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.

Didn't expect to see ME mentioned in Neel Mukherjee's novel

Am enjoying Neel Mukherjee's 2010 novel A Life Apart - a novel within a novel -  and was surprised to come across this observation from the main character Ritwik Ghosh, a student from Calcutta studying English Lit at Oxford in 80s/90s:

 'And then there is the steady rise of illnesses Ritwik's never heard of - glandular fever and ME, chronic fatigue syndrome and RSI. God, these are the very people who take a  dozen jabs before they go to India and carry a whole pharmacy with them! At least you get nothing more serious than diarrhoea or worms out there but here you get incurable, unheard of things such as BSE and CFS and ME, the acronyms themselves trying to hide the dreaded nature of the new-fangled confections.'

It's not often you come across references to ME in fiction. Ritwik has had an impoverished, traumatic childhood in Calcutta, at the hands of a violent mother - those passages are hard to read - and the point here is that these new 'British' illnesses scare him - in a way, India is safer.  

I would  like Ritwik to read The State of Me,  though it was not yet written then, but Helen Fleet,  also an English Lit student in eighties, was of course already ill with ME.

I also love this paragraph:

'These presences and shadows scare him sometimes. He has taken to sitting with his back firmly pressed to the corner where two walls meet at right angles. He has become like a cat: at least two sides are covered and nothing can startle him from behind. Whatever encounter there is in store for him will be face to face; he's prepared for it, ready to look it in the eye.'

Heartbreaking, he has become like a cat.

How I love novels.

The Missing Story

A couple of months ago my friends lent me Tagore's selected stories, recommending one in particular, 'Kabuliwallah'. When I looked it up I thought I had the wrong page because the story was not there and after checking several  times, I realised the story was missing, it had been removed. So I read another couple of stories instead and loved 'Exercise-book', a story about a little girl who loves writing so much she will write on any surface she can get her hands on. His stories can be saccharine but there are gorgeous details, and unexpected harshnesses that stab you like drawing pins in a warm bath. When I mentioned the missing story to my friends they explained they had given me the wrong book, that they had another identical edition, and that 'Kabuliwallah' had indeed been carefully removed a long time ago to fax to someone. So we swapped over the books and they gave me the edition that did have 'Kabuliwallah' on page 115. As  I was reading it, the pages fell out and I thought what have I done, only to realise that these were the few pages that had been removed from the first edition, now slotted into the wrong book.  In the end, I got two 'Kabuliwallah's; these are the tiny beautiful details that make the world go round.

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.

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.

The Panda Theory, Joseph Anton & an anthology

Gallic Books very kindly sent me a copy of The Panda Theory by Pascal Garnier when I said last week  on Twitter that I'd had to return it to the library before I had finished. I started reading it last July (I think) and got a third of the way. I look forward to starting it again. I finally finished Joseph Anton, I had a lump in my throat when Salman's second son, Milan, was born, I was surprised at my emotion. I also have huge respect - and sadness -  for his ex-wives Clarissa Luard and Elizabeth West. Clarissa sadly died in 1999. I have the Vintage Book of Indian Writing (1997) that he and West edited - in fact, I bought it that year, I see from the date, I always date my books. Interesting now to get the backdrop to the fraughtness round the publication, it was considered risky then for her to have her name on the anthology (it was a secret they were together). It was dipping into this anthology last autumn that I discovered Bapsi Sidhwa's work. And I had no idea Salman was big pals with Bono (I am not a U2 fan).

Manto & translation, & Pakistani fathers

This is Saadat Hasan Manto's Mottled Dawn, Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition, published by Penguin India. The cover is exquisite, it came the other day. The painting is 'Melting Wit' (2005, acrylic on canvas) by N. S. Harsha. I'm not sure if the clowns are bleeding or melting. Harsha says: 'I fill my work with gaps and loose ends; I want to lead and mislead the viewer. Ambiguity makes a picture very exciting'.

I've already read 'Toba Tek Singh' online - the first story in this anthology -  and have also read the introduction by Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose own short story 'A Spoiled Man' from In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is one of the saddest stories I've ever read. I look forward to the rest of Manto's  deceptively simple yet brutal and sometimes funny stories about Partition. It struck me that Manto was only seven years older than my Indian-born Pakistani father, who migrated to Karachi briefly in the late forties before coming to the west to work as a doctor. Manto migrated to Lahore from Bombay, but he was never happy there. Both of them died as not old men through alcohol excess.

These stories have been translated by Khalid Hasan and I was interested to read that Aatish Taseer - the estranged son of  the assassinated Pakistani politician (himself the nephew of poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz ) - does not approve of Hasan's translations, suggesting he lacks 'the simplicity, speed and vitality' of the original prose. He has translated Manto himself in an anthology of Selected Stories (Random House). I downloaded these last month and have read a couple. This reviewer is critical of Taseer's criticism of Hasan as a translator. As I only know a few words in Urdu - banana, water and thank you - I have to trust that whoever has translated has done a fine job.

And, on translation, here is a list of the best books of 2012.

Saadat Manto's 'Toba Tek Singh'

I have recently discovered the writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, he wrote short stories in Urdu, the bad boy of Partition literature. This story 'Toba Tek Singh' is one of his most popular, a satire on the separation of India and Pakistan, and focuses on the exchange across the border of inmates from mental institutions (based on fact).

'All that these inmates knew was that there was a man by the name of Quaid-e-Azam who had set up a separate state for Muslims, called Pakistan. But they had no idea where Pakistan was. That was why they were all at a loss whether they were now in India or in Pakistan. If they were in India, then where was Pakistan? If they were in Pakistan, how come that only a short while ago they were in India? How could they be in India a short while ago and now suddenly in Pakistan?'

The full story is here in English, it is very short, and funny and desperately sad at the same time. I just wish I could understand Urdu and read the original.

John Maddox Award...& a gorgeous novel

This is, sadly, not an early April Fool, but Professor Simon Wessely has been named as one of the recipients of the inaugural John Maddox award - for those individuals 'standing up for science and showing courage in the face of acute hostility'. I am sure the other recipient, Chinese writer Fang Shi-min, is indeed an inspiring and courageous scientist, but  in the case of Simon it is a dangerous absurdity to reward him - it only perpetuates the  damage and nonsense of conflating ME with 'chronic fatigue syndrome'. Oh, and I am not a terrorist, to anybody in the Simon camp reading this - I am a writer who has had a virally-triggered neuroimmune illness since 1982 which has, in many ways, ruined my life. Simon Wessely and his friends have offered me nothing except a disturbing, distorted narrative of my illness (I am not depressed, except when Simon gets ill-deserved prizes!). 

I honestly don't know how those who remain severely ill with ME cope with his 'bravado', and I can only think there is currently a shortage of brave scientists and acute hostility, for Simon to have bagged this. It's an act of appalling scientific ignorance to give him this prize, the continued blinkered back patting is frankly terrifying, I could weep.

*Has been pointed out to me that Simon is on the advisory council of Sense about Science, who are joint initiators of the award with Nature. So that may explain a little... there actually is no other explanation. He's just giving himself a wee prize. Worrying, though,  to see the so called 'scientific' community, blithely tweeting in celebration of Simon's achievement. Their blinkers remain stuck on with Superglue. This is a gross insult to everyone with my illness.

** One of the judges, Professor Colin Blakemore - also on the advisory council - said earlier this week in the Times: If scientists are silent, loony ideas will win. Why reward the loony ideas, then? I am compelled to ask.

*** There is now a discussion over at this blog, Simon has commented too.

*

And something far more important, I have discovered a gorgeous novel 'Cracking India' by Bapsi Sidhwa (originally published as Ice Candy Man) - it's about Partition from the point of view of a young Parsee girl in Lahore, who happens to have polio. She is witty as hell. I am only 50 pages in, but I love it.

Mona Siddiqui on Desert Island Discs

Very listenable, academic Mona Siddiqui on Desert Island Discs yesterday. I love that her luxury item would be tea. And I had not heard of Jagjit Singh.

Being grabbed by one sentence

This spring and summer I've been reading fiction and non-fiction from Pakistan and India. As I've said before,  I feel slightly 'fake' mixed race but, at the moment, I feel very pulled to writing from South Asia. I have the books above on my side table and others I'm reading/have read include Mohammed Hanif's brilliantly cheeky and dark satirical novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes (am impatiently waiting for the paperback of Our Lady of Alice Bhatti to be released); Aboard the Democracy Train by Nafisa Hoodbhoy (very factual non-fiction, taking me a *long* time, I dip in and out on Kindle) and Alok Bhalla's Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home, which I'm eagerly waiting for from Amazon. I watched this wonderful interview with Alok Bhalla a few weeks ago and was struck by his statement that 'the function of art (culture) is to imagine spaces where we can live differently from the way we have been'. By differently, he means better, more ethically. (approx. 20 minutes in)

This weekend, I learned The Friday Project had published an e-book version of British novelist Niven Govinden's Black Bread White Beer, already published in India. I downloaded the sample and immediately downloaded the whole book, something I seldom do. I was grabbed, particularly by one sentence in the opening pages: Amal, the day after his wife's miscarriage, is in conversation with a Polish car mechanic who says that in his country this is 'something we do not speak of. It is kept in the  preserve of women'. Amal replies: "'My country too'. Automatically, he bows to the Indian gene. Though he thinks of himself as educated and enlightened, it is always the pull of the genes that navigates him through crisis, as if there was a state of sense-making that comes solely from the combined force of his parental cells". I still have to read the rest of the book, but for me a novel or short story often spins on one sentence,  above all, and those words stay with me long after I've finished.