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Middlemarch, George Eliot and the female novelist (me)

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I don’t know what it was that drew me towards Middlemarch NOW, in the middle of writing a difficult book. Maybe because I wanted to read a difficult book to keep my brain limber, does that ever happen to you? Do you sometimes want to consume something challenging so it feels like your brain is doing jumping jacks, flexing in the far corners of your mind? If you think of your brain in a body, then what is that body doing, what is that body eating (Netflix? romances? murder mysteries?) does that body still recall how to read something one way and interpret it for you so it means something else? (This happens when you are reading poetry, for example.)

As a novelist, reading is the way I come up with new ideas. Something will set something else off: oh, this scene reminds me of that person I met five years ago. I wonder what would have happened if… Or, interesting, this book mentions five different perspectives, but this is what is still missing, I wonder what a book like that would look like. People ask me a lot, young people I mean, back when I did book tours across the country (those were fun) “how can I be a writer?” and I say, “Read more.” And they look slightly disappointed, I don’t know what they are expecting, maybe a rattled off set of tips: “1. Wake up at 6 am every morning. 2. Sit in front of [COMPUTER BRAND] and open an empty Word document. Use the Garamond font (my favourite) and type out the first sentence.” Actually, knowing our Indian education system, they are probably expecting that. My first and only art class in primary school was us copying one picture on to our blank sheets, the person who copied it best, got the best marks. Of course, this is the tenet of a lot of art schools: learn to draw realistically before you can break the rules, but I say pooh to all that. Draw the way you used to draw as a child, write the way you used to write as a child. Not thinking of who would see the picture or the poem, just doing it for the delight of it.

But what has all this got to do with Middlemarch? Plenty. For one thing, as you’re immersed in the book, and I bought a paperback copy, hefty and hard on the wrists and my stomach on which it rested, you realise that if George Eliot aka Mary Anne Evans aka Marian, darling had not written for the sheer joy of it, had not created the kind of novel that she wanted to read, we wouldn’t have this book at all. Middlemarch is, as I put in the thumbnail description of my bookish Instagram: “Pride and Prejudice but with marriages, not weddings and not just rich people, it is Anna Karenina but English pastoral, it is A Suitable Boy but with more ethical lessons tossed in.”

I did find myself thinking of Jane Austen a lot, it was inevitable, here was English provincial life, but as I said, Marian took the village of Middlemarch and explored it from all angles. We are never allowed to linger on a marriage proposal too long, or follow a happy couple during a honeymoon.

There are three marriages that occur during the course of the book (I’m not counting the two that happen in the finale) and of those, one was between a pompous old man and a very young woman who wants to do good in the world and feels the only way to do this is by marrying someone great and helping them, between two extremely attractive people who have been flirting steadily for a while, and a side-character marriage of the previously mentioned starry-eyed young woman’s sister to her rejected suitor.

Of these marriages, our main characters are all unhappy. Dorothea (who marries the old man) realises that her husband isn’t as smart as he says he is, nor as wise, her husband, in turn (and this is Marian’s gift, that she gives us all these points of view, not condemning or mocking, just holding a mirror up) realises that marriage really isn’t for him. So the two of them labour on, and it gets more and more claustrophobic to read about them, I remember one bit that stood out to me, I’ll paraphrase here: “whenever he said ‘my love’ he used his coldest tones.”

And while you start out by rolling your eyes at Dorothea, you are the reader after all, you are older and wiser and you know how marriages are, by the time you are in the middle of her unhappy marriage with her, you long to save her as well. George Eliot keeps describing her as “good,” everyone who comes in contact with her, seems to feel the same way, and yet you’re not annoyed by her as you are by other saintly characters in literature. (One day I will do a whole thing on What Katy Did and how poor Katy was forced to tamp down her rebellious hoyden nature because of that prig of a Cousin Helen who taught her to be the soul of the house and never complain about her backache or whatever. Bah.) Why does Dorothea not annoy me? I think because Marian/George gets so deeply into her psyche, you’re not just looking at a paper cut-out of a person, like saintly people in books so often are, you looking at a real young woman with ambition and drive. She really wants to change the world for the better, and she keeps tilting at it, attempting to fix things and keeps being thwarted by her well-meaning male relatives. In the beginning, sure, she’s all poses, she’s like, “Oh I like riding too much, I must give it up” but the genius of Marian is that you are invited to roll your eyes at her, as much as her younger sister does, just sitting there, wanting a necklace from their dead mother’s jewellery box and being snubbed a little in her pleasure.

Mary Anne Evans was born to loving parents, she had loving siblings also, but she was considered too unattractive to get married, and since she was pretty smart, her father decided to educate her. Which makes me think that it was probably better to be born ugly and smart than pretty and smart, even though I know vanity is strong in all of us, but imagine being pretty and smart, and you’re dying to be educated, and read and learn and your fam’s like, “Nah, we’ll just wait for a good man to take you off our hands.” INFURIATING. Luckily, for Marian, which is what her family and loved ones called her and which is what I will as well, she was a homely child, and she made the most of her intelligence by continuing to read and teaching herself the classics when she was forced to leave school and look after her father.

After that, she took the German she had taught herself to read and translated a controversial text for that time: The Life of Jesus, which brought her to the attention of the London crowd, and pretty soon, she was the assistant editor of a magazine, and quickly moved up to the editor’s role, UNHEARD of for women at that time, especially since it was a political journal not just household tips or whatever. In fact, if Marian could be said to have a Fatal Flaw, I think she didn’t like women very much. I’m basing this on her essay, largely quoted on the internet in articles about Middlemarch. It was called Silly Novels by Lady Novelists and I’m putting some excerpts here:

[On their heroines] Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues. 

We had imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they had no other “ladylike” means of getting their bread.  […] Under these impressions we shrank from criticising a lady’s novel: her English might be faulty, but we said to ourselves her motives are irreproachable; her imagination may be uninventive, but her patience is untiring.  Empty writing was excused by an empty stomach, and twaddle was consecrated by tears. 

To judge from their writings, there are certain ladies who think that an amazing ignorance, both of science and of life, is the best possible qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest moral and speculative questions.

Okay, but then we’re sort of side-eyeing Marian, like, come on Marian, why let the sisterhood down and so on, and then she says:

The foolish vanity of wishing to appear in print, instead of being counterbalanced by any consciousness of the intellectual or moral derogation implied in futile authorship, seems to be encouraged by the extremely false impression that to write at all is a proof of superiority in a woman. On this ground we believe that the average intellect of women is unfairly represented by the mass of feminine literature, and that while the few women who write well are very far above the ordinary intellectual level of their sex, the many women who write ill are very far below it. 

No sooner does a woman show that she has genius or effective talent, than she receives the tribute of being moderately praised and severely criticised. By a peculiar thermometric adjustment, when a woman’s talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and if ever she reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point. Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell, and Mrs. Gaskell have been treated as cavalierly as if they had been men.

So, you see, she really was on our side after all. And the arguments she makes her about “silly novels” can be applied to us right now in the twenty first century, and also to all sexes. Silly novels are a phenomenon that never actually dies. Today, looking at Indian romance novels (written primarily by men, how the world has changed) we can see that the hero is always well-meaning, dashing but emotionally foolish, the woman is always a peculiar mixture of weak and fragile and yet preternaturally wise, and the romance is always ill-advised but one we’re supposed to root for anyway. Meanwhile, I can’t remember the last Big Debut Fiction Darling that was written by a man. I think it was Amitabh Bagchi? But that wasn’t debut, no? And women soar ahead.

The other bad marriage in Middlemarch is that of Rosamund, the mayoral candidate’s daughter with the new doctor in town, Lydgate. Rosamund is extremely attractive, we’re told about her flaxen hair and her blue eyes, and we’re also told that she longs to better herself, get good company round her own table, her father’s friends are too low brow for her. She’s aware of her beauty and fixates on Lydgate, the new guy, to rescue her from a lifetime of being a provincial wife. And Lydgate, by the same measure, although he doesn’t actually want to get married, falls prey to her blue eyes and helpless face. And then, of course, they realise that they didn’t really know each other at all before the wedding. Rosamund is obstinate and sly, Lydgate is in debt and harsh and easily manipulated. I hated Rosamund as I read her and yet, I loved the fact that I hated her, if that makes sense. She breathed, she moved, she thought, this little china doll! I was in her head! To make a character like that alive like that, what skill.

Of course, as I write my own book side-by-side, I begin to think of the lessons I’ve learned from Marian. How to examine a character from a distance, for example. How to work in thoughts and beliefs, but not in a preachy way, but as a way to both keep the story going and provide some context. After all, we do not exist in black holes, so neither should our books. How to, also, make sure that all your characters have ambition and heart and complex psychologies of their own, even the supporting ones, so that they all feel like real people, not just painted extras on a background. I don’t want to write like Marian, because well, I worked very hard to develop my own voice, my own style, so I write like MYSELF and no one else, but I want to take away some lessons from her, the same way I do with other great writers.

George was always very popular, by the way, no artistic struggle there to hold up as inspiration. Her first book was an instant bestseller, and she found love with a man named George something, whose first name she adopted as her pseudonym because she loved it so much. (‘Eliot’ because it was a nice round mouthful of a name.) He was married, so they lived together for about twenty years before he died, and for a while, everyone was scandalised, but Queen Victoria was a great fan of Marian’s work so after a royal visit with the Princess, everyone was like, “Well, ok, if royalty is fine with it then why not?”

After her George’s death, she married a man twenty years younger than herself (go Marian!) and went off to Venice on a honeymoon, where this young fellow jumped out of a window and into a canal (he survived), some speculate because he didn’t want to have sex with her, but you know, who knows why he did? Marian was no beauty, sure, but she was a great woman, and any man would be lucky to have her, and men should stop being such delicate darlings about these kind of things, and remember that very young women have been having sex with very old men for centuries and no one jumps out of windows dramatically.

Anyway, one last story about Marian: at the height of her fame, she had to have her living room in London extended, because of the crowds of people who came to visit her every Sunday evening, when she hosted an apparently open-to-all party.

I wish you all great success in your writing careers (or okay, other careers also), and hope at some time in the future we must all have our living rooms extended to accommodate all our loving fans.

PS: More Middlemarch? This is a great essay by Rebecca Mead, who turned it into a book.

 

 

Would you, like Edmund Pevensie, sell your soul for Turkish Delight?

(I think this came out in The Indian Express? Not sure though. Read ANYWAY.)




“The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle on to the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which when opened , turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight. Each piece was sweet and light to the very centre and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious.” - C.S Lewis, The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe


Once upon a time in Istanbul, a sultan wanted to keep all his wives and mistresses happy, so he called upon a confectioner to create a sweet to keep them—well—sweet. (Or so says an article in the Independent, talking about the history of Turkish Delight). This was a thing that the confectioner invented, a gel of starch and sugar, sprinkled with nuts and flavoured with rosewater, a cloying, dense sweet, rubbery but not chewy. Nice, if you like that sort of thing, which I, disappointed adult, once childhood Narnia fan, did not.


There is an argument to be made about not re-reading your old favourite books as an adult. Your rational mind isn't supposed to stop and examine a problematic bit of prose, you're supposed to skim right along, breathless and caught up in the adventure like the heroes you're reading about. There should also be an argument about not eating food you've read about that has been exalted. Fish and chips were bland, kidneys smell so strongly of pee I just couldn't stomach them, and Turkish Delight was the unkindest of all—not a delight, not even remotely so. I was well into adulthood by the time I tried them, and with the first bite, I paused for a moment, with the second, I decided they weren't for me. No offense to Turkish Delight lovers, it was just that I realised in that moment, almond slivers catching on my palate, that it was no wonder that Edmund in Narnia loved them, they would please a child, achingly sweet, and only a child could consume so many in one go and not be sick after.


The first—and now, looking back, the only--time I read about the Sultan's appeasement was in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, the very first of the Narnia books, which, if you're not familiar with, is about four English children who stumble through a wardrobe into a magic land and overthrow the evil queen who has been ruling there for many years. Before they can overthrow her, one of the children—Edmund—is lured into her power by the magic sweets she feeds him. This makes him silly and vulnerable—not unlike being roofied—and soon, he is her spy. While the Beavers and the children eat fish and potatoes, Edmund has been corrupted by the Turkish Delight he betrays his whole family for it, and is betrayed in turn.


“He had eaten his share of the dinner, but he hadn't really enjoyed it because he was thinking all the time about Turkish Delight—and there's nothing that spoils the taste of good ordinary food half so much as the memory of bad magic food.”


Now, in Lewis' time, Turkish Delight was the ultimate in imported confectionery, and in war-time England, when the book was written and set, sweets were hard to get. An article theorises that maybe the idea of Narnia under the White Witch where it was “always winter and never Christmas” led Lewis to think of it. After all, sugar rations were scarce during the time, and he probably drew parallels between that life and the one he was creating in Narnia.


 Originally, it was called rahat-ul hulkum, for “comfort of the throat” but in modern day Turkey, Turkish delight is just plain old “mouthful” or lokum. Edmund's betrayal has travelled around the world—Bulgaria, where it's spiced with walnuts; Greece where it's served with coffee instead of biscuits; Romania, where you don't really want to know what “rahat” now means; and North America and England where they coat it with chocolate as they do most sweet things.


In my imaginings, the TD was marshmallow-like, spongy and soft and ethereal. I was ready o make peace with the idea that it wasn't a real thing, just a made up name for something so wonderful it couldn't be described. I'm not the only one. In an article in Slate, the author imagines it “crumbly and buttery and warm, like shortbread with walnuts, just out of the oven, with a rich, molten filling inside.” But after tasting it: “It tasted like soap rolled in plaster dust.” Maybe that's where the mystery lies, not in what Edmund ate, but why he ate it, not the reason he was seduced but what he was tasting as he gave up his whole family. I suspect it'll always be a mystery to me.

Ugh, I hate the end of Deathly Hallows

This week I got into a passionate discussion with a friend about how much I hated the epilogue of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. First: it's very unlikely that you fall in love and marry and pop out three kids with your high school sweetheart, I mean, okay, maybe not UNLIKELY, but definitely a little icky, right? Secondly, none of those couples had anything in common with each other. I'm not a Harry/Hermione shipper, but Harry told everyone more than he told Ginny. Mostly, his adventures were confined to co-adventurers Ron and Hermione, with no room for anyone else, even the girl he supposedly loved. And before that, he turned to a zillion people for advice: Dumbledore, Sirius, Remus, Hagrid, even LUNA, but he never seemed to do that much with Ginny except grab her and passionately make out in corners and rooms and whatnot. Out of this you're telling me that they should get married? Please.
Secondly, even Joanne HERSELF admitted that putting Ron and Hermione together was a mistake. What does whip smart Hermione have in common with an open mouthed, slightly bumbling fool? Ron is great, don't get me wrong, but he's really.. thick, and most of the adventures have Harry and Hermione doing all the work while Ron follows along behind, bleating. Now, I get that Hermione had this huge crush on him, so yeah, kiss him. Have sex with him even. Just don't MARRY him and have his babies.
Thirdly, who calls their child Albus Severus if they don't want their child to be bullied mercilessly?
Fourthly, I refuse to acknowledge the hot mess that is The Cursed Child. So there.
That's my HP Rant, just for you. For those of you who have never "got" Harry Potter, I suggest reading as a sociological experiment. Like, book one is a bit too childish, I agree, but he was eleven. It's a truth universally acknowledged that book three is the best of the books.
(My friend actually has a soft spot for Ron, but then she also supports Mr Bhaer for Jo, so what does she know, really?)

Thursday Miscellany

(This was sent as a newsletter last year or thereabouts. Like, most of this stuff is older writing now anyway, except for the Today in Photo. I suppose my newsletter has turned into my blog? But I still archive things here because there are still people who prefer it. So there is that.)



 
I have had a slow week. Last weekend, I had two house parties in a row, this is rare, because who hosts parties anymore? There was a time in Delhi where your weekends would be spent flitting from one house party to another--and I don't just mean sitting around with three people in a living room having civilised conversations. No, these were party-parties, sometimes you'd see the same five people, but in different combinations, sometimes the only person you knew was the person taking you there, not even the host, but it didn't matter, because you carried that bottle of Old Monk tucked under your arm as an offering, just as someone carried it to your house previously. Anyway, it is fun going to parties, especially unexpected ones, and making conversation with unexpected people, but you are required to be on in a way that is taxing, if you're not used to having conversations with other people apart from your partner, your employees (maid and gardener), and now your German teacher. (And with him, your conversation is about German, if not in German just yet, but it's a process.) (I have had only three German classes, scheduling has been hard recently, but the other night I dreamt of two German words--ich nicht--which means "I not" which is not a sentence, but in my dream it kept echoing in my head: ich nicht, ich nicht, ich nicht.) (Probably because they sound sort of the same.)
This week in movies: I did leave the house once though! Went to watch the premiere of Manto in the cinema with my friend Naila. The movie was great--a biopic of an Indian writer, done well and sensitively, and I'd recommend you watch it, but it's much clearer viewing if you've actually read some of Manto's short stories, because they're woven into the narrative. It could be confusing if you've never even heard of the man, but once you have, there's a thrill at watching him loaf around Bombay with Ismat Chugtai, that pre-Partition writer life, you know? I've seen biopics of writers across the world in a specific time period, and this was my first time watching something set in India. It was really very cool.
My only quibble is that it seemed somehow disjointed, like several different scenes as opposed to one long story, and also that he spends a lot of the second half feeling sorry for himself and gazing moodily into a whiskey glass, which okay, I suppose he might have done in real life also, but I would have liked to see more of the effects of drinking rather than the drinking itself. Watching someone get high in the movies or on television is very boring unless it's done really, really well.
Also, my Feminist Voice kept popping up in my head, no matter how many times I said, "Shhh! Just watch the movie!" "If Manto was a woman," said my FV, "Then he'd HAVE to get it together after Partition and keep his family together. He's only being so self-indulgent because he's a man." My FV keeps it real, she is the antidote to my usual Pollyanna-rose-tinted-glasses situation.
This week in make in India, I think?: A couple of weeks ago, I bought myself a large bar of Amul dark chocolate, which was surprisingly so good, that I bought another bar, and now I can't stop eating it. Amul, a gift for someone you love, Amul, the butter guys, were never very good at the chocolate, sort of hard and chalky compared to Cadbury's (which I actually like the Indian version of more than the British one). BUT! This dark chocolate is kind of perfect. And so CHEAP, guys. It's a 100 bucks a bar or something, and this is a big bar I'm talking about, not one of those piddly little ones. 
And while we're on the subject of Amul, please also try their gouda and emmental line of cheese cubes, which are heavily processed, but still tasty. They're not any kind of gouda you will be familiar with, but they still make a nice snack for between meals.
This week in books:  Got sent the new Robert Galbraith Lethal White, and all I will say about it is that it is a) massive, and if you read in bed, you'll have to keep tossing and turning to get your wrists aligned properly and b) SO GOOD that you should probably clear your schedule for as long as it takes for you to finish it. (This Digested Read column about the first book Cuckoo's Calling is snarky and hilarious though.)
I just finished Lark Rise To Candleford, which is this semi-autobiographical life of a young girl in England during the 19th century. I have this other set of books which I love which begin with A London Child of the Seventies (that's 1870s, by the way) and this feels like a country counterpart. Lark Rise is also famous as a BBC show, which I just watched the first episode of, and it is VERY BBC period drama, so obviously I love it already.
Meanwhile, Galbraith put a spanner in my plans to finish reading Sapiens for my book club yesterday, but I mostly enjoyed that too. It's quite dense, but so many insights into what makes us human beings--how we work, how we think, how we operate. Plus written lightly, so it's very readable. Give it a whirl, except don't try to speed-read in three days like I did because then the only whirl will be inside your own head.
And last night, I began reading Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London at midnight, and by the time I finally was like, "Enough! Go to bed!" it was 2 am, so yeah.

Before you read The Testaments, here's why India is very much like Gilead

(A version of this appeared in Scroll)

There's a reason dystopian fiction is so addictive to read. Like a ghost story, or a murder mystery, it draws you in. There but for the grace of God, go I. An authoritarian government, the poor at the very bottom, the rich at the very top, measures that you should be outraged about but aren't, for fear of retribution; or just plain old apathy. This could be us. This could be us today.

The Handmaid's Tale is one of the most quoted examples of this genre, and rightly so. Margaret Atwood, the author, can write circles around anyone else, even when she's describing female friendship or placing a novel within a novel. But it is Atwood's dystopia that stands out, whether it's the more recent Oryx and Crake (climate change in a strange new world) or back to basics, back to the book that defined a female-centric dystopian fantasy: The Handmaid's Tale. It seems funny that there was a time I'd never even heard of Atwood, and that it took the urgings of my partner, then in our heady nascent early dating days, to push The Handmaid's Tale on me, and how when I read it, devoured it, it was an act of falling in love on two levels: one with the man that brought the book to me and the other with the author of this book. Then I read it swiftly and speedily, I couldn't wait to finish and put together the jigsaw but I re-read it again recently, all anticipation for the TV adaptation of the book, and this time I went slowly, and what I read along the way troubled me. Increasingly, the narrative was sounding like a true life report, something that is actually happening today in India.

The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985. I was four when it came out, and now looking back over the years, the 1980s have taken on a sepia-tinged look, cycling down alleys, organic food before there were any other options of food, but 1985 was the year Air India flight 182 was blown up over the Atlantic Ocean, with all passengers aboard dying. It was the year the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act was passed in India, claiming that a person suspected of terrorism could be imprisoned without a trial or any formal charges, removing a defence of free speech. In the United States, it was the Year of The Spy, because a number of arrests were made on Russian spies in the US.

“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course [...] but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The news paper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others.” - The Handmaid's Tale

One of the big issues in the fall of the United States as we know it in the book was the loss of fertility. A nuclear fall out or some such had resulted in infertility and as a result, those up top, in power, could call upon “Handmaids” or women who were known to be fertile to come to their homes and lie with them and produce a child for them, after which the women were shipped off to another posting, and so on and so forth until their ovaries died out. Offred, our narrator, named so because she belongs to Fred who is a “Commander” is one of these women.

In 2017, in India, there may not be a decline in the birth rate, but the RSS is claiming that you can get “customised, fair skinned babies” by following a few rituals. The Garbh Vigyan Sanskar project claims to have delivered 450 of these “specialised” babies so far and has plans to have “thousands of such babies by 2020,” according to their spokesperson. They're born by following certain rituals, yes, but also complete abstinence after the baby is born. Compare this to the Ceremony in The Handmaid's Tale, where the Commander, fully clothed except for the essential part, has sex with Offred, also fully clothed, minus her underwear, while she lies between the legs of the Commander's Wife. (Also, needless to say, fully clothed.) When there is a birth, the Wife sits above the labouring Handmaid, pretending to give birth as she does. These are all aided by certain rituals they all do—especially the night the Commander and the Handmaid have sex—to ensure fertility.

The Commander's Wife—and her particular, peculiar sexless marriage—reminded me a lot of the Indian mother-in-law. The Handmaid is in the Wife's domain, and it is the Wife who decides her fate. “We fought for it,” the Wife tells Offred, when she emphasises that her husband is hers alone. A majority of the dowry deaths in India have the mother-in-law as the murderer, and in a country where the husband lives with his parents, it is to the mother-in-law that the new wife has the closest relationship. She may not literally be the third person in the bedroom, but her spectre is looming close by. Plus arranged marriages? They abound in Gilead—the book's fictional world—as well as in real life right here.

I turned to an article by Neha Dixit in Outlook published in 2013, and find that the women in RSS training camps have similar ideas about their segregation. Motherhood is held up as the ultimate ideal. To quote from the article: “We are not feminists, we are family-ists. We believe in ‘dampatya’ (conjugality) where a man and a woman together need to bring up a family.” The modesty the Handmaids have to always employ is echoed in this other quote by a Samiti member: ““Besides unemployment, there are two major problems that need to be addressed”, [..] “One is that young girls must be stopped from putting their pictures on social networking websites like Facebook. They risk their honour and then their pictures are morphed into n

ude ones and circulated.”

Offred is lucky to be a Handmaid, she's frequently told. Less viable women are Marthas—cooks, maids, general dogsbodies. Others marry lower soldiers and are Econowives, the Handmaids still occupy a higher status than them. The women in the book are not allowed to read, and there are frequent heartbreaking flashbacks to Offred's previous life where all her freedoms were slowly taken away.

It begins, as these things often do, with constant surveillance. The old government is overthrown, a new one promised, but never delivered, people with differing beliefs asked to leave the country. Do you see echoes now as I did? Do you see the Aadhar card being used to keep an eye on you? Do you see new media like Republic TV becoming the norm, because what that's what people want to listen to? Do you see how they get rid of anyone with a dissenting voice? Do you see how this is happening all over the world?

“Ordinary,” said Aunt Lydia, “Is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”

In Praise Of Marilla Cuthbert

(This appeared in The Indian Express a long time ago.)

What do we know about Marilla Cuthbert? We know she's an older single woman who keeps house for her farmer brother in the beginning of Anne Of Green Gables. Her age is never mentioned until once in Rainbow Valley, where Anne says sadly, “Marilla is eighty five.” By some back calculation, this makes her not younger than fifty something when we first meet her: “a tall, thin woman, with angles and without curves. [..] She looked like a woman of narrow experience and rigid conscience, which she was; but there was a saving something about her mouth, which, if it had been ever so slightly developed, might have been considered indicative of a sense of humour.” Remember that mouth as her creator L.M Montgomery wanted you to, there's foreshadowing in that mouth.

With Mother's Day just past, and a new adaptation of Anne Of Green Gables on Netflix, I got to thinking about Anne as a mother. She was a great mother, as her children will evidence, loving and warm and all those things. But it surprised me that she took so easily to it, where was Anne's role model? Her own mother, long dead, her brief stint as a helper for mothers with their children just left an impression of an impatient harridan and her brood of squalling infants. We never do learn much about Gilbert Blythe's mother, and Diana's mother is stern and inflexible for the most part. So where does Anne learn it? Some might argue that motherhood is instinctive, but I say your basis has to be formed on what you know. And what Anne knew was Marilla Cuthbert.

Marilla, fifty something, a spinster for life, a stern woman who knew what she wanted. Balanced by her brother Matthew, who you, reader, might remember more lovingly, because he shared an affinity with Anne, and was sympathetic to her needs. But remember also that it was Marilla who made the final decision that Anne should stay with them—even though she wasn't a boy, Marilla who gave Anne one of her biggest comforts: her relationship with God. So too was it Marilla who made sure the flighty, imaginative girl was taught household skills—something we might scoff at now, but which was a necessary accomplishment in that time. Anne teaches Marilla how to love, yes, but Marilla gives Anne a safe space in which to love. 

 

All this not to run down Matthew—he was lovely, but he was not a parent. He was the generous uncle Anne needed, a port in the storm, a place for unconditional love. Matthew gave her a puffed sleeve dress and listened to her talk and took her side against Marilla whenever needed. But Marilla, that spiky spinster, the childfree person who didn't even really want a child, she gave Anne a chance to go to college, and a place to come home to, and rounded off her raptures with old fashioned common sense. Marilla didn't want a child, not even the boy they asked for, he was meant to be a help to Matthew, but once she had one, she mothered her as she had been mothered herself. Unsentimental and supportive. Stern but loving. The first time we see her completely on Anne's side is when she goes to correct Mrs Barry's impression of Anne, that she was a child who “set Diana drunk.” Matthew would never have the courage to make that confrontation, and in this scene, all of Marilla's mothering comes to the forefront.

“Poor little soul,” she murmured, lifting a loose curl of hair from the child's tear stained face. Then she bent down and kissed the flushed cheek on the pillow.

We know the great tragedy of Marilla's life was her lost romance with Gilbert Blythe's father, but we do not know when that exact moment was that she decided she was going to be alone forever. Spinsterhood was thrust upon you in those days, when you were considered too old to be viable, and your options were limited. In Marilla's time, you couldn't even be a teacher, so you had to settle down and keep house, and if you lived alone with no independent income, you may not even have a house to keep. 

 

Children's literature does away with mothers to make heroes—think Harry Potter or Oliver Twist—but Anne with her imagination and her speeches would not have the same effect on readers if we didn't have Marilla in the background making sardonic remarks and always making sure that the whimsy was balanced out with the very real indeed.

I re-read Pride & Prejudice and changed my mind about one of the main characters

I've been re-reading Jane Austen this past week and a half. I only have The Collected Works, which is a large paperback copy, squinty little font, so you can't lie down and read, the best you can do is propped up against a pillow. I don't know why all collected Jane Austens have this tiny font, I suppose it is to fit all seven books into one volume, but it adds to the old-fashioned-ness of the thing. You are very aware you are reading a classic, the language is dated: he "staid" instead of "stayed," they lie on the "sopha," she does not "chuse" to return his letter. That sort of thing. I think Jane would be more accessible to readers, if you wanted to make her accessible, if the publishers updated that font a bit, maybe put the Collected Works into a two volume set. Oh, I know there are all sorts of beautiful copies of the individual books floating about, but everyone needs a Collected Works, so they can read all the way through.

On the other hand, the power of Jane is that even now, two hundred years after she lived, across continents, across worlds she probably couldn't even fathom, everyone knows her writing intimately, this woman who confined herself to writing about the drawing rooms she found herself in. You may not think she's important (who are you and why do you read this newsletter by another woman who writes about the world she finds herself in?) but you cannot ignore the impact she has had on the world.

Okay, that done, I'm getting to the meat and bones of this, which is my beloved Pride and Prejudice. [I began with Sense and Sensibility which I hadn't actually read before, that and Persuasion are both to be tackled on this read]. Like all of you, I have certain well formed opinions about the characters in P&P, which are:

1) Miss Bingley and Mrs Bennet are the worst.
2) Elizabeth is the best.
3) Darcy is dreamy.
4) Bingley seems a Nice Guy, with not much to say for himself, but an overall impression of Nice.
5) Poor Charlotte Lucas.

Upon re-reading though, I am beginning to revise my opinions on some of the characters, but most surprisingly, on Mrs Bennet.

Now, Austen sort of wants us to hate Mrs Bennet. You can tell by the dialogue she's given, she mewls and vapours and exaggerates. I mean, who could love such a woman? Certainly not her husband, we're told that quite clearly: he was fooled by her youth and good looks, not her children, except for the youngest, perhaps, a person of such monstrous selfishness that it's hard to think of Lydia loving anyone besides herself. Her siblings? Nope, there's the brother, Mr Gardiner, who is sort of ashamed of his sister, the other sister, Mrs Lucas who is about as silly as Mrs Bennet, but they don't hang out much. Take this woman, then: five daughters, one husband, two siblings, and no one loves her. Isn't that sad?

If Mr Bennet was fooled by youth and good looks, could Mrs Bennet have been any less gullible? I'm assuming no one warned her about the fact that her new husband's home was entailed away from her offspring, besides, at that point, she might have been confident in having a son. But, she's given five daughters instead, five daughters to marry off and ensure the welfare of. Is Mr Bennet interested in the matrimonial prospects of his daughters considering he doesn't have that much money? He is not. Instead he mocks and stymies her every chance he gets, not in the least interested in whether his kids will get to live comfortably after he dies. (In Austen's time, it is assumed that the only way to live a good life is to marry into it.)

Which brings me to Charlotte Lucas. I was always a little sorry for her, here she is, age 27 and forced to marry a man who is ODIOUS. But on re-reading, I realised that Charlotte had not done so differently as anyone with an arranged marriage would: she picked a man who could support her, and who, presumably, she does not hate. She doesn't love him, sure, and she might be embarrassed by him, but she likes the life they have together, her little cottage and the hens, and she can tolerate the man and make him a good wife. We can't all have Darcys. (I did some idle wondering about their sex life, but I'm sure it was about as earnest as Mr Collins himself.)

Speaking of Darcy, I know, I know, great passion, great speeches. But the problems he outlines at the beginning of the book regarding her connections: her parents, the fact that her brother-in-law is the man he hates most in the world, the connection to a poor country parson, who is basically his aunt's servant, those problems aren't going to go away, despite all of Elizabeth's flashing repartee and hot body. What happens next? What happens when Mrs Bennet, after the death of Mr Bennet, has to go live with one or the other of her daughters, because the man she married has failed to provide her a permanent home? At least we know, since Jane has spelt it out, that Mrs Bennet does not love Elizabeth, likes her least of all her children, so probably she'd spend most of her time with Jane and Bingley.

It's funny that Austen names the eldest daughter after herself: Jane, meek and mild and lovely, always willing to believe the best of everyone, and yet, if you imagine Austen, you're more likely to think of an Elizabeth type person. Someone smart and energetic and full of life. But Austen herself never married, despite writing all these love stories, I wonder if Jane was the Jane she wanted to be, placidly drifting through life without complaints.

Did any of you also think of P&P while reading A Suitable Boy? There's the two sisters and the silly mother, and the marriage looming over it all, even though Vikram Seth is kinder to Mrs Rupa Mehra than Austen is to Mrs Bennet.  She may have been a silly woman but in the end, she was perhaps the only practical member of that entire family.
 

A Brief History Of My Childhood In Reading

I wish I could remember learning how to read. The old family lore is that my mother used to try and make mealtimes palatable to me by reading aloud and so I picked it up myself. I was an inordinately picky eater as a child, and required many distractions to shovel food into my mouth. This was 1983 or thereabouts, we didn't even have 24 hour programming on our small black and white TV set, that's how old I am. Anyway, so my mother would bribe me into taking bites by showing me a book, but as time went by, the meals got longer, the books grew from just one chapter to two or three books per meal, I'd trot off and bring my selection, and then sit back to be fed and entertained, opening my mouth at intervals like a little queen. I must have absorbed some of this, because by the time I went to school--a Montessori school on Hailey Road, which still exists, I think, called Shiv Niketan--it was very easy for me to slip from being read aloud to to reading aloud to myself. So easy that I don't remember it happening, and I have vivid memories about my childhood. I remember being toilet trained, for example, the feel of the plastic potty under my naked bottom, how I used to drum my fingers against it, I remember thinking as a child that I could go back to being as young as I wanted once I was done growing up just by climbing into one of the big cupboards installed into the walls of our flat. I remember the way the sun looked filtering through the stone lattice work of the building. (Asia House on Curzon Road as it was known then, Kasturba Gandhi Marg to us now.) I remember two water pumps I used to call my horses, Big Horse and Little Horse, and how I used to bring them grass to eat. And yet, for all of this, I cannot remember my first time looking at a page and realising that one letter connected to another letter, and being all "Off I go!" into the story. The first book I took home to my mother, thrilled with the fact that I read it myself was The Enormous Turnip, a Ladybird book about a farmer and his wife who grow a turnip so big--so ENORMOUS--that they can't pull it out of the ground themselves and have to ask all sorts of animals to help. I remember sounding out that en-or-mous and the thrill of satisfaction I got when I got the word right.

Shiv Niketan was the sort of school where you weren't tested every week or moved up traditionally and so on. Instead, me and another classmate (whose name I coincidentally heard over the weekend after about a decade, so if his ears are burning this week, you know why) were quietly shifted from the nursery to a higher grade. I was born in December, so that's where this whole thing starts, being six months younger than my classmates, in some cases, later, a whole eleven months younger. (I made up for this early burst of prodigy by failing class 9 spectacularly and being pushed back into the batch I had originally been a part of, making me older than everyone else for the rest of my academic life, but it didn't matter, because the scene had been set and I always acted younger than everyone else by then.) When we were shifted, I heard the Hindi Aunty having a loud argument with the class teacher about me, telling her, "But she hasn't even reached my class yet!" I think this is always why I was bad at languages too, god knows I tried, and if you grow up in Delhi your Hindi is Delhi Hindi which is pretty good  okay okay not BAD in my case, if a little rusty, but not as good as people who speak it fluently and frequently. So broken Delhi Hindi, mixing up my grammar, always being taught Hindi as a task, always having a Hindi teacher who sort of hated everyone who couldn't speak the language properly, you see how I longed to read my (English) books all the time and forget the world where things were difficult and abstract. I just wanted to stay with the things that came easily and naturally to me. After all, I was rewarded for those things once by being told how smart I was for Reading Already.


It wasn't long till people started telling me not to read all the time though. All my life this has been a battle, people want me to put down a book and make conversation and I... don't want to. Especially on trains, god, the number of uncles on trains who will make loud remarks about how much I read. I feel their insecurities then, why participate in an activity that implies I am better than them. In many ways, the advent of everyone having a smart phone has been so good for my reading life, I am not the only one looking at a screen or a page all the time. We have all embraced our inner selves! My cousins, I remember, used to nag at me all the time in the summer holidays, "Don't read, Minna, don't read." My grandfather on my mother's side would take great offense to me carrying a book to the dining table, but I still find it hard to eat when I have nothing to look at. This banishment of books from the dining table just meant I ate slower and slower, or littler and littler and then slipped off to find my book again.

How old was I when I read Roald Dahl or Ramona Quimby? I don't remember, so for a friend's child's birthday, I bought The Twits and Fantastic Mr Fox but another friend tells me four is too young for Dahl. I believe though that if you read indiscriminately to your kid, any good story, forget it having big pictures on every page, just keep your kid engrossed, that the love for the story will seep in, that your child will start longing to know more about the books he or she is experiencing through you, that it will set off a need for "just one more chapter" and once you have that need, you know you're a reader for life. In many ways, we were lucky growing up, no internet, no TV, all we had were books, and it's so much easier to form a reading habit when there's nothing else competing with it. But I think if you offered your child the reward of a book instead of screen time or what have you, that if you equate reading with a Good Time, you'll have the reader you want. Of course, your kid should see you reading for pleasure too, so there's that. But nothing like an Family Read Along, whether it's Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl or Harry Potter. I know, I don't have children, but like many people who stay connected to their Inner Child as it were, I feel inside my soul like the six year old I used to be. Along with nineteen and twenty six. (The only age I don't feel connected to is 37, and this year is almost over.)
 
More memories, flying thicker now: going to the World Book Fair and ordering a set of the most gorgeous children's encyclopedias, and then waiting at home for them to be delivered. The way it taught you things through a story: I remember one about a picnic and a storm, and the safest place to be during a storm. (Your car, apparently.) Living in Trivandrum, my parents' friend coming to visit and bringing me a dense small printed copy of Little Women. "Don't be put off by the print," she said, but it took me a year and some boredom before I pulled it off my shelf. I have that edition still, much loved. Daryagunj Sunday book market, taking a tonga home with our book piles. So many Amar Chitra Kathas, which we bound into fat volumes so I could read them over and over. One red letter day, finding all of the Little House in the Big Woods series, just there on the pavement. Anne of Green Gables on one long train journey, my mother skipped the Mrs Rachel Lynde Is Surprised chapter and led me straight to Anne without waiting for it, a wise abridging, because I read the chapter myself years later and it was never that exciting a way to get into the book.

Books held me in my later years. No matter how bad it got, I always had my books. Briefly, books were trendy in the 90s, we'd read Sweet Valley High, not out of any great joy about the prose, but because they were a) like a soap opera and b) our parents disapproved of them. What could be more alluring to a preteen girl? My old friends are still here, still on my shelves, and though I have re-read all my childhood favorites so many times that I can no longer tell you early memories, just vague feelings about them, layered on top of each other, it's nice to know that when the world is garbage, some things still hold. I wish you (and your kids if you have any) the same joy.

Newsletter: It's definitely Yanny

This is already an old reference but it wasn't earlier this week

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Hanging on the wall of my study is a calendar a friend gave me, It features several doctored photographs of cats--like they've all been put through a Snapchat filter, say. Cat with sunglasses, cat with a hat, cat with sjiny bokeh stars around their face. This same friend also gave me an excellent fridge magnet which says "show me your kitties" and still makes me laugh when I look at it. Anyway, the cat calendar is also great because all the boxes for each day of the month are nice and big, so I can fit in my plans without having to squinch my handwriting up. So I've taken to writing down my commitments and from where I sit at my desk, I can see what the week looks like without getting up. (I have to get up to see the specifics of the week though, it's too far away to read in detail.) I used to use Google's calendar app, still do sometimes, but something about the satisfaction of a flesh and blood calendar, and also why give the internet one more thing they know about you right? Already major companies know who my friends are, how I spend my time, what I think about and often, what I do, but they don't have to know where I'm going and who I'm meeting if I choose not to say.

I sometimes think if you're busy socially, you send out a frequency that your other friends can hear as well, and suddenly they start to think about you. "Oh, hmm," they think, "We haven't heard from her in a while, let's make that plan to hang out." And then your calendar is full, and you're dressing up every night, until the next week, when no one has thought of you at all, so you have a week sitting at home in your pajamas reading. Both are great, but this was the former week.

I've also been putting up a lot of photos of my outfits on Instagram (you can follow me here) which is very not-a-fashion-blogger style. I don't go on about where I got my outfits from, but I do go on about how they make me feel. I love clothes, and I love experimenting with style. There was a time when no one would take you seriously as a writer if you dressed up a lot, but those days are thankfully over. I see women at lit fests and parties and conferences wearing really nice things. I see "serious" people talking about lipstick shades and fabric. And I see that when someone says "You look nice" they say it admiringly, not condescendingly.

This week in restaurants: For a long time, Ameya, Niyati and I have been talking about going to Chateau de Pondicherry but the plan just never happened. It became sort of a running joke--a restaurant that was super close to us but one which we would never visit. Finally, we made it happen yesterday, and dudes, maybe we should have left it as a running joke. The cocktails were nice, the restaurant itself is beautiful and the woman serving us who might have also been the owner, was very warm and friendly, but the food, oh, it didn't have much to recommend. Almost everything was undersalted, and was very heavy on one spice or the other (too much pepper, too much basil). We ordered a lot and ate most of it, because we were hungry but it was an eating-because-we're-hungry thing, not a this-is-so-delicious thing.

This week in home comforts: I have rediscovered my love for the watermelon. It's summer time, and that means mango time, but often, we forget about the amazingness of watermelon. So sweet, so cold, like that poem goes. I read this great article on The Goya Journal on how to make watermelon shrub (I kept calling it watermelon FROSH for some reason, but shrub is not much better) and I'm excited to try it. For that, I'm going to get my melons from I Say Organic, which is still the best place in Delhi to buy organic fruits and vegetables. (I also have a great organic shop down the road from us called Roots, which I use frequently for organic sugar, lentils and once a really good pickle as well.)

This week in books: Had a really good haul delivered from Book Chor again recently. Here's a photo I took of it.

Of these, so far I have read:

1) Good In Bed which is hilarious, but then I got the sequel on my Kindle and it was terrible, so if you read it and are similarly tempted: DON'T.
2) The Broken Bridge which was nice, but I judge all of Pullman through His Dark Materials and this was not that.
3) Pretty Monsters which was AMAZING, one of the best books I have read all year, a fantasy-meets-horror-meets-humour collection of short stories. I am now on a mission to read all of Kelly Link's books.
4) A Dog So Small which was also very similar to the author Phillipa Pearce's other book Tom's Midnight Garden which is one of the best books I've read about being in a time slip, whether for adults or children. Similar as in, there's also a boy who yearns for something (in this case a dog) so much that he tunes out of his regular life completely, and so, worries his family.
5) Katherine of Aragon which I am currently reading. Have read all of Phillipa Gregory on the subject of Tudors and now I am branching out. Why does Henry VIII fascinate me so? Is it the wives? Is it the cruelty? I think it's both those things, he turns into a Bluebeard-esque character, ominous, laughing and handsome until he wasn't.

Stuff I read on the web this week

As someone who is interested in the Royal Wedding this weekend but also not THAT interested, here are two articles on the subject that made me go hmmm.
 

The incredible Margo Jefferson on Megan Markle and whether her arrival indicates a wind of change.

Excerpt: But is Markle automatically marrying up by marrying a prince? In the old school way, yes: any “commoner” who marries into any royal family is seen as marrying up. But Harry is marrying up too. He’s marrying up by marrying out – out of long-entwined bloodlines, out of entrenched rituals and hierarchies, out of a lineage as constricted as it is privileged. We always ascribe social ambitions to commoners, but aristocrats have their own longings for a world elsewhere. Harry is marrying into all the possibilities of postmodernity. It’s a world where – as Zora Neale Hurston said of black folktales and music – hierarchies, styles, sites of social and cultural change are being made and forgotten every day.
 

And if you're ever invited to a royal wedding, here are some dos and don'ts (which are disturbingly almost entirely aimed at women.)

Excerpt:     “Do not touch the Queen.

    Do not shake the Queen's hand unless she holds her hand out first to shake your hand.

    Do not speak to the Queen unless she speaks to you first.

    If the Queen addresses you first, answer her ending your first response with ‘Your Majesty.’ End your second response with ‘Ma'am’ to rhyme with ‘jam.’”
 

An oldie but a goodie: trying to find the end of an endless appetiser promo.

Excerpt: 1:30 p.m. I goddamn hate these fucking mozzarella sticks. The more of them I eat, the more I feel like I can taste every ingredient. Ingredients include: cardboard left in a hamster cage in the sun; acid.
 

A lovely essay which feels very relevant to me: on birds, cats and children. (Except: I like children unlike the author of this piece. My feelings are like that old saying about New York: a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.)

Excerpt: Dorian [the cat] and the songbird nestlings were both completely dependent on me for their survival, as a newborn infant would be. The overbearing affection I poured onto Dorian would have drowned or smothered a child, while the stoicism I cultivated with the birds was only appropriate for a mother who planned to die young, leaving her children to fend for themselves. Motherhood, not marriage, was the one “till death do us part” relationship among humans. A mother would have to navigate between the urge to protect and the need to respect her child’s autonomy even after the child had left home to study, work, or marry. I knew how to hold on and how to let go, but I couldn’t imagine having to do a little of both, in the right mixture for each occasion, day after day for the many decades that make up the average span of a mother-child relationship. And in order to love my own child in spite of my general dislike of children, I would have to think of him or her as an entirely different category of being: for example, a cat. That’s what I was trying to say when people refused to accept my decision not to have children. I could only become a mother if Dorian could be my child—that is to say, never.
 

On falling in love with a polyamorous man, which okay, has been done, but the author is from Mumbai which is why I found this piece interesting.

Excerpt: She has suggested the meeting. I have heard enough about her to know I’d like her. Cory says she feels the same. Well, maybe if we met in a slightly different situation though? I’m so nervous. We meet for xiao long bao – Shanghainese soup dumplings. Cory texts me when I’m on my way there to tell me I can sit on his side of the table. This is actually one among a few things I’ve been stressing about. I don’t want to end up on one side alone while they sit across from me, like it’s an interrogation. This text calms me down a bit. So does his hug when I meet him outside the restaurant door.

This one guy had done a terribly tone deaf piece on why women succeed in publishing. (I believe one of his arguments was: because they already know how to juggle children and in laws.) Urvashi Butalia is having NONE OF IT.

Excerpt: In feminist circles, and sometimes even out of them, when women talk together we often find ourselves saying, resignedly, that when speaking about women, even the best of men will at some point, reveal the deep biases they carry inside them. We recognise these with a sense of familiarity, we’ve met them all our lives, but every time we encounter them – as in Venkatachalapathy’s piece – there’s also a sense of disappointment, almost of despair. We’re in the 21st century and we still have to deal with this?

Newsletter: Making a cup of memory tea

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This week in mysteries: My staycation would be nothing without detective novels--no, it's true. I lie on the sofa in my study, which is not a very comfortable one for lying on, since it's too small and invariably gives me a kink in my neck, but it's there, you know? And these days, keeping me company is Deborah Crombie. I've mentioned her to you before, she does this series about two detectives called Duncan Kinkaid and Gemma James, but since the last time I wrote about her, I've read at least seven more books in the series and now I feel like I can talk about Crombie's oeuvre as it were, more efficiently.

So--these are very British books. Primarily set in London and nearby, the two detectives, Duncan (always referred to as Kinkaid) and Gemma (who gets a first name, in what I'm not sure is slightly sexist or because Crombie is fonder of her) work with Scotland Yard and the London Metropolitan Police respectively. Here's the odd thing: Crombie is actually American. Now, normally, when an American writer tries to Britishify themselves, you can tell with one giveaway or another, but she seems to have completely subdued her own Americanism to write EXTREMELY British scenes. (This is as far as I can tell, but maybe a true native would be able to nitpick further.) From the biog at the back of the books, we know that Crombie spends a lot of time in London, researching each book, and so, the central theme of each book is usually sprawling. For example, there's the mystery of the Olympic rower who was murdered and then there's pages of meticulous detail about belonging to a rowing club and what that means. There's stuff about the monks in Glastonbury and automatic writing and spiritualism, which is also amazing, and my own personal favourite, Dreaming of the Bones, where the murder of a famous poet back in the day leads to a more current murder, with lots of "excerpts" as it were, from the fake book.

But besides the research, what's truly addictive about Kinkaid/James is their own relationship. Soon enough, they start sleeping together, soon after, there's this big blended family, and watching the two solve their own mysteries while also connecting with each other in the end, it's a relief after all those stories about lonely fucked up detectives who "only work alone." It's soothing, like an Agatha Christie, but the scope is wider.

This week in thinking about old hobbies: Was reading this article about the Capital City Minstrels, a choir based in Delhi, who I used to sing with, back in school/college. I really did enjoy my time singing, this is before karaoke night became so ubiquitous, and I had been in a couple of school choirs before, so I was full of confidence in my singing abilities. In school I was an alto, taking the lower notes, but the director of the choir then, a man named Nowshad, took me through the scales, and we discovered I was a soprano after all. I hit notes I have never been able to hit since--blame smoking? And my moment of triumph was singing Ave Verum Corpus where the soprano section got to hold the note high and sweet and long while the rest chimed in.

I miss rehearsals, I think, whether for plays or choirs, I miss the camaraderie, the tea and snacks, the sense of accomplishment after a good session. For a while, Lushin Dubey and Bubbles Sabharwal used to run a kids theatre camp every summer, where they put on musicals. Nayantara and I auditioned for Matilda, and we both got in to the chorus, which stood in the orchestra pit of Kamani auditorium. There was a boy....

But he was so much cooler and older and wiser than I was, he was seventeen, but he may as well have been twenty seven, and I was fourteen, but I looked around eleven, so there was no chance, NO CHANCE, but I still gazed at him every night, his beauty, his voice. And when the play finished, I wanted desperately to get in touch, but I wanted him to get in touch with me, not just the needy tagalong, but the girl he finally saw for her Inner Beauty as it were. I spent so many of my teen years yearning, which is a great hobby for your teen if you're looking for them to never get into any trouble at all, because all they are doing is daydreaming of that perfect evening, where he calls and then he takes your hand and he tells you how special you are.  I was heavily into the occult as this point, remind me to tell you someday about my brief brush with Wiccanism, so I used my homemade Ouija boards to ask for his phone number, and wrote it down, and never dialled it, and one afternoon, my dear patient friend and I called all the His Last Names in the phone book so we could ask for him.  By page two, it still wasn't his number, and we gave it up.

I wonder what it would have been like to come of age in today's world--Facebook and Instagram making it so easy to stalk someone, to tell them of your interest. Not so much fun, but I think if you offered it to me back then--here is a magic machine on which you can tell what your object of interest is doing AT ALL TIMES--I would have taken it in a heartbeat.

Thursday link list coming to you courtesy of a slow week:

 

Cardi B at the Met Gala, but also so much more.

 

Excerpt: “Okurrr!” added a few members of Cardi’s team, filling the room in the Carlyle Hotel with the sounds of an avian chorus. (“Okurrr,” with a trilled r, is one of Cardi’s signature exclamations. The association of Cardi with “okurrr” has become so strong that the hotel embroidered the interjection on one of her room’s pillowcases.)

This guy pretended to be a high schooler so he could take advantage of the American college system.

 

Excerpt: The things about him that raised questions—he wore suits and ties sometimes, he had an accent—were readily dismissed as the strangenesses of any new student. When someone would ask why he talked funny, Asher would tell them he grew up "in the Russian-Jewish neighborhood down by the river." When they asked where he'd been before ninth grade, he said he'd been homeschooled. When an instructor asked him why his name had changed to Asher Potts (he'd improbably started freshman year as Artur Samarin), Asher joked: "Because I'm a Russian spy." But for the most part, in the way of all high school students, the suspect details were mostly met with a shrug. American teenagers, to his great benefit, were naturally incurious. No oddity was worth paying attention to more than their own. And so he became one of them.

Why everyone should talk to their kids about rape, and maybe also take them to protests

Excerpt: Some parents travel with their children to foreign countries to expose them to different cultures. Others take them to libraries, book readings and panel discussions. I take my son to protests where he hears and sees strong women of all ages come out to talk fearlessly about violence, misogyny, poetry, anguish and love. He sees women laugh raucously, dress whimsically, and express their opinions unhesitatingly. As he grows up he will realise that it’s a world where he will be welcomed as an equal if he accords them the same respect.

The Juul has made smokers out of non smokers

 

Excerpt:  Juuling and scrolling through Instagram offer strikingly similar forms of contemporary pleasure. Both provide stimulus when you’re tired and fidgety, and both tend to become mindless tics that fit neatly into rapidly diminishing amounts of free time. (You can take two Juul hits and double-tap a bunch of pics in about ten seconds. You need an inefficient five minutes to burn a paper tube of tar and leaves into ash.) The omnipresence of Juul on social media has undoubtedly made kids overestimate the extent of teen Juuling—young people tend to think that their peers drink, smoke, and hook up more than they actually do. And it’s all beyond regulation: the F.D.A. can control the behavior of companies advertising nicotine for profit, but it can do nothing about teens advertising nicotine to one another for free.
 

Why take a round trip bus across Delhi? Because you cannnn.

 

Excerpt: In a city like Delhi, one can live 20 years, and still be perceived as an outsider. There are still locations and settings which are alien to you and where you stand out, even when you try to fit in. Great cities, I realised on that Mudrika, are like lovers— you know them intimately, but you will never know them entirely. You will be well-versed with certain terrains and landscapes, and one day, the unforeseen raises its head.
 

Newsletter: Staycation Edition

(This is last week's edition. This week's JUST went out to subscribers. Want to stay current? Sign up here.)

I made this joke on my Instagram story and v pleased with it

For the last two months, I was burning the candle at both ends. As an idiom, it makes so much sense to me right now: imagining my life as wax drippy, long wicks, placed horizontally, and there I was lighting the end that said "work" and when that bit burnt down, lighting the other side which said "social" and letting all my rest, my everything else, be reduced to just wax drippings on the floor.

But this past week, I have felt like doing nothing except sit indoors, and think and read, and watch movies, my great movie watching plan is going very well, and I have done that as well. So, I don't have that much to report, except that I'm enjoying my staycation. I sleep about ten hours every night, and wake up refreshed. It's nice, no I'm not bored, or getting cabin fever just yet. I think I needed this.

My week watching movies: K just discovered an app for my desktop (rhymes with Schmopcorn Mime). I had tried this same app ages ago on my best beloved long lamented Macbook (RIP) (stupid cats), but it didn't work on it, so I gave it up, but turns out, it's rather excellent on Windows. K also--and I must give him all credit here, because I moaned and cried about all the door handles he was removing, more on that in a moment--fixed up the perfect movie watching AREA in his study, which is the only room in the house which you can successfully darken even in the middle of the afternoon, and as a result, it is the best television room I have ever had in my entire life.

So basically, we have a projector--it's a pretty cheap one, but it works--and he set it up so that it projects against the white wall to wall cupboards he has in that room. In order to do that, he had to move the handles so that they wouldn't be in the way, so now the handles are a little lower, but it means that I can lie on the sofa, fully stretched out, as is my preferred position, and watch movies while he works at his desk (and occasionally chimes in with some commentary.) Thanks to the app I just mentioned, things have gotten really easy to watch and bookmark, so I'm regularly watching two movies a day. The funny thing about watching films as opposed to TV, you never feel that brain numbing OMG HOW MUCH HAVE I WATCHED feeling at the end of it. Instead, you feel slightly... triumphant even. Dare I say watching a good movie is like reading a good book? How my attitude has changed from last week when I was all like, "Ugh movies will never be as good as reading."

This is what I watched this week (a mix of what's available and what's on You Know Where). I realised that I sort of followed a theme, even if I wasn't aware of it at the moment.

The Little Mermaid day:

Wonder Woman: nice but FULL of anachronisms, at one point, the Scottish guy goes, "guys." Now, "guys" as a way of saying "everyone" wasn't a popular manner of speech till much later, and would not have been in England during WWI at any rate. I feel like if you're going to spend so much money on a movie with sets and costumes and what not, why not get an accurate historian to go through dialogue while you're at it?

Moana: Which was faaaaaar better than Frozen, I don't know why people like that movie so much. Still Disney, so a little animal sidekick, and lots of songs, but I loved Maui, the demigod who helps Moana because he was such a very realistic douchebag. Nice to see.

The why am I different day:

Wonder: the book, oh my god, the book. I loved it so much. I was fully prepared to be manipulated into tearjerker-y heartwarmingness of the film, and STILL my tears were jerked, my heart was warmed. Very sweet movie, I thought, and THENNN *ominous music* I read this article about how whitewashed the disability was. Sigh.

Get Out: was actually dark dark DARK comedy, and no spoilers, promise, but the end was quite something. I think I love oh look how pretty suburbia is but WAIT there is a SECRET lurking behind the gorgeous woods.

The let's save the day day:

Paddington 2: OKAY, but, a) Michael Bond is the same author who wrote Olga da Polga, who I named our CAT after, so you see, I love him and b) Paddington is one of my favourite bears--Winnie is a bit twee, Rupert is too good to be true, I did a whole article on bears and Michael Bond when he died, here's a link.  Paddington 2 is delightful, but not as delightful as the books. There, that's that.

The Incredibles: a rewatch, but SUCH an underrated Pixar classic. Part two is coming out soon, so I had a sudden URGE to watch the original.

The teen movie day:
The Edge of Seventeen was a REVELATION. Really good in that teen movie way I haven't seen happen since the early noughties. Very real angst as well, and though you feel like shaking some sense into the main character, you're also nodding along like yup, yup, I would have reacted in exactly the same way at that age, because sometimes you forget you weren't born extremely evolved and enlightened.

This week in stuff I wrote: My book recommendation column got lots of views last weekend mainly because of the first book, almost fan fiction about a certain dimple faced popular writer in India and the publishing industry.

Excerpt: Besides people-spotting behind the pseudonyms, there’s also fun to be had by finding real-life names (Hi, Nilanjana Roy and Janice Pariat!) as well as a whole description of partying at the Udaipur Literature Festival.

And this week in stuff other people wrote which I liked:

A ghostwriter might be talking to you on Tinder

Excerpt: “There’s no question about it,” reads one chapter, “women want to date the alpha male. They are naturally drawn to the ‘leader of the pack.’” Valdez elaborates later in the manual: “The alpha male is the selector, he chooses… he is not chosen.” But how do you present yourself as an Alpha? “Never compliment her without a qualification,” he writes. “Let her know what you want in a woman and make her explain why she fits those criteria.”

Since I'm watching some superhero movies, this one about the Avengers in general and the idea of an American hero in particular was interesting.

Excerpt: Yet even as the films restore a sense of heroism to a war that has become bureaucratic, they also betray profound anxiety about that war. This emerges through a peculiar feature of the Marvel movies. The heroes confront threats of all sorts, but time and again, they fight their doppelgängers. Iron Man takes on other scientists in metal suits. Ant-Man’s enemy is Yellowjacket, who is, like him, a shrinking technological insectoid. Captain America battles serum-enhanced supersoldiers (“What kind of monster would let a German scientist experiment on him to protect his country?” he asks, winking). Often, the heroes simply face their relatives, as when Black Panther fights his cousin, Thor fights his siblings, or Peter Quill, the leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy, fights his father (while another Guardian, Gamora, fights her sister). The Hulk’s antagonist is the Abomination, a similarly sized creature made with the Hulk’s own blood. And SHIELD, the shadowy governmental organization that runs the Avengers, must face HYDRA, another shadowy governmental organization that has infiltrated it.

Hey did you know Aatish Taseer once dated a royal? Did you? Did you?

Excerpt: My own enduring memory of the Windsors was of constant cutbacks and reduced circumstances. To fly with royalty was to fly EasyJet. On the flight back from Sardinia, a velvet rope cordoned off the first row alone, behind which Their Royal Highnesses—Prince and Princess Michael—sat with Ella and me. A moment of silence ensued, then there was a dull roar on the Jetway, and a planeload of lobster-red British tourists poured onto the flight, muttering, “Wot’s this, wot’s this?,” as they rushed past the grandson of George V, Emperor of India.

Cape Town is fucked. But there's the very merest glimmer of hope because society.

 

Excerpt: Wealthy South Africans, traditionally, have had fastidious cleanliness standards, a way of distinguishing themselves and of tapping the vast labor reserve of cheap maids. Now, being able to show a visitor day-old urine ripening in your toilet bowl, proving you do not flush, is a proud moment. Body odor is less taboo. Many women have radically adjusted their haircare routines: embracing natural curls to diminish the need to wash and style, shampooing only once a week or, as one woman told me in a discussion on a community-run drought Facebook page, “experimenting with spraying my hair lightly” with a plant mister. Others chopped hip-length hair off into bobs or Sinéad O’Connor shaves. A queer friend of mine complained she didn’t know who to hit on because “there are queer haircuts everywhere.”

How to have a conversation with a grieving friend (or a friend in trouble, even.)

Excerpt:  Sociologist Charles Derber describes this tendency to insert oneself into a conversation as “conversational narcissism.” It’s the desire to take over a conversation, to do most of the talking and to turn the focus of the exchange to yourself.

A conversation with the woman who was raped by Mahmood Farooqi

 

Excerpt: The decision to press charges against a person is never a onetime event. For me, it was a decision that I had to make repeatedly day after day as pressure to drop the charges surrounded me – some of it even coming from well-meaning people attempting to protect me from further pain. It was a decision that I questioned daily because I was never quite sure if I would have the strength to survive the process. Reliving your trauma time and again to strangers, a necessary requirement of partaking in the judicial system, is – in a way – beyond explanation. It is hard and it is heartbreaking. But in the way of which it breaks you apart, the act of being heard, of having a voice also made me grateful. It allowed me to have hope that I could put myself back together again. It reminded me that I am still alive and able to fight for myself. Of course, I hadn’t anticipated being socially ostracised by groups of people I had considered friends, both in India and America, that was perhaps the most difficult.