so much for empowering women

a woman named reshma used to do our dishes at home a few years ago. she would also sweep and dust the place for a sum of rs 1500 a month. i don’t know her last name, despite the fact that she was with us for over three years. what i do know is that she came from maharashtra’s smallest city, panhala, once capital of the maratha state and famous for its fort — the only one where, according to a few blogs, chhatrapati shivaji spent the most amount of time outside his childhood homes.

what i did know was that reshma was punctual, efficient, hard-working, and funny when she chose to speak, which was often. on the days she didn’t speak, i knew it was because she had been beaten by her husband.

as his second wife (and the younger one), she said it was her feisty nature that provoked him. he had two children with his first wife, who refused to work, and two with reshma, who was forced to work because there simply wasn’t enough money to go around. he couldn’t stand the fact that she helped provide for the family, apparently, and accused her of being ‘too proud’ for her own good. his anger would then compel him to attack her.

i tried, time and again, to convince reshma to report her husband to the police. i offered to invite them to my home, and have her speak to them there instead. i offered to call ngos that deal with domestic violence. reshma refused every offer. “my husband doesn’t care about the police,” she said. “he will get away within minutes. what will i do then?” my reassurances meant nothing to her.

her solution, at the time, was to bear the abuse until her children grew up and took her away. panhala offered no job opportunities, she added, so her mother couldn’t afford to keep her there. she didn’t want to disrupt her children’s education either.

i realized, after a point, that reshma simply had nothing to look forward to. stretching before her were years of dishwashing, the annual week-long trip to her mother’s home, and the dim hope that her children would study enough to land a job that could help them support her. if she chose not to work at someone’s home doing the dishes, she simply didn’t have the option of doing anything else. nothing that didn’t involve physical labour was open to her as a means of livelihood. she refused to accept charity, because she said she wanted to put her children through school without any help. i admired her enormously.

there are millions of reshmas across the country, doing hard labour on the streets or at homes like yours and mine, who have been completely ignored by governments that are supposedly there to take care of them too. these women have no job security, no medical insurance, and no access to public services that so many of us take for granted. the worst thing is how they have no help when it comes to domestic violence. how can they, when we live in a country where domestic violence is barely acknowledged? or, when we live in a country where the minister for women and child development says that marital rape — a very real issue in a country where millions of women simply don’t have a voice — cannot be applied to the ‘indian context’. what does that ‘indian context’ even mean? how do factors like poverty, illiteracy and religious beliefs (three specific excuses used by the minister herself) condone the fact that women have to suffer in silence?

there doesn’t seem to be any genuine attempt, by successive governments, to empower women either. politicians continue to debate the pros and cons of the women’s reservation bill, which proposes 33 per cent reservation for women in the lok sabha and assemblies. the central government says it is working towards evolving consensus and hopes it will succeed at the earliest. then again, the upa government tried to evolve consensus on the issue for 10 years. the bill was passed by the rajya sabha in 2010 but was stuck in the lok sabha on account of stiff resistance by a number of parties.

i remember asking reshma if more empowered women in politics would make any difference to her. she laughed for a few seconds, then asked, “will they manage to take decisions without asking their husbands for permission?” i haven’t thought of a reply yet.

if six were nine

is there anything about the quick-burning life of jimi hendrix that hasn’t already been said? starting at zero proves there is, using words that are largely his own. it appears that not many people actually sat hendrix down to ask him about his life and what drove him to create the songs that quickly placed him on a pedestal. the result of this lapse has been a glut of biographies that have long toggled between haphazard music criticism and pop psychology.

to be fair, this isn’t really a biography; more like a compilation of interviews, letters and assorted morsels put together by writer peter neal and alan douglas — the producer once vilified by hendrix fans for replacing some of his playing with the work of session musicians.

what comes across (apart from the editors’ respect for a friend) is how well hendrix recognised his place in the larger scheme of things. when he died mysteriously in london on september 18, 1970 at that cursed age of 27, he was already a legend. his performance at woodstock a year earlier, however, created the myth of a wild musician that starting at zero dispels quickly, drawing attention instead to his sensitivity and spiritual nature. also particularly refreshing are his comments, via interviews and jotted musings, on the notion of race and identity.

if you happen to be a guitar player, hendrix discussing his music ought to be reason enough to pick up this book. if you are just a fan of what he left behind, this will dramatically change the way you listen to it. “they make black and white fight each other so they can take over at each end,” he says at one point. it is an extremely astute remark for someone often dismissed as just a great guitar player.

— starting at zero: his own story, jimi hendrix, bloomsbury, rs 499

speaking for his time

'soon as they like you make ‘em unlike you,’ says kanye west on i am a god. it’s the third track off an album we know is titled yeezus only because a sticker placed helpfully by the record company informs us of this. the line and lack of album sleeve are both revelatory. the former helps one understand west’s current approach after the jaw-dropping masterpiece that was my beautiful dark twisted fantasy. the latter is a bold statement that can only be made by someone supremely confident of his artistic vision.

that kanye west has long been confident will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed his career (or reads american tabloids). to his credit he backs it up consistently, breaking new ground in an age that tends to reward artistes who play it safe. take i am a god again, for instance. it samples ‘forward inna dem clothes’ by jamaican reggae artist clifton bailey iii and ‘arey zindagi hai khel’ by anand bakshi and a certain rahul burman. how does he arrive at these choices? bound 2 samples a 1977 track called ‘aeroplane’ and ‘sweet nothin’s’ by rockabilly singer brenda lee. and, somehow, it all works.

his guest performers are equally impressive. justin vernon (i’m in it) and frank ocean (new slaves) drop by again, as they did on the last kanye release. also present this time are controversial rapper chief keef (hold my liquor) and kid cudi (guilt trip). blood on the leaves samples an astonishing cover, by nina simone, of billie holiday’s strange fruit. by doing so, they add unique textures to each track, lifting them up and out of the realm of the ordinary soundscape that is contemporary american hip-hop.

ultimately, dear potential listener, you have two choices. one: take kanye west at face value and dismiss him as a loudmouth who can add nothing to your life. two: listen to yeezus carefully, then try and understand why he’s doing what he’s doing. this is an artiste bent on opening our ears, and minds, to new and surprising experiences. we should celebrate his presence.

— yeezus, kanye west, universal, rs 395

not so great after all

what would f. scott fitzgerald do? that is the question the fabulous jay-z, who co-produced this soundtrack, ought to have asked himself first. one assumes his partner, the equally intriguing baz luhrmann, must have spent hours tackling that problem before setting out to film the 1925 novel. even a cursory listen to this batch of songs, however, yields this tragic answer: irrespective of what fitzgerald could have done, this would probably not be it.



the novel in question uses a mysterious protagonist to explore everything from greed and corruption to a society caught in the process of change beyond its control. juxtapose that lofty ambition against, if you will, these lines from the song ‘bang bang’ by the ubiquitous will.i.am: ‘my baby shot me down again, shot me down with the love and it go bang bang. that girl’s a killer from a gang, shot me down with the love and it go bang bang.’
this exploration of contemporary hip-hop is supposedly meant to mirror the role played by america’s jazz age in the novel. apart from the gorgeous (and now two years old) ‘no church in the wild’ by jay-z and kanye west, there is no strong representative of the genre at all. beyoncé and andre 3000’s cover of amy winehouse’s ‘back to black’ stumbles and falls, as does british singer emeli sandé's cover of ‘crazy in love.’

there's more of the banal in the form of fergie’s ‘a little party never killed nobody (all we got)’. the only thing that manages to work is ‘together’, by english indie darlings the xx. how this soundtrack plays out when set against the backdrop of luhrmann’s film is grist for another review. as the movie in question hasn’t been released here yet, this is all we have. and it isn’t enough.

— the great gatsby ost, various artists, universal, rs 395

easy does it

this is not for fans of the dan brown school of writing. it’s important to get that out of the way because the infatuations is marketed as a murder mystery. it isn’t what you should be carrying on the local train, or what you should bring out at the airport waiting lounge. it should be dipped into at intervals, like wine, giving you time to dive in and come up for air every once in a while.

paraphrasing what the novel is about is pointless. there is a murder, if one can call it that, and an air of mystery surrounding the protagonists. what marias does, however, is use his characters not so much to move the action along — as, say, a murder mystery writer would — but to tackle the big questions that all major writers grapple with; questions about the meaning, or lack thereof, of life and death.

as maria dolz, the narrator, is drawn into the lives of luisa alday, her husband miguel desverne and his best friend diaz-varela, everything that at first reading appears to be random is revealed as anything but. for those familiar with marías’s history — specifically the years he spent translating joseph conrad, thomas hardy, shakespeare and other greats from the english canon into spanish — it’s interesting to try and trace his influences.

to be fair, the book does what all good murder mysteries are supposed to: deceive the reader. one learns, or is taught, to expect the unexpected. do pick up a copy.

— the infatuations, javier marias, penguin

his joyful noise

mustansir dalvi may not remember, but he shared a table with me at a workshop over a decade and a half ago. it was conducted by british poet tobias hill and one of the pieces dalvi submitted for perusal was a sketch about a young boy working at a tea stall outside the building. that i still remember the story — how dalvi described the boy washing a teacup, for instance — makes a great case for the fact that this is a writer who chooses his words with enormous care.

going by the cover of dalvi's first book of poems in english, he pays the same amount of attention to images. it carries a detail from caravaggio's the incredulity of saint thomas, focusing on the apostle’s finger being guided by christ into a wound on the latter’s body. this highlights the role of a sceptic (or doubting thomas, as it were), as well as the act of peering beneath the surface of something to get to the heart of the matter. interestingly, it describes what any decent poet must do.



luckily, dalvi is more than just a decent poet. he is an extremely accomplished one, scratching away at all corners of bombay — his professed muse — to give us the poems that adorn these pages, ranging from the wry to the raucous. in ‘forest fires over khopoli’, he shows why he is a master of his craft. the line ‘ladies night at the rotary club, chiffon swish, babel breathlessness,’ for instance, employs not just assonance — repeating vowel sounds for internal rhyming — but consonance, where he repeats the same consonant for effect.

in ‘friday mosque in new bombay’, he reveals an exquisite eye for detail: ‘pink, the economic times pages are prayer mats: global stock indices all face due west.’ there are biblical references in ‘apple’ when the poet encounters a beggar at a traffic light. all kinds of other voices make their appearance, from writers of apps for android to ladies in crowded borivali locals, the prophet elijah to kings and boatmen. while the section that gives the collection its title is clearly located within the city’s railways, others like ‘mar thome’ and  ‘denizens’ allow dalvi to speak through voices scattered through space and time. and sprinkled throughout is a dry humour.

to borrow another biblical reference, dalvi’s poems make a joyful noise. his brouhaha makes for a bravura performance.

— brouhahas of cocks, mustansir dalvi, poetrywala, rs 250

heaven-haven a nun takes the veil

i have desired to go
where springs not fail,
to fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
and a few lilies blow.

and i have asked to be
where no storms come,
where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
and out of the swing of the sea.

— gerard manley hopkins

not going to him

minute by minute, i do not get up and just

go to him –

by day, twenty blocks away;

by night, due across the city's

woods, where night-crowned heron sleep.

it is what i do now: not go, not

see or touch. and after eleven

million six hundred sixty-four thousand

minutes of not, i am a stunned knower

of not. then i let myself picture him

a moment: the bone that seemed to surface in his

wrist after i had held my father's

hand in coma; then up, over

his arm, with its fold, from which for a friend

he gave his blood. then a sense of his presence

returns, his flesh which seemed, to me,

made as if before the christian

god existed, a north-island baby's

body become a man's, with that pent

spirit, its heels dug in, those time-worn

heels, those elegant flat feet;

and then, in a sweep, calf shin knee thigh pelvis

waist, and i run my irises

over his feathered chest, and on his neck,

the scar, dollhouse saucer of tarnish

set in time's throat, and up to the nape and then

dive again, as the swallows fly

at speed – cliff and barn and bank

and tree – at twilight, just over the surface

of a sloping terrain. he is alive, he breathes

and moves! my body may never learn

not to yearn for that one, or this could be

a first farewell to him, a life-do-us-part.

— sharon olds, from the collection 'stag's leap'

murder, she wrote

the murder in anu kumar’s elegantly wrought novel is, for lack of a better word, superfluous. it acts as a pivot, of course, as any novel categorised as ‘crime fiction’ ought to, but is rendered unnecessary simply because this is much more than just a crime novel. there are criminals, but not the kind one usually associates with the genre. these are criminals with questionable motives, living out their lives in a small town where everybody knows — or, at the very least, presumes to know — what their neighbour is up to.

brooks town, where the tale is set, gives anu kumar the perfect setting from which to launch an examination of her characters and their motives. it helps that she has the tools, and is practised in the art of using them to effect. everything, be it a road precariously clinging to the side of a hill or the state of a man’s sideburns, is described in prose that is carefully measured.

at the centre stands charlotte hyde, a curious figure who can best be described — in the words of american literary critic wayne booth — as an unreliable narrator. she is ineffectual and detached at times, prescient and decisive at others. kumar’s narrative isn’t linear. her narrator travels through time, picking up threads of one story, putting them down abruptly when another one catches her eye. it gives the novel a surprisingly hallucinatory tone, perfect for the supposedly sleepy town it is set in. interestingly, the lives of kumar’s characters also come into dramatic contact with india’s larger history playing out in the background.

the only thing this critic had a problem with can be explained by a principle expounded by russian playwright anton chekhov. often referred to as ‘chekhov’s gun’, it is a metaphor that could be applied to kumar’s unusually long cast of characters: if a loaded gun appears in the first act of a play, it should be fired at some point in the future. if not, it need not appear at all. putting aside that minor quibble, one hopes anu kumar writes again, and very soon.

— it takes a murder, anu kumar, hachette, rs 350

a host of beautiful voices

an anthology like this must be an astonishingly complicated task for any editor to approach. for one, justice must be done to the rich seam of poetry in regional languages that goes back a couple of thousand years. then, one must take into account what scholars of the vedas (like vaman shivram apte, in the practical sanskrit dictionary) have differentiated as śruti (what is heard) and smṛti (what is remembered).

one must also incorporate not just the religious bhakti movement but also the ancient tradition of love poetry in classical languages like tamil. to their credit, then, eunice de souza and melanie silgardo rise to the task with finesse.

for french philosopher denis diderot, poetry needed to have something in it that was ‘barbaric, vast and wild.’ for the american critic babette deutsch, it was important because ‘no less than science’ it sought a hold upon reality. she believed the closeness of its approach was ‘the test of its success.’ in india, poet a k ramanujan often mentioned the ‘intertextual’ nature of our literature, moving between oral and written, referring to older stories and other versions. this is most obvious when one looks at interpretations of the ramayana, for instance, happily included within these pages.



somewhere between these myriad approaches to an ancient literary art form lies something primal: a need to evoke or provoke an emotive response using nothing but language as a tool.

shunning the banal chronological approach, de souza and silgardo collate their selection by the way poets approach everything from what a poem ought to be, to how they deal with the big questions of love and death. for the reader who chooses to flip through at random, the pleasant surprises are many. this critic, for instance, was moved by everything from kalidasa’s work in sanskrit (‘is poetry always worthy when it's old? and is it worthless, then, because it’s new?’) to ramanujan’s translations of tamil bhakti poet nammalvar (‘remembering only my faults, my lord doesn’t show me any grace’) and much writing of great beauty in between.

there was marathi poet shobha bhagwat’s opinion on husbands (‘where can one find a husband who likes his wife?’), imtiaz dharker, writing in english, on mumbai (‘which other city hands out two different calling cards, one with the left hand, the other with the right?’), anonymous gujarati folk songs, kamala das’s translations of malayalam poets unniyarcha and aromal unni, and faiz ahmad faiz on ‘the morning of freedom, 15th august 1947.’

the breadth of work represented is extraordinary, from the tamil hindu devotional form to buddhist monk vidyakara’s love poetry from bengal, dilip chitre’s translations of tukaram (as poignant now as when they were first published in 1991), modern urdu literature and representatives of the pan-india progressive writers movement founded in 1936.

at the end of their introduction, de souza and silgardo mention the need for further anthologies, praying to god for strength if they should choose to do them. we hope this strength is granted to them.

— these my words: the penguin book of indian poetry, eunice de souza & melanie silgardo, penguin, rs 499