Banana Stem Meditations

Bombay usually energises me but this time I was just exhausted. I left as I arrived - with a headache. In between there were more people than I thought I'd meet though there was less conversation than I imagined.

I have been sleeping. I have been postponing the yoga with an odd kind of guilt I have not felt in years. Like I have a duty to the time and to the pose - whichever one it is that has caught my fancy.

I cut banana stem for my mother who says it's hard on her fingers. This replaces for me, for today, the meditation of holding a pose. I slice one circle off, pull the fiber around a finger and then slip it off like a ring. Knife, slice, wind, ring, pick up knife again. The bowl of buttermilk is clear on the top. I swirl a finger in it, drown the slices so they don't get brown.

Peace in repetition, in knowing this is a pose - yes, pose - with a clear end in sight. When these four lengths of stem are cut. Steadily beating heart, no particular thought that needs handholding. I must insist on being the one to cut the banana stem. Like I have claimed for myself the task of grating coconut. These domesticities are where I feel at home.

At Kala Ghoda 5th and 6th Feb

I'll be at Kala Ghoda for the annual Arts and Literature Festival. The full programme is up at the KGAF site. My sessions as follows:

On the 5th, from 5-9.15pm, 18 poets (The Hope Street Poets!) will read at The refurbished David Sassoon Library. There will be three sessions of 75 minutes each, with six poets reading in each session. A 15 minute break after sessions 1 & 2.

In order:

Panel 1 | 5 - 6:15 pm

Adil Jussawalla

Sridala Swami

Gerson da Cunha

Jane Bhandari

Priya Sarukkai Chabria

K Srilata

Panel 2 | 6:30 - 7:45 pm

Arundhathi Subramaniam

Gieve Patel

Ranjit Hoskote

Anupama Raju

Menka Shivdasani

Sampurna Chattarji

Panel 3 | 8 - 9:15 pm

Mustansir Dalvi

Meena Kandasamy

Anju Makhija

Anand Thakore

Dominic Alapat

Mani Rao

On the 6th, Thursday, The Tarq Salon: Translation from 6.15-7.15pm. Participants are Arunava Sinha, K. Srilata, R. Sivapriya. I will moderate.

Hope to see some of you!

In which I tell Anthony Bourdain to make raita

The night before last, I dreamt I was kneading dough for bread. It was in a huge barn, with a wood-fire oven. There was a large table with lots of flour sprinkled all over it. I was kneading dough that was soft, bubbly and much more runny than any dough I've ever kneaded but that was how it was supposed to be in both worlds. Strangely, my hands were completely dry and dough-free.

I shaped the dough into loaves, opened the oven and shoveled them in. That's when I noticed Anthony Bourdain standing at my shoulder. I told him he needed to get on with grating the cucumber for raita and not to forget roasting some jeera he'd later need to powder.

Then we talked about August Kleinzahler.

The next morning, someone landed up on this blog searching for Kleinzahler and found this post.

Sometimes I love my dreams but I still wouldn't want them to come true.

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The best 45 minutes of any given day are the ones I spend doing yoga.

Tomorrow the Hyd Lit Fest begins. I'm reading with Mani Rao, K. Srilata and Tejdeep Kaur Menon on Saturday from 4-5pm. But there's lots of things I'm looking forward to, not least T.M.Krishna's reading and Rajmohan Gandhi's sessions.

This evening I'm moderating a conversation with some women filmmakers. I'm not on Facebook, but I believe you can find details here.

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Are we really already in the last week of Jan?

Not even a humble brag

Today's lunch was avarakkai curry and vazhai thandu mor kootu.

The beans, the banana stem and the coconut all came from our garden.

That is all.

RIP Namdeo Dhasal

Namdeo Dhasal, Dalit Panther, poet, has died. His family struggled to raise money for his treatment and this morning he died, a bare month before he'd have turned 65.

Here's a poem - not the better known ones from his earlier work - but from Ya Sattet Jeev Rahmat Nahi (The Soul Doesn't Find Peace in This Regime, 1995), translated by the late Dilip Chitre and published by Navayana in Namdeo Dhasal: Poet of the Underworld.

Autobiography

 The face you find stirred up on the surface of the water is mine:
The foaming crown on the raised wave
About to touch a pride poised between time and space.
Hell's bastions of suffering have begun to crumble and fall.
I've made myself tired and unhappy here on this seashore of pain;
Sculpting with a chisel and image of many-faceted wounds.
The gossamer mantle of Being fluttering in the wind;
a fierce foreplay of light and dark creating its urgent rage
Formless skies; wistful; as the transparent birds of dreams fly away.
The flowers of inner awareness, beginning to bloom, have no fragrance;
Like a snake, I too shed my skin; this touch of icy water cuts all passion's cords.
Don't blow a soothing breath on the surface of the water now, or my memoirs will lose their face.

RIP.

Not a Priotity

Hindu Metro Plus [Hyderabad] 10 January 2014

Although here they've changed the headline, I have the actual paper.

Self-promotion Round-up

Happy New Year, you guys!

I don't know what it is about this time of the year that makes me so excited. I expect all this will fade once the sun really begins to do its work. Until mid-Feb, at least, though, I can keep talking in exclamations!

It occurred to me that though I've written very little that's out there in the public domain, the few things I did, I might have failed to link to. So though this post harks back to last year, I thought I should get it all out of the way.

Here goes:

1. The first thing I did last year at the IWP was the Jazz and Poetry evening in Pittsburgh, with! Joy Harjo! Who was inspiring and lovely (and whose shadow was made to rise over a building while she played). It was very dramatic.

I refuse to link to the video of my reading because it's very badly edited but there's an interview the City of Asylum people did with me. I don't remember half the things I said and I refuse to watch because I can't bear to see or hear myself, but here it is.

2. The very day I flew back from Pittsburgh, I had my reading at Prairie Lights (side note: I have realised that 'prairie' is one of the words I consistently mis-spell. I feel I ought to let the world know this.) The flight was delayed, there was some hitch getting back to Iowa and I barely made it to my own reading.

That reading is archived here.

Of course I haven't heard it. What did I just say about hearing/seeing myself?

3. The EPW has recently started a new thing called Postscript - a more light-hearted, less academic take on the world by all kinds of contributors. Here I am, sending dispatches from Iowa and Congo Square (kinda sorta).

4. Finally, Himal did a special for a 100 years on Indian Cinema and asked me to write something. Here's that thing.

That's it, folks! Shameless self-promotion over (I got a rejection slip the day before yesterday. While my usual method of dealing with rejection is to write more - and I did do that - I thought I could counter the aftereffects with a little self-love also.)

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In other news, that Diamond House you all were introduced to? It was draped in fairy lights for New Year! No photos, sadly. It blinged, I can tell you that.

Also, Sherlock S03 is horrible. Can someone please reduce all these bloated mostrous productions to a series of hilarious gifs? Thank you.

And stay tuned for Hyd Lit Fest updates.

A letter to end the year

Not mine. Not even from someone I know.

Wait.

You know how there are books of famous speeches that kids used to be encouraged to mug up, for elocution competitions and such? I once thought (and said in some blogpost I can't find) that it would be a great idea to have an anthology of fictional speeches; that is, speeches characters make in books, but which are fantastic and stirring and all that. I was thinking, mainly, of Andre-Louis Moreau from Scaramouche, but that's just me. Cat said, with perfect truth, that any anthology of fictional speeches that left out Gussy Fink-Nottle's prize-giving speech at Market Snodsbury, did not deserve to exist. How can anyone disagree with that?

Speeches are all very well. Anthologies even more well. (Weller. Something.)

I want to now propose, in the last few hours of this old year, that someone do an anthology of fictional letters. Letters written by characters that, if taken out of their context and placed in the world, would deserve to be in Volume 2 of Letters of Note.

This, naturally, disqualifies epistolary novels, because they're all letters and we're not doing volume two of My Dear Bapu.

But I want to nominate this letter below for that imaginary anthology: it's between Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, in Gaudy Night. Now Dorothy Sayers, like a couple of other writers, is on an emergency shelf of books that are comfort reading. I have recently re-read Have His Carcase, but the big gun, the cannon, is Gaudy Night and it's usually saved for emergencies.

But I found this letter here and as love letters go, it is delicate and gorgeous; as a way to end the year, it is perfect. Here it is in full:

Dear Harriet,

I send in my demand notes with the brutal regularity of the income-tax commissioners; and probably you say when you see the envelopes, ‘Oh, God! I know what this is.’ The only difference is that, some time or other, one has to take notice of the income tax.

Will you marry me?—It’s beginning to look like one of those lines in a farce—merely boring till it’s said often enough; and after that, you get a bigger laugh every time it comes.

I should like to write you the kind of words that burn the paper they are written on—but words like that have a way of being not only unforgettable but unforgivable. You will burn the paper in any case; and I would rather there should be nothing in it that you cannot forget if you want to.
Well, that’s over. Don’t worry about it.

My nephew (whom you seem, by the way, to have stimulated to the most extraordinary diligence) is cheering my exile by dark hints that you are involved in some disagreeable and dangerous job of work at Oxford about which he is in honour-bound to say nothing. I hope he is mistaken. But I know that, if you have put anything in hand, disagreeableness and danger will not turn you back, and God forbid they should. Whatever it is, you have my best wishes for it.

I am not my own master at the moment, and do not know where I shall be sent next or when I shall be back—soon, I trust. In the meantime may I hope to hear from time to time that all is well with you?

Yours, more than my own,

Peter Wimsey

*Siiiiigh*

On that letter of note, dear ones, here's wishing you a very happy year ahead.

Hanging by a thread

(It's not spider-silk but it's just as strong, so I don't despair.

Every time I announce a long silence on this blog, I break it almost immediately. This time, while not doing precisely that, I can't let the year go without looking back just once. At least just a little way.)

The year in reading has been amazing. I don't keep a reading diary - maybe I should - but off the top of my head, my stand-outs have been Rahul Soni's translation of Shrikant Verma's Magadh, reading and re-reading Sundara Ramaswamy, getting annoyed with Kalidasa in Iowa City, among other things.

But there's a book for every phase in one's life and while it was all Book of Disquiet five years ago and A Lover's Discourse two years ago, this is the year in which Daniil Kharms' Today I Wrote Nothing became my I Ching. What can I say? When I need divination, solace, when I need to bury something in someone else's words, I dive into this one.

Other things I've been reading recently: Miroslav Holub's Intensive Care which is basically some new poems and all his Selected rearranged in strange but informative ways. There are bits of paper sticking out, where I've marked lines and pages and the plan is to write about one book of poetry I've read at some regular interval as yet undecided upon.

When? Who knows. Some time soon, I hope.

Also Tomas Salamun's On the Track of Wild Game which, I don't know, is lik he was trying to be Bukowski, and was disappointing. I should put it away and return to it some other time.

Currently reading: Kazim Ali's translations of Sohrab Sepehri's poetry, The Oasis of Now.

On my Next Up list:

Tsering Wangmo's A Home in Tibet.
Naiyer Masud's Occult
Nirmal Verma's Days of Longing & The Red Tin Roof
Forugh Farrokhzad's Sin (in a less than satisfactory translation by Sholeh Wolpe, I already know this, but Farrokhzad has been the guardian angel of my recent writing, so it must be forgiven)
Kazim Ali's Skyward
M. Nourbese Philip's Zong!

This last is a book I have long wanted and when Kazim just gave me his copy of it, I almost swooned with gratitude. It deserves close and careful reading and extensive, maybe even running, commentary so I will definitely be writing about it, if not here then somewhere.

So that's the reading year, both gone by and coming up. It's not a blow by blow account - god! why would I do that to you guys? but it's some kind of highlight.

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I haven't watched and don't plan to watch The Desolation of Smaug. I feel the shorter and more entertaining gifs on tumblrs around the world are enough. And, Jennifer Lawrence notwithstanding, Hunger Games does nothing for me.

The Sherlock mini thingie yesterday! Did y'all see it? The hair, oh gawd! So terrible! I predict an awful season, but I will watch it anyway.

What will make me both happier and weepier, will be this evening's Doctor Who, in which Peter Capaldi says hello and Matt Smith says goodbye.

All this seems to indicate that I watch more TV than films and this is true. The last film I remember watching is Four Lions which is funny and sad and problematic and in which it is proved that Brit Pakistanis can outswear Malcolm Tucker.

Other films in recent times included the loooong, strange and strangely fun film Kin Dza Dza! There was the harrowing Act of Killing and the epic-but-went-by-in-no-time Jai Bhim Comrade. And oh yes! - there was Recollections of the Yellow House and Offside, which were easier because more familiar types of filmmaking, without asking too much of the viewer. I regret to say I didn't finish watching 12 Storeys, which I found unrelentingly bleak; but now I wish I hadn't skipped it.

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Music, I dunno. I said nasty things about whiny midwestern American singers who hide their faces behind their long beautiful hair and thus might have offended a friend. There was a lot of salsa music at the IWP, as well as lots of belly-dancing.

I mean, I listened to all the big releases and all - Kanye, Beyonce, Daft Punk (that was this year, wasn't it?) but the thing that really got me was a mixtape of tango that Kaash put up somewhere. It had 'Tango Apasionado' from Happy Together on it, so no more words necessary.

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I cannot talk about the people. They have been the most important.

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I am trepidatious about the new year. If I've had a good one - and I have - it must follow that the universe has a mega-balancing k.o punch in store for me, right? Right? Therefore I am nervous. I feel like I'm being set-up and I want to finish the year in hiding and/or hibernation so that I can fly under the radar and make myself small and invisible until it becomes necessary to show myself.

But that's just me. I hope the new year will be good to all of you.

See you on the other side.

Spaniard Was Here

Yes, I know it's been ages (and ages) but I'm not sure what to say about that. Iowa happened, then Chicago, DC and New York and then I came back.

And I haven't felt like blogging, that's what. Not sure things are going to change around here. This silence, absence, whatever - it's not a slump. I feel energised, actually. But I also feel I should be pouring that energy into other stuff.

In other words, life is elsewhere.

Of course, going by my past record, I need only announce this in order to want to blog the heck out of the remaining few weeks of this year. We shall see, but don't hold your breath.

I leave you with a photo.

BANKSY WAS HERE. November 2013.

That was where the Bansky truck thing was.

Consider this a portrait of the space he occupied.