A Monsoon Feast Read online

  A Monsoon Feast

  Verena Tay (Editor)

  Contents

  FOREWORD BY KIRPAL SINGH

  FOREWORD BY SHASHI THAROOR

  Big Wall Newspaper by Suchen Christine Lim

  About Suchen Christine Lim

  The Death of a Schoolmaster by Shashi Tharoor

  About Shashi Tharoor

  Because I Tell by Felix Cheong

  About Felix Cheong

  A Life Elsewhere by Jaishree Misra

  About Jaishree Misra

  Patchwork by O Thiam Chin

  About O Thiam Chin

  In Memory of Kaya Toast by Anjali Menon

  About Anjali Menon

  Taste by Verena Tay

  About Verena Tay

  AUTHOR COPYRIGHTS

  ABOUT INSIGHT INDIA 2012

  ABOUT DFP

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SPECIAL THANKS

  COPYRIGHT

  Foreword by Kirpal Singh

  More than Stories: Ways to Knowing

  I believe it was the tortured Muriel Rukeyser who stated that the universe was full of stories, not atoms. Embedded in her curious utterance are so many different layers, so many stories, each waiting to be culled. Readers are normally of two varieties: those who just want a read and those who want more than just a read. I am very happy that A Monsoon Feast will satisfy both varieties. For here are stories which one can just read but they are also stories which offer more than just a read. And this is the triumph of the collection – to succeed in offering us a rich store of narratives which engages and which clearly points us to see more.

  Let’s begin by reflecting on the opening sen tence of the story by my good, old friend, Christine Suchen Lim:

  In one minute’s time, the electric bell will bong!

  Now, one could be fussy and say – since the story is, among other things, about schools and learning and teaching (things our author knows only too well having been in the good employ of the Education Ministry for decades!) – there is no real need for the word ‘time’ since ‘In one minute’ states the same point. Ah, well, does it? Should we be finicky, picky and bother/worry about such details? Or should we not? And what about that interesting word bong? Frankly, how many of us would have used such a word to describe the sound coming from a bell? And please do note it is an electric bell. When both Christine and I were in school we didn’t hear electric bells; what we heard was the bell being held and rung by burly men and women keen on making sure we school kids were obeying the call of the bell! There is more: in writing that apparently simple first sentence, the writer cleverly traps us in a world which is going to reveal some terrible goings-on – from relationships to jealousies, envies and allusions to high hopes and big reputations. Of course, the author is an old hand at telling stories – as they all are in A Monsoon Feast.

  These days it is almost common to pick up anthologies of stories which pertain to a theme or a fixed style – or, more scintillatingly, attempt to seduce us by proffering sensational reality-checks very thinly disguised as fiction. It is a pleasure to realize that the current collection suffers from none of these. Though comprising only a few stories, A Monsoon Feast invites us to read, ponder, reflect, engage, respond. Is it therefore an anthology with an agenda? Yes. But the agenda is the old, familiar and noble one of transporting us, even briefly, to worlds, which while striking us as being so familiar, so readily recognizable, are also worlds which displace and plunge us into thoughts and arouse emotions which are best experienced perhaps privately in the comforts of our own reading spaces. Allow me to cite here the very disturbing story by Felix Cheong, Because I Tell:

  Cheche takes me to the bedroom and closes the door. She says, ‘Why do you have to tell Mama? See what you did?’ I say I forget it is a secret. Cheche says, ‘You always forget. You were born stupid. You will always be stupid.’

  I say I am not stupid. I keep secrets. I never tell Mama Cheche takes Terence one time to her bedroom. I never tell Mama Terence kisses Cheche and holds her on the bed. I never tell Mama Terence tickles Cheche and they wear no clothes and they laugh loud. Cheche hits my face. She goes out of the house but forgets to take her keys. I cry and I put a pillow on my pain. Too many, many secrets to forget!

  Just this small glimpse into the world of the poor child who is subjected to know but keep ‘secrets’ frightens because of the implicit immorality of what he experiences. The ironic stretch of dramatization here, exploiting deftly our own inner knowledge and our constant struggle to ‘keep secrets’ challenges a more-than-normal state of personal and familial morality. What do we as adults, grown men and women with responsibilities and good jobs and reputations to uphold, inflict on our young? And why do we expect our young, those in our charge, to not tell when we preach honesty is the best policy? Or don’t we? The story is a powerful reminder of the pitfalls of easy moralization, of the terrible dangers which lurk just beneath the veneer of social and personal respectability. Nothing we have not been told about by other writers. But Felix Cheong does it in a manner which is very close to home because so many of us know this is the hard, unaccepted truth.

  Just like many other truths. So the remarkable story by Jaishree Misra – one of the finest in the collection – swiftly and almost with a casual air of nonchalance, betrays the broader hypocrisy which spreads to us all either because we become, willy-nilly, victims of our own making. How many of us, as we read this painful story of anguish and near betrayal, identify with its devastating expose? How many of us know the likes of Manichettan – this one-of-a-kind who is the life of every party, the hero on everyone’s lips? How many of us, dare I ask, are Manichettans, not ever daring or wanting any one to discover our secret? Told with great subtlety, A Life Elsewhere captures that ever awesome question: where do we draw the line? Where do we stop in our quest for truth, Truth? The conclusion is worth quoting in full:

  I ought to have been all puffed up that Manichettan had given me such a generous and trusting glimpse into his life, a far bigger deal than showing me his flat and giving me all the details of his job. Had he deliberately picked me of all the cousins to reveal this aspect to: his life in Singapore and this new kind of happiness he had found? But, as I turned to walk into the hotel lobby, it was a strange kind of fear that I felt, fluttering somewhere deep inside my stomach. Stepping into the lift, I thought of the number of times I had grandly predicted that Manichettan would die before making his parents unhappy. It was truly no exaggeration that he would far rather invite anguish on himself than see pain in his mother’s eyes. That was just the kind of person he was. Did he now expect me to go back to our family in India and smooth his path for him in some way? I felt renewed panic; it was he who had always had that kind of clout with our elders, not me! I thought of how hard it would be to take up Manichettan’s case, of the tears that would flow and the noisy recriminations that would follow. Would it be best to merely stay silent – as Manichettan himself had done all these years – so that he could cling to the happiness he had found for as long as he possibly could?

  The narrative voice here appeals to us for sympathy, nay, empathy. Is this mere rationalization or the ultimate glory of the story-teller? Would it be best to stay silent? So many of us do; even smugly.

  I return to Rukeyser’s statement: the universe is full of stories, not atoms. Yes, the atoms are there for sure – all the great scientists (Rutherford, Einstein) can’t be wrong. But Rukeyser’s is a quintessential observation – our stories are shrouded (note ‘shrouded’) in atomic silences and it is the writer’s special gift to give these silences a voice. All the writers in A Monsoon Feast do this with alacrity. And the articulations present us with not only a delectable invitation but also, I should add, a vexing trial. The
se are not stories for the weak-minded or weak-hearted for they tax our capacities for fellow-feeling; a humane response getting rarer and rarer.

  Kirpal Singh, noted poet, fictionist, critic, scholar, is currently with the Singapore Management University where he is Director of the Wee Kim Wee Centre.

  Foreword by Shashi Tharoor

  The Anxiety of Audience: Reflections Prompted by A Monsoon Feast

  The stories in this collection reflect an unusual meeting of two streams of post-colonial literary writing in English, those of Kerala and Singapore. Prof Kirpal Singh has looked at them with a Singaporean scholar’s eye; my perspective as a Malayali (as Keralites are called, since they speak Malayalam) is somewhat different. Though I am a Malayali and a writer, I am not a Malayali writer; my literary production has been entirely in English. That is true of the other Kerala writers represented in this volume. For us, the evocation of a Kerala sensibility occurs in a language other than that of the state’s famous literary tradition. To write of and from Kerala, but not to do so in Malayalam, involves a choice that some would argue is also a distancing.

  The Malayalam literary tradition goes all the way back to the 16th century efforts of the legendary Thunchath Ezhuthachan, who first established Malayalam as a literary language. He was born at a very different time, in an era where knowledge was the monopoly of a few and the transmission of culture was confined to a handful of Brahmins – a community to which Thunchath Ezhuthachan did not belong. Despite being born into a socially underprivileged caste – the Chakala Nairs – whose members were forbidden to learn the Vedas, he defied the ossified traditions of his time and both gently and firmly thwarted the attempts by the entrenched interests of the day to keep him away from learning. Thunchath Ezhuthachan mastered the Vedas and the Upanishads without the support, let alone the blessings, of the upper castes. In this, he captured the spirit of determination that all Keralites are proud of – the determination to overcome all obstacles in the pursuit of education and the development of culture. The thriving literary culture of Kerala is a reflection of this proud tradition. Despite not having undergone comparable struggles, the English-language writers represented in this volume are heirs to this cultural and literary legacy.

  But yes, they write in English. As a Malayali and a writer who is not a Malayali writer – and as a writer in English who is not English, but focuses very much on India – I am said to suffer from what one critic called ‘the anxiety of audience’. Whenever I am asked (which is more often than I would wish) to address listeners or readers about my writing, I have to confess I approach the task with some diffidence. Writers are supposed to write; we should leave the pontificating to the critics. But once in a while even writers are forced to think about their craft. And I suspect that many of the writers from Kerala you will encounter in these pages have been asked the question I find myself constantly answering: ‘Who do you write for?’

  The assumption behind the question is that there is something artificial and un-Indian about an Indian writing in English. I write about India in a language mastered, if the last census is to be believed, by only 2 per cent of the Indian population. There is an unspoken accusation implicit in the question: am I not guilty of the terrible sin of inauthenticity, of writing about my country for foreigners?

  This question has, for many years, bedevilled the work of the growing tribe of writers of what used to be called Indo-Anglian fiction and is now termed, more respectfully, Indian Writing in English. This is ironic, because few developments in world literature have been more remarkable than the emergence, over the last two decades, of a new generation of Indian writers in English. Beginning with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 1981, they have expanded the boundaries of their craft and of their nation’s literary heritage, enriching English with the rhythms of ancient legends and the larger-than-life complexities of another civilization, while reinventing India in the confident cadences of English prose. Of the many unintended consequences of the Empire, it is hard to imagine one of greater value to both colonizers and colonized.

  The new Indian writers dip into a deep well of memory and experience far removed from those of their fellow novelists in the English language. But whereas Americans, or Englishmen, or Australians have also set their fictions in distant lands, Indians write of India without exoticism, their insights undimmed by the dislocations of foreignness. And they do so in an English they have both learned and lived, an English of freshness and vigour, a language that is as natural to them as their quarrels at the school playground or the surreptitious notes they slipped each other in their classrooms.

  Those who level the charge of inauthenticity (usually in English) base themselves on a notion of ‘Indianness’ that is highly suspect. Why should the rural peasant or the small-town schoolteacher be considered more quintessentially ‘Indian’ than the pun-dropping collegian or the Bombay socialite who is as much a part of the Indian reality? India is a vast and complex country; in Whitman’s phrase, it contains multitudes. The world depicted in these stories is a very narrow slice of it, but it is Indian for all that. The critic M. K. Naik once suggested that the acid test ought to be: ‘Could this have been written only by an Indian?’ For most, though not all, of my stories, and certainly of my novels, I would answer that this could not only have been written only by an Indian, but only by an Indian in English. In that, and in the pleasure I hope the writing will impart, lies their principal vindication.

  But this is not an English aimed at foreigners. Much of my own writing emerges from a sensibility comparable to the writers in this volume: with one or two exceptions the concerns, assumptions, and language of my fiction all emerge from the consciousness of an urban Indian male who has grown up in metropolitan India. I write for anyone who will read me, but first of all for Indians like myself, Indians who have grown up speaking, writing, playing, wooing and quarrelling in English, all over India. (No writer really chooses a language: the circumstances of his upbringing ensure that the language chooses him.) Members of this class have entered the groves of academe and condemned themselves in terms of bitter self-reproach: one Indian scholar, Harish Trivedi, has asserted (in English) that Indian writers in that language are ‘cut off from the experiential mainstream, and from that common cultural matrix … shared with writers of all other Indian languages.’ Trivedi metaphorically cites the fictional English-medium school in a R. K. Narayan story whose students must first rub off the sandalwood-paste caste-marks from their foreheads before they enter its portals: ‘For this golden gate is only for the déraciné to pass through, for those who have erased their antecedents.’

  It’s an evocative image, even though I thought the secular Indian state was supposed to encourage the erasure of casteism from the classroom. But the more important point is that writers like myself do share a ‘common cultural matrix’, albeit one devoid of helpfully identifying caste-marks. It is one that consists of an urban upbringing and a pan-national outlook on the Indian reality. I do not think this is any less authentically ‘Indian’ than the worldviews of writers in other Indian languages. Why should the rural peasant or the small-town schoolteacher with his sandalwood-smeared forehead be considered more quintessentially Indian than the punning collegian or the Bombay socialite, who are as much a part of the Indian reality?

  I write of an India of multiple truths and multiple realities, an India that is greater than the sum of its parts. English expresses that diversity better than any Indian language precisely because it is not rooted in any one region of my vast country. At the same time, as an Indian, I remain conscious of, and connected to, my pre-urban and non-Anglophone antecedents: my novels reflect an intellectual heritage that embraces the ancient epic the Mahabharata, the Kerala folk dance called the ottamthullal (of which my father was a gifted practitioner) and the Hindi B-movies of ‘Bollywood’, as well as Shakespeare, Wodehouse and the Beatles.

  As a first-generation urbanite myself, I keep returning to the Kerala villages of m
y parents, in my life as in my writing. Yet I have grown up in Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi, Indian cities a thousand miles apart from each other; the mother of my children is half-Kashmiri, half-Bengali; and my own mother now lives in the Southern town of Kochi. This may be a wider cultural matrix than the good Dr Trivedi imagined, but it draws from a rather broad range of Indian experience. And English is the language that brings those various threads of my India together, the language in which my former wife could speak to her mother-in-law, the language that enables a Kashmiri to function in Kochi, the language that serves to express the complexity of that polyphonous Indian experience better than any other language I know.

  What is the Kerala tradition these writers draw from? Hailing from a land of forty-four rivers and innumerable lakes, with 1500 kilometres of ‘backwaters’, the Keralite bathes twice a day and dresses immaculately in white or cream. But she also lives in a world of colour: from the gold border on her off-white mundu and the red of her bodice to the burnished sheen of the brass lamp in her hand whose flame glints against the shine of her jewellery, the golden kodakaddakan glittering at her ear. Kerala’s women are usually simple and unadorned. But they float on a riot of colour: the voluptuous green of the lush Kerala foliage, the rich red of the fecund earth, the brilliant blue of the life-giving waters, the shimmering gold of the beaches and riverbanks.

  Yet there is much more to the Kerala experience than its natural beauty. Since my first sojourn as a child in my ancestral village, I have seen remarkable transformations in Kerala society, with land reform, free and universal education and dramatic changes in caste relations.

  It is not often that an American reference seems even mildly appropriate to an Indian case, but a recent study established some astonishing parallels between the United States and the state of Kerala. The life expectancy of a male American is 72, that of a male Keralite 70. The literacy rate in the United States is 95 per cent; in Kerala it is 96 per cent. The birth rate in the US is 16 per thousand; in Kerala it is 18 per thousand, but it is falling faster. The gender ratio in the United States is 1050 females to 1000 males; in Kerala it is 1040 to 1000, and that in a country where neglect of female children has dropped the Indian national ratio to 930 women for 1000 men. Death rates are also comparable, as are the number of hospital beds per 100,000 population. The major difference is that the annual per capita income in the US is about seventy times as much as that in Kerala.