Amma

Sometimes a person's memory invades your mind at an unguarded moment. And it invades it so intensely that you are left overpowered by a sense of both loss and presence. Today I felt this inexplicable sensation for the dearest person I have lost to death: my maternal grandmother. She passed away 12 years ago, at a contented old age, and the rawness with which her memory came back to me was startling. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that she slipped away when I could not be with her and I had to deal with an emptiness I groped physically for a long time. My last memory of her -- as vivid as ever -- is of a woman suddenly weak in body with a strange glow in her eyes hungry for one last sight of her loved ones.

This is not the first time I have felt this sudden emotion in the years after she passed away, but it caught me unawares today after the longest gap in time. I am both shaken and gladdened by the realization that time hasn't really obliterated a dear one. If pain persists, however transfigured, there must be some permanence in life and in love.

Here are two poems I wrote in the memory of my grandmother, with the dates on which I first posted them on my blog:

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2008

Amma

The day you decided to take off,

I failed to glimpse
the golden chariot
and angels’ wings.

No gesture replied,
though I turned round and round
the house trying to clasp
what had seeped neatly into the past

And then the monsoon came
with the winds and the watery clouds.

I have been sure
these five years
that you were
on the other side.

But last night I woke up
to the sound of a voice singing
as tuneless as ever: there was nothing
in it that spoke of distance.

SATURDAY, MAY 23, 2009

Twilight 

Listening to her gravelly voice rise in song,

I would wait for the sudden drop in pitch
or the change of tune midway.

It is a raga of her own making, we would laugh.

But surer than music-mongers meticulously nailing notes
to lyrics, she performed in magnificent style.
The very walls of the house had grown attuned to her ways.

In youth, her fury could shake and shatter.
Neighbours who thought her a hapless widow
with  children she could barely mind
found themselves confronting an army of bony hands
that set stones flying
towards their gilded window-panes.

The story still startles me. What is true of her,
I would wonder searching her gentle features
lost in the winding alleys of her song, oblivious
to the babble of a busy young world.

Or could this be truer, this feeble puffing
of lips that flap infant-like
as she sleeps wrapped in thin blue sheets?
Her limbs look tired and very old – older than the
snowflakes in her hair.

Flood of Fire: Impressions

This morning I finished reading the third of Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy, Flood of Fire. Although it didn't tire me, my first response would be to say that the book disappointed. Of course, this response may not be echoed by all: being a regular and eager reader of Ghosh's works, I have come to expect a few things in his writing which in my opinion are characteristic of him at his best. It is perhaps in having missed these for the most part of the narrative that my first impulse was to say the book disappointed. As in a way the whole of the trilogy does, in spite of its many marvelous achievements.

But let me leave that bit for a little later. The most appreciable and outstanding part of this mammoth project -- for that is what the Ibis trilogy is more than anything else, -- is its deep, detailed and palpable critique of the peculiar kind of hungry, zealous but utterly composed and self-assured tyranny that came to be embodied by British colonialism. Of course it is widely acknowledged now that this domination of a staggeringly large part of the world by one nation was a remarkable collusion of capitalist greed, racial superiority and military strength boosted by scientific advancement, and one which was often articulated in terms of a religious fervor. We have all read our Edward Saids and the numerous theorists after who have peeled off the many layers of this grand phenomenon. But Ghosh's story brings it all out in visceral human detail, and that of course has been the great strength of his fictional engagement with history, something I have followed with admiration over the last couple of decades. In fact, one could even say that there has been a steady progression and deepening of Ghosh’s historical insight as his canvas has broadened from The Shadow Lines of personally familiar places and occurrences to the Ibis trilogy, whose task is ambitious to say the least.

The parodic and slightly mythical facet of the narrative seems to me an interesting modification of the hyperbolic style that is recurrent in Ghosh. But I didn't quite take to those instances in the trilogy where this is most pronounced. I prefer the Nirmal version of it, infused with poetry, a raw lyrical quality and dreamy idealism. But here it is more cinematic, with visions and shrines, lores and sudden dramatic escapes. It has an important role to play in the narrative and the import (or rather the impact) of the novels, no doubt, but this wasn't among what I could enjoy in reading them. Of course, this is in part my own preference for an old fashioned realism from which I seem to permit only certain kinds of deviation.

Coming to Flood of Fire in particular, I thought that the first half of the book was a bit of a drag. Zachary's escapades with Mrs. Burnham and the page after page of discourse on 'onanism' researched a bit too painstakingly almost made me wonder if some of it was just meant to add pages of titillation to the tome. The descriptions of warfare in the second half are similarly long-drawn and although to someone interested in details of combat these may seem particularly striking, there seems to be a tendency to lapse into minute findings of research here. (My own inability to reconstruct a vivid mental picture of the terrain described added to my distress in reading these pages.) Of course the full horror of the war in all its mundane everyday ugliness had to be brought out and Ghosh does a good job of it, but fiction writing is stretched in the process into mind-boggling lengths of detail. 

As for the 'story', that disappointed me too. It was all a bit too simplistic. Zachary' story of steady fall from innocence, visualized in Baboo Nobo Kissan’s scheme of things as the Kaliyug, becomes sinister capitalist domination represented as tame allegory (in fact the joining of hands between Burnham, Reid and Chan reminded me of the ending of Animal Farm). Mrs. Burnham and Captain Mee are conveniently disposed of in a manner that certainly doesn’t evoke pathos as Bahram’s death does at the end of River of Smoke. By this point in the novel, I was just impatient to be done with the wrapping up that was happening with a rapidity that contrasts awkwardly with the dull pace of the first half. (The ships tips over, so to speak.) I was left with a sense of an epic that had suddenly shrunk.

It is the character of Neel that surprised me. Each of Ghosh’s novels has this intellectual observer-chronicler who becomes the author’s alter ego in the narrative. I am curious to see how this character develops in his future work.

Spotlight: Uma Shashikant

I have never written on this blog about people I admire. Admire long-distance, that is. Mostly through their work or their writing, often both. I have resolved to write such 'spotlight' features every once in a while. Today I will write on one such person and the organisation that she leads, which is distinguished by a rare combination of exceptional clarity of purpose and method, efficient working and a market awareness that does not extend to falling prey to the temptations of expansion to the unfortunate detriment of quality.

I have been reading The Economic Times' weekly supplement, 'Wealth', for almost a year. There is no doubt that it has both increased my confidence in dealing with money and sparked off a lot of interest in the complex, dynamic system that we call the financial market. The space I await most eagerly in the paper is Uma Shashikant's unfailingly sensible and astoundingly lucid column. This author is not just extremely reader-friendly and incredibly adept at phrasing in the simplest, most comprehensible terms every piece of financial knowledge she imparts, but is also sensitive to the investor as a human being. Which is why she seems to have this knack of putting her finger on what is financially crucial as well as personally significant for her readers in making the right decisions. Come to think of it, investments are all about our desires, our well-being and our emotions. In fact, a strain that runs through every article of Shashikant's is her tactful advice to be judicious with our emotions while making financial decisions -- something that will, eventually, only bring us health and happiness.

Uma Shashikant is the Managing Director of the Centre for Investor Education and Learning (CIEL), an organisation which, as I learnt only today, is based in Mumbai but functions largely on cloud technology with the team working from home. Again, most admirable because it is so sensible! The internet is full of praise for Shashikant as an exemplary teacher and trainer. Indeed, I have a good mind to preserve her articles for use in my language classroom as fine examples of lucid articulation.

There are two more points that have enhanced my admiration for CIEL. First, the organisation is almost an all-woman venture, with a team of exceptionally well-qualified and experienced women from the fields of finance, law, information technology and design. (Here is their page.) That makes me very proud as a woman and very hopeful about women building better lives for themselves and the society at large. And the second point is the organisation's clarity about its own goals. As Shashikant puts it unambiguously in this interview, they do not deal with end customers and are essentially a small organisation modelled on providing intensive service rather than taking on too many projects. It is obvious that they have identified a strong market need and have placed themselves neatly as service-providers, but are not out to capture more and more space. And that is a very rare choice indeed in a world where quality is quickly compromised in favour of unrestrained expansion.

Hats off to Uma Shashikant and her team. I am sure I shall keep enjoying and benefiting from her column for a long time! For a sample of her writing, do look here.