Arul Mani on P.G. Wodehouse

Arul Mani writes divinely about Wodehouse in Caravan:

Who reads Wodehouse in India and why?

For a long time, I knew nobody who did actually read Wodehouse. Undergraduate boredom caused me to insert myself into Bangalore’s quizzing scene in the late 1980s, and that is where I came across live Wodehouse fans for the first time. Their conversations began unexceptionably—which book was their favourite, Wooster or Blandings, and so on—but deteriorated rapidly after that into mantric call-and-response routines. I remember very clearly an exchange between two grizzled veterans where one raised his snout to the sky to bellow the words, “Forty- five minutes if it lasted a second?” and received in no time the response, “Heppenstall’s sermon on Brotherly Love!” I don’t know if this has anything to do with anything, but both men were Bengalis. The former respondent then assumed the same quivering-nostrils attitude to deliver the even more puzzling phrase, “Begins in a low minor of two quarter-notes in four-four time, and ends in a shower of accidental grace-notes?” upon which the other smote himself in the chest and decimated all eardrums in the vicinity with a lusty rendition of “Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey”, the infallible pig-calling formula that Lord Emsworth is taught by a kind soul. Their exchanges were punctuated with bursts of shrill laughter that began as fairly domestic whinnies before tailing off into hyena-sounds.

The Wodehousian in India is typically either some archaic monster that causes terror each time it digs its dactyls deep into a shuffle-bag of plum metaphors and phrases, or it is a pip-pipsqueak, an accumulator of period mannerisms and verbal tics.

This is probably not the time to say, 'eternal summer gilds them yet'

Apparently April was the hottest one on record in the UK. There have been forest fires, and the rain since yesterday has been greeted with relief (even by the faculty, which was not happy about missing the sunshine, what with having to correct papers & end of term blues).

But until Wednesday, I have say this place closely resembled a Wodehousey rural idyll. Castle, lake, ducks, swans, small boats, idle men, energetic women, libraries (no Anatole, regrettably, and no ice to steal).

It allows me to make this blog a visible sign that keeps offline such rage, disbelief and annoyance I might feel about the rest of the world.

"Five years. People don't remember a thing..."

"Five years. People don't remember a thing here that happened five years back unless they're reminded of it."

Guess who said that.

No, not Tarun Tejpal, no editor of any newspaper, no one who yelled their heads off on The Big Fight. (Harsh Mandar may have tried to say something very like it, but if he did no one could hear him).

Billy Windsor. Who's Billy Windsor, you will ask. I will tell you.

Billy Windsor is temporary editor of the nauseating Cosy Moments, waiting for the big break in P.G.Wodehouse's Psmith Journalist. Wodehouse wrote the book in 1915. In it, Psmith helps Billy Windsor do a big story on cheap tenements and the big guys who make big money off the misery of the inhabitants. Nothing new there: politicians, gangs, cops that come after the gangs have all killed each other.

They find out that the owner of the ironically named Pleasant Street tenement is a guy who is running for City Alderman, and used to be Commissioner of Buildings. When a building he'd allowed collapsed, five years earlier, he lay low; now all that's blown over and he can come back and be Alderman, provided no one gums up the works for him. Billy and Psmith are trying to do precisely that. It is in this context that Windsor says, "People don't remember a thing here that happened five years back unless they're reminded of it."

Not unnaturally, I was reminded of the contents of the latest issue of Tehelka while reading all of this. Sure, tenement buildings do not compare with genocide, but remember that the book was written in 1915, before the term 'World War' was coined; before trench warfare and weapons of mass destruction became commonplace; before every dictator was also a butcher on a grand scale.

Then, as now, there was the default cynical view that one only needs a little time before everything - even the most horrifying crimes - can be forgotten; that a little relentless spin will transform a very culpable, unrepentant monster into a messiah for development; that the state machinery will side with said monster, never mind what they know to be the truth.

Bah.