Going back to Sinha's Novel

So many links on Bhopal, but I found this gives a good sense of the difficulty still going on
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15485

and, a statue of Animal he commissioned in New York:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-media/product-gallery/0743259203?ie=UTF8&index=1

Last In, First Out

Irwin Allan Sealy managed to produce a fascinatingly original short story despite it being a commissioned accomplishment. This is not to say that all commissioned stories will inevitably end up sounding forced, but some of the other pieces compiled in Delhi Noir have this sense of contractual production. "Last In, First Out" presents an odd narrative in a voice that seems truly Sealy. The diction is fresh and so are most of the images. I felt that the two preceding stories in this compilation did not accomplish the same level of creativity that emanates from the words of Sealy's autorickshaw driver - let's call him Bee-Cruiser. I have deemed the story odd, and I believe it to be that exactly. Bee-Cruiser begins his narrative by explaining to the readers that he didn't finish school because his father found out about the accumulating ideas that were a result of his enrollment at Delhi University. This part of the story is only there to lay the foundation for why Bee-Cruiser likes to drive around Delhi Ridge at night. Sealy's description of sights and sounds that one will incur at Delhi Ridge is quite unique. The "half-heckle, half-jeer" of the peacocks and "laughter therapy" of joggers both stand out as particularly original moments in Sealy's illustration. Bee-Cruiser moves on in his description of Delhi Ridge by illustrating the dangers of being in the area at night. In spite of these dangers, DU lovers come to the urban wilderness because of its proximity...and the fact that there isn't any other place that suits their "needs" so perfectly. As expected, rapes occur. Bee-Cruiser doesn't understand why these things happen, or why people continue to go into Delhi Ridge at night. But Bee Cruiser continues to drive through the Ridge. One dark evening, he found himself involved with the aftermath of a rape where little was said but much was conveyed. We all know the rest. Noir ensues and Bee-Cruiser wants to teach two goon rapists a lesson. After my first reading of the story's conclusion, I wasn't exactly sure what happened in his house at the very end. I didn't know if he now suspected his family of being involved, but for some reason he sensed that he had been used. Upon re-reading, I now see that he wondered why the Sidey had winked at him. Had Sidey/Mongoose used Bee-Cruiser to get rid of Cobra? Possibly, but either way the man is gone and Bee-Cruiser has a wonderful new paint job on his autorickshaw. I feel that poverty wasn't just used as a backdrop for this story. As Bee-Cruiser might say: That's progress - an individual taking it upon himself to make everything just a tinge better.

Marcus Aurelius

Having never read Marcus Aurelius it was relatively difficult to understand Agastya's facination with this text. He stays true to it to the end quoting, "Today I have got myself out of my perplexities; or rather, I got the perplexities out of myself-- for they were not without, but within; they lay in my outlook."
What a great line to sum up how I thought of this novel. The story was very dull, though funny at times, but it was all in matter of how you looked at it. Looking around the class I could tell some of us were more into it than others. I was not particularly fond of it though I did enjoy reading some parts of the novel. Some of us saw things in this novel that were very intriguing and I did not see a lot of those. I read this novel as what some would call "An airplane read." It was very discriptive of superficial environments and did not delve into issues that it set itself up to, namely politics in India. It raises issues of corruption, but in Agastya's attemp to remain apart from that world we do not see a strong stance by the author on these issues. This was very different from the previous novels read in the class.
I am left perplexed because the novel does not fit our established pattern of novels which have a clear goal to expose certain things of India and take a stance on them. Maybe its all in my oulook of this novel.

Lose Your Clothes and run Naked

Between the two opening stories of “delhi noir,” I found “How I Lost my Clothes” to be ‘better’ than “Yesterday Man” in every aspect—from sheer entertainment value to quality of writing. Though I do suspect my enjoyment of “How I Lost my Clothes” may be, at least partially, due to its literal juxtaposition with “Yesterday Man,” which this I found to be a tedious, slow moving, somewhat predictable, story (I apologize to the readers who enjoyed it). Sorry for the digression. I’ll stop bashing the opening story and proceed by discussing “How I Lost My Clothes.”

From beginning to end, Jha constructs a consistently surreal, dreamlike, bizarre, hallucinatory (what have you) narrative. And the aesthetics of this narrative lie hand in hand with the content of the story—Jha matches “what he says” with “how he says” it. Accordingly, Jha’s writing affects readers in the same way the content of the story affects readers. Through the aesthetics of his writing, Jha enables readers to experience the same feelings that his doped-out, deranged perhaps, protagonist experiences.

But I do not find the story to be neatly resolved. If the protagonist’s dreamlike state of consciousness is the result of the heroin he’s ingested, I cannot find a way to rationally explain his lengthy state of intoxication. He only ‘fixes-up’ once, near the story’s opening, but the drug’s effects last over a day, until the story’s final paragraphs—surly he would be sober by then, and probably be experiencing withdrawal. He continues to wander around the city, naked, and his bizarre narrative never reaches any sober state of understanding until the story’s closing paragraphs, which make a chronological jump into the narrator’s future, and give his previous story the feeling of retrospection (especially with the final paragraph’s shift into the present tense).

The story ends: “And I wonder whether he ever realized the gift I’d given to him or whether he simply wrapped the dead man’s sheet around him…” Apparently, even in this latter state of sobriety, the man is still convinced of the authenticity of the meaning he’s derived from the preceding story, despite it being drug-induced. I find two ways to make sense of this. 1) for the readers who believe any ‘enlightened’ state of understanding, if drug induced, is inauthentic, then the story as whole becomes ‘drug-porn’ with no higher meaning, and the narrator’s retrospective interpretation of his story works only to prove his permanent insanity, or, 2) for the readers who believe meaning can be achieved—and perhaps augmented—by a state of hallucinatory intoxication, then the narrator’s insights are authentic. Either way, the story is emotive, compelling, artistic, etcetera. Well done, Jha.

The Passage

"Movement without purpose, an endless ebb and flow, from one world to another, journeys and passages, undertaken by cocoons not for rest or solace, but for ephemerals. The flux of the sea now seemed the only pattern, within and beyond the mind -- mirrored even in his encounters with the myriad faces, on some of which he had tried to impose an order by seeing them as mirror-images, facets of his own self, but now that longing, for repose through the mastering of chaos, itself seemed vain. Perhaps it was true that he had first to banish all yearning, and learn to accept the drift, perhaps it was true that all was clouded by desire, as fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust, as a unborn babe by its covering."

This passage deserves to be quoted in its entirety, so I have included it in this post.

To begin discussing this excerpt, I think it is best to start with the first sentence. There is movement in our lives, but the overwhelming concern of this novel is to point out that the movement is not valuable in the sense that we normally assign to travel or translocation. The voice of this novel finds the movement to be a need that we have as rational beings in a chaotic existence. The only way to deal with the chaos is to find some way to experience short bursts of life with endings in plain sight. Ephemerality is the only avenue that will not wring out all of an individual's vitality. I find it fascinating to examine the narration in this excerpt. The point of view so often seemed to be Agastya's, but in this excerpt it is clear that the point of view is third person omniscient. The narration has a very interesting, and dismantling, effect on my perception of the world as presented in the novel. Because the narrating voice is not Agastya, it takes on a separate vantage at times. However, even those times when the narration is moving away from the mind of Agastya the overwhelming sense of dislocation remains intact. I always feel like a "cocoon" looking for "rest or solace," but never realizing anything outside of Agastya's thoughts. Moving back to the beautifully tragic excerpt, the sea is used to signify the only pattern one will find in life. Ebb and flow. Ebb and flow. Agastya attempts to use this pattern in comparing the people he meets to himself, but his self absorbed rationale is incapable of locating anything that resembles itself. The passage ends with the consideration of ridding oneself of all desire. If yearning can be extinguished, maybe then a kind of happiness can be forged. But maybe not...

I absolutely love this passage, and there are times when I believe an extinguishing of desires might lead to sense of contentment. However, I enjoy the chaotic existence that I revolve within...at times.

Chipanthi: Protesting the Absurd

In one of the more eventful episodes of the novel, Agastya travels into the hinterland to the village of Chipanthi. He has come to the village with a Deputy Engineer after a conversation with a tribal woman who visited him in Jompanna to explain the extremity of Chipanthi's water dilemma. Upon arrival, Agastya immediately feels strange about the conditions of the village. He notices that there is an unsettling silence in the air that is unlike anything to which he is accustomed. There is no laughter, nor are there any conversations taking place. Agastya and his colleague make their way over to well to examine exactly how bad the water conditions are in the village. As the two of them are approaching the well, more and more villagers become aware of their presence.

The well is an awful sight. The tribal women are tying the children to ropes (this is where the children are) and lowering them down into the well so they can scoop buckets of "thin mud" from the bottom. Agastya is shocked. He demands that the Deputy Engineer have one of the water trucks sent to Chipanthi immediately. Before the Deputy Engineer has the time to finish making excuses about why it is impossible for a truck to come to Chipanthi, Agastya tells the man to take the jeep back to Jompanna while he (Agastya) stays in the village. I didn't this command upon first reading. Finally, I had a reason to like Agastya beyond his clever lies and love of marijuana. However, the reader later discovers that Agastya's reason for coming to Chipanthi in the first place was to escape the duties of his office. He stays in the village to expedite and assure that the Deputy Engineer will do exactly what Agastya has asked of him, but also to spend a bit more time with the beautiful women of the village. Not exactly a pure example of civil service, but in light of the rest of the novel, I'll take it.

After Agastya's colleague leaves, he is engaged in a conversation with a Naxalite. This man, Rao, begins explaining the reason for the Naxalite presence in Chipanthi. Rao continued to reel off injustices that needed to be addressed while Agastya slipped deeper into his own thoughts regarding Rao's appearance. The "conversation" is suddenly interrupted when one of the ropes unwinds around a child who is still hanging inside the well. The woman holding the rope gasps loudly and people begin to help her pull the child out of the well. At the sight of this, Agastya finds himself in a fit of irritation. The scene reads, "For a ghastly second he thought that they were putting on a show, intending to make him feel, yet again, absurd, or guilty." The narrator goes on to state that Agastya finds no adequate argument for the way the tribals live: "risking the lives of their children for half-buckets of mud." It makes no sense to him. Even after hearing the arguments of the Naxalites, Agastya feels that these people are subjecting themselves to the conditions that are so terribly difficult to witness as an outsider. For Agastya, it is simply absurd. This scene in the novel brings to the foreground the consideration, or lack thereof, of poverty in this book. The lifestyle of the tribals is presented from two opposing sides -- the Naxalites and Agastya. The Naxalites victimize the tribals inability to cope with the modern age by placing the blame on the government and their unwillingness to provide help. Contrastingly, Agastya feels that the tribals could better their lives in simple ways without needing the help of the government. In his eyes, all of us are at war with the ever-changing world, but some of us choose to cope while others hold on to the way things used to be. I think there is sound reason for each of the two arguments. Either way, I'm proud of Agastya for going to Chipanthi and taking a stand to help them, regardless of his reasoning.

A Final Thought Before The Finish

I've begun to notice that Chatterjee has changed the way in which Agastya is describing his surroundings. He employs more and more fragments from the perspective of Agastya as the character gives snapshots of the scenery he is passing. It's almost as if Agastya is familiarity with the things around him would stop him from taking notice, but because he is a part of a novel...the description simply must go on. Also, with the majority of the book resting in my left hand at this point, the anxious desire to leap to conclusions is coming on pretty strong. All of the untied strings of this book are beginning to swirl in my mind, searching for some sort of ending to knot themselves with. This started happening this morning while I reading the section bout Jompanna and I found myself thinking that John Avery was surely going to be attacked by a tiger because people continued to mention that no tiger had been seen in 12 years. I don't know if I wanted this to happen because it would be a deserving symbol for the Raj's place in Indian society, or if all I want is some sort of action beyond Agastya nabbing someone's keys. I had to set the book aside and convince myself that there is not going to be anything exciting that will happen, but instead I have to allow Chatterjee to finish the story that has somehow managed to capture my imagination. I am stuck in Madna just as Agastya. He needs to make a move or I think I am going to have to write an alternate ending to the book. Only kidding, but I do hope that some sort of wildly unexpected denouement comes about that is some way makes my graduation a bit less disheartening. A boy can dream, can't he?