Seeing What You Want to See

It was one of those lunch-time conversations that brought up the name of Saramago, and the memory lay hidden till the book called out to me as I browsed the shelves of the library that’s my haunt once every month. The back cover had a remarkable description – “José Saramago has deftly created the politician’s ultimate nightmare: disillusionment” – and the author’s history piqued me: a Nobel Prize winner who became a full-time writer in 1979 although he was born in 1922!

And so the pick found place in my reading list. And exited the queue quite fast too, because towards the middle, the slow-paced writing gets quite gripping.

It was only after finishing the book and reading up about it online that I realized that Seeing was the sequel to Blindness. But that doesn’t take away from the reading experience. And what’s the experience itself all about? The story of Seeing is set in an unnamed country, perhaps Portugal, where elections are being held at the time the narration begins. The results for the capital city reveal something extraordinary – a large majority of votes do not have the name of any party, they are blank. A repeat election makes things worse, as the share of blank votes is higher this time. The ruling government – a legitimately elected one – considers the blank votes an assault on democracy.

Indeed, the government sees what it wants – rebellion and disrespect for democracy – and uses various means to subvert the perceived subversion. In that sense, Seeing reminded me of some of George Orwell’s works where the Big Brother state controls people’s lives.

Very soon, the government puts the capital city under a state of siege, and withdraws all administration and police from within the city perimeters. The people are not too displeased and the situation remains completely peaceful. The government then resorts to finding a scapegoat for the problem, for they consider the situation to be a problem. They choose as the culprit a woman who did not go blind when four years ago the entire population of the city was afflicted by inexplicable blindness and stumbled around helplessly. What then follows is an attempt to lay the blame on her, and the story proceeds from the perspective of the police superintendent who is assigned the job.

Through the book, Saramago’s intricate sensitivity to human nature comes across clearly. Consider this paragraph, for instance:

The superintendent slowly reached out his hand and touched the dog’s head. He felt like crying and letting the tears course down his face… The doctor’s wife put her book away in her bag and said, “Let’s go… You’ll have lunch with us, won’t you?”

“Are you sure?… You’re not afraid I might be tricking you?”

“Not with those tears in your eyes, no.”

Saramago is also adept at conveying the barter that happens in each dialogue between people. He also makes keen observations such as the idea that memories are selectively created, in the sense that there is a first filter of “hearing” by the senses and then a second filter of “hearing” by the mind or memory.

The narrative is free-flowing, with only a paragraph or two per page, and Saramago has a way of expressing dialogue using only commas as the punctuation. (In the passage cited above, I took the liberty of adding quotation marks and paragraph breaks.) This might put off casual readers, but for those who are ready to go with the flow, so to speak, it is fascinating to see, and not without real reason, if I may say so, how the author leads the reader on and on into the diabolical, not to say sensitive and witty, world of government insecurity, political intrigue, and just as important, institutional hierarchy, all juxtaposed, in a style not very common, into the lives of ordinary people, who are, like their counterparts across the world, simply trying to lead their lives.

If you liked the last sentence, Seeing is probably for you. And while you are at it, it might be better to go for Blindness first.

Stark Reality, Simply Narrated – a Review of ‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’

There are some books which you know are good, but you also know that they are so tangential to what you do on a day-to-day basis that unless you set apart solid time, you won’t get around to reading them. And so you avoid thinking about them, and even when you see such a book lying on a colleague’s table, the bookworm in you starves itself by ignoring the book. Such are the woes of those of us who go to work every day.

And yet, sometimes, there comes a day when the book returns to you, and you end up reading it in spite of yourself. And you realize that it was worth it. That’s how Behind the Beautiful Forevers turned out to be. <Warning: multiple plot spoilers ahead.>

Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo’s BTBF is the real story of a few families and street children living in Annawadi, a nondescript slum near the Mumbai airport. Among them are ragpickers and slumlord-hopefuls, animal lovers and teachers. There are children grown too old too quickly by poverty, there are friends who know that to help someone is to invite disaster upon oneself and to share is to starve, and there are opportunists who know the multiple sources of money in an impoverished slum.

When a handicapped woman attempts suicide, only to regret it immediately, and then dies in hospital, her neighbours are arrested and incarcerated for murder. The subsequent trials take their toll on the Husain family not only because of the loss of income of days spent in jails, but also because of the uncertainty of whether the father, son and daughter would ever be released from prison. The family takes an impossibly bold and apparently reckless stance of not paying anyone despite repeated offers from various quarters to “help” them be declared innocent of a crime they did not commit.

When Abdul muses that Kasab, one of the perpetrators of the terrorist attack at the Taj in South Mumbai, has at least the saving grace of being tried for a crime he did commit, it reeks of resignation at a political and judicial system so convoluted that it is effectively unable to determine innocence and guilt: the only color it recognizes is that of money, the only command it follows is that of power. When Abdul and his family are acquitted, seemingly more by chance than by design, there is no particular victory to be celebrated, only a permission to go on living that was nearly too late in coming.

BTBF also reminded me of a mildly unsettling realisation that I had been conscious of since I started travelling on work, coming into contact with staff at airports, hotels, taxis and offices: to be nice to such people is not an act of generosity on your part, it is a privilege granted to you. It is only the rich who can afford to be nice, to lavish money on tips, to pleasantly wait two more minutes as the room is readied, to smile at the housemaid. For the ragpickers who “earn to eat,” niceness is a luxury they can neither afford nor gain from. (If this sounds moralising, let me flatter myself that the years have made me wiser!)

For what is Boo’s first full-length book, BTBF is very well-written. What I liked best was the impeccable flow of the narrative that gives hardly a hint of the copious amounts of research and file-chasing behind the facts. Unlike the exclamatory tone adopted by many first time visitors to Mumbai and its slums, and unlike the patronising optimism of Slumdog Millionaire, BTBF possesses a clearheaded voice, unassuming but sympathetic, pragmatically limited in its sentimentality and hopefulness. After all, the lives of Akbar and Sunil and Asha and Manju are not going to change in a day. At the same time, this also makes the purpose of such a book unclear. Yes, it lays bare the stark reality of life in a slum next to the gleaming airport, but there is no call to action. Then again, who is to say what the right action is?

Despite being a work of non-fiction, BTBF also bears similarity to City of Joy, a novel by Dominique Lapierre on life in the underbelly of Kolkata in the 1970s. The book traces the lives of people as diverse as a rickshaw-puller, a Polish priest and an American doctor, all linked by their lives in Anand Nagar (the “city of joy”), a slum in Kolkata. Lapierre’s description of the rickshaw-puller Hasari Pal’s life left such an impression on the class nine student who read the book (yours truly) that she could never be at ease in the cycle-rickshaws of Gurgaon, years later. Indeed, during that stifling summer, the one-hour walk from office to home was preferable to the discomfort of seeing an invariably reed-thin man sweat for me. It tore my heart whenever he bargained to transport the three of us for an additional ten rupees on his own rickshaw, rather than let one of us take a second rickshaw. But I digress.

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P.S.: I had meant this post to be only a review of BTBF, but felt that it had to do justice to how I ended up reading a book I had deliberately kept off my regrettably short reading list. Many thanks to the protagonist of the first two paragraphs.

‘A Passage to India’ and Other Books

‘A Passage to India’ is a novel set during the later days of British rule in India, and I had expected it to be yet another, perhaps a little less clichéd, description of Indians and the Indian way of life as seen by an Englishman writing from his country or at most, writing based on his visits to India. But I was in for a pleasant surprise. E. M. Forster describes, in a nuanced and sensitive manner, how Indians and Englishmen got along with and sometimes did not get along with each other, as they inevitably came into contact.

The plot  in ‘A Passage to India’ is far from vast. It can easily fit into a short story – Aziz, a widowed Muslim doctor, offers to take Adela Quested and her future mother-in-law Mrs. Moore on a trip to visit the well-known Marabar caves in Chandrapore. Inside one of the dark caves, Adela imagines that someone tried to attack her and assumes without doubt that her invisible attacker was Aziz. He is arrested and tried in court, but before the trial is over, Adela realizes that she was mistaken and withdraws her complaint. Yet, the damage is done and many lives have been affected irrevocably.

The author leaves unsaid, but makes amply clear, that while these are important events in the lives of a few Indians and Englishmen, they illustrate merely another instance of the impossibility of true and trusting relationships between two groups widely separated by not just geographical and cultural barriers, but also the more divisive chasm that distances the ruler from the ruled.

For instance, open-minded Englishmen such as Mr. Fielding (whom Aziz gradually starts to think of as simply Fielding) might become friendly with Indians, but their English wives can never really mentally get past the distance. For all their determination to see the “real India” and their friendly disposition towards Aziz, Adela and Mrs. Moore are never truly at home in India.

Indians in the book are not blameless either, for they hold stereotyped views of the Englishmen and English women. With the caveat that what comes out in the book is perhaps the English stereotype of what the Indian stereotype of the English is. (The book is nowhere as convoluted as the sentence you just read, so do not let my analysis dissuade you from reading it.) In short, ‘A Passage to India’ is an eminently readable story, one of the rare books that make me wish I had read them earlier.

What I like best about ‘A Passage to India’ is the way Forster narrates and implies, but never brings himself into the story. In comparison to the two other books that I happened to read recently, ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’ (a historical thriller based on the death of Pakistani President General Zia ul-Haq) and ‘The House of Blue Mangoes’ (a mostly lifeless account of the lives of three generations of a family based in South India), ‘A Passage to India’ is a refreshing piece of work. It is as a novel should be – the characters are so important to you that at least for the period you are with them, you fancy that you care for what happens in their lives, you want to know how things turn out for them. In this respect, the book reminded me of ‘The Mandelbaum Gate’ by Muriel Spark.

The book that I am currently reading is just as powerful. ‘The Finkler Question’ (Howard Jacobson’s Man Booker Prize winner that is witty and sympathetic in equal measure) brings up severe issues with a gravity that is as unbelievable as it is real. Because that’s often how life is, a curious mix of the comical and serious. Julian Treslove is just another guy next door till he is mugged one night on the way home, and a phrase uttered by his assailant (a phrase which he isn’t even sure he heard right) changes his outlook to life. From the outside, there is no break in the flow of his life, but mentally he is a changed man. Not impossible, I suppose.

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P.S.: With all this mention of books, it is very natural to wonder whether this consultant (yours truly) has been “on the beach” far too long. But the more pertinent question is whether this consultant has been on far too many flights…