Book Review – Come, Tell Me How You Live (an archaeological memoir) by Agatha Christie

After reading Elizabeth Peters’ archaeological adventure, I decided to read a book on an actual archaeological expedition. So I picked up Agatha Christie’s ‘Come, Tell Me How You Live‘.

Agatha Christie’s husband was an archaeologist and so Agatha Christie frequently accompanied him on his expeditions helping him out, and sometimes using the expedition as a backdrop for one of her novels. Some of her friends asked her once what her day-to-day life was when she was on an expedition and to answer their question, Agatha Christie wrote this book. The expedition that Agatha Christie describes in the book happened in the 1930s in Syria. She describes how they surveyed different places, how they decided on the place where they can dig, how they hired people to work there, how everyday life was, how they managed food and water and what happened when someone was sick. She also describes the life of the local people and their culture and customs. I found her description on how Arab people and Kurdish people are different, very fascinating. I also found her description of the Yezidi people very fascinating. Agatha Christie says that the Yezidi people are devil worshippers and I found that very fascinating. She also describes a Yezidi temple that she visited. I didn’t know about the Yezidi people before. I want to read more on them.

Agatha Christie describes a Syria and a Middle East which was very different compared to how it is today. It was a different time, a charming, innocent time, which will never come again. There is one particular passage that I found very interesting. It went like this.

“An old man comes and sits down beside us. There is the usual long silence after greetings have been given.

Then he enquires courteously if we are French. German? English?

English!

He nods his head. “Is it the English this country belongs to now? I cannot remember. I know it is no longer the Turks.”

“No,” we say, “the Turks have not been here since the war.”

“A war?” says the old man, puzzled.

“A war that was fought twenty years ago.”

He reflects. “I do not remember a war…. Ah yes, about the time you mention, many ‘asker went to and fro over the railway. That, then, was the war? We did not realize it was a war. It did not touch us here.”

Presently, after another long silence, he rises, bids us farewell politely, and is gone.”

This particular part was also very beautiful.

“There is a village there, and with Hamoudi as ambassador we try and obtain workmen. The men are doubtful and suspicious.

“We do not need money,” they say. “It has been a good harvest.”

For this is a simple and, I think, consequently a happy part of the world. Food is the only consideration. If the harvest is good, you are rich. For the rest of the year there is leisure and plenty, until the time comes to plough and sow once more.

“A little extra money,” says Hamoudi, like the serpent of Eden, “is always welcome.”

They answer simply : “But what can we buy with it? We have enough food until the harvest comes again.””

I found this passage also very beautiful.

“Accustomed as we are to our Western ideas of the importance of life, it is difficult to adjust our thoughts to a different scale of values. And yet to the Oriental mind it is simple enough. Death is bound to come – it is as inevitable as birth, whether it comes early or late is entirely at the will of Allah. And that belief, that acquiescence, does away with what has become the curse of our present-day world – anxiety. There may not be freedom from want, but there is certainly freedom from fear. And idleness is a blessed and natural state – work is the unnatural necessity.”

I loved ‘Come, Tell Me How You Live’. It was very different from what I expected. It brought back a bygone time and it was very beautiful. There might be an occasional sentence or passage here and there which might offend our 21st century sensibilities, but the book was beautiful and charming and it had a fascinating cast of characters who were all likeable. I loved Agatha Christie’s humour too.

Towards the end of the book, Agatha Christie says this –

“For after four years spent in London in war-time, I know what a very good life that was, and it has been a joy and refreshment to me to live those days again…. Writing this simple record has been not a task, but a labour of love. Not an escape to something that was, but the bringing into the hard work and sorrow of today of something imperishable that one not only had but still has!

For I love that gentle fertile country and its simple people, who know how to laugh and how to enjoy life, who are idle and gay, and who have dignity, good manners, and a great sense of humour, and to whom death is not terrible.

Inshallah, I shall go there again, and the things that I love shall not have perished from this earth….”

When we leave the book, we can’t help but echo the exact same sentiments…

I’ll leave you with one of my favourite pages from the book. It is long, and so I apologize in advance. Do make yourself a cup of coffee or hot tea and hope you enjoy reading it.

“I am struck as often before by the fundamental difference of race. Nothing could differ more widely than the attitude of our two chauffeurs to money. Abdullah lets hardly a day pass without clamouring for an advance of salary. If he had had his way he would have had the entire amount in advance, and it would, I rather imagine, have been dissipated before a week was out. With Arab prodigality Abdullah would have splashed it about in the coffee-house. He would have cut a figure! He would have ‘made a reputation for himself’.

Aristide, the Armenian, has displayed the greatest reluctance to have a penny of his salary paid him. “You will keep it for me, Khwaja, until the journey is finished. If I want money for some little expense I will come to you.” So far he has demanded only four pence of his salary – to purchase a pair of socks!

His chin is snow adorned by a sprouting beard, which makes him look quite a Biblical figure. It is cheaper, he explains, not to shave. One saves the money one might have to spend on a razor blade. And it does not matter here in the desert.

At the end of the trip Abdullah will be penniless once more, and will doubtless be again adorning the water-front of Beyrout, waiting with Arab fatalism for the goodness of God to provide him with another job. Aristide will have the money he has earned untouched. “And what will you do with it?” Max asks him.

“It will go towards buying a better taxi,” replies Aristide.

“And when you have a better taxi?”

“Then I shall earn more and have two taxis.”

I can quite easily foresee returning to Syria in twenty years’ time, and finding Aristide the immensely rich owner of a large garage, and probably living in a big house in Beyrout. And even then, I dare say, he will avoid shaving in the desert because it saves the price of a razor blade.

And yet, Aristide has not been brought up by his own people. One day, as we pass some Beduin, he is hailed by them, and cries back to them, waving and shouting affec- tionately.

“That,” he explains, “is the Anaizah tribe, of whom I am one.”

“How is that?” Max asks.

And then Aristide, in his gentle, happy voice, with his quiet, cheerful smile, tells the story. The story of a little boy of seven, who with his family and other Armenian families was thrown by the Turks alive into a deep pit. Tar was poured on them and set alight. His father and mother and two brothers and sisters were all burnt alive. But he, was below them all, was still alive when the Turks left, and he was found later by some of the Anaizah Arabs. They took the little boy with them and adopted him into the Anaizah tribe. He was brought up as an Arab, wandering with them over their pastures. But when he was eighteen he went into Mosul, and there demanded that papers be given him to show his nationality. He was an Armenian, not an Arab! Yet the blood brotherhood still holds, and to members of the Anaizah he still is one of them.”

Have you read ‘Come, Tell Me How You Live’? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Before Memory Fades : An Autobiography by Fali S. Nariman

I saw in the news recently that Fali Nariman has passed away. I felt sad when I heard the news. Fali Nariman was one of the great lawyers from India. He spent a significant part of his career working as a lawyer at the Supreme Court. He is one of the last of the greats – someone who was born before Indian independence, who started his law career at around the same time India became a republic, who has seen in close quarters most of the big happenings in the country from a legal, constitutional perspective and who has been part of those happenings. He is also from the time when lawyers were well read and very articulate – Nariman quotes from Shakespeare and Chesterton and Matthew Arnold and James Barrie and Omar Khayyam and other classic writers in his book.

This book, his autobiography, came out in 2010. I got it at that time. But for some reason I couldn’t read it till now. I didn’t know why I had to wait for the man to die before reading his book. I feel ashamed.

In his book, Nariman describes his childhood in Burma and how his family moved back to India when the Japanese invaded Burma. He also describes his schooling in Shimla and his favourite teachers there, briefly touches on his college life in Bombay, and later tells us how he became a lawyer. Then we get to know more about his work, about the fascinating people he met, and the interesting experiences he had.

The book starts in chronological fashion, but after sometime it becomes topical, and each chapter feels independent and is about a particular topic. One is about the Emergency, another is about his favourite judges, some are on legal topics like how water sharing disputes among states are handled in India, how judges to the Supreme Court are appointed. There is one big chapter dedicated to his role as a lawyer in the case related to the Bhopal gas tragedy. The autobiographical, anecdotal parts of the book are easy to read. The chapters in which Nariman talks about the law are harder. The level of difficulty is between an article meant for the general audience and a legal brief. A lawyer will find those chapters easy to understand, but a general reader will find them challenging. But it is possible to get through this by careful reading, looking at those sections of the Constitution and reading articles on the relevant judgements, most of which are probably available online. Those chapters cannot be read like a regular book, but need more closer reading like a textbook.

My favourite parts of the book were about his childhood and other personal chapters at the beginning of the book, and the parts of the book about his favourite lawyers and his favourite judges and the chapter in which he talks about the Emergency and Constitutional amendments. Nariman asks an important question in that part – how much Constitutional amendment is allowed and is it possible for a government to amend away the whole Constitution including suspending things like fundamental rights? Is there something called the basic structure of the Constitution which cannot be touched or is everything open to amendment and change? It is an important question, it is a fascinating question, and Nariman spends considerable amount of time on it.

My least favourite part of the book was the one on the Bhopal gas tragedy. In the case related to this, Nariman represented Union Carbide, the company which was responsible for the tragedy, in the court. I expected that he’d explain what happened in that case from his perspective, why he took it up and how he defended it, and whether he had any moral compunctions in doing that, as he was working against the victims here. But, unfortunately, Nariman resorts to legalese here, and reproduces a long article which he wrote on this topic, in which everything is vague and obtuse and hard to understand. If we show enough patience and are able to wade through the legalese, we can get to what he is saying, but whatever he is saying doesn’t answer any questions. It is frustrating to read that chapter because it is such a stark contrast to the rest of the book, which is crystal clear. Representing Union Carbide in that case was a black spot in Nariman’s career. But it was a distinguished career in which he did many good things and fought the good fight many times, and so what is the fun in a long distinguished career if there isn’t a big bad blackspot somewhere? This was his. My only disappointment was that he didn’t own up to it.

I loved reading Nariman’s book. Parts of it were easy to read and flowed smoothly, while other parts were challenging to read. I’m glad I read it, though it took me many years to get to it.

Fali Nariman inspired generations of lawyers and judges. He was active in his work till the end. He even published a big book on the Indian Constitution last year, when he was 94. His passing is a big loss to the legal fraternity and to his well-wishers everywhere. But Nariman lived a long life, a good life, a rich life, in which he did many amazing beautiful things. It is time to celebrate that. Nariman ends his book with these lines –

“I belong to a minority community, a microscopic, wholly insignificant minority, which spurned the offer made (at the time of the drafting of our Constitution) – to Anglo-Indians and Parsis alike – to have, for at least a decade, one special representative in Parliament. We rejected the offer. In the Constituent Assembly, Sir Homi Mody said that we Parsis would rather join the mainstream of a free India. We did, and we have no regrets. We have made good, just as my mother’s ancestors (the Burjorjees of Calicut) – two centuries ago – made good in Burma.

I have never felt that I lived in this country at the sufferance of the majority. I have been brought up to think and feel that the minorities, together with the majority community, are integral parts of India.

I have lived and flourished in a secular India. In the fullness of time if God wills, I would also like to die in a secular India.”

It touched me somewhere deep in my heart when I read that.

Here are a couple of articles on Fali Nariman.

Article 1

Article 2

Sharing some of my favourite parts from the book.

Quote 1

“…the writ of habeas corpus which was granted by each one of the nine high courts in the country was denied by the highest court. The judgments of the high courts of India which took the contrary, more liberal view, were declared erroneous, and set aside by the apex court. By denying habeas corpus, the Supreme Court had set back the clock of liberty, proclaiming its helplessness against arbitrary arrests and malafide detentions. It was judicial pusillanimity at its worst!

The lone dissent was that of the seniormost judge in the Supreme Court (next only to Chief Justice Ray), Justice H. R. Khanna, who refused to rationalize tyranny. He would not bow down to insolent might. ‘Life and liberty are not conferred by any Constitution’ he said, ‘they inhere in men and women as human beings.’ But Khanna was in a minority – a brave minority of one. Historians of the Supreme Court will doubtless record that it was only in the post-Emergency period (not during the Internal Emergency of June 1975 March 1977) that the highest court gave vent to expressions of grave concern about violations of human rights! A sobering thought for human rights activists – and for judges and lawyers.

In a book titled ‘Six Men’, Alistair Cooke, eminent broadcaster and says of the late Duke of Windsor (for a few months King Edward VIII before he finally abdicated), ‘He was always at his best when the going was good.’ It was when the going was rough (while the Emergency of June 1975 lasted) that a few of our judges (alas, too few!) were at their best. One of them (and the most notable of them) was H. R. Khanna, with his lone dissent in the infamous Emergency Case (ADM Jabalpur). He showed what a brave judge could do. “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” Khanna knew, when he signed his dissenting judgment, that he was signing away his future chief justiceship – which was only a few months hence. Khanna was No. 2 on the court (seniority-wise), and (other things being equal) would have become the chief justice of India on the retirement of Chief Justice Ray on 28 January 1977. Inexorably, when the time came, ‘other things’ were not considered equal (by the government of the day). Khanna was ‘superseded. Justice M. H. Beg (No. 3) was appointed the chief justrice of India. Khanna resigned – but in a blaze of glory! It is for good reason that Khanna’s portrait (though not a very good likeness of him) hangs in the court where he sat – Court No. 2.

Jean Monet, father of the European Union, once said that the world is divided into two types of people – ‘those who want to be somebody and those who want to do something.’ Khanna is remembered, and will always be remembered, long after many chief justices of India are forgotten, because he did something for which he deserved to be remembered.

One of the lessons of the Internal Emergency (of June 1975) was not to rely on constitutional functionaries. These functionaries failed us – ministers of government, members of Parliament, judges of the Supreme Court, even the president of India.”

Quote 2

“But a written constitution safeguarding the rights of citizens does not add up to very much – they are just words. When the historian, Edward Gibbon, completed the first volume of his classic, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he was permitted to present it to the Duke of Gloucester, brother of King George III. He was well received. When, a few years later, he presented the second volume of almost equal length, the prince received the author with considerable affability, saying to him, as he laid the heavy volume on the table, ‘Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?’ Not only academicians and politicians but a good many intellectuals around the world have harboured similar sentiments about the proliferation of documentation in the area of human rights – declarations, conventions, resolutions, treaties… Words, words, words … The United Nations (UN) is long on instruments relating to human rights (they say), but its member states are significantly short on performance. Universalization of human rights may well have been achieved, but only on paper. Effective implementation is lacking. There is much truth in this criticism. Sovereign nation states often impede the quest for universalization. What governments profess (around the world) and what they practise (within the state) hardly ever coincides. The most important single factor in the implementation of human rights is not documentation, but the spirit of the people.”

Quote 3

“I was privileged to appear before Justice M. Hidayatullah when he presided on the bench of the Supreme Court as chief justice of India from February 1968 to December 1970. He was erudite, but carried his learning lightly. Always charming and courteous to the Bar, he had a flair for the appropriate turn of phrase (the French call it, le mot juste). But it was not only in his judgments that he was eloquent. His brief but precise introduction to the sixteenth edition of Mulla’s classic work on Mohammedan Law is a piece of writing unmatched in India’s legal annals.

His extrajudicial utterances were not without humour. His description of the three great organs of state: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary – will be long remembered for the barbed innuendos. About the proliferation of bureaucrats in the government, he adapted an old nursery rhyme to produce what he described as ‘a poem of truth’ :

“One civil servant with nothing much to do

Wrote a Memorandum and there were two,

Two civil servants over cups of tea

Formed a working party, and there were three

Three civil servants drafting forms galore,

One whispered ‘Planning’ and then there were four

Four civil servants found they could not thrive

Without coordination, and then there were five.”

And so it went on to the last lines which were :

“Nine civil servants very busy men,

Just ask them what they find to do.

You’ll find they have grown to ten.”

About Parliament, his observation was that only a handful of people really took seriously to the task of law making. Others were silent spectators, which (he said) was not a bad thing, because a legislature which said nothing and did much was to be preferred to one where members talked too much and did nothing! And as for the judiciary he believed that in writing judgments, judges should not pontificate or indulge in grandiloquence. Quoting Dr Johnson he pointedly compared ‘certain writings’ to a meal which is ‘ill-killed, ill-dressed, ill-cooked and ill-served’, an apt description of judicial opinions that are badly written! Haddi, as he was popularly known, loved quoting Samuel Johnson. Even his scintillating autobiography is titled ‘My Own Boswell’. It does one good to remember a judge as eloquent and as distinguished as Hidayatullah.

His lasting memorial for posterity is the judgments he has left behind. After 59 years at the Bar, I am convinced that the finest epitaph for a judge is, ‘He never wrote bad judgments – only elegant ones, eminently readable by one and all!’ A fitting epitaph for dear Haddi.

Quote 4

“At this ripe old age (besides the family and staff) what sustains me are two things. First (and frankly), the possibility and the thrill (even now) of winning a difficult case (‘The race is over, but the work is never done while the power to work remains!’). And second, the affection of all my colleagues at the Bar (young and old) whose company I greatly value and enjoy, so much so that a couple of years after being allotted (by the chief justice of India) a small chamber in the building on the road opposite the Supreme Court (after I kept it for a few months), I surrendered it because I did not find it of use. I did not like sitting alone in my chamber waiting for my (fewer and fewer) cases to come up in court. At 80 plus, it is better to sit in court, and listen and learn (as Sir Jamshedji used to say) or sit in the lounge and talk to friends (old and new) at the Bar.

At this age, one does not – one should not – think of one’s professional future.

A few months ago, I addressed an international seminar in New York and was introduced to the audience by a ‘friend’ who said (with a wink and tongue in cheek) that ‘Mr Nariman is also President of the Bar Association of India almost since the time of the Norman Conquest’; a gentle hint, perhaps, that I retire from official positions (and active practice). Well, who knows, someday I might. But as advised at present, I propose to die with my boots on!”

Have you read Nariman’s book? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – A Still Life by Josie George

I discovered Josie George’s ‘A Still Life‘ through Caroline’s (‘Beauty is a Sleeping Cat‘) recommendation. Got immersed in it the past few days and just finished reading it.

Josie George has chronic illness since the time she was a kid. It limits where she can go, what she can do. She decides to chronicle one year of her life, looking at her life through different seasons, and also looks back in time, to see how it all started and how it all unravelled. As Josie George says in her prologue –

“Usually, when you are unwell, people expect one of two stories : either you get better – you beat it – or you get worse and die. Stories of everyday living and undramatic, sustained existence, stories that don’t end with cures or tragic climaxes but that are made up of slow, persistent continuation as you learn and change – stories about what happens then – they may be harder to tell, but I believe they’re important too. I believe we need to tell more of them.”

It is not all frustrating and painful and heartbreaking, though that is all there. It is also beautiful and joyful and serene and contemplative. Josie George’s writing is meditative and contemplative and flows smoothly like a river. It is an absolute pleasure to read. I couldn’t stop highlighting passages – there were so many favourites. This is early days yet, but I think this book will be one of my favourites of the year.

Sharing some of my favourite parts.

“Difference is an odd thing. I’m beginning to realise that it’s a spectrum – no, a wedge. Yes, that’s it. We all have a place in it, we’re all different, but some of us are undeniably more different than others. The thin edge of the wedge is a strange place to exist. The further down into difference you go, the more of you that doesn’t match, the tighter it all gets. Fewer and fewer people look like you or act like you or live like you. Fewer and fewer environments fit your body or meet your needs, spaces catered for the masses. Opportunities and choices shrink. It gets harder to see yourself in other people, harder to find common ground. You begin to realise what a privilege it is to have the ability to blend in, and what it really means when you don’t, can’t. More and more people begin either to look past you and through you, or to stare. I have never decided which is worse. I suspect getting older feels the same: I’ve just had to learn it sooner.”

“I have a habit of leaving flowers in vases long past their best, until they are puckered and wrinkled, losing their petals and manners. This habit’s not from idleness or fatigue though, this is more a kind of lived intention: I don’t give up on things any more. I want to love beyond first bloom and easy convenience, all through the inevitable changing and fading. I want to see what happens when things stop being perfect. I have learnt, painfully, that love without curiosity is short-lived. I want a life now where love doesn’t run out; to see things for everything they are, for as long as they live. And so, I let my flowers turn every colour they know, change their shape, cast new shadows, in defiance and in pride. Perhaps, I think, if I do, I will learn how to love my people better. Myself, even.”

“I will admit it: some days, I feel broken. Like a wave is broken. Not damaged, just scattered. The kind of lonely that makes you feel stretched so thin, you stop being able to see yourself.”

“I so rarely know how to be acceptable; how to be unwild. We love to talk of being wild in human terms as something exciting, alluring, the stuff of movies and pin-ups but when you watch wild things, you begin to understand that this is not what wildness means. It is nothing so conveniently pleasing. To be truly wild is to be skittish, capricious, trusting of few. It is to be pulled to home and warmth and the sensory comfort of familiar bodies, not to newness and excitement. To be wild is to be wary, heeding instinct louder than promise. It is the hope that those who see you will see you only for love, not as prey, and a wish for not too many eyes on you at once. It is to crave simplicity: an undisturbed spot, a full belly, a body that knows itself. To be wild is to be drawn to sing one perfect song over and over, like the great tit in the pine trees now, and for that to be enough for you to belong where you are. It is to live close to death and change but not let it panic you into worse. It is to steer yourself endlessly towards the things that nurture you, to be unable to stop or deny yourself. I am wild.”

“The older you get, the harder it is to experience a singular grief. Instead, when loss comes again, it doesn’t bring something solid all the way through or isolated, it brings you a Russian doll. Loss comes; a new layer of grief forms. And instead of staying still, it opens, and out all the others pour, popping into their composite forms until you are sitting surrounded by an eager, bleeding crowd of them. Grief is cumulative and to feel one kind is to feel at least a little of them all, renewed. When I wake from the shock, there it is, right here in my hands. All my past losses, nestled.”

“I don’t know what to do today so I will make a cup of tea. There is nothing else for it. I have forgotten everything. I have no idea what the hell anything means or who I am supposed to be or what I’m supposed to be doing. I am all blank, all gone, but for this one thread of me left. Look, it leads to the kitchen. I will follow it until I reach the kettle and then I will make a cup of tea and everything will be OK again, maybe. Maybe it will. How funny that drinking tea is the one act of hope that endures; the one thing that resists falling through that trapdoor of panic and despair. You could lose faith in everything else, but you would still take a cup of tea held out, I know you would. On the days when I can barely stand my face in the mirror, I will still, carefully, kindly, brew myself a cup of the stuff. It is an untouchable parlay. A gap in the wall. A truce in the most complicated feeling of everything.”

“And yet this tangle of muscle and bone, this pumping heart, these busy thoughts: these are what have got me this far. This is the form that will see me through all the rest of my days, whatever shape it’s in, whatever it looks like, however much it struggles. These are the only hands that will let me stroke and soothe the people I love, the only back that will root me when I need to hold firm. My breath is the only space that will allow me to pause and gather myself in and maybe finally, finally do what’s right. My mind is the only one I get to work with. This is my one ride. So many of us search endlessly for some sense of a lasting home and forget that we already inhabit it. However imperfect, our body is the one thing that’s ever really ours. It’s the one thing we get to keep hold of all our life.”

Have you read ‘A Still Life’? What to you think about it?

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Book Review – Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

I got this book as a Christmas present and decided to read it now. This is Michelle Zauner’s memoir – about growing up as a biracial Korean–American kid and being torn between her Korean and American roots, about getting into music and struggling to make it as a musician, about family, love, loss, grief. But the most important thing about the book is that it is about Zauner’s mom and about the love between mother and daughter (though it doesn’t always look that way – as Zauner says somewhere, it is sometimes tougher than tough love), and how mother and daughter bond over food, inspite of their complex relationship. There is a lot in the book about Korean food, and if you love food, especially Korean food, you’ll love that part of it. A significant part of the book is about loss and grief, and it is moving and beautiful and it makes you cry.

When I read this towards the end of the book –

“I struggled to write her eulogy, to find the words to encompass her in a single page. It was difficult to write about someone I felt I knew so well. The words were unwieldy, engorged with pretension. I wanted to uncover something special about her that only I could reveal. That she was so much more than a housewife, than a mother. That she was her own spectacular individual. Perhaps I was still sanctimoniously belittling the two roles she was ultimately most proud of, unable to accept that the same degree of fulfillment may await those who wish to nurture and love as those who seek to earn and create. Her art was the love that beat on in her loved ones, a contribution to the world that could be just as monumental as a song or a book. There could not be one without the other. Maybe I was just terrified that I might be the closest thing she had to leaving a piece of herself behind.”

– when I read this, I cried.

When I read this –

“”Isn’t it nice how we actually enjoy talking to each other now?”

“It is,” she said. “You know what I realized? I’ve just never met someone like you.”

I’ve just never met someone like you, as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line – generational, cultural, linguistic – we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.”

– when I read this, I cried even more.

Some favourite parts from the book –

“Left with her in the woods, I was overwhelmed by her time and attention, a devotion that I learned could both be an auspicious privilege and have smothering consequences. My mother was a homemaker. Making a home had been her livelihood since I was born, and while she was vigilant and protective, she wasn’t what you would call coddling. She was not what I’d refer to as a “Mommy-Mom,” which was what I envied most of my friends for having. A Mommy-Mom is someone who takes an interest in everything her child has to say even when there is no actual way she gives a shit, who whisks you away to the doctor when you complain of the slightest ailment, who tells you “they’re just jealous” if someone makes fun of you, or “you always look beautiful to me” even if you don’t, or “I love this!” when you give them a piece of crap for Christmas. But every time I got hurt, my mom would start screaming. Not for me, but at me. I couldn’t understand it. When my friends got hurt, their mothers scooped them up and told them it was going to be okay, or they went straight to the doctor. White people were always going to the doctor. But when I got hurt, my mom was livid, as if I had maliciously damaged her property.”

“I loved that she did not fear god. I loved that she believed in reincarnation, the idea that after all this she could start anew. When I asked her what she’d want to come back as, she always told me she’d like to return as a tree. It was a strange and comforting answer, that rather than something grand and heroic, my mother preferred to return to life as something humble and still.”

“I had thought fermentation was controlled death. Left alone, a head of cabbage molds and decomposes. It becomes rotten, inedible. But when brined and stored, the course of its decay is altered. Sugars are broken down to produce lactic acid, which protects it from spoiling. Carbon dioxide is released and the brine acidifies. It ages. Its color and texture transmute. Its flavor becomes tarter, more pungent. It exists in time and transforms. So it is not quite controlled death, because it enjoys a new life altogether.”

Have you read Michelle Zauner’s book? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Siberian Haiku by Jurga Vilė and Lina Itagaki (Translated by Jūra Avižienis)

I discovered ‘Siberian Haiku‘ by Jurga Vilė and Lina Itagaki sometime back. I decided to read it now for ‘Women in Translation Month‘. This is also my first ever Lithuanian book. So, yay! 😊

‘Siberian Haiku‘ is the story of the author Jurga Vilė’s father Algis, when he was young. One day, Russian soldiers knock at their door, ask Algis’ family to leave in ten minutes, and then they and others are taken by a cart to a railway station, they are asked to get into a train, into freight cars, and they are transported to a distant land called Siberia. What happens to them after that forms the rest of the story.

The story is narrated by the voice of the young Algis, and we get to see the events unfolding through his eyes. Being transported to Siberia and being put in a Gulag is terrible and heartbreaking. But hearing it through the voice of a kid, who alongwith real tragic happenings, also imagines beautiful things and regards them as real, we also find that in the middle of all the tragedy, the story is also charming. It is like watching the film ‘Life is Beautiful‘. There are many beautiful characters in the story. Two of my favourites were Aunt Petronella and Aunt Margarita. The ending of the story is bittersweet – there is tragedy and redemption at the same time.

The story is told through a combination of words, illustrations and comics-style panels and it is beautiful to read. The lettering with its idiosyncratic mixture of capital and small letters is charming.

I’ve read stories like this about Nazis knocking the door and taking innocent people and sending them to some far off place and putting them in a concentration camp. But this is the first time I’m reading of Russians doing the same thing. (This story happened in 1941.) It was eye-opening for me. I don’t know why Russians hated Lithuanians so much at that time.

At the end of the Second World War and at the end of the Cold War, the general belief was that this concentration camp thing would be a horror of the past and it will never happen again as the world is an enlightened place now. But unfortunately, thirty years from that time, now we are living in an era, when in many democracies people are voting for right-wing governments who are using the same language as the Nazis and the Russians during the Cold War era, and are dividing people. In other countries, autocrats and dictators have taken over their countries with sham elections, and they are also using the exact same language and dividing people. The disease is widespread now. We are just a blink away from everything turning upside down and new concentration camps being set up. We need to keep our guard up and not let these bad guys win. This is the takeaway for me, from this story.

‘Siberian Haiku‘ is a beautiful, charming, heartbreaking book. It shines a light on an important chapter of history that many of us may not be aware of, a chapter of history which looks more and more relevant with every passing day, looking at contemporary events.

Have you read ‘Siberian Haiku’? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – The Names of all the Flowers by Melissa Valentine

I discovered Melissa Valentine’s memoir ‘The Names of all the Flowers‘ recently, through Olga’s recommendation, and I just finished reading it.

When Melissa Valentine moves back to Oakland after being away for many years, she gets in touch with her childhood friend and they catch up. Then this friend’s brother and their cousin also join and Melissa looks at this friend’s brother and remembers her own brother, whom she calls Junior, whom she loved very much, who was shot dead by unknown assailants when he was nineteen. The rest of the book is about Melissa and her family, and especially her brother Junior, the good times and the bad, and how things happened which ended in this heartbreaking tragedy.

Melissa is biracial – her mom is black and her dad is white. Her mom’s side relatives treat her and her siblings as one of their own, and they even accept her dad as a part of the family, while her dad’s side relatives attempt to show affection, but it looks like condescension. This adds to the complexity of her and her family’s experiences, because frequently they are treated as outsiders, both by the black and the white community, and so things are doubly hard and challenging for them. It is especially hard for the kids, especially Melissa’s brothers, and her favourite brother Junior gets beaten up in school for not being black enough. The book starts with this complex background and gives a perceptive and sensitive depiction on what it means to be a black teenager in today’s America. Melissa’s love for her brother Junior shines through in every page, and Junior comes through as a complex character, someone who is happy and cheerful to start with, but whom the system and society harass and pigeonhole into a box, and when Junior tries protecting himself by any means possible, it all ends in tragedy. It is moving, poignant, heartbreaking. I cried after I finished reading the book.

I loved ‘The Names of all the Flowers‘. I can’t wait to find out what Melissa Valentine will come up with next. This book is published by the Feminist Press and they continue to rock – this is the third consecutive amazing book by them that I’ve read.

I’ll leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.

“Dad is a poet in the way he believes in life, the growing of things, of children. But his poetry is the kind people don’t understand, maybe he doesn’t either, the way it grows out of control, the desire for life so great it escapes even him; he cannot control this life. He loves children, which are another kind of life. I have observed the way he admires babies. He holds them awkwardly, kind of like the way he dances, as if his joints do not easily bend, moving choppily to a rhythm only he can hear. Instead of the normal way of holding a baby—bringing it to your chest, rubbing its back, smelling its skin—instead of the cooing and pleasantries most people make in the presence of babies, he stares into the child’s eyes lovingly, with reverence, while holding its head in his sandpaper palm. I have seen him do this with my baby cousins in Alabama. I have felt the discomfort of the people around him, wondering what this white man is trying to transmit into the skull of this black child. It is usually a black child he holds up with this kind of reverence.”

“She warns us not to show our true colors, warns us regularly—before we go to the neighbors’, before we go to school, before we go to Grandma’s. What color is that? Sometimes it is the color of desire—don’t show hunger, don’t show need or want of any kind to outsiders. But often it is something else—the color of the city, the color of the cement, the color of the curse words that often slip from our mouths, the blackness of our bodies that mixes with the white to make us what the little Southern kids call bright. “Why are you so bright?” they ask in earnest, and I look at them bewildered, wondering with my literal city ears what brightness they see in me. Bright, but still very much not white. Is that the color Mom means? The not-white? Or is it another color? She would prefer we act like we don’t come from the city, like our feet were born dusty, like we came from roads, not streets. She would prefer we act full, satisfied. Junior doesn’t care; he always shows his truest colors.”

“I know by now that nice and good are myths. There is no good, no nice. And if there is, it is impermanent. There is proof all around me : a homeless summer and a burned-down house full of trash that was masquerading as good, as nice; a brother whose bad follows him wherever he goes, no matter how nice—there is no protection from black boyness. Good and nice are only illusory feelings, but, at least for a moment, I enjoy wrapping myself up in the illusion.”

Have you read ‘The Names of all the Flowers‘? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen

I read the third and final part of Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir, ‘Dependency‘, today. There are going to be spoilers in the review, and so please be forewarned.

‘Dependency‘ starts with a surprise – Tove is married! It came as such a surprise to me, as I didn’t see that coming! Starting from there, Tove goes on to describe her married life, her writing experiences, how she falls in love again with another person and breaks up with her husband, how her quest for romantic happiness and marital bliss continues for the rest of her life with unpredictable results, the new friends she makes and how they shape her life – we learn about these and other things in the first part of the book.

There are some interesting things that the book describes which were probably unusual for that time. For example, at one point, Tove becomes a successful writer and her name comes in the papers and she makes lots of money, but her husband is still a student at university. This leads to some complicated situations at home. When Tove describes the troubles in her marriage to her friend, and says that she fears that her husband might leave her, her friend says this – “He is really proud of you; it’s obvious when he talks about you. You just have to understand that it’s so easy for him to feel inferior. You’re famous, you earn money, you love your work. Ebbe’s just a poor student who’s being more or less supported by his wife. He’s studying for a degree he doesn’t fit, and he has to get drunk to cope with life.” There is also a part in which Tove describes how she is romantically attracted to one of her girlfriends. I don’t know whether that led to something more, as Tove is quiet about that.

Tove also describes the time she has an unplanned pregnancy and has to get an illegal abortion, and how when it happens again, it leads to some unintended consequences, which in turn leads to a dark period in her life. In the second part of the book, Tove describes how she got addicted to painkillers, and how this addiction took over her life, and affected her relationships with her family and friends and everyone around her, and how she came out of that harrowing period in her life.

‘Dependency‘ is very different from the first two parts of the trilogy. Tove’s searing honesty as she describes her life and her struggles with addiction makes for a fascinating and difficult read. The second part of the book, which describes her descent into addiction, is especially hard to read. Tove’s bravery and courage as she lays bare her life is amazing and inspiring. This trilogy was first published in the period 1967-71, and I’m sure it must have created waves when it first came out, shocking and surprising readers with its frankness and honesty. I don’t think there was any memoir of that time which came close to this. I don’t think even Tove’s great French contemporary, Marguerite Duras, wrote a frank memoir like this. The closest I can think of is Erica Jong’s ‘Fear of Flying‘, but even that is classified as fiction. As a memoir, Tove’s trilogy is unparalleled and unique, and it was far ahead of its time. The first two volumes of this memoir were translated and published in English in 1985. The publishers and the translator refused to touch the third volume and for many years it was not available in English. It was finally translated 34 years later. After reading it now, I realize why. The third volume is very different from the first two, because it is more frank, more honest, and probably controversial for its time, and it shows the grownup Tove as a complex, beautiful, imperfect, flawed human being. How she mustered up the bravery and courage to put this on paper, I’ll never know. It gives me goosebumps, just thinking about it.

I loved ‘Dependency‘, though it was a challenging read. I loved the whole trilogy. It is a beautiful, insightful and frank depiction of the times as seen through the eyes of one person, the fascinating Tove Ditlevsen.

I’ll leave you with a couple of my favourite passages from the book.

“And I realize more and more that the only thing I’m good for, the only thing that truly captivates me, is forming sentences and word combinations, or writing simple, four-line poetry. And in order to do this I have to be able to observe people in a certain way, almost as if I needed to store them in a file somewhere for later use. And to be able to do this I have to be able to read in a certain way too, so I can absorb through all my pores everything I need, if not for now, then for later use. That’s why I can’t interact with too many people; and I can’t go out too much and drink alcohol, because then I can’t work the next day. And since I’m always forming sentences in my head, I’m often distant and distracted when Ebbe starts talking to me, and that makes him feel dejected.”

“I’ve never been out in the country before, and I’m amazed at the silence, which is like nothing I have ever experienced. I feel something resembling happiness, and I wonder if this is what is meant by enjoying life. In the evening I go for a walk alone while Ester watches Helle. The aromas from the fields and pine forest are stronger than on the day we arrived. The lighted windows in the farmhouse shine like yellow squares in the darkness, and I wonder what the people there do to pass the time. The man probably sits listening to the radio; and the wife probably darns socks which she pulls up out of a woven basket. Soon they’ll yawn and stretch and look out at the weather and say a few words about the work awaiting them in the morning. Then they’ll tiptoe to bed so as not to wake the children. The yellow squares will go dark. Eyes will shut all over the world. The cities go to sleep, and the houses, and the fields.”

Have you read ‘Dependency‘? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Youth by Tove Ditlevsen

Today, I finished reading the second part of Tove Ditlevsen’s memoirs, ‘Youth‘. I read it in one breath.

In ‘Youth‘, Tove describes what happens after she goes to work, the different kinds of jobs she has, how her employers and colleagues are, the young men who are attracted towards her, how she can’t wait to turn eighteen and move out of her house and be independent – how she wants a room of her own as Virginia Woolf describes it, and which Tove describes eloquently thus –

“But I want so badly to have a place where I can practice writing real poems. I’d like to have a room with four walls and a closed door. A room with a bed, a table and a chair, with a typewriter, or a pad of paper and a pencil, nothing more. Well, yes – a door I could lock. All of this I can’t have until I’m eighteen and can move away from home.”

The book also describes how her parents resist Tove’s plans to become independent, how Tove becomes friends with literary-inclined older people with whom she has delightful bookish conversations, and her attempts at writing poems and getting them published. The book also touches upon the looming spectre of Nazism in Europe.

When Tove’s first poem gets published in a small literary magazine, she is thrilled. But her reaction to it was also complex and very interesting. It was one of my favourite passages from the book, and it goes like this –

“The next day two copies of Wild Wheat arrive in the mail and my poem is in both of them. I read it many times and get an apprehensive feeling in my stomach. It looks completely different in print than typewritten or in longhand. I can’t correct it anymore and it’s no longer mine alone. It’s in many hundreds or thousands of copies of the journal, and strange people will read it and may think that it’s good. It’s spread out over the whole country, and people I meet on the street may have read it. They may be walking about with a copy of the journal in their inside pocket or purse. If I ride in the streetcar, there may be a man sitting across from me reading it. It’s completely overwhelming and there’s not a person I can share this wonderful experience with.”

I loved ‘Youth‘. It is fascinating to watch how Tove navigates the complicated, messy adult world, and listening to her experiences through her own unique voice. I can’t wait to read the third part now, and find out what Tove’s upto next.

I’ll leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.

“Being young is itself temporary, fragile, and ephemeral. You have to get through it – it has no other meaning.”

“Death is not a gentle falling asleep as I once believed. It’s brutal, hideous, and foul smelling. I wrap my arms around myself and rejoice in my youth and my health. Otherwise my youth is nothing more than a deficiency and a hindrance that I can’t get rid of fast enough.”

“I also like to look at people who in one way or another give expression to their feelings. I like to look at mothers caressing their children, and I willingly go a little out of my way in order to follow a young couple who are walking hand in hand and are openly in love. It gives me a wistful feeling of happiness and an indefinable hope for the future.”

“‘If you don’t stop being so strange,’ my mother says, ‘you’ll never get married.’ ‘I don’t want to anyway,’ I say, even though I’m sitting there considering that desperate alternative. I think about my childhood ghost : the stable skilled worker. I don’t have anything against a skilled worker; it’s the word ‘stable’ that blocks out all bright future dreams. It’s as gray as a rainy sky when no bright ray of sun trickles through.”

Have you read Tove Ditlevsen’s ‘Youth‘? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen

I was inspired to read Tove Ditlevsen’s memoirs by one of my friends, who is an artist and a writer, and who is the biggest admirer of Tove Ditlevsen that I know. My friend has been gushing about Tove Ditlevsen for a long time, much before last year, when everyone started reading Ditlevsen after the recent English translation of her memoirs were published.

I read the first part of Tove Ditlevsen’s memoirs, ‘Childhood‘, today. Ditlevsen was born in 1918, when the First World War had just ended, and so it was a very different world then. ‘Childhood‘ describes the first decade and a half of Ditlevsen’s life. It brings that era beautifully alive, and interestingly it doesn’t feel like Ditlevsen is talking about a period which is nearly a century back, but it feels fresh like today. One of my favourite parts of the book is the one which describes how Tove fell in love with books, especially poetry, and how she started writing poetry of her own. I loved that part. Another thing that I loved about the book was when Tove describes how she hides her real thoughts and feelings from people around her, and pretends to be dumb and stupid, because she feels like an outsider as her thoughts are very different and unconventional compared to those around her. Those of us who are or have been outsiders will be able to understand exactly how Tove must have felt and will be able to identify with her. There are interesting characters who come through the book, including Tove and her brother and her parents and her teachers, her neighbours and her friends. Tove’s mother looks like a fascinating, complex person. Some of my favourite characters in the book were the minor ones who make a brief appearance, like the librarian who helps Tove borrow books for grown-ups, and Tove’s neighbour Ketty, who is her mother’s best friend, and who has an unconventional job, and who is kind and affectionate towards Tove. Tove’s friend Ruth is also a very fascinating character and made me think of Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking. Tove’s grandmother is also a very interesting character. The book ends with Tove graduating out of middle school and getting ready to go to work and looking at the grownups’ strange world with apprehension.

I loved ‘Childhood‘. It is slim at around a hundred pages, but there is so much packed in those pages, including a commentary on the social and political situation of the times seen through a young girl’s eyes. Tove’s narrative voice is beautiful and authentic and unique. The writing is beautiful and there were many beautiful sentences and passages in the book. I’m sharing one of my favourites below.

“In the meantime, there exist certain facts. They are stiff and immovable, like the lampposts in the street, but at least they change in the evening when the lamplighter has touched them with his magic wand. Then they light up like big soft sunflowers in the narrow borderland between night and day, when all the people move so quietly and slowly, as if they were walking on the bottom of the green ocean. Facts never light up and they can’t soften hearts like Ditte menneskebarn, which is one of the first books that I read. ‘It’s a social novel,’ says my father pedantically, and that probably is a fact, but it doesn’t tell me anything, and I have no use for it. ‘Nonsense,’ says my mother, who doesn’t care for facts, either, but can more easily ignore them than I can. Whenever my father, on rare occasions, gets really mad at her, he says she’s full of lies, but I know that’s not so. I know every person has their own truth just as every child has their own childhood. My mother’s truth is completely different from my father’s truth, but it’s just as obvious as the fact that he has brown eyes while hers are blue. Fortunately, things are set up so that you can keep quiet about the truths in your heart; but the cruel, gray facts are written in the school records and in the history of the world and in the law and in the church books. No one can change them and no one dares to try, either – not even the Lord, whose image I can’t separate from Prime Minister Stauning’s, even though my father says that I shouldn’t believe in the Lord since the capitalists have always used Him against the poor.”

Have you read ‘Childhood‘? What do you think about it?

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My old friend Raleigh

One of my schoolmates shared a vintage Indian ad for a bicycle. It triggered off some nostalgic memories for me.

A vintage Indian ad showing an Indian woman in a sari riding a bicycle

I learnt how to ride a bicycle when I was around ten years old. When I was around twelve, my dad got me my own bicycle. During those days, the bicycles which were popular among pre-teens and teens were the models made by Hero and BSA. These models were cool and stylish and used to come in many colours – red and blue used to be favourites among young people. There were other brands which were popular among older people, like Hercules and Atlas and Philips which were heavy and sturdy. When my dad decided to get a bicycle for me, he took my uncle along. My uncle said that the best bicycle out there was Humber and the second best was Raleigh. Everything else was third. The prices seemed to indicate that – Humber was the most expensive and the second most expensive was Raleigh. I wondered why, because I couldn’t tell the difference between them and other brands. I had never heard of Humber or Raleigh before and none of my friends had them. Later I discovered that my uncle’s bicycle was a Humber. My dad asked me which one I wanted. Those days Indian kids were taught that they shouldn’t choose the best or the most expensive, because they didn’t deserve them, and they also shouldn’t choose the cheapest one because the quality of that wouldn’t be good, and so they should follow Aristotle’s golden mean and choose the one in between. So for me, Humber was out, and most other models were priced low and so they were out too. So Raleigh, it was. This is the kind of weird decision that people like me made those days, never comparing products and their features but using Aristotelean logic. None of my friends had a Raleigh bicycle or seen one, and as long as I had it, I was the only person I knew who had a Raleigh. Recently one of my schoolfriends told me that his grandfather had a Raleigh and he gifted it to my friend later.

I later discovered that Raleigh was a British company which was more than a century old and was a leader in bicycles once upon a time. Even decades after the British had left India, Indians continued loving and admiring British products and that showed in my uncle’s admiration for Humber and Raleigh. I wonder now whether the model I had was the original nineteenth century one and whether this was the bicycle Jerome K. Jerome wrote about in ‘Three Men in a Bummel‘.

Vintage British ads showing a young people riding Raleigh bicycles

The Raleigh bicycle that I got was heavy, but once I got used to it, it was good and I loved it. I started going to school in it and later to college. My first school was probably five kilometres away from my home and my second school was probably around ten kilometres away. Just cycling to school meant that I got a lot of exercise done naturally and it kept me very fit. I also went to the library and read a lot there, visited bookshops, went to movies, and helped my mom in buying groceries or for getting money for her from the bank. I didn’t do anything fancy with my Raleigh bicycle, but I took long rides in it, sometimes to travel from one place to another and sometimes for fun. It opened up new worlds for an introvert like me. I remember once I even took a ride on it to the university which was probably more than twenty kilometres away and another time I took a ride to the Agricultural college which was also of similar distance. My Raleigh almost never broke down when I was riding – it was sturdy and smooth and tough. A BSA bicycle which looked cool and stylish wouldn’t have been able to withstand the stress that I put my Raleigh through. Of course, the occasional issue cropped up. There were always tyre punctures which I had to contend with and once in a while there were major problems for which I had to take it to the bicycle service shop. The bicycle repair guy would tell me to come back after a couple of hours and collect my bicycle, but I would always stay and watch him work. When he removed the wheel and the inner parts of it and a lot of bearing balls came tumbling out, it was fascinating to watch! I didn’t know that a bicycle had so many intricate parts! The bicycle repair guy almost became my friend because of my visits to his repair shop and he taught me a lot of things about bicycles. When my sister got married, I invited him to the wedding. He didn’t come through. He knew what I didn’t know when I was young – that we were on different sides of the social divide and he would feel extremely awkward if he had come. I always felt that socioeconomic divides never mattered in a friendship and this is probably true when we are kids, but unfortunately, between grownups it always comes in the way at times, and makes things awkward, even if someone like me didn’t care about it.

There used to be bicycle races in my locality during festival times, when I was in my teens. These were not regular bicycle races, but were called ‘slow-cycle’ races. The competitors would ride a bicycle, but the winner would be the guy who rides his bicycle so slow that he comes last. The rules were simple – once you are on the bicycle, you can’t come off it or touch the street with your feet, and your bicycle has to be in continuous motion. It was a very tough competition, and most of the participants gave up halfway through, because they broke one of the rules. A guy called John was an expert in slow-cycle racing and he used to win every year. It was amazing to watch him expertly keep the bicycle balanced while at the same time riding it really slowly. We flocked every year to the street which doubled as the racing track to watch him showcase his brilliant skills and cheer him.

I had a few close shaves while riding my Raleigh. Once a bus came in front from the opposite direction and I swerved to one side to avoid it and I fell on the side of the road on top of some stuff which was piled up there. My hand was sprained and I had to get a plastercast which stayed for a month. Another time a bus came very close from behind me and it was speeding and it hit my hand which was holding the bicycle handle and nearly knocked me off. My hand was in pain for days after that. The third time, I nearly got caught between a bus and a lorry – I was trying to overtake a bus which had stopped at a bus stop, but the bus suddenly started and accelerated and a lorry was coming on the opposite side, and I nearly got caught between them. I don’t know how I survived that day. I have to thank my lucky stars.

I also met one of my best friends of that time because of my Raleigh. I was going to college one day and when I turned into the main road, my neighbour was walking. It looked like she had missed her bus to her office. I asked her if I could help and drop her at her office as it was on my way and she was happy to take my help. As our leaving times coincided in the morning, at some point we started leaving together in the morning and I started dropping her off at work everyday. We had many wonderful conversations on the way. She had been working for a few years and so was a grown-up while I was a student and so still a kid from her perspective. She became a big sister and mentor to me. My own sister became jealous of this friendship and tried putting spokes in it and it was funny for me to watch, because my own sister never bothered spending time with me before.

I rode my Raleigh for many years starting from my pre-teens till my middle twenties. Even after I finished college and went to work, though my office was too far to ride by bicycle, I used to ride it in the evenings or during weekends, going here and there. Then I left work and went to college again. That was the last time I rode my Raleigh, though I didn’t know it then. When I finished my second degree and came back home, it was gone. My dad told me that one of our neighbours had asked for it, and as I was away and the bicycle was gathering rust, he had sold it away. I felt sad. I had never had a pet, though I loved cats and dogs, and my Raleigh was the closest to a pet that I had ever had. I had never given it a name, like people do these days to their bicycles. I wish I had. I mourned the passing of my old friend which had served me loyally for many years.

When I was a kid, bicycles were a common sight in India. Most families had one. Sometimes they had more than one. Boys and girls had different kinds of bicycles. Young women wore saris and salwars and rode their bicycles to school or college or work. Women riding a bicycle wearing saris was a sight which was unique to India. But with the passing of time, things changed. Italian mopeds and scooters and Japanese bikes started arriving in India. While in Italy, mopeds were regarded as fun vehicles which one rented and rode during the holidays while going to the beach, in India they became vehicles which people used for regular transportation, for going to school and college and to work. People graduated from bicycles to mopeds to scooters to motorbikes. And later when the small cars of Italian or Japanese design arrived, those who could afford them, got them. Once upon a time Indian roads were filled with bicycles, and every street corner had a bicycle repair shop. But with all these big changes happening, and with more and more people able to afford these bigger faster vehicles, both bicycles and their repair shops disappeared. Bicycle manufacturers closed down or they started making motorbikes. Today, there is a motorcycle repair shop near my home which services fancy bikes like Harley Davidsons and Triumphs and KTMs, but there is no bicycle repair shop.

A bicycle was never a lifestyle thing in India, except maybe among teenagers. People didn’t ride it because they would stay fit. People rode it because it was a medium of transport which was very affordable. It turned out that it also helped them stay fit. But with other modes of transport becoming affordable, the bicycle died a quiet death. I have heard people from my parents’ generation say that things were better during old times. I generally don’t agree with that sentiment – as humans we always have a tendency to be nostalgic about our childhood or our teens and say that it was a golden era. But on one thing, I would say that things were better during old times. There were bicycles around then and most people learnt to ride them. Bicycles provided exercise without us even realizing it. I cycled 20 kilometres to my school and later to my college everyday. I didn’t do any other exercise. I hated doing exercise. But I loved cycling. And it kept me fit, as it did millions of others. I miss that.

In recent years, when the Tour de France became suddenly popular in India, there was a brief revival of cycling in India. But the people who were doing it were different from those who cycled during old times. These new guys were corporate types who admired Lance Armstrong and other Tour de France winners and imagined themselves in their shoes. These were the guys who never rode a bicycle in their lives before and who probably regarded a bicycle and it’s rider with contempt, but who now wanted to do it, because it was regarded as cool. They started posting pictures in social media with captions like ‘Me and my Bike’. So suddenly new types of bicycles started making an appearance on the roads with gears and reflectors and riders who wore helmets and sunglasses. International bicycle companies realized that there might be a market in India and they brought their overpriced racing bicycles here. One of my book club friends had three of them, and the highest priced bicycle he had cost as much as a small car. But like all fads, this one also died after a while. The new bicycle shops which sold fancy bicycles and accessories started closing down.

I never owned a bicycle again. I rode my friend’s bicycle a couple of times, but otherwise I haven’t even ridden one in years. I hope I haven’t forgotten how to ride. Sometime back I thought I’ll revive my bicycling. I don’t think I have the confidence now to ride on main roads or highways, but I thought I’ll take rides in my locality and maybe go to the beach. I went to the bicycle shop and checked out different models. I told the guy there that I’ll think about it and get back soon. But I procrastinated for too long and the shop closed down. Maybe I’ll try again when normalcy resumes. It will be interesting to see how this second innings of bicycling goes.

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