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I
am writing this to you from Himachal Pradesh, where the rain was so
heavy the last two days, the highways are blocked by landslides, and
even though the electricity came back for a brief, glittering moment
about thirty minutes ago, it's gone again, and we can talk until my
phone hotspot finally exhausts itself, until my laptop begins to blink
pink warnings at me. I came to talk about writing to a writer's retreat
called
Alekhya in Parvati Valley, their
third retreat of the year. Winter is coming to the hills, and soon, all
the green I'm looking at, each time I look up from my laptop, will be
covered by snow, and the thirty to forty minute uphill walk to get to
the orchard, inaccessible by car, will also be inaccessible by foot to
all but the most hardy mountain travelers.
Okay, my phone is blinking at me--already!--and I'm going to shelf this,
writing in the pale twilight, the light from the screen the only
visible thing in this dark room, until the power is restored again.
Three days later
Back on the plains, I am listening to classical music this Friday
afternoon, and have an Olga cat on my desk, purring as she washes
herself. Apart from a lingering tiredness in my bones from the bus
journey, I'm mostly recovered, and have come back with 1500 words and a
document full of ideas for my new-new novel. (As opposed to my NEW
novel, which will be out at the end of the year and is called
The One Who Had Two Lives,
and is about Amba from the Mahabharata, her sad story and then the
twist of fate that turns her into Shikhandini.) I honestly didn't think
I'd do more at a writing retreat than do my workshop, talk to people
about their writing and read a lot of mystery novels, but it turns out
when you are talking about books and writing all day--organically,
nothing forced, but that was obviously everyone's shared interest, so
conversation turned to writing and reading more often than not--you are
far more motivated to do some of your own writing than you normally
would be.
Plus it was so
pretty, all the mountains and the mist, and we
took along some whiskey. I have never been a whiskey drinker, but I
somehow got fixed on an image of myself writing with a whiskey and water
next to me. Sometimes the images in my head are so strong, they make me
do things, but not in the spooky way that sentence made it sound like.
I'm talking more like--I'll be thinking of cooking in my Instant Pot for
example, and I'll have such a strong idea of myself doing this really
easy recipe which tastes really good, so I go online and get myself the
Instant Pot cookbook by
this lady.
Similarly, I saw myself wrapped up in a shawl, on a balcony with a desk
overlooking the mountains and a glass of whiskey next to me. (Plus a
pen and paper, because no doubt I got this image from some old movie
about a writer, but we'll ignore that.) Turns out, every single other
Indian I know (and the ones I don't) is correct! Whiskey is delicious!
This week in long bus journeys: Ugh, though. The worst part about going to the hills is all the
effort
involved. I mean, people keep saying, "Go to the hills! It's a quick
getaway!" but it's only quick if you're going somewhere easily
accessible by train or plane or just a few hours by bus. Unfortunately,
anywhere worth going for remote rural beauty in this country requires a
certain amount of hardship training before you get there. It
has
to be hard, right, or everyone would be there and it would be just as
ugly as Bhunter, this little town we caught our bus from which has got
to be the most unattractive place I've ever seen in the hills. On the
other hand, Manali and Dharamshala are pretty far away and they've
become quite seedy too. So has Kasol, which we were quite close to, and
which I had heard described as charming and hip. I guess it was still
quite hip, because I did sit on a stool in a tiny hole in the wall
coffee shop which STILL had all sorts of beans and grinds and an
espresso machine, despite the fact that the place was just two low
tables and the kind of stool you'd normally put in your bathroom so
granny doesn't slip and break her hip while she's bathing.
But the buses. I chose to take a Volvo instead of a car because it's
more comfortable, which is... true? But when whatever vehicle goes round
those bends, your ass keeps slipping out of your chair and you spend
almost the entire night, in an uncomfortable state of having to adjust
yourself each time you're just about falling asleep so you don't land on
the floor. Which means you crick your legs up in an effort to stay in
one position, but that means your legs are all stiff and sore by the
time it's twelve or thirteen hours later when you're finally ejected in
Delhi. I don't know a solution to this problem unless it's adding seat
belts to all the seats and not just a few of them.
On the other other hand, the plus side to a bus, as opposed to a car, is that you can read without getting sick, which I did.
This fortnight in stuff I wrote:
In
Reader's Digest, a list of
the top ten books that have shaped my writing in one way or the other.
Excerpt: Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell, Simon &
Schuster, Rs 599. It was everything my romantic soul desired: a
sprawling epic, a feisty heroine, lots of men kissing and making
dramatic speeches. Often when I miss deadlines, I swoosh my hair around
and declare, "After all, tomorrow is another day."
Last time I wrote to you about that spa I went to review, remember?
The review's up on the
Conde Nast Traveler website.
Excerpt: I’m at Naad, a new wellness centre just outside of
Sonepat. Sonepat is not a lovely town, in fact, it is almost defiantly
ugly—buildings with no particular design aesthetic, fields that are
either dry or boggy, but Naad makes up for this with high walls edged
with bamboo trees. There’s piped muzak in all the corridors,
aromatherapy burners on the floor, potted plants in niches. It’s a small
property—compact and broad-shouldered like a wrestler, three floors,
only 39 rooms. I am the only guest this weekend, and it is raining.
Excerpt: A look at the days of the week in the Hindu calendar
reveal that they are exact correspondents to the Roman one. Sunday is
Ravivar, the god of the sun, Monday is Somvar for the moon, Tuesday is
Mangalvar for Mars, Wednesday is Budhvar for Mercury, Thursday, like I
already said, is Guruvar for Jupiter, Friday is Sukravar for Venus and
Saturday is Shanivar for Saturn. This is a relatively new way of looking
at the calendar — new for Hinduism, ie — dating back to about the 4th
or 5th century, when a king called Rudraman I, asked for a Greek text on
horoscopes to be translated into Sanskrit. This book, called the
Yavanajataka (“Yavana” is “Greek,” “jataka” is “nativity”) is what led
to Hinduism's days of the week, and a text modern-day Indians use to
this day.
Oh, and I drew some comics! I put one at the beginning of this
newsletter and one at the end. (Enable images in your email client if
you can't see them.)
This week in stuff I read on the internet:
Comforting to know that
my love for spicy food makes me a sort of rebel. (Only sort of, I too was raised on spicy food ever since I was a child.)
Excerpt: Nevertheless, Rozin saw that some people, even in Mexico,
ate more chili pepper than others. And outside of traditional chili
pepper-eating cultures, it is common to see people learn to love spicy
food on their own. To explain this phenomenon Rozin came up with a
theory he called “benign masochism.” A certain type of person, he
theorized, was lured to the burn—the same kind of person, he suggested,
who might be drawn to other “sensation-seeking” activities.
Dog cloning is
a real thing now, but you'll never get exactly the same pet. (So why bother?)
Excerpt: Why, I ask him, do so many people want to clone their
dogs? “The main reason,” he replies, “is that their beloved companion
dogs are like family members, and they would like to have as close to a
continuation of that companionship as possible.” He makes clear, though,
that customers do not get an exact replica of their dog. Clones often
look like the original dog, and share some traits, but they don’t have
the original dog’s memories, and their upbringing is inevitably
different. “Cloned puppies are like identical twins born at a later
date,” Hwang tells me. “A twin out of time.”
And, speaking of science,
this story on a facial transplant done on a 21-year-old woman is incredible. (The last line in the excerpt below really got to me.)
Excerpt: We are members of an exclusive group: animals that
recognize their own faces in a mirror. Besides us, great apes, Asian
elephants, Eurasian magpies, and bottlenose dolphins are the only other
animals known to recognize themselves. Dolphins as young as seven months
will pose, twirl, and put their eye right up against the mirror to
stare at their faces. Only humans are known to express dismay when
looking at their reflections.
Nilanjana on Naipaul. I'd heard
this story
before, but never in this detail, only him being really cross with a
woman, never any more context. The more I read about him, the more I
realise what truly fucked up men we hoist on our shoulders and declaim
as artists.
Excerpt: That day at the festival, V S Naipaul got into an argument with
Vera Hildebrand, a scholar and the wife of the American ambassador to
India. The argument was over whether Islamic immigrants in Denmark
should be permitted to wear their veils. It flamed outward; Naipaul
called her a “foolish and illiterate” woman, and she remarked that we
all knew from his books that he had a low opinion of women. This was
reported as gossip.
Excerpt: I always forget how direct the novel is about the crimes
at its center. All of that ugliness was hidden, we tell ourselves each
time we close its pages, covered in Nabokov’s exquisite language. But
then, at some remove of years, we pick up the book once again and
discover what frauds we’ve been. Here is Humbert Humbert telling
himself, and us, what he’s done: “This was a lone child, an absolute
waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous
intercourse three times that very morning.” And here she is, in the
passenger seat of his car, “complaining of pains,” he tells us. She
“said she could not sit, said I had torn something inside of her.”
Excerpt: Let’s face it, writers are, in general, a neurotic, insecure,
self-flagellating lot — often shy and withdrawn and introverted by
nature. For many, that’s what drew them to writing in the first place.
That’s certainly true with me. So being pressured to perform and be
charming and sell myself is absolutely terrifying. Over time, I’ve
learned to be a good performer, but I am still filled with dread each
time I have to do anything in public. It doesn’t matter that most of the
time when I give a reading, there’s hardly anyone in the audience.
Excerpt: Once the caveats are accounted for, we are left with the
complex and fascinating map of a Harappan civilisation—an empire
seemingly without kings and armies, a political federation forged across
a vast territory of 2 million sq km that achieved a rare unity in terms
of planning and coordinated activity for the general weal. A thought
world where social stratification did not entail poverty, whose urban
systems negated the very ground of caste—and whose gender relations
would be a fascinating area of study, judging by the way female bones
were buried differently.
And finally--a critique of Queer Eye (which, as you know, I love) which goes beyond the regular TV recaps.
Excerpt: One curious repeating bridge of the show’s format is that
there’s almost always a woman the hapless straight-dude subjects have to
shape up for: a female friend, a potential love interest, a parent or
another family member who is involved in this man’s life whose approval
of the transformation must be courted and won. Sometimes it’ll be the
wife, but most often these men are single. This canny reversal of
cultural power is cathartic to watch if you’re a woman who dates men:
here are men gleefully doing for one another what some women and girls
have spent our lives being pressured or cajoled into doing for them.
Here, at last, are a corps of men going through the rigors of
top-to-bottom self-invention for our approval. We still have to do it
for them, of course, and we don’t get a fanfare and a free kitchen
remodel out of it, but hey, every little bit helps.
