A woodpecker just when I needed one

I rest a lot in my bedroom. I read there too and also watch garden birds, I have a chair at the window. It is my meditation, my way of being peaceful, my way of 'working out'. It's restorative, I lose myself, nothing else matters. I have had a dreadful few weeks with one thing and another. Last night, I woke up around three with a brutal sinus headache, I am very prone to them and can no longer use steroidal sprays because of ocular hypertension (discovered in 2009 when using steroid drops for uveitis), so I swallowed a handful of Sudafed and Ibuprofen. It's the kind of pain that can make you cry. I had a scan many years ago and have chronic inflammation, possibly from an over-zealous use of mothballs. I declined surgery. Today, I woke early with the pain still on the fringes but bearable. A few hours later, I saw a woodpecker - an adult male great spotted - I've never seen one before. I had on my old glasses and saw a flash of red at feeder, wondered why goldfinches were eating peanuts and when I held up my camera - always in my bedside drawer -  I realised it was a woodpecker. I managed to nab it before it flitted off. It felt auspicious. Today is also the anniversary of my father's death, he died in 1972, and although for many years it was not a date I ever thought about,  since I've  been writing about him, the date has much more resonance. A friend sent me this, the symbolism of a woodpecker. 

Autobiographical novel: 'a prosthetic voice' (Alexander Chee). And (films of) Guru Dutt

I recently dipped into Alexander Chee's collection of essays How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. I find reading about writing to be reassuring: you learn things that you already knew but didn't know you knew. It's the kind of book where you want to write down fragments and keep them close to your heart. Chee describes his first (autobiographical) novel as a 'prosthetic voice', which gives voice to those things too difficult to speak about, in his case, sexual abuse. His image of prosthesis is, I think,  quite brilliant.

And so while I wrote this novel, it didn't feel like I could say that I chose to write this novel. The writing felt both like an autonomic process, as compulsory as breathing or the beat of the heart, and at the same time as if an invisible creature had moved into a corner of my mind and begun building itself, making visible parts out of things dismantled from my memory, summoned from my imagination. I was spelling out a message that would allow me to talk to myself and to others. The novel that emerged was about things I could not speak of in life, in some cases literally. I would lie, or I would feel a weight on my chest as if someone was sitting there. But when the novel was done, I could read from it. A prosthetic voice.

The State of Me - hard to believe it was published ten years ago, its message as relevant today - wasn't for me a fictionalisation  about something too difficult to talk about, but rather a representation of the anger and injustice that people with ME have felt for decades due to a wilful reframing/misrepresentation of the illness by a core of the medical/political establishment. The novel had to be written, but the difficulties in writing it were much more the physical/cognitive challenges of ME than an inability to voice the subject. (I also, of course, faced the structural challenges of writing a novel that face all writers, ill or not.)

Chee's concept of  'prosthetic voice' does, though, resonate for me when I go to the project/novella which is partly about my late Pakistani father, the project that often has me thinking of Bernard MacLaverty's description of writing as 'a way of trying out different fathers'. This is exactly what I am doing - when I can - and something in me is a little broken the whole time. The theme of my novella is 'not knowing'.

It's fascinating to learn about writers/artists who would have been contemporaries of my father. I've just discovered Guru Dutt, an Indian director and actor, famous for Pyaasa, Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers) and Chaudhvin Ka Chand. Dutt died aged only thirty-nine in 1964 from probable suicide, he had mixed sleeping pills and alcohol.  He had attempted suicide before. Knowing Dutt's life story made it even more emotional watching Pyaasa, the story of a shunned poet, who only finds success when he is (wrongly) presumed dead. And Kaagaz Ke Phool, a melodramatic tale of a director's flop (prescient as Kaagaz Ke Phool also flopped) - had me in tears at the end. Real tears rolling down my cheeks.  When we respond to films we are, of course, not responding to just the fictional narrative but to the narratives in our own lives. I especially love the framing of the film - the opening and closing scenes - with Suresh Sinha as an old man looking back on his life.

I thought of Saddat Hasan Manto and wondered if he had ever met Dutt in Bombay (Manto left his beloved Bombay for Lahore shortly after partition). When googling Manto and Dutt, I came across this review, which likens Guru Dutt's Pyaasa to Nandita Das's recent biopic Manto. Manto and Dutt certainly shared sensibilities, a concern for those in the margins, those disenfranchised, in Manto's case specifically those harmed by Partition (on both sides).

Manto was seven years older than my father. Dutt was six years younger than my father. All were in Bombay in 1947. My father was not working in film, or as a writer, he was a medical student, who had interrupted his studies to join the Indian Air Force during the Second World War. What these three  men would come to have in common was an addiction to alcohol, an addiction tragically implicated in all of their deaths. They were not old men when they died, Manto was forty-two, my father was fifty-three (I was eight). I fancifully allow myself to imagine the three of them meeting up in Bombay before Partition, wondering what they would have spoken about.

I've discovered that Nasreen Munni Kabir made a Channel 4 documentary  in 1989 called In Search of Guru Dutt. I have ordered her book on Dutt. The beautiful and luminous Waheeda Rehman appears in all three films mentioned above. I understand that she and Dutt had an  affair, which ended his marriage to Geeta Dutt.  Geeta Dutt was also the hugely talented playback singer for Rehman's songs. Geeta, I have read, had a breakdown and became alcoholic after Dutt's death. She died in 1972, leaving behind their three children, two sons and a daughter, Nina (Nina was just a baby when her father died). It is heartbreaking that Tarun Gutt, their eldest son also took his own life and Arun Dutt - who was involved in preserving his father's legacy - died of alcohol-related illness in 2014.

Having now also seen Chaudhvin Ka Chand I am left with a huge nostalgia for a period in Indian film-making in 1950s I did not even live through. I think the melodrama, the heightened reality, the muted gorgeousness of monochrome all tap into a process in my head and heart (the not knowing). The wonderful singer for Guru Dutt, in these three films, is Mohammed Rafi, who died aged fifty-five (though it is Hemant Kumar who sings 'Jane Woh Kaise Log' in Pyaasa). I also loved the actor 'Johnny Walker', who brought humanity and slapstick (much needed, to balance the sadness) in his role as the masseur in Pyaasa. I have read Johhny Walker and Guru Dutt were great friends in real life.

Reading Chee's essays and watching Dutt's films, something collided gently in me - it reinforced how important art and film and fiction are in understanding our lives, both for those who create the art and those who consume. Making the hard stuff bearable.

Zaibunissa Street

I recently learned that Elphinstone Street (named after British official Monstuart Elphinstone) in Karachi was re-named Zaibunissa Street in 1970 after writer and journalist Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah. This interests me as Elphinstone was in Saddar, the area my paternal family migrated to in 1950s after Partition. I've read that Saddar was then full of book shops and (Iranian) tea houses. The streets were washed every day. Elphinstone was a street people strolled down. There was ballroom dancing on Elphinstone Street.

Today, the population of Karachi is approximately 16 million, Zaibunissa is a busy shopping street with over one hundred and thirty jewellery stores and most of the book shops have gone. Yesterday, I came across a purse that held earrings my Karachi family gifted me when they visited a few years ago after many years of little contact. The jeweller is in a building on Zaibunissa Street.

I looked up Monstuart Elphinstone, a Scot born in Dumbarton in 1779. I grew up five miles from Dumbarton - in fact, my GP practice was there - that's where we had our innoculations for visiting Karachi in 1974. And in early-mid eighties Coxsackie virus was locally being called 'Dumbarton Disease' because so many had become ill. I love how narratives link together, little synchronicities often appearing.

Learning to swim in Lahore; Muriel Spark and Kjersti Skomsvold

I recently reviewed Isambard Wilkinson's Travels in a Dervish Cloak, this passage stays in my mind:

Pakistani novelists of  a certain vintage remember a golden era in Pakistan's first decades when Anglo-Indians danced at Karachi's Metropole, hippies spun vinyl at discotheques, Pakistan was advertised as an exotic holiday location and Dizzy Gillespie beguiled a Sindhi snake charmer's serpent with his trumpet. That innocent age, if it ever existed, was dead.

It makes me nostalgic for a Karachi I barely know. We visited in 1974, two years after my father had died. I find myself scraping those memories up, trying to build a narrative (I have a letter that a visiting British doctor staying at Hotel Metropole left for my father who was then working at Jinnah Hospital in mid-1950s). I recall that we stayed in Lahore for a few days in the Intercontinental and that was where I learned to swim without arm bands. A far cry from the swimming lessons at primary school back home, where you would shiver as you were checked in line for verrucas. There was also an earthquake when we were in Lahore and all the dishes shook on the hotel breakfast table.

*

Many of us have been giving  Muriel Spark for Christmas because of the centenary of her birth. I've just re-read The Driver's Seat. I read it when I was about sixteen and didn't understand it, I am not sure I understand it any better but I much more appreciate the elegance and construction of this slim,  disturbing novel. And the humour is marvellous.

I just got a copy of Norwegian writer Kjersti Skomvold's MonsterHuman, which is now available in English. I blogged about her a few years ago and read her debut novel, which she started writing on post-it notes when she was very ill with ME. I'm obviously very interested in autobiographical, fictionalised accounts of ME and look forward to MonsterHuman. I see on Wikipedia that Skomvold also studied French at L'Université de Caen, which is a great coincidence as I was studying there in 1982/3 when I first became ill with Coxsackie virus, which later evolved monstrously into ME. We got ill at a similar age though I am a good decade older.

I love the start of new year, a whole new pile of to be read books on the bedside table:

Stairs and Whispers is an anthology by deaf and disabled poets that I have just started dipping into. It looks brilliant.

Dr Avindra Nath's research. And lovely books

I'm so very, very heartened by the research that is currently going in USA at the National Institute of Health with Dr Avindra Nath as principle investigator (PI). Dr Nath is a neuroimmunologist and exactly the calibre of scientist we need in ME research. His hypothesis is that ME is 'triggered by a viral illness that results in immune-mediated brain dysfunction'. His work is described as a 'deep-diving' into the disease, he is looking at not just one aspect but every aspect. Long overdue!!! Brian Vastag is a former science reporter for the Washington Post, now disabled by ME - he got ill almost five years ago. He's one of Dr Nath's patients - you have to have had a clear infectious trigger and been ill for less than five years - and has been tweeting some interesting details of the study. This is a lovely photo of doctor and patient (from Brian's timeline) - such mutual respect and warmth on display (can you even begin to imagine that scenario here with our so-called 'CFS experts'?).

More than thirty years ago, Peter Behan, the consultant neurologist who diagnosed me, was  looking into viral damage and mitochondrial dysfunction (I recently came across this article from 1985 in the The Journal of Infection. He describes muscle abnormalities in fifty ME patients, I'm uncertain if I was one of them but I had all the tests he refers to):

His paper states: 'The illness was severe, with a high morbidity, and a disastrous effect on their lives'. Of course, medical technology is way more advanced now and I'm optimistic about what will be uncovered in the years ahead. Just tragic though that a core in the medical profession, specifically UK psychiatrists, have held back biomedical research with their self-serving theories of false illness beliefs, and their wilful and sinister conflation of ME with 'chronic fatigue'. That's thirty-three years of my life I'll never get back - thanks, in no small part, to their biopsychosocial idealogy.

*

Been meaning for a while to mention Marion Michell's book Supinely Sublimely (2016).

Marion is a German-born artist, based in London. She is very severely ill and I can imagine what it cost her to produce this slim book of meditations and art. I love the cover, which if you look closely has tiny paper boats as faces. There is a sense too of being shackled, at least, I see chains, and what is ME if it is not a kind of prison, in all its grimly fluctuating, punitive severity. The book is perfect for dipping into and there are gems such as: 'Limbs, jaws, skull, the hair on my head hurt, my hands had been stamped on, and something pounded my ribs and stole my air. Half a week later, I am still returning''.

*

Another book I very much enjoyed recently is Zeeba Sadiq's 38 Bahadurabad (1996), a gorgeous mix of fiction and autobiography, it describes a young woman growing up in Karachi in 1960s with a doctor father who has spent time in Britain. I loved it, especially the chapter called 'Lame Auntie', the writing is exquisite. I was truly sad to learn that Zeeba had passed away suddenly in 2010 after suffering a brain aneuryism, we're almost the same age.

On fathers: Om Puri, Hisham Matar and some short writing

Saddened to learn that Om Puri has died aged only sixty-six. I loved him, of course, as the flawed Pakistani father in East is East. And as the taxi driver in My Son the Fanatic (based on a short story by Hanif Kureishi). I watched him more recently in Satyajit Ray's 1981 film Sadgati/Deliverance - Puri, in his early thirties, gave a devastating performance as an 'untouchable'.

*

The last book I read in 2016 was Hisham Matar's The Return. Anne Enright describes it as a terrible and lovely book, and it is: the writing is lovely and the truth is terrible, the knowing and not knowing the brutality of his father's death at the hands of the Gaddafi regime in the nineties. I underlined several passages as I read, words that stay in my head: 'I have always wondered if it is possible to lose your father without sensing the particular moment of his death'.

*

Happy that 2017 will see with the upcoming publication (print and digital) of Bath Flash Fiction anthology - I had a story longlisted almost a year ago - 'A widow with a bowl of wine and lipstick coming off'. This flash was inspired by seeing my dear stepfather in the funeral parlour in February 2015, the image still shocks me, though it was one of peace, but nothing about it was real, nothing.

I've not written much flash fiction, I've read more, but I think flash titles are very important, they act like a hinge for what's unfolding. I see flash fiction like fireworks - small with a beautiful punch - but still demanding time and energy in creating. Flash lends itself well to low energy writing. And as you tweak even 300 words,  you know more than ever, as you shift the words around in such a small space, how arbitrary it all is.  The story was accepted by an online literary journal at the same time as it was longlisted and I had to decide where I wanted it placed. I look forward to seeing my words - which with time passing now seem 'remote'  - see the light of day.

Penelope Lively on ageing reminds me of getting used to being ill at twenty

I've just started Penelope Lively's memoir Ammonites and Leaping Fish, I had not heard of this book and am glad that artist and writer Nancy nudged me in its direction. For a long time, I've been reading about South Asia in 1940s and 1950s in an attempt to put together some kind of fictionalised version of my father, and Nancy told me Penelope talks about Suez in 1950s, which is perfect as my dad travelled by ship from Pakistan to UK at least once in that decade (I even found the passenger list). I'm not yet at the Suez part, but Penelope's chapter on old age makes me smile. Talking about adapting to old age - she is 80 - she says:

You get used to it. And that surprises me. You get used to diminishment, to a body that is stalled, an impediment? Well, yes, you do. An alter ego is amazed, aghast perhaps - myself in the roaring forties, when robust health was an assumption, a given, something you barely noticed because it was always there. Acceptance has set in, somehow, has crept up on you, which is just as well, because the alternative - perpetual rage and resentment - would not help matters. You are now this other person, your earlier selves are out there, familiar, well remembered, but you have to come to terms with a different incarnation.

Getting used to a different incarnation is, of course, very different when you are young and the catastrophe of illness has punched into your life. I always say it takes about a decade to get used to having ME. That's probably how long it took me. In The State of Me when Helen is still horribly ill, aged 21, in bed, she lists 10 things about her old life:

6. Looking at photos of other self in other life. Tracing finger over old self, a smiling girl in a hockey team. My hockey stick lay like a corpse in the back of my cupboard, club foot poking through my clothes, reminding me of my frailty. I had tried to throw it out twice, but Nab had brought it back in.

And in real life I didn't really ever have difficulty accepting, it just was, though at the beginning, when acutely ill, I was more terrified than anything of how ill you could feel and not be dying. I think I have always dealt with my illness with dignity, but there may well be some rage at the fucking circus of psychiatrists who have made life so hard for us by denying our illness is physical. The PACE trial is crumbling though. And we have Americans - journalist and academic David Tuller and professor of psychology James Coyne - to thank for that.

(And I had to look up ammonite. )

Writing, Rituximab & a Japanese film about death

Three pieces on writing I have recently enjoyed:

An interview with Janice Galloway, who has a new collection of short stories out. Speaking about the blurring of memoir and fiction, she says: 'It’s all stories, as far as I’m concerned and your job is to tell the story interestingly and not be dull.'

I agree with her wholeheartedly.

Here, writer Fiona Melrose on how a Caravaggio painting she loves makes her think about story and construct: 'Someone central in your story has to want something that drives some sort of journey, even if the thing they want the most is to stop everything from changing.'

I think that's an interesting point. Writers learn early on their main character has to want something - I remember reading years ago that your character has to really want something, even if it's just a glass of water - but wanting things not to change is often a driving force in real life, so of course applies to fictional characters.

And a very interesting essay on ethnicity and writing - should ethnicity limit what a writer can write? - from  Susan Barker, who describes herself as 'British — mixed-race English and Chinese, but linguistically and culturally British'. I too am British, a Scottish mother and Pakistani father, and I certainly feel culturally and linguistically Scottish. 

I've been thinking recently that Helen Fleet my main character in 'The State of Me' is white, it never occurred to me that she wouldn't be. My novel is about illness, not race. Writing Caucasian characters is natural to me, whereas writing Asian characters is harder as I did not have much Asian influence in my childhood. I am less confident with Asian characters, but that does not mean I should not write them. After all,  fiction-writing is pretending to be someone else. And I am in the slow process. 

I tried to say more about this in the comment thread of an excellent blog post about diversity and fiction  back in June by Nikesh Shukla.

Going back to Susan Barker's essay, she says: 'In a best case scenario, what should determine the legitimacy of fiction is the writing itself, and though this is not always the case, fiction writers should not be deterred from writing from other cultural perspectives.'

Indeed, it's the writing, always the writing.

*
 

Also, good news on Rituximab last month, phase 2 of the Norwegian drug trial was published. I feel cautiously optimistic. Just so gratifying to see actual science in progress, after decades of buffoonery.

And I highly recommend this Japanese film from 2009, 'Departures', a gorgeous film about death.

'Trying out different fathers' - my thoughts on Omar Sharif

Had tears today, hearing that Omar Sharif has died. Sad for his family, but happy for him that he no longer suffers the ravages of dementia. To me, he is more than the handsome Egyptian actor who glittered in Dr Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia.

I grew up hearing that my father looked like Omar Sharif. My father was my mother's first husband, she met him in the sixties when he was a doctor and she was a nurse, a Mills & Boon romance without the happy ending. My father died in tragic circumstances when I was eight. My memories of him are hazy. He looks handsome in photos, and I can definitely see the resemblance (though I think Omar had the edge). When I first saw Dr Zhivago - aged thirteen? - I couldn't watch Omar Sharif without thinking of  my father. The tram scene had me weeping, and not just because Yuri  doesn't get to see Julie Christie again. I've since seen Dr Zhivago many times over the years, and the tram scene is me watching my father dying, which sounds fanciful, but that is the truth. My memory also tells me that I first saw Dr Zhivago in Karachi, when we visited in 1974 (after my father had passed away), but that is not true, I watched it a few years later at the cinema in Glasgow.

And I still can't even listen to Lara's Theme without welling up.

In May, when the media revealed that Omar Sharif had dementia I had a lump in my throat, having recently lost my beloved stepfather to dementia. To know that this brilliant actor now had dementia  touched me. And when my stepfather passed away, five months ago, I was unable to contemplate even a sentence of the novella I've been slowly, slowly writing, based on my father. My head was full of Greenland, there was no room for Karachi (my father was my father for eight years, my stepfather was my father for thirty-eight years).

The character based on my father is called Omar, I'd juggled many names but Omar fits best. Recently, I've ventured back to the novella when I have 'spare' energy - creative writing is much more physically and mentally demanding that you would think - but I'm a different person writing as I no longer have a stepfather, there is a huge gap where he should be. Moreover, fictionalising my father has its own griefs and complexities: I  think of Bernard MacLaverty who has spoken of 'writing as a way of trying out different fathers'.

I say to my mother sometimes, Did he really look like Omar Sharif? Yes, she says, he did.

RIP, Omar Sharif.  In the meantime, I will try out different fathers.

*I watched Monsieur Ibrahim last year, I recommend it. ** The character is no longer Omar, but I am not saying who he is now, don't want to jinx.

Sliding down Mt Everest

This is utterly gorgeous footage of the Himalayas. Made me think of both my dad and my stepdad. In the seventies, we visited Murree Hill Station - in the Himalayan foothills -  with my dad's family in Pakistan, after his death. And a couple of years ago, my step dad had taken to telling us that he had climbed Mount Everest in a day and slid all the way down. He was very well travelled, but we are sure this didn't happen. We got used to his false memories and stopped contradicting him, it was more gentle just to listen.

Five days after the morning after

It seems like months ago we voted to stay or go - I had a tear in the polling booth, it felt like destiny was weighing on you -  a real chance to make a fairer country - but not even a week has passed since the Scottish referendum. Last Thursday night, it felt like Hogmanay, but you didn't know when the bells would be, or if there would even be bells. I sat up 'til just after midnight but had to go to bed, woke up at six, so nervous, saw a FB message from a friend in Australia, saying, I don't understand all these Nos, my heart sank, and I turned on television to see that No had just won. Alex Salmond made a speech. I wept. My mother - I was staying with her for a few days while my stepdad was in respite care -  knew before me - she'd been up during the night. Friday was a day like no other I have experienced: a tangible grief being felt by 1.6 million people in Scotland, while 2 million others were celebrating, or, if they'd voted No out of fear, thanking their lucky stars. Worth noting, again, I think, that many of us who voted Yes - I think almost half - are not nationalists We simply want a better country, a better everything.

But there was  an 85% turnout, which is, in itself, a wonderful thing. Most of my family voted Yes, half of my friends voted No. There were interesting discussions to be had, certainly, but no one fell out.

Of course, the extra powers promised - aka the vow/bribe made to Scotland by a sleekit, panicked Westminster galloping up north when it thought Yes might just win - were instantly clipped onto wider constitutional reform - the question of only English MPs voting on English issues - when Cameron made his victory speech early on Friday morning. When - if at all - we will see those extra powers remains to be seen. I'm not holding my breath. As Lesley Riddoch said, we've been put to the back of the constitutional queue.

I read so much before and after the 18th, it has all blurred into one, but I thought this was a good article by Jonathan Freedland, the day after.  Also enjoyed this yesterday, by Iain Macwhirter.  I am gutted we didn't get independence, but the referendum was a fascinating event to live through and I will keep my polling card forever. I do believe that politics in the UK will never be the same again. SNP membership has doubled since the result on Friday. The Greens and Scottish Socialist Party are enjoying increases too. Labour is standing in the corner in disgrace for its part in joining with Team Tory to scare the bejesus out of us if we voted Yes.

My stepdad came home from respite on Monday and my mother asked him what he thought of the referendum  results. He replied, What referendum?  Knocking his forehead with his knuckles, he said to me: My brain is mud. My intelligence is still here, but my memory is not. He had a postal vote, but has no recollection.  Later, as he poured himself a wee whisky, he shouted through from the kitchen, Where is Arran?

I've had a *horrible* few days of illness, classic ME, and was mostly in bed for three days (tweeting from my pillow). Thirty years on, this is beyond a fucking joke. Still, on Monday I had an hour in my parents' garden reading, an Indian summer indeed (though it's dark now by half seven).

The article in the photo is from The Sunday Herald - the only newspaper to back independence - well worth reading, by Paul Hutcheon. And I ordered 'Autobiography of an Unknown Indian' by  Nirad C Chaudhuri after reading Ian Jack's very interesting pre-Indyref article last week: Is This the End of Britishness?  Personally,  while I love some things about Britain - our precious NHS - increasingly under threat - is a gem of gems - I've never felt particularly British. I feel Scottish, emotionally and psychologically, though my outlook by default is international. My mother is Scottish, my late father was an Indian-born Pakistani (I'm slowly exploring my Pakistani side, such as it is, in my current writing project). My stepfather is Danish, my sister-in-law is German. My most meaningful longterm relationship has been with someone not from UK. Moreover, the referendum to me was not about Britishness or Scottishness, or anti-Englishness - the worst accusation slung around by media - it was about fairness and social justice. I knew we weren't going to wake up in Norway, but a Yes vote would have surely given us the template for a more equal society.

 *

I'm home now and desperately hoping the baby squirrels haven't been hurt by the ever-present, prowling gangster neighbourhood cats. And I just love the poem 'The Morning After' by Christine de Luca: here it is being recited by Scottish 16 and 17-year-olds, first-time voters. Indeed, 'there are dragons to slay whatever happens'.

And here are the results in full. But, as Jonathan Freedland above said, 'When close to half the population of a nation inside a union wants to break away, the state of that union is not strong. It is fragile'.

There are, for sure, interesting times ahead.

*Update And this by Gerry Hassan worth reading too.

Discovering Anita Desai and Malcolm Lowry

I hadn't read anything by Anita Desai before, but just loved her gorgeous, short novel Clear Light of Day, a collection of disappointments and sadnesses, sprinkled with joy as two sisters Bim and Tara look back on their childhood in India in 1940s and their lives post-Partition. Here's a short clip of Desai  talking about Indian writers writing in English. And a longer interview here. Also, I recently discovered the writer Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957), this Oscar-nominated documentary from 1976, 'Volcano, An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry' is on YouTube. It's a compelling and disturbing portrayal of the debauchery and devastation of alcoholism and the cycle of perseverance and rejection and success in the writing life. I couldn't watch this film in one go, it's a disquieting experience, I watched it over a few nights,  the soundtrack is jangling and alienating. One of Lowry's friends interviewed, years after his death, wipes away a tear saying: 'The idea of such a talented man going so wrong... He could cope as long as he was drunk...' This resonates,  thinking of my own father.

Fathers & stepfathers & childhood homes

I was surprised - and flattered - last week to learn I'd been nominated for a *Scottish Asian Women's Award, in the 'achievements against all the odds' category. I wondered what I had done to qualify: it's five years since my novel came out, though perhaps someone saw The Scotsman story or the repeat of the BBC Alba documentary.  I don't, to be honest, feel particularly representative of Scottish Asian women, though I am proud of my Asian roots, they are part of who I am.  If I see an elderly Asian man in the street, my heart collapses gently. I often say I feel  'fake' mixed race as my Pakistani father, born in British India, died when I was eight and I didn't really grow up between two cultures; I am more in tune with what an alcoholic father is than a Pakistani one (I'm in the painfully snail-slow process of writing about him - unexpectedly painful in several ways - although it is a highly fictionalised account). He was doing his medical degree in Bombay at the time of Partition, and I'm fascinated by what that must have been like for him.

I actually withdrew my name from the awards as I couldn't attend the judging panel, it was far too short notice, I must always plan my energy meticulously, though I think they are still trying to arrange a later date for me. I do, of course, feel representative of women (and men) with ME and if this nomination can spread awareness, that is fine and dandy.

I spent yesterday with my Greenland-born Danish stepdad, he continues to drift into his own wee twilight world of dementia. Sometimes, I sit with him and google Greenland just to see what comes up. We look at videos of Ilulissat, the town where he was born, and he exclaims, That's the hospital! Or That's where Per and I had our confirmation, pointing to the beautiful old church. The house he grew up in is now an art museum with a permanent collection of Emanuel Petersen, a Danish  artist. He was overjoyed when I showed him this.  

I was in my own childhood home last summer for the first time in almost thirty years. Last year, some of my Pakistani family visited Scotland, I hadn't seen them for many, many years, we went out to Loch Lomond in two black cabs, ten of us, and we stopped outside the old house. Like a scene from a movie, we lined up against the wall and had our photos taken. The owner was in her garden and kindly invited us round the back to have a look. I was  physically and emotionally shattered from the trip and when I saw my uncle's heels disappearing into the kitchen I thought I was dreaming, but sure enough the owner had invited him in. I went in after him and it was surreal to be in a house that was mine and wasn't mine. The stairs up to the bedrooms seemed so steep and I remembered how I would have to sit down to rest halfway when I became severely ill with ME. The most surreal thing was to look out the window of the back bedroom and see my Pakistani cousins' children playing on the swing.

*update: Uuganaa Ramsay won the Scottish Asian Women's Award 2014. I reviewed her book MONGOL here.

Three essays & a review

I highly recommend Deborah Levy's recently published essay, 'Things I Don't Want to Know' - it's feisty and sharp, with long, gorgeous sentences that can make you dizzy if you are not careful. Towards the end she says: 'What do we do with the knowledge that we cannot bear to live with? What do we do with the things we do not want to know?' I also enjoyed Zadie Smith's essay on writing, 'That Crafty Feeling', which I came across a couple of weeks ago on Poets and Writers,  Lines We Live By. Zadie's tone can sometimes feel a bit too artfully self-deprecating, but I love her obsession with the first 20 pages of whatever she is working on, and this: 'After each book is done, you look forward to hating it (and you never have to wait long)...'

Also enjoyed Janice Pariat's 'A line runs through', her short piece on borders in literature in which she references Saadat Manto's short story 'Toba Tek Singh'. I read Manto for the first time just over a year ago and was bowled over.

And allow me to link to this new review on Amazon of The State of Me which begins: 'This is an excellent book from a gifted writer. I don't think it ever received much publicity, and so I suspect nearly everyone reading it suffers from or knows someone who suffers from chronic illness. This is a shame as it's a superb portrayal of the "world" of chronic illness, yet at the same time it is never dreary or too depressing...'

Radio 3: Childhood, memory, autobiographical narrative & fiction

I have been for some time now been attempting a novella which involves a fierce scraping of my memories in order to fictionalise events in the life of my Pakistani doctor father. Apart from the usual writing/energy challenges, it feels like quite a brutal mining of myself, and for reasons beyond me the narrative is emerging as third person omniscient. A writer friend suggested that the technical challenges of this point of view mirror the emotional challenges. I like that theory.

I am, therefore, fascinated more than ever by childhood, memory and  narrative.

Some interesting radio programmes from Radio 3's 'Free Thinking' series:

Autobiographical writing and Contemporary Fiction', a 15 minute essay slot which explores the complex intertwining of autobiography and fiction, the blurring of selves: 'These gaps between the different versions of the self leave spaces for fictional invention'.

References are made to Lydia Davis, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt.

I also liked the sentence: 'Memories are revised every time we remember'.

And here on childhood and memory, a longer 45 minute programme: 'Who's Got Hold of Children's Imaginations', writer Patrick Ness suggests that writing is 'the novelist's way to pin down the world and . . .  contain anxiety'. (8.30 mins)

A Norwegian writer, a Pakistani orchestra & a biomedical conference

Have recently discovered:

Karl Ove Knausgaard's novel/memoir A Man in Love (part two of a six-part series. I skipped part one, and the others are not yet translated). His writing is slow and self-obsessed, but there is something comforting about the pedantry and rhythm. I am wading through, it is worth it for the gems, and observations on the Swedish/Norwegian arts and writing scene. I first came across him in this review a while back, and a Norwegian friend has since filled me in on the stooshie he caused back home.

And the Lahore-based Sachal Studios Orchestra. The background to the musicians is here, a little heartbreaking. This is their version of REM's 'Everybody Hurts', and Dave Brubeck's 'Take Five'

And this wonderfully hypnotic Sufi music, which is used in the opening sequence of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Also, today is the annual International Invest in ME conference in London with researchers from all over the world. Is being live tweeted by  @DeBortgjemte.

Louis MacNeice

I recently read that the poet Louis MacNeice had been sent by the BBC to India  in 1947 to report on Partition. I knew his name, of course, but was not familiar with his work (I don't read much poetry, shame on me!). Tonight, I came across his poem 'Snow' and I had to read it three times, I loved it so much. Now, I want to know everything about him.

Some articles on Pakistan election

Have been fascinated by the election in Pakistan (though I still get a bit confused with all the parties). Some great articles and different perspectives:

Writer Mohammed Hanif in the Guardian.

Journalist Declan Walsh, who was, ludicrously, expelled from Pakistan last week.

Writer Bina Shah on her blog.

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad in London Review of Books.

And this was before the election, a long article by  Mira Sethi which I still have to finish, but  gorgeously informative.

When we visited Pakistan in 1974, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto would have been prime minister, of course I was just a child and had no idea of these things.

The power of narrative (for good and ill)

I am increasingly interested in why we read stories, I think it might make you a better writer if you understand the seduction of narrative (though maybe it is better not to think about these things at all, and just write).  I've been dipping into The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall:  The riddle of fiction comes to this: Evolution is ruthlessly utilitarian. How has the seeming luxury of fiction not been eliminated from human life? My stepdad continues to bemuse us with narratives based on false memories - and what else is narrative if not memory? - he told us at the weekend that he had travelled across India by train in the nineties. He also referred to dinner plates as 'big flats', which is just poetry. I've been horrified at the pre-election violence in Pakistan (my family on my father's side live in Karachi). This clip from a couple of weeks ago is unbearable to watch, capturing a young boy's trauma after a bomb has gone off in Peshawar.  I cannot claim to understand much of the political narrative that is playing out in Pakistan at the moment, but my heart sinks at the seemingly  endless cycle of violence. This is an interesting article  by doctor and writer Qanta Ahmed, who lives in New York. She explores the twisted, nihilistic  narrative that seduces young men like the Boston bombers - there is no motive, just narrative which brings 'meaning' to their senseless and cruel  acts.

Margins, B-cells behaving badly, and a wee dance

Interesting post  - and discussion - on medical humanities and literary medicine from the Centre for Medical Humanities Blog. And a wee reminder that I'm reading extracts from The State of Me at Dissecting Edinburgh event  'Writing Medicine'  on 2 May. I  often say I live on  the margins of the writing life, I can't run around promoting my book, so it's lovely to be joining the mainstream for an hour or two. Is the first time I've read from the novel since 2008. Tickets free, though I'm told there are not many left. The reading will take place in the fascinating pathology museum in Surgeons' Hall.

Is ME all down to B-cells behaving badly? Rituximab research of Norwegian doctors Mella and Fluge reported in Discover Magazine. Good article, but the oft-used photo of a model in crisp white shirt looking like she has a bit of a headache to represent neuroimmune illness is beyond annoying.

Very encouraging to see Norfolk and Suffolk standing up for the neuroimmune model, they are pushing for CFS and ME to be treated separately, and advocate a biomedically driven, consultant-led clinic rather than the currently flawed CBT/GET 'fatigue' clinics (their clinic was in fact biomedically led until 2005). Of course, the Scottish Public Health Network recommended the same, but we unsurprisingly got the Lothian ME/CFS clinic instead.

At the weekend,  after reading this article, I discovered the Wagah border-crossing ceremony, a huge tourist attraction, where the Pakistan and India flags are lowered every day, and the border closed, before sunset. Michael Palin has called it 'choreographed contempt', and there is more than a touch of Monty Python to the whole thing. Gloriously camp, though, obviously, serious undertones.


*Had an email today from a reader whose partner has ME. I loved this: 'Great read, shit illness, be proud for looking it in the eye and spitting'.