books and rode a pygmy hippopotamus. But if you wanted to distinguish her from everyone else in the world, you’d say that she was a girl who could strike a match more beautifully than anyone.” 

“Mina would slide open the box and select a single match with her delicate fingers. Then she would close the box and hold the rounded, reddish-brown tip at a slightly odd angle against the striking surface. Up to this point, everything would happen in a relaxed, tranquil manner. Nothing forced or hurried. Her lips pressed together, her eyes lowered. Only the tips of the three fingers that held the match seemed animated with the knowledge of the deed they were about to do. Then, she would hold her breath for an instant and her fingertips would fly, followed by a sound so sharp that you wondered how such a frail girl could achieve this kind of velocity. I was captivated, realizing for the first time how transparent the flame of a match could be. If not for the slight odor of phosphorus, I might have been tempted to believe that Mina had produced the flame magically, out of thin air, or that, given the clarity of the light, it was her finger itself that was burning.”