Judgments

“If you’re a person who loves Alice Munro and you’re going out with someone whose favorite book is ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal.”— Sloane Crosley

I’ve always believed that you can learn everything you need to know about a person by looking at their bookshelf. The problem with that though is that (a) they may not read at all and (b) even if they do read, they may not buy books because they’re on a pro-environment paper-saving binge, because they can’t afford them or because they’re miserly.

I read about people deciding whether to spend time on a relationship because of the other person’s taste in books the other day. As I read the write-up, it seemed a little far-fetched to me but a few minutes ago, I began to think of it after I almost unsubscribed from a blog which reviewed a novel which I’d like to read called ‘The Palace of Illusions’ by Chitra Divakaruni by saying that although it’s ‘not as good or as strong as Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’, it’s still very much worth reading’.

Judging people by their taste in books isn’t something I thought I did, but when I read that sentence, I almost unsubscribed from the blog. Dan Brown. Strong? I’ve enjoyed reading Mr Brown’s books but his writing is hardly great literature. If it weren’t for the subjects he’s chosen, I’m sure he’d be just another novelist in the list: John Grisham, Jeffrey Archer, Arthur Hailey, Stephen King.

Thinking about it, I realise that if someone told me that their favourite author was someone I didn’t think too highly of, I’d write the person off. Never mind that my own favourite authors are Beatrix Potter and A A Milne.

I somehow believe that a person’s tastes and choices reveal who they are with far more clarity than any of their assertions ever do. And those choices are not restricted to what they choose to read.

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About ‘The Palace of Illusions’ from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s site:

“Relevant to today’s war-torn world, The Palace of Illusions takes us back to the time of the Indian epic The Mahabharat—a time that is half-history, half-myth, and wholly magical. Through her narrator Panchaali, the wife of the legendary five Pandavas brothers, Divakaruni gives us a rare feminist interpretation of an epic story.”

Read the first chapter at randomhouse.com/doubleday/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385515993&view=excerpt

Legacy

All your secrets. Everything you didn’t share with me. Everything you didn’t want anyone to know. Written out in your own hand. Page after page, all of them belong to me now.
Or is there still much that I know naught of?

The Memory of a Friend

I just came across this letter [1] which a friend seems to have written to a magazine years ago:

“May I correct a small linguistic error in the extremely interesting article, appearing in our May issue, contributed by Sarvashri Ghorpade, Verghese and Mallik ?At the top of page 3 occur words which show the authors to have relied on the basic rule of Latin that “nouns ending in –a are feminine.” Actually, there are exceptions to this rule” eg: ‘nauta’ (or ‘navita’) meaning a sailor, ‘poeta’ meaning a (male or female) poet, and ‘agricola’ meaning a farmer (always in Roman days, a male). ‘Monticola’ is evidently analogous with ‘agricola’ and simply means ‘a chap who lives on a mountain’, NOT a ‘mountain maid’. There is no form ‘agricolus’ or ‘monticolus’.Whether the authors of the Latin language devised these exceptions for the fun of tripping up future generations of schoolboys (as they have often done) I cannot say; but I am sure they would have felt proud to have snared such birds as Ghorpade sandurensis and his two companions.
Thomas Gay”

It sounds just like him.
I also came across the memoirs [2] of John Percival Waterfield (who in 1966 became the Head of Chancery at the High Commission in Delhi) which speak of him in less than flattering terms:

I also came across the memoirs [2] of John Percival Waterfield (who in 1966 became the Head of Chancery at the High Commission in Delhi) which speak of him in less than flattering terms:

Tom, who is still alive as I write, in India, aged 92, was the son of Edward Hope Waterfield, referred to above, known as Odo, and my grandfather William’s second surviving son.
We never saw Tom, who lived somewhere near Bombay, when we were in India from 1966-69. He had deserted his English wife, Barbara, and children, in Cambridge in order to settle near Bombay, living in Indian style, after his retirement from the Indian Civil Service on Partition or soon after. I just remember once seeing him going for a swim in the sea at Dawlish, when I was a boy, and I was staying also at the Clint, his mother’s house. In India I did not feel I had anything sufficiently in common with him to seek him out, and it would not have been easy as it was a long way and we were very fully occupied at the High Commission in Delhi, where I was Head of Chancery or ‘chief of staff’ to John Freeman. … Mrs Pandit, a great Indian lady and distinguished politician, Pandit Nehru’s sister, spoke to us in Delhi most warmly of Tom. I had know Mrs Pandit when she came to Moscow in 1948 as India’s first Ambassador and, as her people knew little or no Russian, and had no experience of entertaining in Moscow, I remember that I helped in, and in fact organized, her first big diplomatic party. Her then First Secretary, to whom I did not warm, was one T N Kaul whom I found again as the ‘Secretary’ or top official of the Department of External Affairs in Delhi in 1966. Though surprisingly affable to me then, I still did not warm to him, and his attitude to British interests was, if not hostile, certainly equivocal. Despite my unenthusiastic views of Tom Waterfield, I have been much impressed and touched by some verses he wrote about his father (Odo) after the latter’s early death which my cousin Ruth Bell, Tom’s younger sister, found and sent to me (or Mary) comparatively recently. I think they are well worth reproducing here if I can find them, which I have not yet done. We have always had close relations if on my part with good-natured laughter at her foibles with Ruth, whose husband Ian Bell was in the Foreign Service at much the same time as myself, having started in the Consular Service.

After his death, I came across several accounts of him that were not entirely pleasant but somehow they didn’t make an iota of difference to me. I knew him when he was an old man, perhaps by then, he’d mellowed considerably although I can’t be sure. What I do know is that I cared about and respected the gentleman I knew to be.

Sources:
[1] Newsletter For Birdwatchers July 1974 Volume 14 (7):10 http://www.indiabirds.com/PDFFiles/PDF/nandi.pdf
[2] http://www.tamburlane.co.uk/resources/JPW_MEMS.PDF

Guest Post: Real Nightmares

This post was written by Aban Mukherji in 2006. It speaks of a domestic violence incident which involved an acid attack and describes the author’s reaction to it.
How can one deal with experiences that cross the borders of language?
Yesterday my friend Vijaya, an experienced medical social worker at the J—- Hospital, baldly described the trauma of a patient. The ’sweet-looking young girl’ was brought from Pune to the J—- Hospital in Mumbai in a Sumo, crouched on her hands and knees on the floor of the vehicle for four hours. “She couldn’t sit,” said Vijaya, matter of factly, “because her buttocks were on fire.” I felt a band of steel grip my forehead, even before Vijaya started narrating the sequence of events, which brought this girl-wife across the threshold of the hospital. “A few weeks ago, her husband, who periodically tortured her, threw acid on her private parts, then inserted a bottle of Vicks VapoRub into her vagina before having sex with her. You should have seen her condition two weeks ago. It was horrible!” and Vijaya’s face puckered in a ghastly grimace. “Her pelvic region and buttocks are covered with huge sores and boils. But today she seems a little better. She will pull through”.
“Her pain was so great that she barely remembered crawling out of the house on her hands and knees. Her neighbours refused to come to her aid. How she reached her sister’s home is anybody’s guess. The police refused to register an FIR and S—- Hospital closed their doors on her.
In desperation she was brought all the way from Pune to J—- Hospital – her private parts, a mass of burnt flesh.” “But her face is so pretty and untouched,” she concluded. “And nothing has been done to arrest the husband. That psychopath is still at large! Dr. D—-, the head of the Gynaecological Dept is reluctant to allow reporters to interview the girl though the —- correspondent has managed to see her in Ward 32 of the hospital!”
After Vijaya left, my mother and I watched part of Schindler’s List. How could one put into words what the victims of brutality on such a vast scale had suffered? Even personal suffering, on a very modest scale, seems to freeze one into silence. Perhaps Vijaya’s tale, and Schindler’s List together proved too strong a dose for me and the horror brought on the old, familiar, nightmare which used to haunt me a few years ago, when I had come face to face with a woman whose face was a ghastly mesh of scars, eyeballs bulging out of their sockets, a mouth without lips with protruding teeth, cheeks, neck and shoulders a mass of raw, burnt flesh—the victim of an acid attack. She was standing on the overbridge spanning Queen’s Road. As I hurried past her, our eyes interlocked. I could not fathom their expression as they bored into mine. Was it pain, despair, detachment or utter numbness? I stumbled down the steps, feeling giddy and nauseous.
That night I dreamt that acid had been thrown on my face. I could not recognize myself. I knew I was me, but who was I? ” I know who I am.” I went on proclaiming to myself, hysterically. But I could not identify myself with that ghastly image and if I could not accept that image as myself, then, I was not ‘I’. In my dream, I distinctly remember covering myself with a sheet from head to foot. If I could not see myself and no one could see me, then, perhaps, I could be me. I awoke feeling hot and feverish, grateful to see my face unscarred.
Last night, I again dreamt of an acid attack. This time I was given a choice—your face or your vagina. I shielded my face with both arms, screaming, begging, pleading to spare my face. If my face went “I” would be snuffed out. I woke up with the shrill ring of the alarm before I could clearly articulate my choice. I lay quietly in the dark, knowing I would protect my face at all cost because I would not be able to bear the rejection reflected in the eyes of others. What could be covered and hidden could be denied but the denial of oneself by others would be unbearable.
Published with the author’s permission.

Youth

Rolling down a hill over green grass. Sitting by the canal, our feet almost touching the water. Swinging on banyan trees. Climbing mango trees. Making houses with walls of hay. Playing house. Stroking Black Beauty.
Lego. Jewellery. High heels. Long gowns. Make up. Manicures. Jigsaw puzzles. Plaster of Paris models. Paint. Embroidery. Music.

• Laughter …because there could have been nothing else.
• Fearlessness …because the thought that anything could go wrong was non-existent.
• Hope …because disappointment was unknown.
• Receptiveness …beause everything was new.
• Spiritedness …because rectitude had not made its presence felt.
• Comfort …because being judged was an alien concept.
• Confidence …because self-esteem was intact.
• Provocativeness …because vulnerability had never been experienced.
• Generosity …because nothing else had ever been contemplated.

Remember what you saw then. Don’t look at what the years have now left you to see.

Grief

Late at night, I sometimes think of you when the day is done and I know that I should sleep. Dreams then come to my rescue and remind me of what it was like to be with you.
The morning after, the memories refuse to fade and I wish that I had not dreamt of you. That I had not remembered.
Because I’m left to face the present. Alone.
There are so many things I wanted to tell you. That I didn’t. And the sad thing is that I don’t know why I didn’t say them. I’ve learnt, too late, that there is no inappropriate time to tell someone that you care for them. That there is no reason to feel ashamed for doing so. That nothing is as sacred as love.

Forgiveness

There's a post on Mad Melancholic Feminista about forgiveness and (sibling) relationships. It made me think about forgiveness in my own life.
It's an issue I've been grappling with for a while now -- it simply doesn't come easily to me. The way I see it, forgiveness is, by and large, a tool I use to be able to justify the existence or creation of a context which either does actually exist or which I want to have exist.
There are times when I don't even have the slightest desire to forgive. Usually, when that happens, it's simply because I’m afraid that forgiving might involve forgetting, and that forgetting might involve allowing an encore which is not something I would like to have to deal with no matter now many ‘mights’ would have to find their way into reality before that happened.
There are other times when I think that it is beyond me to be able to forgive primarily because anger or pain get in the way although my ability to set those feelings aside seems to depend on who the other person involved is — like most people, I suppose, I can forgive almost anything in those I love.
Although, then again, there are those whom my inability to forgive has ultimately caused me to stop caring for. What seems strange is that I don't have to care about a person to somehow find a way to forgive them. What I need to be able to forgive is to want to be able to see that person playing a part in my life, however small, at some point in the future. And if I want to be able to see that in my mind's eye, I am willing to ignore reality.

Broken Violins

I just came across an article about David Garrett accidentally crushing his 236-year-old million-dollar Guadagnini violin and felt really sad.
I don’t play the violin although many years ago, my grandmother had given me an old Czech copy of a Stradivarius. It first came to me in good condition. After years of my being separated from it, it came back to me with its body cracked. I doubt the violin was ever worth very much but I was heartbroken nonetheless.

Link: http://music.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2257124,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

Debit Cards

I’ve never beeen too comfortable with cards. Sometime ago, I encountered a problem I haven’t faced before although I’m told that it’s common enough — I went to a shop and paid using a debit card. Later, when I updated my passbook, I noticed that I’d been charged twice for the purchase.
Assuming the shop had charged me twice, I tried to follow it up with them (and get my money back). They were polite and helpful – having a membership card with them may have helped — although they told me that they problem was with the bank. They took about ten minutes to give me a letter to give to the bank saying that I’d made a purchase for which they had received payment only once (although I’d been charged twice), and asked that the bank give me back my money.
I then went to the bank with the letter and had a completely different experience there. To begin with, they were completely ill-equipped to handle the situation — such as it is. First they couldn’t find the form which needed to be filled up. When they did finally find it, they discovered that they had just one copy (and have therefore asked me to come back tomorrow to collect the form). It turns out that they also need the form to be submitted in triplicate with three sets of photocopies of the first and last pages of my passbook, and the letter which the shop gave me to give them. Not too surprisingly, they’re not planning to pay for the photocopying charges and to make matters even more annoying, they plan to take a minimum of 45 days to reimburse me. Also, they tell me that it isn’t their fault.
At this stage though I don’t care whose fault it is. I want my money to be returned to me and I am astounded that the bank doesn’t have a quicker procedure to deal with problems like this. The amount in this particular case is small but I dread ever having the same thing occur with a large amount of money being involved.

Quarter Life

Another year, and you find that now:

• You fail to recognise the music being played when you enter a coffee shop.


• You are entirely capable of having a conversation with teenagers without having any idea of what they've said.


• You think that Lycra is cheap.


• You can be grouchy and you don't suffer jackasses gladly.


• You may not know what you want or where you're going but you know without a doubt whom you don't want to be around.


• You have little tolerance for people who think very differently from you and insist on preaching all the time.


• You're in love with structured fabrics and your favorite brands are Van Heusen Woman and Allen Solly.


• You don't feel comfortable wearing stilettos all day long, and it doesn't bother you.


• You don't equate looking sexy with revealing flesh.


• You can legitimately use the phrase 'when I was young' even if it's only to say things like '...we didn't have cell phones in school'.


• You can imagine life without SMS.


• You actually know what to do when an audio cassette loses its tension.


• You no longer particularly care for T-shirts.


• You've stopped thinking in terms of a happily ever after.
  


• 18 years old: Misologist, naïve.
• 20 years old: Misoneist, comfortable.
• 22 years old: Misandrist, suspicious.
• 24 years old: Misogamist, undecided.


• You live life in shades of grey.


• You know that your life doesn't look like what you want it to and you're learning how to deal with disappointment.


• You don't give a damn about what anyone else says about you.


• You're no longer sure you know your way around.


• You're not willing to waste time on getting revenge but that doesn't mean that you're willing to forget (or forgive).


• You know that you can flirt but you have absolutely no desire to spend time talking to random guys who mean nothing to you. You just wish you had been that good at it when you were 16.


• You stop making friends with people merely because it's convenient. Your best friend isn't the kid next door who's like a parasite living off your toys.


• You choose your friends carefully; they're people whom you genuinely like and respect, and they're don't all live just around the corner.


• You think that there's nothing cool about not being in control; you've almost completely stopped drinking, forget about getting drunk.


• You realise that you not only draft virtually everything in points -- plaints must be drafted in consecutively numbered paragraphs, double spaced and in font size 14 -- but that you also think in points.

Book Covers

Book CoversFebruary 9, 2008
I like books which look good. Speaking of Mills and Boon, they’ve recently begun to print their books in India but the paper they use doesn’t seem to be as good as the paper they use abroad. Also, the covers prominently say that the books cost only 99 INR each. Apart from the fact that 99 for a book is not ‘only’ 99 in a country where Wordsworth Classics — Dickens, Austen, etc. — cost 90 INR and Bantam Classics — Homer, Virgil, Twain etc. — cost 125 INR, there is something extremely unpalatable about buying a book which reminds you that you’ve bought an inexpensive edition. And I think that that’s why I’ve never bought a Dover Thrift Edition or, for that matter, classics published by Wilson despite their having faux leather covers.
Perhaps it is entirely about being snobbish but given an option between a buying a good-looking book and one which, well, isn’t, I’d always choose the former. Sometime ago, that prompted me to buy a beautiful edition of Jane Austen’s works, my favourite author — never mind that she never moves very far out of a living room — in small, gilded volumes.
That being said, I also love to go to second-hand bookshops and look through layers of dirt for old books. The books I’ve picked up doing that include The Old Curiosity Shop by Dickens which I bought for 10 INR and The Second Treatise of Civil Government by J Locke for 7 INR.

Words

Playing with words. Feelings. Sequences. Cold. Heat. Shorn. Warmth: glimpsed, untouched, locked. Bare. Bereft. Frigid. Untouchable in the end.

Jaded

Some time ago, I read an article about E Prime as a linguistic tool and loved the idea -- simply delete the words 'to be' along with all its forms from your vocabulary. Don't categorise people or experiences. Try to say, "She practises law," instead of, "She is a lawyer." (Although I don't know how to convert, 'He is on his way to the market,' into E Prime.)
I find that the older I become, the more I tend to categorise and label everything I come across. The more I refuse to accept anything on an 'as is' basis, the less able I become to feel wonder in the way that a child does. The less capable of being able to marvel at anything around me I am, the more cynical I become. And that isn't what I want to be.

Waltz

Have you ever done something with someone so special that you wouldn't want to do it with anyone else ever? That you hate the thought of doing it with anyone else so much that you'd do anything to avoid being able to do so? That you'd pretend that you didn't know how to just so that you wouldn't have a single memory in your mind associated with it except with that one person?
Close your eyes and you can still imagine him supporting you. When was the last time you trusted someone so completely? Do you think you'll ever do so again?

Image

Yesterday, I went to a bookshop and read a book called ‘How Fat Do I Look?’ and it made me feel uncomfortable. Not because I have anything against fat people or because I don’t get what the author was trying to say but quite simply because in the rush to make fat people feel ok about their being fat, most authors and various other assorted do-gooders seem to have quite simply forgotten that the need to conform to societal expectations is not limited to fat women. And the women who aren’t fat don’t get half as much attention, or support, for that matter.
Honestly, when was the last time you saw a book entitled ‘It’s OK to be XS and not use make-up?’Or have a body worth showing off and not actually show it off?Or be sensible and not grow your nails so long that you can’t make a fist with your hand?Or wear what you’re comfortable wearing instead of wearing what you look most sexy in?Or that it’s ok to be thin without having a well-toned body?...
Personally, I’m not convinced that there is any such thing as the perfect figure – there are times when I’ve gone into shops with a 22-inch waist and still not been able to find a pair of trousers I can actually pull up over my hips. (And no, I do not have a humungous butt or thunder thighs.) And even assuming that you do happen to have what fashion mags and designers, who presumably get their measurements using mannequins made of match-sticks, consider is an acceptable figure, there’s always something else that you don’t have, be it the right shoes, hair, make-up, nails, skin, eye-lashes... and guess what, that you never will have.
No matter what it is that you do have, it turns out that it’s never enough. It isn’t about being fat and therefore not feeling good enough to exist. It’s about not looking good enough in any number of ways and consequently not feeling good enough to exist, and, even worse, being told that you aren’t.
We spend a mint trying to look like re-incarnations of Venus: apart from continually being told that – thin or fat – we should look a particular way, the yardstick used to define the ideal itself keeps changing – the most obvious way in which this happens is through fashions which never remain the same for more than a season, so to be able to look fashionable – and by extension, acceptable – throughout the year, the average fashion-conscious woman’s expenditure on clothes, shoes and handbags literally rivals the annual budget of a small country. I’m sure it helps the economy but that isn’t the goal, is it?
And then of course, there’s makeup. Take something as supposedly simple as lipstick, for example. It’s not one swipe by a long shot. Lipstick with a cold cream core to keep lips moisturised. Split down the middle: metallic on one side and matte on the other. Gloss, if required. Powder over it. And don’t ever forget that you apparently simply cannot get good looking lips with just one colour. Fancy brush to blend the two colours (if not more). And if that isn’t enough, don’t forget that you apparently need lip-liner too. Otherwise, it’d smudge and seep over the lip-line and look absolutely ghastly (not that it doesn’t sometimes look ghastly anyway – a green core with black glitter?)
It’s not just the fashion industry and the media which promote the image though. Or get sucked into believing in the image, depending on how you see it.
Speaking for myself, I’m petite – read ‘slightly underweight’ – have pimple scars, a plain haircut and little enthusiasm to doll up. I don’t easily get clothes my size – they’re either too small or much too large – have got more advice from well-intentioned friends about what I should wear than I’ve ever wanted, have one who actually takes me shopping for face creams, and have come across more not-so-nice people than I’ve been able to keep count of who’ve made comments about my lack of fashion-sense that I wouldn’t venture to repeat.
And I’m not entirely sure why that’s the case. I’m not saying that I want to make a special effort to look dowdy – all I’m saying is that I don’t want to have to spend a large fraction of my time trying not to look dowdy. And I certainly don’t want to spend a large fraction of my time being told that I do look just that way for the sole reason that I’m not up on all the latest fashions or because I haven’t got a facial done for over a year (make that three, actually)…
Frankly, does it really matter if my skirts are an inch below knee level instead of above it? Or if my sleeves have a bit of a puff on them? Or if the heels of my shoes are shaped just a little differently? Or if my kurtas aren’t tight enough to cause respiratory depression?
I’d like to think that it doesn’t matter. I’m told that it does. Never mind that most of the women I know who do get it right look like they spend so much of their time in getting it right that they have little time for anything else (except, possibly, studying for exams) and the result is that they are so much more style than substance that irrespective of what they wear, they wind up looking like dolled-up scarecrows.
Not that there is anything wrong with looking like a dolled-up scarecrow, I suppose. It just isn’t what I want for myself. And I don’t want to be continually told that not wanting that for myself makes me inadequate in some way, that it makes me a source of continual embarrassment to myself and everyone around me, that I have an obligation to duck and run for cover every single time there’s a camera in the vicinity, that not being dressed up means that I have nothing at all to offer anyone, that looking different involves desexualising myself – although I’ve found that that isn’t always a bad thing.
After all, not being viewed as a sex object makes it easier to hold your own and to avoid being hit on. It’s another matter that I don’t really understand why being treated as an individual is usually closely associated with being non-sexual… are you treated as a person (particularly by men) when you look so awful that they simply can't stand the thought of treating you like a woman, and, as a result, have no choice but to treat you as a non-sexual individual simply by default?
I sometimes wonder if I spend a lot of my time looking like anything but the stereotypical wannabe fashionista simply because, at some level, I want to. Because I don’t particularly enjoy being hit on. Because I enjoy not being treated like a dumb babe. Because I don’t enjoy the competitions which women tend to get into while hunting for a man in which their most potent weapons are stilettos, foundation and concealer. Or perhaps it’s because I’m afraid of just that. Because I don’t know myself well enough to know what I would do or what I’m capable of doing. And because I’d rather not find out.
Either way, one of the very few things which I do know for certain is that I’d like to be able to make my own rules. I don’t want to have anyone tell me what constitutes an acceptable image. How thin or how fat I should be. What I should wear. And how much make-up I should have on.
I’d like to feel comfortable in my own skin. I’d like to be allowed the opportunity to feel comfortable in my own skin.