Why I might just not write a novel, annus horribilis nearly and other miscellany

This will probably be my closing blog for the year.  There are lots of things on my mind at this time.  Hence this confused title.  

Right on top in my mind is this business of the novel that I have been referring to in a couple of posts.  So some of you have been intrigued or surprised that I had one in mind, some of you have encouraged me to press on with it.  

Knowing that you are a small set of people to whom I send links to my blog, all of fourteen at last count, and knowing that you are all dear to me there is a sampling bias in these reactions. 

So here is the story on my novel.  I have written up most of the plot.   But the core of the setting into which I wish to my weave my story has just started taking shape.  I know it will be a long way before I get that bit in place. 

I would like to engage in this writing effort purely as a matter of indulgence.  I would like to do it for my sake.   I wish to spend a lot of time researching the historical setting at the core of the novel.

That said, here are the reasons I might eventually not write the novel after all.  And if I did I might not publish it.  At a very basic level I believe a writer needs to be a sensitive person, being able to get into the minds of the character.  A writer needs to have a good command of language, with the ability to create the right effect on the reader’s mind with nothing more than words to create that effect.  Above all, a writer needs to be able to tell an engaging story.

Having spent an enormous amount of time thinking about myself as a writer I am not sure I have acquired any of these abilities in adequate measure.  If at all my blogs suggest that I possess some kind of writing skills I would dismiss them as inadequate for a novel where the writer has to engage the reader for an extended period of time.  My raconteuring skills are even poorer.

So, here I am.  I would love to tell a story that has been close to my heart, for more reason than one.  The setting I want to locate the story in has been close to my heart as a topic in history.   Hence my belief that writing this novel will be an act of pure indulgence.  Again, my story is about a protagonist who is modeled on someone special that I know.  That leaves me with this dilemma:  Should I lay bare the details of this protagonist and her life?  Or should I just preserve my thoughts and recollections of the protagonist as a private treasure?

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With three days to go, I cannot wait for this year to get over.   I know that sounds awfully superstitious.  But then this year started off with so many transitions that my wife and I said to each other in the middle of January that we could not wait for the year to get over.

 

Looking back, by the grace of God, it has not turned out to be quite the annus horribilis that we were afraid that it would be.   It is true that we will not see any more of some relatives, friends and acquaintances that we would miss.  But then we are grateful to God that the year did not get any worse.

On a different note I realize that during the year I got to know someone very interesting, very likeable as a person, someone who impressed me deeply with some extraordinary qualities I noticed during my interactions, although she is a generation younger to me.  It was a strange and first of its kind experience for me, although I have heard of friends and relatives telling me about having turned completely unconnected acquaintances into adopted nieces and nephews and assorted family.

It is a pity that I will probably not have much longer to get to know this person, more or better, since she will very soon move on to pursue a new phase in her destiny in a different part of the world that I may have nothing to do with.  So much so there will be practically no touch points in our incipient connection in a few days from today.   

So here is the bright side:  Apart from the joy that one gets out of admiring someone talented, someone likable, I also discovered that after all I am capable of caring selflessly for someone from whom I had not received anything, from whom I looked forward to nothing at all, except the joy of having cared for.

I am grateful to God I made this acquaintance.  I am sorry our (this individual's and mine) paths will probably never cross again, after a few days from now.

That would bring up the obvious question:  What about my wife, my sons and other members of my family?  Did / do I not care for them?  After much thinking I am now of the belief that none of that so far has been truly selfless.  I have asked myself probably the ultimate counterfactual:  Would I love them all just the same if I had not received the amount of affection that I had received or been receiving from each of them?  That is a tough question to answer.  And the most honest answer I can give is I don’t know.

Having been through all of that I can now say this:  Those folks who are capable of loving and sharing without asking for anything in return are truly a blessed lot.  That has been a great realization this year for me.

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This year has been a slow year on the work front.  But that is nothing new for me.  With the year behind me, I realise that I will have nothing significant to show that would take me closer to immortality, which perhaps is what many would consider the final frontier of achievement.  

I will leave out the notion of immortality from this discussion.  Shankaracharya is immortal as is Gautama Buddha.  Alexander the Great is immortal.  But isn’t Timur the lame immortal too?  Is Adam Smith immortal?  Is Louis Pasteur immortal?  What about Karl Marx?  They have all touched our lives our influenced our thoughts in such perceptible ways.

Getting back to my life this year at work, it has been just another dull and uneventful year as many others in the past, with nothing that took place portending that anything significantly different in a positive way is likely to happen in the next year. 

But then I look at the bright side:  It could have been worse too.  Thank God it wasn’t so.


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It turns out that since I started blogging three years back I would have written the largest number of posts this year.  I resumed writing after suspending it for a few months when I thought that I had said that all I had to.

And then I went through this rather wrenching experience this year that made me want to resume writing.  It is commonly believed that behind many a creative work there is a Muse.  My spurt in blogging productivity is largely due to a Muse.

Some of you have sensed it already.  Although I wrote on a variety of topics during the year I eventually came back to the one same theme, which had to with my unrequited feelings for the Muse and my troubled relationship.  Although of some antiquity, the ghosts of that relationship came back to haunt me this year.  It bothered me a great deal.  To the extent, that my niece, one of the people in my list of people I mail links to, wrote back that she had had enough of  that theme.  

I think it is now time for me to sign off for the year - from the theme as well as blogging.  

In closing, I want to thank each of you for having been such kind and occasionally even indulgent readers, often getting back with kind feedback, suggestions and thoughts.  Thank you for patiently reading my rambling posts.  All I can give you in return is my prayerful best wishes for a great 2015 for you and everyone in your family.

Nanni.  Namaskaaram.

Koyikode Vignettes

It is one of those unusual trips where the journey and the destination were sources of joy to me.  Driving through the forests of Bandipur and winding up and down the hills where the Western Ghats meet the Deccan plateau was delight in itself.   The troops of monkeys and a darting leopard in the reserve forest raised our expectations of being able to see more of the wildlife of Bandipur.  That was not to be though.  It turned out the leopard indeed was a non-normal sighting. 

  

We descended into the foothills of Wayanad, having negotiated the nine hair pin bends, with me muttering and swearing under my breath as I tried to deal with my acrophobia.  After driving through another fifty kilometres of the undulating beauty of the Western Ghats we drove into Koyikode. 

To all those who have not been on this trip I would strongly encourage you to make the trip to Wayanad just for enjoying the sheet beauty of nature in this part of the world.  I guess it may look even more picturesque in the rains, although one may not able to screech through the distance in the six hours and fifteen minutes that I managed to in the comfort of the dry, cool December air.

Koyikode and Malabar are different from the rest of Kerala.  Our stay there was very short, for a maiden trip.  Apart from the seven hours that I slept for, most of the twelve waking hours we spent there was taken up by the main purpose of our trip, which I shall not say much about. 

So we did after all miss seeing those spots on the lovely beaches where Dr. Prasad Varkey explained to Puja Mathew the three sequential levels of response to lost love in the movie Om Shanti Oshana (OSO).   More about Dr. Varkey's theory on lost love in another post.

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Koyikode – that is what the locals would call Kozhikode – is a city with a rich past that is struggling to come to terms with a contemporary present.   The Malabar region has always captured my imagination as it has held a prominent place in the history of Kerala.  

Its fertile hinterland grew spices that the rest of the world coveted.  Its inviting ports beckoned traders, who eventually became conquerors, to its shores, centuries before the advent of Jesus Christ.  In medieval times, a mere forty five years after the officially accepted year of the Renaissance and Reformation, fired by the spirit of adventure that it is said to have ignited, the first Europeans landed in India through the Kappada beach.    

In more recent times it reasserted its place in the annals of history as the fiery spirit of its people manifested in one of the early freedom struggles in the form of the Mappilla rebellion.  The people of the region later on followed with their struggle for social justice through their feisty leaders like EMS, VT Bhattathiripad and Comrade Ajitha.  

Each of them represented a different approach to achieving their ends.  What was common to all of them was their abiding commitment to the social cause they espoused.  That is the essence of history in a sense.  

For successive generations, history has been wrongly taught as the story of individual triumphs of conquerors and heroes who prevailed over the vanquished.  The truth is that often they also represent the larger collective aspirations of peoples and societies.

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To me places are nothing but the spatial coordinates of where people created events.  Take the people out of the context, a place is nothing but a lifeless piece of geography, with the flora and fauna the only living beings who anyway do not have much of a story to tell by themselves, unless you are a zoologist or a botanist.   I am neither.  Imagine the flowers and the beasts and the birds that we read about as children without the human or humanoid stories woven around them!

 

I tried to visualize the Dravidians as they over-ran the local negroids more than three thousand years ago in modern Wayanad, as they tried to find a new home after they had been displaced by the more war like Aryans who marauded their way into the fertile Indo Gangetic plains from the cold, dry and inhospitable terrains of Central Europe and West Asia.  I wondered how the local worshippers of animistic faiths must have responded as their religions were supplanted by the Goddess worshipping immigrants and their symbols and icons cleverly coopted.

As we drove through Sultan Battery I relived the battles between Tipu Sultan and the British and the role that the battery must have played in those battles till the truce of Srirangapatnam.  The Sultan never managed to get to Kozhikode although he extended the road to Thamarassery.  

The little towns of Chungam, Chundale, Engapuzha, Adivaram,Vythiri, Thamarassery and so on bore testimony to the trading prowess of the Muslims of this region and the tenuous confluence until the recent past between their religious and their secular lives.  The market places and their shops had a look that was distinct from similar establishments I had seen in Central or Southern Kerala.  On the beaches of Kozhikode I could not help imagining the first Greek and Roman vessels buoying up and down on the waters of the distant dark moonless horizon.   

So here is the rub.  While my wife and sons admired the sights, sounds and smells of the beautiful and vibrant beach of Kozhikode on a balmy Sunday evening, here I was lost in reverie, somewhere inside the many hundreds of pages of history that I had read and was now struggling to recreate through my fading recollections - like a visually impaired man trying to read the faded and moth eaten pages of an ancient book.

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I loved Koyikode for all that.  I could see the struggle between tradition hanging around its old houses and shops and buildings that clung together with their black tar roofs on the one hand and the new glass walled showrooms that evidenced the purchasing power of the western trained, Gulf oil funded Malabari.  Koyikode did not seem to have transitioned neatly from the world of (Vaikom Mohammed) Basheerka to this modern world that is perhaps epitomized by Dulqur Salman and the character that he plays in Ustad Hotel.  

Its strong tradition and character, I suspect, will not allow that to happen.  And that has perhaps nothing to do with the zeal of the hundreds of thousands of pious Muslims clad in their spotless white Mappilla costume that I saw milling around the Markaz convention centre where a massive event was in progress.

In that sense Koyikode is like my home town, Trivandrum.  There is an uneasy and immiscible coexistence between the quaint and the contemporary.   It is unlike Kochi which has always been a bit of a parvenu.  The jarring garishness of Manmohan’s Singh’s market economy has come to settle down well in Kochi, among its new hotels, fancy apartments and a new generation that often appears to have lost its way and seems to seek solace and sense in the city’s numerous bands and herb-dispensing hangouts. 

Koyikode is unlike Trivandrum in an important way though.  Its people are awfully nice, to the point of being genteel.  That is very unlike my fellow Travancorite who would make you think twice before you try a second attempt at building a conversation.

 

And as you think of its many violent struggles in the past, as you recall the many press stories of the political clashes, as you think of the many movie stories that revolve around mindless fundamentalists being misguided into evil plots to liquidate unsuspecting and harmless citizens, one cannot help wonder how a society that is full of such people could whip such a frenzy of emotions.   

That is perhaps what the Malayali means when he says that even the docile rat snake is capable of striking back if adequately provoked.

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As we navigated out of Koyikode, through its narrow but well maintained streets, past its well laid out even if somewhat tasteless buildings, through the din of the Monday morning traffic, listening to the sweet prattle of the RJ in her musical North Keralite and Malabari accent, I said to myself that this, Insha Allah, will not be my last visit to Koyikode.  

This is where I need to start my journey to gather the material for my as yet unborn, half written novel, in which my protagonist, Ammu, a fierce Marxian historian in the footsteps of Damodar Kosambi, a love child who is struggling to come to terms with her scar-filled past, sifts through years of archaeological material littered across the hills and caves of the Western Ghats to find a new explanation for the mystery of the nearly mythical port of Muziris. 

At the end of my travel I may still not have a novel.  But I hope to have sated my lust for the coast of Malabar. 

But then I also know that I will have another important reason, a new chapter that appears to be unfolding in my life, God willing, that is too early to speculate about.  But it is one of those visions of the future that one sometimes thinks one can see, however hazily through the silvery mists of uncertainty.

This post is dedicated to the only two Koyikkodans I know, apart from the third who is at the centre of the unfolding future that I am not able to speak of yet in much detail.  By the time that drama has played out its magic on me I might just smile at the evanescence of all that I saw, I experienced, I wrote about and all that is so ephemeral that we hold on to it like it will be there eternally.

Nanni.  Namaskaaram.

That time of the year when...

It will be soon that time of the year when another set of young men and women say good bye to the campus.  The place that was school to them for a little less than two years would soon be alma mater, a somewhat vaguely defined relationship.  For many of them the alma mater would just be a bagful of memories.  For others it would be a badge of lifelong honour and pride.

I often wonder how many of them would miss the place as they head out to a world of expectations and promise.  Would they miss us teachers a good part of whose lives revolve around them?

It is our engagement with the students that defines or marks our calendars.  We plan our academic life around our teaching commitments.  And our families plan their lives around our academic lives. 

Students have a larger impact on our lives as teachers than we might imagine.  And I am not yet talking about the feedback, which sometimes leaves evergreen memories and, on some rare occasions, scars that you wish you could forget.

Which makes me often wonder how much truth there is to what some of my colleagues claim: We academics are at the heart of an academic institution.  I ask instead:  What would this school and our lives as teachers be but for its students?

It will be soon that time of the year when the trees would have all shed their leaves, in preparation for the hot and desiccating summer of Bangalore.  To a more delusive or hyper-imaginative mind like mine it would appear that they do so in honour of the kids that are about to leave the campus.

Or may be it is their way of saying how much they will miss them.  Like the flora of Ayodhya that is said to have left the town to accompany Lord Rama to the Dandakaranya forest when His father banished Him.

These trees are like mute witnesses to the vicissitudes of life on the campus.  They stand there stoically for years and decades, watching the steady procession of people who live on the campus and then eventually leave as they graduate, retire or are snatched away by the Hands of Destiny.

I know most of these trees individually, like they were animate creatures, and not the inanimate but living creatures that our science text books would have us believe.  They must have stood where they are for many decades, like Lord Tennyson's brook, even as men come and go.  I know how their leaves look, how their branches droop and the spread of their lush, generous canopies.

It will be soon that time of the year when the whole campus will go to sleep.  The students' halls of residences will be vacant once again.  Many faculty colleagues and their families will leave on their annual vacation, as if they wanted to say, What do we do here with all the students gone. 

It will be soon that time of the year that I do not look forward to.  In spite of being an old man I do not like transitions in life.  And I do not like milestones that forebode impending transitions either.

As I walk back home to the hastening dusk on the December sky I visualise that time of the year that will soon be upon me which will remind that I will be closer to completing another year of my life as a teacher.  It will soon be that time of the year when I will be one year closer to calling it a day as a teacher.

It will soon be that time of the year when I would have gone through another year of circumstances working their inevitable changes on my mind, ever so subtly that I would not even notice.  Until I run into someone from my remote past who exclaims how much I have changed over the years, how taciturn, morose, quiet, grumpy, cynical or humourless I have become.

But this year will not be just another of those fourteen years that I have spent as a teacher here.  I have been through some extraordinary experiences this year.  I discovered a latent emotional need that I had never imagined that I had - the need to be an elderly relative of a kind that I have not been so far.  But just as quickly I realised to my searing disappointment that this desire will remain unfulfilled.

It will soon be that time of the year when the strong arm of Rejection will have prised a piece of me away from the complex ensemble of personalities that my friends who claim to me know me well tell me I am - even though the rational side to me may have helped me come to terms with this unrequited need for belongingness.

Nanni...Namaskaaram..