Mridula Koshy

Seattle Reading: The Elliot Bay Book Company

2011-09-22T09:14:00.001+05:30

I love Seattle, but it's been years since I've been. The last time I was there, my son Saleem was three and got lost for two heart-stopping minutes in Pike Place market. Now he's 13, carries a mobile phone, a bus pass, and a library card--and he travels all over Portland by himself. All that, and he's a better blogger than me; you can find him here, at the Fool on the Hill.

This weekend, I'll be taking Saleem and the rest of the family to Seattle. Friday night, I'll be dancing at the Neptune: DJ Anjali and the Incredible Kid's World Tour in Seattle. Saturday night, I'll be reading at one of my favorite bookstores, the Elliot Bay Book Company. I'll be there a 7pm, and I expect to read from If It Is Sweet as well as my forthcoming novel. Do come if you can, and send along any friends you might know in the area.

For more information, check out the event page on Facebook.

If It Is Sweet: Australian edition and events

2011-09-05T02:47:00.003+05:30

I'm happy to say that If It Is Sweet has been brought out by Brass Monkey Books in Australia. Find out where to get the Australian edition here. It's a very different book--ten stories instead of seventeen and some quite different than they were in the original collection. I'm in Australia for two weeks, launching the book and participating in the Melbourne and Brisbane Writers Festivals.

Last week I spoke at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Here are the links my upcoming events in Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra and Sydney:

September 7, Canberra: Reading, Asia Bookroom, 6 pm.

September 8, Sydney: Conversation with Sunil Badami. Berkelouw Books, Leichhardt. 6 pm

September 10, Brisbane Writers Festival: "Almost Ordinary Stories"; panel discussion, 11:30 am.

September 10, Brisbane Writers Festival: "The Trouble with Feminism"; panel discussion, 2:30 pm.

September 11, Brisbane Writers Festival: "Short Story Writing"; workshop, 1:30 pm.

September 12, Melbourne: Panel discussion on the short story with Tony Birch and Catherine Harris. 6:30 pm.

Days of Roses

2011-05-01T17:22:00.000+05:30

My story "The Large Girl" is now available on line at Days of Roses, an interesting London-based site; do go have a look. The story has also appeared in 21 Under 40 (Zubaan, India, 2007) and Katha: Short Stories by Indian Women (Saqi, UK, 2007).

Ain't I a Woman?

2011-04-26T21:01:00.000+05:30

My most recent work of creative non-fiction,"Ain't I a Woman?," is on-line at Social Policy. Do go have a look. The piece originally ran in and ampersand, but they don't have an on-line archive.

tooth fairy

2011-02-11T08:32:00.003+05:30

The tooth fairy left Rs 50 under Akshay's pillow but forgot to collect the tooth. Akshay handed me the tooth this morning, politely stressing 'tooth fairy' as he made an observation about her increasing forgetfulness. Indeed the tooth fairy has left the wrong amount on a number of occasions and entirely forgotten to leave money on other occasions - resulting in a correspondence in which she has apologized and been forced into negotiations over late payment fines. I don't think the tooth fairy is headed toward dementia so much as she is troubled by living in a house without a roof. When I was a child we threw the tooth on the nearest roof - ours. Where we live now there is a flat stacked on top of our flat. And a small pile of ivory accumulating under the newspaper lining my almirah.

Now in Femina: 'The Opposite of Hate'

2011-01-09T14:46:00.000+05:30

'The Opposite of Hate," a short story in three parts, is currently running in Femina Magazine. The first part ran in the December 29 issue. The second part is on newsstands now, in the January 12 issue. The final part will run in the issue after that.

The form--a story broken into three equal parts--was challenging. But it's good to see Femina running a little literary fiction alongside fashion, diet and relationship stories.

Literature: What News from a Changing India

2011-01-03T18:50:00.001+05:30

I wrote this essay for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition INDIA AWAKENS Under the Banyan Tree, which was curated by Alka Pande and which showed last month at Vienna's Essl Museum.

***

Literature tells us who we are, and not in the merely static sense. Our constant state of flux requires our best stories to capture not only a moment in time, but to also articulate the relationship of that moment to the moment preceding it, and to be prescient about the moment yet to unfold. By travelling our imagination and not just our histories to reach us, our dreams and not just our destinies, literature tells us powerfully, dynamically, who we might become.

Literature is positioned to bring us news, then, of our changing selves. What news of a changing India? And what news of literature in India?

Indian literature is a vast ocean in which the currents of many languages and peoples swim. The 22 officially recognized languages in India and the dozens of other languages and dialects all have active literatures. A language like Malayalam, little known outside of India, is prolific in its literary output and deeply engaged with the world. Translated into Malayalam, Ishiguro and Clezio join Zacharia and Mukunden in chronicling the changing world of the Malayalam language reader. Some currents in Indian literature, those of Tamil literature for instance, are ancient. Sangam poetry, the body of classical Tamil literature was created somewhere between 600 BCE and 300 CE. It is not possible to here swim the entirety of this ocean.

If we confine ourselves to literary fiction written in English, we swim a small but powerful current. The Indian constitution, adopted in 1950, spelled an end to the colonially imposed rule of English over other Indian languages: in fifteen years, English was to be replaced by Hindi in the operation of the Indian government. India saw language riots through much of the 1960s and 1970s as new states came into being, arguing for linguistic boundaries instead of those old boundaries convenient to the administration of colonial rule.

To this day there is no agreement about what language can replace English. It continues to hold sway, not only as the language through which the rule of law is administered and adjudicated, but also as the language of commerce, and yes, as the language of power. It is the language of India’s elite.

Until recently, those who wrote in English faced the charge of perpetuating the oppression of the colonial era. More seriously still, the argument went, it was not possible to authentically express Indian reality in this alien language. This argument was stood on its head with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnights Children, a novel that wrote the story of India in an English so charged with the emotions of Indian life, the very language was reshaped in the service of its story. The exuberant English that emerged had its precedent in the earlier All About H. Hatterr by G.V. Desani. It was literary English that took its frisson by making bold alliance with the Indian-English of the streets, that language which is laid over by the syntactical imprint of so many other Indian languages.

In the years since Midnight’s Children, the flexibility of Indians writing in English has only been matched by the seemingly inexhaustible malleability of English. A generation removed from his Indian roots, Daljit Nagra makes use of this malleability to tell a specifically Indian story of migration in his collection of poetry, Look We Have Coming to Dover.

This innovative use of English unfortunately belies the staid nature of much of Indian English writing. It is an exceedingly small group of Indians who are in a position to read literary fiction in English. At its broadest, the number of people reading in English does not exceed seven to eight million, drawn from of a population of more than a billion. Indian writer’s, cut off as they are from a wider readership at home, are particularly vulnerable to the cultural power of the west, about which the writer Pankaj Misra says, it ‘determines the artistic worth of, and, more importantly confers commercial value upon, work from places peripheral to the west.’

One important implication of western power in the making of writing careers is the resulting and overwhelming influence on the writer’s rendering of the home culture. The success of a work like Khaled Hosseini’s Kite Runner, which won popular and critical acclaim in the west for its Afghani-origin writer, sends a message that any critical look at a society formed by a fundamentalist reading of Islam must be drawn in such broad brushstrokes as Hosseini rendered the Taliban leadership. The villainy of his characters extends to paedophilia. Of course the implications at the philosophical level are disastrous: can evil ever be subtle and difficult to pin down, or is it always so obvious, so unsubtle, as in Hosseini’s depiction?

Too many Indian writers are immured in the broad brushstroke approach to Indian-ness. A generation and more have expended energy on a sort of anthropological writing, handling as curiosities what would otherwise be mundane – bindis, bangles and arranged marriage. Deciding how much of an India unfamiliar to the west may enter a work if it is to find success abroad is a constantly negotiated question for the Indian writer in English. Like Hosseini, some of these writers are immigrants to the US, while others live for extended periods of time in the west. The migrant writer is in this case like other migrant workers, someone forced by the economics of a global marketplace to travel where the work is. But the writer is unlike any other worker in that his work is determined by its accountability to audience. If there is any substance to the notion of authenticity, it rests here in the question of accountability. Nadine Gordimer said of African writing, ‘One must look at the world from Africa, to be an African writer, not look upon Africa from the world.’

Lost in the devotion to the ‘quaint’ story of India, in the accountability to the western, not Indian audience, is the answer to the question of inequity that confronts Indian society at every other turn. The Indian writer in English is a latecomer to the shifting understanding of who this nation belongs to, what story can be told about it, and how a nation fissured, as India is, can even see its way to a whole story.

Arundathi Roy’s God of Small Things is an exquisite attempt to respond to these questions, to write into and against the schismatic nature of India. Love, this work argues, cannot be forbidden. The violent end of their mother’s forbidden love for an untouchable handyman is borne witness by twin children. They are separated, and separately endure the resultant shattering of their childhood, coming together in adulthood to violate the taboo against incest: re-enacting forbidden love. The very beauty of writing in this novel is a heartrending testament to the beauty that ultimately cannot be in life. As in life, even so in the novel, love cannot address systemic violence. In the thirteen years since the novel was written, the liberalization of the economy undertaken in 1991 has caused such rampant pillaging of the resources of the nation for the benefit of the few that Roy has said of India that it is cannibalising itself. It is significant that in the years since God of Small Things Roy has confined herself to writing non fiction.

Is the prescience of fiction, celebrated at the outset of this piece, telling us that the violence of divisions in India dooms this nation, as Roy’s characters are, to a shattered existence? Is it telling us the time for fiction is past? In answer to the former question we can only conclude that it’s hard to know, and not because Roy’s ambition for her work is limited. Not because The God Of Small Things fails to map the emotions of the nation, to fetch forth a language equal to the task of political engagement with our ideals, and certainly not for failing in its accountability to write from India. The failure here is external to the novel. A novel, however brilliant, can only project one fraction of the whole story. Though writers are celebrated for the introspective loneliness they suffer to make possible the act of creation, writing is a collective process, engaged in a dynamic relationship with the equally collective process of reading. Writers write together, deriving meaning and purpose for their work in their understanding of who else they are writing with and against.

Once again, we are back with the seven to eight million in India who have fluency in English. Of this group how many can write in the language? The national curriculum finds in English a language meaningful only for the access it provides to the commercial and bureaucratic worlds. It is not taught as the language of access to the self. When the possibility of introspection is cut off, literature is lost, lost even to those fluent in the language.

Few literary titles in English are released in India each year.

It follows that the brilliant and the skewed co-exist without the interaction necessary for critical understanding to develop, for light to be shed. Arvind Adiga’s recent readings of Indian society in The White Tiger finds a society beset by the anxiety that the oppressed may yet have their day, and possibly a murderous one. Adiga presents this anxiety so that it may then be allayed. When Balram murders his oppressive master, it is only after Adiga establishes him as singularly possessed of injured dignity, and therefore deserving of his rebelliousness. The very singularity of our hero makes impossible the notion of widespread rebellion.

There is, meanwhile, widespread rebellion in central and north India, organized anger in the form of Maoist insurgencies. In Kashmir, two decades of a separatist movement has been met with ferocity by the State. There are over a half million soldiers of the Indian army in a place where the overall population is 7.6 million.

Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie’s fictional effort at telling Kashmir’s story, sets up a masterful allegory of triangulated love—the Muslim boy, the Hindu girl and the interloping American who steals away the girl. But it is a thin tale that turns a boy into a Jihadi to avenge his lost love. Basharat Peer’s recent Curfewed Nights is a compelling and timely non-fiction account employing novelistic elements to provide a more substantial understanding of how thwarted dignity (and not love) can result in violence.

Every piece of writing needs its corrective. But Indian writing in English is not yet informed by the critical mass necessary for a multifaceted viewing of Indian society—as it believes itself to be, as it imagines it wants to be. What we are denied is very real: the story of our engagement with violence is not only the story of Shalimar’s personal vendetta finding form in ideological violence, or Balram, broken bottle in hand retaliating against his master’s annihilating violence, but also the story of all the Balrams who don’t resort to murder, and the story of the many for whom violence is a collective, not individual weapon.

As writing and reading in English takes off in India, the resultant literature will shake off the political and cultural constraints that keep it from writing those stories that more fully write our common humanity. In the polarised world outside literature, the search for truth is about the business of one truth demolishing another. It is precisely because fiction is not in the business of truth, or at least not in the business of the one truth, that it achieves its paradoxical freedom to hold onto multiple truths. The fallacy that finds shape in the world outside fiction, the fallacy that we do not share a common humanity, finds its correction in fiction. The news from India: it is not past the time for fiction.

Christmas Stories: Just in time for the holidays

2010-12-20T11:26:00.002+05:30

I finally went out and bought a copy of Christmas Stories, Scholastic's new collection for children. My story 'Saleem on Earth' is the first one in the book and my kids all liked it--they had to, of course. Akshay and Saleem have read all the stories, and I promise to soon. In addition to my story, the kids highly recommend 'Inappropriate Christmas Behaviour' by Kenny DB.

You can buy one in India through Friends of Books or directly from the Scholastic site. I'm giving copies to my children's teachers for Christmas.

Indian Bites - Celebrating 25 Years of Wasafiri

2010-12-12T22:30:00.000+05:30

The lineup for Wasafiri's 25th anniversary special on India includes my story, ‘Romancing the Koodawallah’. Follow this link to purchase a copy. There are twenty writers in this special, including:

Ganeswar Mishra’s fable ‘The Democratic Crabs’

Jeet Thayil’s Poem ‘The Eye’

Vikram Seth’s Poem ‘The Comfortable Classes at Work and Play’

Satyendra Srivastava’s Poem ‘The Ticket’

Debjani Chatterjee’s Poem ‘Visiting E M Forster’

Keki Daruwalla’s Poem ‘Among Friends’

The Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 2010

2010-12-07T22:19:00.000+05:30

The Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize honours the memory of Shakti Bhatt. I knew her as a friend and as an inspired editor and writer. The only prize of its kind in India, it awards a sum of one lakh to the best first book each year.

This year the prize goes to Samanth Subramanian for Following Fish.

It was selected from a short list that included Homeboy by HM Naqvi, House on the Mall Road by Mohyna Srinivasan, Songs of Blood and Sword, A Daughter's Memoir by Fatima Bhutto, The Wish Maker by Ali Sethi and Delhi Calm by Vishwajyoti Ghosh. The judges - playwright Mahesh Dattani, writer and surgeon Kalpana Swaminathan and writer Ruchir Joshi - were unanimous in their selection of Following Fish.

The prize ceremony is open to the public. Please do come. For more information go here.

2010 Pride Parade, Delhi

2010-11-29T21:05:00.000+05:30

Photo credits: Akshay Koshy.

In this photo, Surya and I.

My eldest son asked me why anyone would care what happens in the privacy of someone's bedroom, which led to a discussion about how one's sexual orientation, whatever it may be, is a part of one's whole life, not just one's life in the bedroom.

My middle son wanted to know why should we care about gay people.This led to a discussion about the people we know who identify as queer. It took a second for the lights to go on, because he had forgotten to remember this aspect of their identity. We talked about the idea that some people we know and love may not be out.

My daughter had no trouble understanding that when we allow one group of people to be targeted for hate then none of us are safe.

It was a great day. We talked a lot., but we never did get around to discussing the fact that historically the queer community has been present in civil rights struggles all over the world. Six years ago, when I first attended the Narmada Andolan rallies at Jantar Mantar, I saw Delhi's GLTB community out in force. I was happy to be in this city.

Happy Pride, Delhi!

The most beautiful woman in the world

2010-11-14T14:13:00.001+05:30

My story, "The most beautiful woman in the world," is in Social Policy this fall. Social Policy is a US based magazine that has been bringing together progressive academics, activists, and organizers for thirty years.

This story can be described as creative non-fiction: though the names of the workers have been changed, the story is based on an actual organizing campaign which took place in eastern Oregon something like a dozen years ago.

Social Policy will bring out another creative non fiction piece, "Aint I A Woman," that I originally wrote for Ampersand magazine in their Women's Day Issue. I will publish the link to that story when the next issue is out.

I have two children's stories coming out in anthologies for the ten to fourteen year old crowd. Scholastic's Christmas Stories should be in bookstores soon. You can buy it online here. Look for my story, "Saleem On Earth." Wisdom Tree is doing an anthology on school days featuring "Warp Speed" by yours truly. I'll post a link when it comes out.

Finally, you can read "Crowd at the Junction," an excerpt from my forthcoming novel, over at Pratilipi.

Footpath

2010-09-05T21:46:00.000+05:30

Here's an Independence Day piece I wrote for the Indo Asian News Service. It ran first here.

Yesterday, I traveled on Khel Gaon Road in New Delhi, alongside construction for the Commonwealth Games. A footpath was being built there by hand. A six year old child brought head-loads of brick balanced on a wooden board, two bricks to a load. She seemed cheerful and sturdy as she moved between the mountainous pile of bricks she was disassembling and the woman to whom she delivered them.

I thought to myself, this is a game a child is playing to occupy herself while her mother is at work. It is a shame she must play with such heavy and dangerous weights. The contractors, the government, someone needed to have provided a crèche or school where she might assemble and disassemble the light wooden blocks meant for children’s play. Then I saw the woman look up from the ground where she had finished affixing a brick. I saw her urge the girl on. I saw the girl hurry to and back from the pile. I saw the girl tilt her head mid-run as she discovered three bricks do not balance as well as two. I saw a smile accompany this discovery and I saw her wince, as well. I saw the woman return the smile, and take the bricks from the child.

How long will it take the child to deliver the rest of the bricks? It is late afternoon. Late for the child, the woman, who is perhaps her mother. It is late now for all of us, for our nation. We walk the footpaths built by our children. We complain the footpaths buckle under our feet, the bricks laid hastily atop gravel that has been tamped poorly. The hands at work are so light.

It is late: our hearts grow harder, daily.

Shortlist

2010-07-26T22:29:00.000+05:30

I was very happy to learn that If It Is Sweet made the fiction shortlist for the Vodafone Crossword Book Prize. The other four books on the fiction list are here.

Taking a Break

2010-04-29T17:10:00.000+05:30

I'm taking a break from blogging to find an agent and a publisher for the novel I recently completed.

In the meantime, I've reorganized this site and will continue to keep it updated. For upcoming events and readings, as well as a list of past events, look here. For my current contact information, go here.

I'll continue to post links and things on my Facebook fan page, which you can find here.

Grumpings

2010-03-30T16:00:00.000+05:30

I wrote this back in January and forgot about it. Still here's my much outdated grumpings about year end lists.

I like these end of year lists. Partly because they make me grouchy. That is, I am happy to sit in bed dunking banana bread in coffee then munching, then grumping, then loving grumping at the various barbaric picks of barbaric pickers of best of books lists.

How? How, I ask again, can anyone consider Cormac McCarthy's The Road worthy of inclusion in any list other than perhaps a list of books that roasts babies on spits for effect. Yes, for effect. Do writers sometimes abuse readers? Yes. Do some readers find happiness in being abused? Sadly, yes.

I am also made grouchy because the various year end lists restrict list makers to year of publication or this being the end of a decade, the decade of publication. But what if the books you read in the last year that absolutely will haunt you for years to come were published not last year, nor even last decade, but oh decades ago.

Independent People by Haldor Laxness. The book was published in 1946. He went on to win the Noble Prize. Oh the appalling humor of the small life crushed by enormous planetary weights --that of nature, class, unweening pride, and sheep. Yes, sheep. It is no small feat to raise sheep. A complex enough life can be lived in the pursuit of this labour. And thats pretty much what the book is about - the complexity of life and sheep. The language of this book is rich, alluding to traditions Icelandic as well as those merely human. The business of writing from a place so remote it may well be a place of myth--writing from there as if it were in fact the very place one must turn to take the pulse of the universe, is what makes this book an object lesson to the IWE (Indian Writing in English) writer. Do you think if Laxness were to have written in English there would have been an Icelandic version of the IWE debate? The same acronym would have conveniently applied, but I think not.

Murakami. I discovered him in the 2000s. But my favourites by him were published before then. Still what matters in all of his books (even in those less favourite ones written in the correct decade for the purpose of list making) is the atmosphere he creates. Yes, he is definitely an atmospheric writer. But his is the understated atmosphere of our lives. I have yet to read any writer who does more for pinning down the mood of loneliness. No, not the existential loneliness, not the madness of the loneliness that haunts Kafka or Coetzee but the very very quiet horror of the loneliness that all of us live. Murakami cracks that hard nut to persuades us there is sweet meat within.

I read Coetzee's Foe and his Youth years ago. I think, in fact, Youth was published in the last decade. An insipid book. It is the subject that determines the book. But I read his much older (1978) In the Heart of the Country about two years ago. I was stunned by the depth of his understanding of everything under the sun, but especially about the way in which racism and insanity go hand in hand. But understanding isn't everything. Insight is what I prize in writing, but the art of writing is inseperable from the ideas of the writer. That is each writer has to create the language in which the hitherto unimagined idea can be expressed. Coetzee does this beautifully profoundly.

Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans. Heartbreaking. Perhaps one of my favourite books ever. Also, his Never Let Me Go.

Another book I value for its mood of surpressed horror - Paumk's Snow.

Hemon's The Lazarus Project is mentioned by many list makers. The book is valuable in so many ways. Not the least among them his matter of fact deployment of odd syntax--as if writing in other than standard English is not something to be feared.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders--I admire Daniyal Mueenuddin's craft. And am a little too envious of it. This is getting confessional. So will stop here. Or I will stray too close to home, to those writers who I not only envy but actually see around town.

Books I want to read:

Breyten Breytenbach's Intimate Stranger - I'm midway through Intimate Stranger and very moved to be addressed so directly by a book. Neither the writer nor the reader is anonymous in Breytenbach'swork.)
Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History
Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence

When will it rain?

2010-03-20T22:16:00.000+05:30

She drops us in a depression scratched into the base of the kitchen wall, outside the London Blessing Party Hall Your Wedding Needs Are Ours. Ahead of us stretches the empty lot, then Khirki Gaanv. Behind us, on the other side of the wall, ten hundred thousand lights are not lit at Select City Mall.

A rip current travelling the planet’s skin sends its tremors ahead. We quake. We cling to that wall. But the tide subsides in the fine mesh of Khirki’s labyrinthine turns, so that crossing the empty lot it laps us, milk lapping a saucer. How do I know milk lapping a saucer? I dreamed it in the womb, my mother’s dream.

Little gusts remain to kick and fuss, to blow softly into our blind eyes the news: plaster and oil, salt and cud of grass, thread of down loosened in flight from young bird’s breast. Twitch nose and sniff for meaning.

The dissipated tide gathers force, roars its growth. We are flat, not against the wall, but fused to it. She stands over us. We think it must stop now, it cannot draw closer; closer and its dragon scales shine and metal heat sickles us, now we are in its belly. Still the roar grows. Till it stands still. This is the world we will inhabit. But no, it recedes.

She curls us to her with her tongue, licks the wet from our birth. Her tongue, it tells us, who have lived till now, six-headed and many limbed. What? We yawn our gape: one ear pointed north, is gone.

We, squirming tumble, submit. Five headed, and how many limbs? The scent of ginger leaves, dragging himself across the lot on three. Already he is a shimmer there, watching us forget him.

She comforts us with a story. This dirt that blows will turn to mud come the next rain. Swamp us in moist music. She promises new smells and a new season. An ecstasy of wagging threatens to shake us loose from our mouthful. She frets her story to do more, to warn us: when the dust shapes into metal and roar, when the tide advances…. But we won’t listen. We are busy learning to suck while swallowing while defeating the weight of our tongue while kneading while puling.

We solve the mystery of the sun..

Eagerness in our quivering knees. She leads us between yellow walls. Twist, she barks. Slop pots empty from overhead. She is nose lost in fetid piles. We are curious. So this is her bliss. Everywhere small lights quench. Sigh and rustle, man and woman embrace. The moon slides across the carom board sky. Onward the joy. Bound, stumble, prostrate. Feel it passing over us, gray lace, the trailing of night’s hem.

Day. And night. Day.

She takes us somewhere—the place where there was a shimmer, and ginger. There is nothing, just a bloating. She tries again to teach us. We learn flattening, slinking. She, poor storyteller, is wisdom.

Then how is it the two in the middle—always quarrelling over the same teat—shrivel together, grow bones? We, two remaining, find each other across the sudden chasm between far teats, synchronize our heat beats.

Time is an accordion that never opening, closes. She tells us, Learn to read. Outside the meat shop, H-a-la-l. The rooster pecks at sinew glistening on cement floor. The curved knife is straddled to halve, quarter, no more. Next door—East West Suits Fusion Frocks. We halt our way through N-I-G-H-T-A-N-G-A-L-E-R-O-S-E.

Are these the words for the man who stands under them, arms curved to call us? What is that in his arm? Let those among you who are without curiosity remain blameless. We don’t yet know to read DL2CAA0009 crowned with silver, festooned with the wrong flower.

Torn petals of marigold, drift between us. My heart is a stranger I watch take a step and then two, and the arm carves a smile there, in the belly, now spills a mass, dark into the dust. Wields a stick wields a nail driven through yields a shoulder yields a last step, no more. Silver speeds and the band plays bouncing notes from trombones, cymbals, boys with drums. Rat-tat-tat. N-I-G-H-T-A-N-G-A-L-E-R-O-S-E rolls ponderously over the dark dust. The rooster finds nothing, not gristle.

She noses me from her. I lay my head on the ground. Nnnnnn, I whimper. She snaps her teeth at me to go where I smell what the rooster couldn’t see. When I turn the walls have finished leaning in; she dwindles in the distance.

I go, back to the beginning. Under the cracked sky the leer of balcony railing overhanging crooked streets turning. I turn their alphabet shapes—L, S and T, cross the empty lot, find the depression scratched into the base of London Blessing Party Hall Your Wedding Needs Are Ours. I read the shape of the beginning the shape of the ending. I turn and turn and turn this map, my tail to my nose to my tail, searching for many heads many limbs. I tamp the ground. Here it comes now, my thinking, here it comes one ear pointing north, not yielding. I want to see the next rain.

First published at I'm a Bhopali.

Blog List Update

2010-02-01T18:46:00.000+05:30

I've added several new blogs to my sidebar. I now have separate lists for fashion blogs and for blogs about politics and the environment.

My favorite new addition is my son Saleem's blog, The Last Resort.

Read and enjoy!

Reading this Sunday, January 17

2010-01-13T21:51:00.001+05:30

I'll be reading at the Friends of Books Book Swap & Meet this Sunday. It looks to be a lot of fun, and I hope to see you there--details are below.

While I'm on the subject, let me give a shout out for the Friends of Books : they are an on-line book lending service. Friends of Books is a little bit like a video rental outfit, except you get better service--and best of all you get books!

BOOK SWAP & MEET

Date:	Sunday, January 17, 2010
Time:	12:00pm - 4:00pm
Location:	Amphi Theatre, India Habitat Centre

Come exchange books with other booklovers, meet authors, story telling for kids and readings and discussions for adults.

PROGRAMME DETAILS:

Ongoing 12:00-4:00 Book Swap

12:30- 1:00
Devika Rangachari reads from her book Harsh Vardhana
(Age group: Teenagers and Young Adults)

1:00 -1:30
Mridula Koshy will be the reading fairy with a picture book for three to six year olds. Enter the world of imagination, wonder and good ol’ story telling!

1:30- 2:00
Open Mic- FriendsOfBooks invites you to read, recite, sing or perform. Participants get a special FriendsOfBooks gift. (Email cs@friendsofbooks.com, if you can so we can come prepared enough goodie bags!)

2:00- 2:30
Mridula Koshy and Arunava Sinha in conversation

2:30-3:00
Steven Rudolph performs, entertains all the while helping you understand your unique nature and true potential.

3:00-3:30
TREE performs Eigdah by Munshi Premchand

3:30-4:00
Aditya Sudarshan and Sidin Vadukut in conversation

For more information, check the Friends of Books website or go to the Facebook event page.

Year End

2010-01-02T17:56:00.000+05:30

I can't believe I've made it on to a year-end list. Manjushree Thapa said this in her Best Fiction article in ekantipur.com:

"So much of the English literature coming out of India today is marred by its authors’ inability to take pleasure in language. (Which, if you think about it, is quite self-defeating.) If It Is Sweet by Mridula Koshy is an important corrective to this. Every story of this collection shines like a cut-and-polished gemstone lodged in the finest of settings."

It's past the year-end, but I'll have my list out soon.

2009-12-10T09:02:00.000+05:30

Night before last I dreamt I was swimming. As so often happens in dreams I was both able to inhabit my body and step away from it. Looking through my eyes, I saw the world underwater. It was murky and beautiful, and within my dream, dreamlike. From far away at treetop level I saw me below, floating on the surface of what must have been a forest pool. I was back-stroking, moving languidly, creating ripples around me. Then I woke.

I cant swim. Not in real life. So this should have been a most delicious dream. My kids have those flying dreams that only children can have. Listening to them talk afterward, I conclude there is pleasure in dreaming of the impossible.

But swimming... My children can all swim. I change the subject when they bring up my inability. I act blase because I fear them seeing how poor I feel about this thing I can't do.

I woke up from my dream of swimming and immediately felt how sad it was to dream of the possible as if it were impossible.

After the Fall

2009-11-27T13:21:00.000+05:30

This is a longer version of a piece I wrote for the Indian Express. You can see the on-line version here.

The Bible of my childhood was beautiful: covered in maroon leather, gold tooled, gilt edged, and illustrated with magnificent colour plates. Did it have marbled end pages? Possibly. There definitely were pages for recording the happenings of many generations of family life—births, marriages, deaths. We, a family displaced and dispossessed, were too abashed to touch these pages. I read through all the other pages—the glorious and the gory, the ones that made me weep and the ones that made me squirm. I was nine then, and ten when we moved and lost the Bible. With the passing years the memory of the actual book grew grander in an effort to keep up with the resonant power of the stories contained within.

Recently I have been reading aloud from the Books of Samuel and Kings to my seven, nine and eleven year olds. The emotions contained within are unparalleled in any other work of literature. We have King Saul’s love of the young David, followed by his jealous rage when David surpasses him in the people’s eyes. Saul chases David into fields, David chases Saul into caves. In the crucial moment, neither can bear to kill the other. The plot thickens as David is rescued by Saul’s son Jonathan, who loves David ‘as if his life depended on him; he loved him as he loved himself.’

Many chapters and stories later when David is king over all of Israel and Saul and Jonathan are cruelly dead, when David is done sending Uriah to certain death so he can take Uriah’s wife Bathsheba to bed, when his son Amnon rapes his daughter Tamar, and when another son Absalom, brother of Tamar, kills Amnon, and turns on David, the text grows silent as David’s tens of thousands march against Absalom. There is no carnage written into the pages, just David’s grief, the grief of a man who lost his first love so many years before, betrayed and killed many others, and now hearing the news of his son’s death weeps: ‘My son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you, Absalom, my son, my son!’ As a writer I can see the value of where the narrative slips underground to emerge further on in the story, with a roar.

Some Recent Blog Love

2009-11-27T12:20:00.000+05:30

I really love getting blog reviews. Often literary blogs are written by fellow writers, and always by avid and discerning readers. Here are three blog reviews and one interview that have come in recently.

This book is a delight to read. Koshy is a wonderful stylist; her style is exactly right for the short story: evocative, finished and allusive. In her plots, she is not afraid to be twisted, and she mixes the surreal and the gritty with aplomb.
-- Rimi Chatterjee's blog, Live Like a Flame

I collect books and have a special fondness for short story anthologies, like many genuine readers out there. And like them, I too have this habit of reading passages, chapters and stories again and again. I know that I will read these stories again sometime in the future. There are some authors one can return to. Mridula Koshy is one of them.
-- Rumjhum Biswas' blog, Writers & Writerisms

Koshy’s writing is a hurricane, words swirling around with such intensity around the reader who she situates within the calm of the eye.

--Words Uttered in Haste

I am always surprised by the things that come out of my mouth. It seems yet again it is about the meaning of work in our lives. I think this has a lot to do with where I live.
My Little Magazine: Interview

A Writerly Crush

2009-11-15T14:28:00.000+05:30

I am crushing on a writer after such a long time. And like any other crush the full enjoyment can only be had by not knowing too much about Breyten Breytenbach. I keep bumping into him. Mostly in Harper's magazine. Its a thrill everytime. And why not? He is lucid and learned. He presents difficult truths in language that is tender. An earlier essay comparing Mandela and Obama, strung together marvellous sayings from African languages - Cameroonian, Hausa, Rwandan. Who can do this without sounding cheesy and acquisitive? Only someone of exquisite sensitivity.

This excerpt is from a more lengthy excerpt of an essay published in the September 2009 issue of Harper's Magazine. The full essay appears in his collection, Intimate Stranger. As for me, I am going to stop hoping to bump into him, take a little more control in this relationship, and buy the book

Unfortunately, as we know, large sectors of humanity (let's call these sectors "cultures" for the sake of convenience) are led to believe that in the beginning there was Truth, and maybe innocence, and all of history since then is a sorry story of decadence and decay. When any culture, however rich or ancient, is but a confirmation of prejudices or the conservation and parroting of so-called truths, it is doomed to be exclusive, voracious, totalitarian, ultimately fundamentalist. I am not referring here only to known expressions of fundamentalist monotheism, although I'd venture to say that monotheism inevitably predisposes to fundamentalism and thus to intolerance.

Let me jump (I said): When the president of the United States and the prime minister of Britain suggest that September 11 was an attack on civilization, they are in effect equating civilization with globalization (which is but the married name of whorish expansionist capitalism), and therefore by implication making a case for Western global fundamentalism.

For my part, I don't believe that "revealed" Truth is ever innocent or benevolent. It can be dangerously evil. For me, the story of mankind is the nomadic search for many, many truths along harsh roads bordered with the flesh and bones and the apparitions of truths long since eaten by birds; it is looking for truths to fill a grumbling stomach, and spitting them out like pebbles when they have lost their flavor.

My time at Toji

2009-10-19T19:37:00.000+05:30

Some pictures from my stay a the Toji Cultural Centre in rural South Korea. The trip started with a two day stay in Seoul, but I had no camera and took no pictures. Seoul was exciting to be in. It's such a cosmopolitan city. I got to see some of the arts, historical sites, etc. Toji, in contrast, was isolated. These pictures were taken by Roselyne Sibille and Gihan Omar, two of the writers I met while at Toji.

A good place to write, upstairs from my room. I did very little other than write.

Mornings in the mountains were cool and misty.

There was Cosmos growing everywhere by the roadside.

The trees were crooked.

Surrounded by rice fields.

I just missed the harvest festival, which fell the weekend after I left. One evening, walking in the village where Toji is located, we stumbled upon young people in what turned out to be the area's community centre. They were rehearsing their performances on traditional musical instruments in preparation for the festival. Nearly every village in the countryside has a similar gathering place.

We set off on a four hour hike.

So much depends upon a yellow wheelbarrow.

I found this mushroom while on the hike.

Grave sites, freshly mowed in preparation for the upcoming festival.

The tunnel we chased after.

At the height of the hike, we looked down upon Toji.

Dinner before a reading.

Jars of kimchee fermenting in the sun.

We ate the fragrance of pine needles.

Sweets afterward.

Second Edition

2009-09-05T11:12:00.000+05:30

I'll be in Korea, working on my novel, for the rest of September. I'll be taking a break from Facebook and book tours; I may update my blog once or twice, and I will check my email, but that's about it. Thanks to the Toji Cultural Center , ARKO (Arts Council Korea) and InKo for generously funding my stay at Toji. Before going, I wanted to give you an update on recent events.

If It Is Sweet continues to do well; so well that it has gone into it's second printing. Also, as you may have heard, it was shortlisted last week for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize.

If you want one of the last few first edition copies still available, now is the time to head to the bookstore or place your order on-line--links to on-line stores are at the bottom of this update. If you are outside of India , Amazon is your only option; so far they've been pretty good at getting the orders out in time, even if they are out of stock when you order.

I enjoyed my trip to Chennai and Bangalore. The audiences were large and a pleasure to read to. Thanks to all of you who came to events and especially to you who bought the book! There were stories in most of the major Southern papers--The Hindu, the Deccan Herald, The New Indian Express, the Chennai Times, and The News Today. Most of the coverage was good. Links to my favorite two are below; I'm not giving you the link to the story that said I was both a "Communist" (who writes with "a Marxian ideolgy and feminism in mind") and a "loving mother." You'll have to spend some time with google it if you want to read that. There was also some very nice blog coverage--links to which are below, as well.

If you have a blog and would like to review the book or interview me, please let me know. So far, I've enjoyed visiting Aspi's Drift and Blotting Paper. Similarly, I'm happy to meet with book clubs in Delhi once I return to India --or to answer questions electronically.

Press Highlights:

The Hindu

Deccan Herald

Recent Blog Coverage:

Aspi's Drift (interview):

Writers and Writerisms (report on Chennai launch):

Anindita Sengupta (report on Bangalore launch):

Bliss (photos from Bangalore launch):

HOW TO BUY THE BOOK:
OUTSIDE OF INDIA (Amazon in most countries can get it):
Amazon US

Amazon UK

IN INDIA--Go to your local bookstore, or buy online:
Friends of Books
Flipkart

This tiger needs cat food: What Aravind Adiga can learn from District 9

2009-08-29T15:27:00.000+05:30

Fear the other. And the natural extension of that fear will be the fear of becoming the other.The fear of becoming not human. One way of understanding cannibalism is to see it as an exercise in exorcising this horror. Eat the inhuman other to conquer your fear of becoming the inhuman other. Another possibility is write your way into that horror, then write your way out. That is, write your way into a novel where the protagonist is you but trapped in the body of the other, now write your protagonist out of that horror. You will successfully digest the other, and retain your untroubled self.

I finally read Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. Lovely title, but an unlovely book. Others have taken the book apart for its pedestrian prose. I trust still others have not failed to point out the strong storytelling. I don’t need to cover these points. I want to talk instead about Adiga’s ideas in this book, particularly his ideas around how one becomes human, or as he puts it cutely, an entrepreneur.

To begin with—Adiga's use of the lone protagonist. And true, the novel as a form lends itself to the use of a lone protagonist. But when Adiga seems to be telling us his car driver, Balram Halwai, is part of a dehumanised class, confined to "the chicken coop", to then see the same Balram set apart from his class, is problematic. Balram alone desires to sit in a lotus position and meditate, to give up paan and spitting, to give up groin scratching, to set himself apart even to the extend of taking a room apart from his compatriots. In the last instance he would rather sleep with cockroaches than his fellow human beings. He alone is possessed of fury. They, the other drivers, are content to spit on the seats of the men they drive, and to gouge their “masters” at every opportunity, siphoning petrol, or selling their whiskey empties on the black market. Our Balram is alone in the scale of his fury and in the scale of his disquiet over that fury. Should he or should he not kill his master?

We know from the first pages that he does in fact kill his master. Nothing is lost in this upfront revelation; this is not a whodunit, it is a howdunit—how does one kill, fly the coop, become human? And Adiga’s story-telling abilities carry us along, arousing our interest in how the murder will be carried out. The Landlord class is portrayed as living in fear of being killed off by those they abuse. Because we, the readers, know Mr Ashok will be killed, we are in thrall to a horror similar to the one the landlord class lives with. How and when will it happen? What will the weapon of choice be? Will it be bloody? Merciful? An act undercut by remorse or one that is vindictive?

This book is not confused about the heinous nature of the landlord class. The landlords are capable of holding the families of their servants (toddlers and grandmothers) hostage, trusting the proximity of these family members—their availability for torture, rape and maiming—will act as deterrence to their own end at the hands of the abused servant. Interestingly this is where reference is made to another kind of organized anger that does exist in India – the Naxals, we are told, did kidnap and kill one of the landlord babies. But this is a book about the anger of our lone hero, not the anger of a class of people, so this reference to the Naxals is a passing one.

Adiga is a master at getting the reader to identify with the perspective of his characters. So much so that there is no critical distance between the reader’s eye, Adiga’s eye and the character’s eye. Fused into one, the reader sees as Balram does the villainy of landlords who in drunken fits drive their car over little children and then don’t hesitate to bribe and manipulate their way out of the situation. But what happens when this close identification has the reader observing the world of the working poor through landlord eyes? What happens when what the landlord believes about the servant is always borne out by what the servant does? The servant will lie. He does.The servant will steal. He does. The servant will kill. He does.

The Indian middle/upper class reader, and possibly the one abroad, will flinch in responsive horror when Balram, interrupted mid-piss on the roadside by a loudspeaker announcement to return his master's car to the hotel entrance, hastily turns away from the task at hand, wiping wet fingers on his pants. Who has not flinched at the implications for their own health in dealing with a class of people denied access to the bathroom? How does one eat a gol gappe from a street vendor’s hand or turn one’s baby over to an ayah without engaging for a split second with that horror? The instinct behind the horror is a self-preserving one. In life, this initial instinct to protect one’s own stomach, one’s own baby, not the stomachs and babies of the working poor, can eventually open the way to an engagement that is broader than the self. In this novel, however, the instinct remains confined to self-preservation.

If Balram is the human Adiga purports to present him as, then where does Adiga work to create that disquiet in the reader necessary to seeing the real horror of the picture—that Balram is without a bathroom. One senses Adiga is channelling his own horror at the possibility of Balram’s piss-wet finger’s coming for him. A different and crucial horror is entirely passed over.

To return to the suspense and wondering around how and when the deed will occur, and who to root for—this is obfuscation. It lends no clarity to the larger question posed by the best literature: who gets to be human? Whether Balram kills on page 50 or page 285, whether with a tyre iron or a bottle with a broken neck, the deed alone does nothing establish or disestablish his humanity. In Adiga’s book, humanity belongs to the one who acts alone. Humanity is conferred neither on the blood-thirsty landlords, who are portrayed doing their share of repellent paan chewing, nor even on their groin scratching servants. Balram is human because he, unlike everyone else in his class, is willing to kill to break out of the coop.

Throughout the book, mention is made of Balram’s apartness as predicated somewhat on his mother’s apartness and to a lesser degree his father’s and even lesser degree his brother, Kishan’s. Beyond these three members of his family is a clan which bears an eerie resemblance in its boorishness to the groin scratching Delhi drivers. The grandmother is presented as a rather sinister arm scratcher, scratching away as she plots to trap Blaram in the same coop of marriage and familial obligation that she has trapped all of the other family members in.

Kishan, however, recognizes Balram’s apartness as something to be valued, telling him the last time they see each other, “Life has become hell here…we’re so happy you’re out of this mess.” To this, Balram responds with the thought, Kishan "had become, all of a sudden, my father." It’s already been established that Balram’s father is yet one step closer to human in Adiga’s eyes. Like the brother, the father will sacrifice anything for his Balram to make it. Anything, that is, save his dignity—although the plot, in the end, does not call on him to prove this.The man,like his wife before him, dies quietly. The father’s refusal to squat like the other rikshaw pullers he shares his profession with, is a sign to Balram of what he must do—set himself apart from the car drivers with whom he shares his profession.

Ultimate humanity however is reserved for Balram’s dead mother who I imagine must never have scratched any part of her body. The book portrays her quite besotted with a fort she wanders off to stand and stare at, a fort unappreciated by the cretinous locals—landlords and peasants alike. We infer her gift to her son, the penchant for staring at the fort, is passed on through her genes since she herself dies early in his life—there is no are no instance of her escorting her little boy to the fort, instructing him into her insights on beauty and art. Without instruction from her, he grows up drawn to beauty. All those around him, grandmother chief among them, recognize Balram’s apartness as his mother’s bequest. And there is much baffled head shaking over this gift. Truth be told, I too did some head shaking. An odd idea this—humanity carried in a genome sequence Adiga is keen on mapping for the reader.

The readers of this book should be quite satisfied at its conclusion that they, like Balram, would not fail to notice the beauty of forts if by chance they found themselves on the wrong side of the class divide.

At minimum there is the quietening of any fears of being trapped in the coop. The coop it seems recognizes when the wrong person gets caught in it. Balram muses in the last pages of The White Tiger thus:

“…the Rooster Coop needs people like me to break out of it. It needs masters like Mr Ashok…not much of a master…to be weeded out.”

This is an old idea: water seeks its own level. It is an idea many have worked to topple in the past. Adiga gives it a new lease on life. The injustice of an entire class still cooped matters little. The argument wasn’t, as it turns out with the coop, it was with getting caught in one. Once our hero is out, the mood is strangely one of equanimity. Adiga leaves us with an image of his creation, Balram, ensconced in a cosy set up, chandelier overhead, a mac laptop in front of him, no doubts in his mind about where he belongs—back on the human side of the class divide.

Contrast this treatment of self and other, the human and the in-human, with the handling of the same subject in the film, District 9. The human protagonist in this film cries out to be recognized as…human. But by the end, he has yet to break out of the coop; he awaits redemption atop a pile of garbage. Redemption which can come only of at the hands of the in-human. This hero cannot go it alone. He needs the other.

Southern Launches: Chennai, August 11; Banglalore, August 13

2009-08-10T07:51:00.000+05:30

If It Is Sweet, is launching this week in Chennai and Bangalore. Please come if you are able!

The Chennai launch is sponsored by Madras Book Club, in association with Tranquebar Press and Prakriti Foundation. I'll do a reading and will be in conversation with K. Srilata, writer and Associate Professor, IIT, Madras.

Here are the details:
Date: Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Time: 6:30 p.m.
Place: Taj Connemara Hotel, Chennai
Street:Binny Road
City:Chennai

The facebook event page is here:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=119614966463&ref=mf
Please invite your friends in Chennai!

The Bangalore Launch is sponsored by Toto Funds the Arts, in association with Tranquebar Press. In Bangalore, I'll do a reading and will be in conversation with the novelist Usha K R.
Here are the Details
Date: Thursday, August 13, 2009
Time: 6:30 pm
Place: Crossword Bookstore, ACR Towers, Ground Floor
Street: 32 Residency Road
City: Bangalore

Facebook event page is here:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=124622424592&ref=mf

Please invite your friends in Bangalore!

Thanks to all the blogs have helped spread the word on this, including Spaniard in The Works, Blotting Paper, Writers and Writerisms, and Delurking.

Review Highlights

2009-07-05T10:43:00.000+05:30

In its first six weeks, If It Is Sweet has been covered widely in the Indian press. Here are some highlights from reviews so far.

Mridula Koshy’s new book of short stories, If It Is Sweet, is a well-paced, strikingly original collection that navigates locales between Los Angeles and Delhi, using several voices to mark out its thematic and stylistic ground…This riveting collection, at once nuanced and adventurous, will stay in the reader’s memory for the way it probes away at the complexities of class and money, transgressions and violations.

--Naintara Maya Oberoi, TimeOut Delhi, July 9, 2009. Full review here:

There is a rawness about these stories that comes not from a lack of intellectual sophistication but from the forthrightness of the narration and the uninhibited portrayal of emotions. The writer is clearly a close observer of life, her own and of others around her, almost a spy who pries into their private moments of love, intimacy, fear, jealousy, proximity to death…What counts more than the narrative is the language — tender, poetic, informed by our mutilingual milieu. The stories retrieve to fiction, if not to history, marginalised lives around us. But they aren’t shown as objects of condescending pity, but as real beings with their own joys and longings. They together make a statement about power in its myriad manifestations, from capitalism to patriarchy.

--K. Satchidanandan, Tehelka, June 21, 2009. Full review here:

Koshy—who was born in Delhi, lived and worked in the US for about two decades, and now lives in Delhi again—says she was “a trade unionistbefore she was a mother and a mother before she was a writer”. These anterior layers of her experience are given expression in the mingled toughness and tenderness of her stories. Many of them are about an underclass of workers—construction labourers, carpenters, garbage collectors, maids—living quietly in the interstices of a thriving south Delhi; one family’s slum home has tin walls “filched long ago from the construction of the Chirag Dilli flyover”. There are excellent close descriptions of the labour of workers, whose condition is sometimes intuited from the smallest details, as when the protagonist of ‘The Good Mother’ hears the sounds of hammering next door and decides that the tools are either “made light, for smaller hands, or made cheaply, for poorer people."...this is absolutely rigorous and distinctive work, and there is a sound and a sense in these stories that make Indian fiction a bigger place.

--Chandrahas Choudhury, Live Mint, June 20, 2009. Full review here. And on The Middle Stage.

Here is a natural stylist, with an easy, accessible turn of phrase…Hers is a determined, stealthy eye, born of fierce concentration, often conjuring up a rustic quiet: ‘Now her pregnant beauty startles him like the fish that rustle and slip past his shins in the flooded fields of paddy he bends over to seed.’

--Rajni George, India Today, June 22, 2009. Full review here.

Koshy’s insights into hidden lives will resonate with people across the country.

--Anjana Basu, The Statesman, June 14, 2009. Full review here.

The writing is evocative, layered and masterful... [Koshy's] fascination with the underbelly is something she has in common with Aravind Adiga, but where his writing is terse and action- oriented, her stories delve deep into the head space of these faceless, marginalised people.

--Sunaina Kumar, Mail Today, Sunday June 7, 2009

…beautifully spare and evocative, with turns that are riveting, surprising, and revealing of the mysteries of the human psyche… Koshy’s greatest strength is that she never over-explains or condescends. She expects the reader to follow even the most dizzying movements, such as rapid changes of geography, or sly shifts from interior monologue to dialogue. This fine sensibility sets her apart. So many writers today rush to ‘say something’ at the expense of artistry. Koshy is a rare—and very welcome—exception.

--Manjushree Thapa, Outlook Magazine, June 8, 2009. Full review here (free registration required)

She Wants to Get Back

2009-06-23T12:17:00.000+05:30

When I first started writing, it was an activity inextricably linked with walking. But there was a long period of walking which never resulted in writing.

I had just moved to Panchsheel Enclave in South Delhi. We moved there from the northeast neighbourhood of Portland, Oregon. In my old life I walked as a way to escape the depression of being in the house all day. So rain or shine, and mostly rain, I bundled my three and nephew makes a fourth, into all the appropriate gear and shoved off each morning to drop the older two at school. A walk of ten to fifteen blocks, sometimes longer if, after dropping the elder two, I felt like walking further – maybe to the train yards to wave at the freight trains switching tracks. If the driver waved back, joy all around, and less guilt for me looking at rain-damp heads and noses red and running from nippy air. In those walks I communed endlessly with myself. Random fragments of narratives moved in and out of my consciousness. I turned words over, but mostly I little handled them, letting them drift into my vision and back out to the ether.

I made this trip to the children’s school and back thrice daily because those years there was always at least one child too young for a full day of schooling. I know I was thought the neighbourhood crazy lady. This period lasted a good six years.

Something shifted for me once in Delhi. I walked in the jungle park bordering my colony—a place, lovely and crowded, like so many in Delhi. A small search here yielded solitude. Solitude, by the way, isn’t at all the same thing as loneliness. In fact solitude is the best cure for loneliness. Walking here I found myself and again became my own best companion—the left right rhythm of walking merging my left right selves, so they spoke to each other. And this time I gave chase to the words floating into and out of me. I wanted to know where they came from and where they were headed. I was not content to think, how extraordinary, as an image emerged then vanished. I wanted to turn it over in my hands, examine it from all angles to see what made it work, and I wanted to replicate it on the page, where it would yield its meaning at my will. But what is extraordinary, when it is suspended between left and right, me and I, becomes less so on possession. I wonder sometimes if that is the way it will always be.

What shifted in the course of the Portland to Delhi move is not important to share. That the move was a homecoming had something to do with it. But it wasn’t as simple as I walked in one city and never wrote, walked in another and did. After all, I had begun writing in the weeks prior to the move. The important thing I’ve understood about writing is that walking is a way for me to enter the stories floating in my head. And the satisfaction of story is its ability to merge selves.

When I met my niece for the first time she was a year and a half and just beginning to handle words. She had a number of skits she performed using a repertoire of word-sounds. In the most hilarious of these skits her part called on her to fling her head back, to make eye contact from under slyly lowered lids, to run her tongue over the repeated sound of Ze. She sounded like an engine revving.

Ze ze ze ze ze.

The engine done revving, she paused for a beat. Then: ha ha ha ha (final emphatic) Ha.

The crisis in her performance was in the moment of the pause. A look of knowing in her eyes– the look of one about to create an effect, the look of one who knows the future.

She was a great storyteller then. I saw her again recently after a two year gap. She is three and a half now and still a story teller to learn from. She lives almost exclusively in the third person. And she sees herself in two. Watching her I recognized the way I see myself. When she wants something she has this to say: ‘She wants to give it to Ella.’ If she were a lesser story teller she would stick to ‘Give me…’ or ‘Ella wants …’

Here’s a tragedy she recounted as I played a game of blocking her way in the rather narrow hall outside my mother’s kitchen. Before I knew it, the game had crossed the point of being fun. Ella stopped darting this way and that, squealing and looking for a way around me. She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “She wants to get back to Ella.”

Le Diplo and Outlook

2009-06-06T06:12:00.000+05:30

I’ve got a couple of stories in the English edition of La Monde Diplomatique this week. One is about the state of reading and writing in Kerala; you can read the on-line version here.

They also printed “Intimations of a Greater Truth,” a story from my collection here.

I was pleased by the review of If It Is Sweet in this week’s Outlook. You can read the whole thing here. Perhaps my favorite part was this:

Koshy’s greatest strength is that she never over-explains or condescends. She expects the reader to follow even the most dizzying movements, such as rapid changes of geography, or sly shifts from interior monologue to dialogue.
This fine sensibility sets her apart. So many writers today rush to ‘say something’ at the expense of artistry. Koshy is a rare—and very welcome—exception.

On Knowing Writers

2009-05-29T11:39:00.000+05:30

The launches in Delhi and Mumbai were great in different ways. I really appreciate Rana and Jeet for being so generous with their time and thinking as we prepared and participated in the author discussions at each of the launchs.

I met both writers right at the start of my effort to become a writer -- three years ago. I met

them at literary festivals and at the homes of literary types, places I was skulking around in the hope of gaining insight into the business of writing. I met Rana first and Jeet a bit afterward. Both were words on the page first and very quickly and exhilaratingly people I engaged with in person. And back I went to the page again. Knowing the writer of a work while reading the work was a first for me. I remember resenting their intrusion into the work, wanting to read the book without their voices in my head, and yet and yet succumbing to the charm of the idea that I would somehow know more about the work if I knew them.

I think knowing the writer can shrink the work. The best kind of knowledge, best in the sense of it aiding a good reading of a work, is one in which the reader has access to the socio-political-economic picture of the times the writer lived in. Ideally from the distance of elapsed time. Maybe after they’re dead.

To know writers here and now as contemporaries is a lazy-making enterpise. First, there is the desire to interpret their work through the lens of the known details of their life. “Oh this story must have to do with that loss in her life etc.” To be in possession of the sense of having a true and right interpretation of a story is an experience that leaves the reader feeling powerful. Who can argue with an interpretation based on the actual author’s actual living? There can also be a certain malice in such a project. The malice of reducing the larger to the smaller. And lazy-making is the desire, fed by lit fest etc, to have the writer explain their work. Spoon feeding. I picture the infant on the high chair, head lolling, sleep setting in, belly full, the excess dribbling from mouth. How easy to not have to chew or even swallow. How easy to not have to think, to debate, to take the work and allow it to expand through collective interpretation. Ultimately a great work resonates not because of its relevance in a writer’s life, but because of its relevance in the lives of readers. Good writing carries more than the traces of one human’s limited experience. Perceptive and courageous writing is a channel for the thinking that’s preceded it, and what will follow from it.

I have to say that in the end, my loyalty to the book and not the writer.

So what I owe the writers I have met along this journey is not the access to their lives and a resultant and exalted understanding of their work but instead an understanding of what it is to be a writer. I have learned so much from the writers I have met in Delhi about my responsibility to engage not just with my writing but also with the idea of myself as a writer. It is too tempting to step back from the work and say, well, gee where did that come from? Or on encountering praise to say, well that was a fluke wasn’t it? To disclaim ownership and responsibility. Fearing criticism, to introduce a work by saying, well just dashed this off and now I’m going to impose it on you and you can’t go after me for what is flawed here because, did I mention, that I just dashed it off.

Most recently there was my own reluctance to engage in the launch activities around my

book, a shying away from talking about the book not only because I felt shy but also because I felt I wouldn’t add to the book so much as detract from it. On different occasions, Rana and Jeet pinned me to the task at hand, which was specifically the launch and the discussions we were preparing as part of the launch, which in turn was related to the larger task of engaging with

my writer self. No wiggling out of this one now.

Books are on sale in Delhi and in parts of Mumbai, and they should be out shortly in the rest of India. Let me know if you are having trouble finding a copy!

Interview in HT

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The best stories are those that are born of the lives of the working class people on the streets, says former professional trade union worker-turned short story writer Mridula Koshy.

The 40-year-old writer's maiden anthology of short stories, If It is Sweet, was released in the Capital on Wednesday.

Published by one of the youngest publishing houses in the country, the Westland/Tranquebar Press, the book "travels through the streets of Delhi picking on odd lives and the disavowed dramas that play themselves out on the stretch of the crowded BRT and in the adjoining residential neighbourhoods like Defence Colony, M-Block Market (of Greater Kailash I), Chirag Delhi flyover and Humayun's Tomb", the writer says.

The prolific writer has been contributing short stories to Penguin Books-India anthologies, American and European publications like Wasafiri, Prairie Fire, The Dalhousie Review and Existere.

Koshy, who was born and raised in Delhi till the age of 15, migrated to the US in the 1980s. After graduating from Occidental College on the outskirts Los Angeles, where US President Barack Obama studied, Koshy became a full-time trade union activist and a community organiser, while holding several small-time jobs like waitress, backstage dresser and silver ware polisher. She returned to Delhi four years ago and took to full-time writing.

Her career as a trade union worker has a lot to with the stories - they are full of the sweat and grime of the city. The narration is punctuated with slogan-like graffiti, italicised excerpts and distortions of words to convey the regional identity of the characters.

"Somehow when I started writing about India, I felt I had to begin with Delhi. The issues that the city threw up were serious and complex. I worked in the US as a trade union organiser, talking to workers in the public sector units, healthcare and those in jobs that were not represented by other unions.

"It was largely because my mother worked as a nurse in the US for some time and I realised that the US was a very complicated society. It is divided along racial and class lines. The city of Los Angeles, where I lived, saw quite a bit of upheaval in the mid-eighties. I found some of it in Delhi," Koshy told IANS.

She was thrown into a society of immigrants - simmering with complications and anxieties, the culture of welfare doles and freeloaders.

"I had to come up with an analysis to convince myself why I was a second class citizen in the US. I brought my intelligence to use in the working class society to understand the gender forces at play and the whole migrants' issue.

"So, after college I joined this radical trade union Local 11 HERE, which came to my campus seeking volunteers. I was arrested for the first time while working for Local 11. Then I joined the United Farm Workers and finally the Service Employees' International Union in Portland, where I worked for six years, organising workers as a pro," she said.

Koshy's stories are a reflection of the proletariat in her. Today is the Day, a cross between a novella and a short story divided into seven sub-heads, tells the tale of Suraj, a domestic help who is tired of working in a big household.

He resents the class-divide and the trappings of sophistication in his employer's home which force him to hit back in a bizarre way.

The Good Mother, a tragic and rather gruesome take on single motherhood, is the story of a woman's pilgrimage to immerse the ashes of her dead sons. She picks up a younger lover on the way from Rishikesh to Delhi and ends up tipping the brass urn containing the ashes of her sons out of the the window sill in a Defence Colony rent-in, which she shares with her foreign lover, instead of in the holy waters of the Ganga.

Koshy's next project: a novel set in Kerala and the US.

From here.

3-2-1 Launch! Delhi May 20; Mumbai May 23

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Please join me in Delhi or Mumbai this week to celebrate the launch If It Is Sweet!

For the Delhi launch, I'll be in conversation with Rana Dasgupta. Our talk will be followed by cocktails. Here are the details:

Date: Wednesday, May 20

Time: 7 p.m.

Place: Agni at the Park Hotel

Street: 15 Parliament Street

City: New Delhi

The Facebook event page is here. Please invite your friends in Delhi!

For the Mumbai launch, I'll be in conversation with Jeet Thayil, and I'll read from the book. Here are the details:

Date: Saturday, May 23

Time: 6 p.m.

Place: Crossword Bookstore--Kemps Corner

Street: N.S.P Marg

City: Mumbai-400 026

The Facebook event page is here. Please invite your freinds in Mumbai!

Past Reviews

2009-04-27T21:22:00.000+05:30

From reviews of First Proof 3 (Penguin India)

Somehow, the fiction section of such anthologies is always less rewarding. The stories, though competently told, rarely open up new territory. One exception is Mridula Koshy’s story about an impoverished Kerala family in the US, “When the Child was a Child”. For a change, Indians have problems relating to each other, instead of relating to American society. I wasn’t surprised to read that the author, who lives in New Delhi, was once a Union and Community Organiser in the US. Her work is certainly the most accomplished in this section.
— Eunice de Souza, Time Out Mumbai, Issue 16 April 4, 2008
http://www.timeoutmumbai.net/books/book_review_details.asp?code=229; reg. required

Among the fiction writers, Mridula Koshy, Temsula Ao and Noureen Sarna leave an indelible impression. Despair and fortitude fight an unequal battle in “When the Child Was a Child”, Koshy’s haunting portrait of an impoverished U.S.-based Malayali family coming apart at the seams as it struggles to survive in a squalid tenement building reverberating with “the quiet misery of spoons moving in plates”.
— Mita Ghose, The Hindu Literary Review, Sunday, February 3, 2003
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2008/02/03/stories/2008020350080300.htm

From reviews of 21 Under 40 (Zubaan)

“Mridula Koshy’s ‘The Large Girl’ and Diane Romany’s ‘Ferris Wheel’ are bold, evocative.—Brinda Bose, IndiaToday, April 30, 2007

How much more real, and empathetic is the lesbian in Mridula Koshy’s “The Large Girl”, so delicately drawn down to the last, grief-ridden sentence: “Do you miss me? A thousand and one chances will come and go in this small city, in this small world. I will never see you again.” There is sexual imagery in this story, too, but it’s bred into the waft and weave of the tale.
—Sheba Thayil, The Hindu Literary, Review, July 1, 2007
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2007/07/01/stories/2007070150020100.htm

“…do feminist love stories exist? On what terms? And how does one wash that cloying taste away? Perhaps the answer lies in Mridula Koshy’s “The Large Girl,” the story of the ‘extramarital’ relationship between onetime classmates: romance threaded into the mundane of shared cigarettes on a terrace, recurrent (and impotent) quarrels and partings, comparisons to other lovers, imperfection (“Mostly I am thinking, ‘Why do I like her? She is so vulgar’ ”). But something rings disturbingly true: mostly love is messy, frustrating, imperfect.”
—Disha Mullick Bose, Biblio, May/June, 2007

“The Large Girl” by Mridula Koshy is about an extramarital lesbian fling, and honestly, the lesbian angle is not what makes the story sensational, it’s got a lot more going for it.
—Rupa Gulab, DNA Sunday April 22, 2007

Meanwhile some blurb love

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Jeet Thayil: In these stories, families are seen in their whole corrosive element, and the poor and disenfranchised are returned to history—in language that’s affecting, tender, unexpected, like translations from a tongue infinitely superior to our own. Mridula Koshy's writing is deeply attentive and fearless, the work of an extraordinary Indian moralist with an unmistakable gift.

Rana Dasgupta: In brooding, otherworldly prose, Mridula Koshy tells us the stories other writers overlook, or do not wish to tell: the household thoughts that must always remain silent, the disavowed dramas of the city, the heartbreaking proximity of opposite emotions. "If It Is Sweet" is a book of savage, beautiful writing, whose empathy and curiosity flood over the usual barricades of the imagination – and remind us, indeed,what real writing is.

Siddharth Deb: Mridula Koshy's voice is fresh and new, animated by a love of language and people that makes these stories remarkably strange and yet disconcertingly familiar.

Releasing: May 20, 2009

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If It Is Sweet published by Tranquebar Press, out soon, to be launched in Delhi on May 16, 2009. Watch this space for updates.