Mayank Chhaya Daily

“I am Shashi Kapoor. I am an actor."

Shashi Kapoor in Ivory-Merchant’s ‘Heat & Dust’

Today marks the 85th birth anniversary of the actor and producer Shashi Kapoor. Here is a piece I originally wrote for this blog on December 5,2017, a day after he passed away at age 79.

December 5, 2017

Cutting a dashing figure in a three-piece pinstripe suit Shashi Kapoor stood in the large porch of a famous bungalow in Bombay’s Juhu area. His right hand was in the pocket of his pleated trousers and left dangling from a lower pocket of his fully buttoned-up vest. The only detail missing was a retinue of obsequious servants. In the city’s polyester humidity Kapoor did not seem to be breaking into a sweat.

As I alighted from a taxi outside the iron gate of the bungalow ‘Radhika’, he appeared to sense that I was the journalist he had given an appointment to that morning. As I climbed up the few steps he stretched out his hand and said, “I am Shashi Kapoor. I am an actor.” “Mayank Chhaya,” is all I said. That I was a journalist was implicit.

I knew about Kapoor’s habit of always introducing himself by name but the way he did it with me came across as mildly mischievous humility. I was amused, especially by the part “I am an actor.” Later, he wove that reference into a context while talking about his much written about insanely busy career as an actor. He shot continuously in three shifts, prompting his more illustrious eldest brother Raj Kapoor to somewhat chidingly describe him as a “taxi”; as in someone who plied the roads being hailed by anyone and everyone as long as it paid.

He had seen me get out of a taxi earlier. “"Raj ji (Raj Kapoor) mujhe aaj kal taxi hi kehte hain, (Raj Kapoor calls me a taxi these days). I am, of course, an actor,” he said.

By the time I met him in 1986—and the only time I did—Kapoor was one of Hindi cinema’s biggest stars but wore his success lightly. He looked a tad older than his 48 because he had become somewhat neglectful of his own health after the death in 1984 of his wife Jennifer, whom he dotted on. Without being prompted by me he pointed at his portly bearing and said, “This is not for a role. Jennifer would not have let me become so fat.” He joked that his body worked for that particular role because he was playing a wealthy businessman in a movie whose name he did not seem to remember.

“I am an actor who does what is expected of him by the director,” he said.

Without the famous last name, Kapoor might have remained just a trophy star leveraging his remarkably good looks but he came from Hindi cinema’s most illustrious family where his father, Prithiviraj, and brothers Raj and Shammi had been among the biggest names. He drew upon his considerable talents to give some truly memorable performances. (I refuse to enumerate them here. It is just too much detail.)

I remember having observed that his eyelashes were so lush that he could lend some to some of his fellow actresses without noticing the difference. He guffawed. He said he had inherited his father’s features. Shashi Kapoor frequently looked like a spitting image of Prithviraj (See the latter’s photo below).

Prthviraj Kapoor 

From what I remember the most of that interaction was a star untouched by the trimmings of his success. Being the youngest of the three Kapoor brothers, Shashi had seen glamor for such a long time—his whole life, really—that its lures had no effect on him. That unselfconscious attitude mixed with his extraordinary good looks and charms made him even more likeable than he might have been otherwise.

One of the questions that I remember was about how he managed to juggle so many assignments without messing up the details of a particular character. I was taken aback by his candor when he countered, “What details? You just create them as you go along.” Lest anyone underestimate his craft, it was the response of someone who had been at it from his childhood and had internalized the process. At the same time, he was quite humorously self-aware of how much of his work in the 1980s was eminently forgettable. “I need money to make my own, more credible movies. It is a good balance. I respect this work and that,” he said.

Although Kapoor’s career was full of instances of his impressive acting chops, he never really projected himself as a brooding, serious artist. He knew that acting was predominantly about being in the moment and not necessarily a doctoral dissertation.

I spent about two hours on the set of the movie he was shooting that day and whose name he appeared not to remember. I watched him give perfect single takes with rather involved lines and emotions. During one of his many returns from these takes he remarked that that ease of remembering lines had come to him having seen his father theater stage days. Performances were always in the Kapoor ecology and for Shashi Kapoor, being the youngest of the three brothers, particularly so. That was one main reason why he never seemed like a labored, rehearsed performer.

All stars the world over often come to be distilled into a few memorable scenes and lines. For him it was from the 1979 movie ‘Deewar’ (The Wall) where he was paired with Amitabh Bachchan and with whom he did more than a dozen movies. The scene and the lines are so iconic for Hindi cinema audiences around the world that they need no introduction. For me it would be enough to say “Merey paas ma hai. (I have mother with me).” The measured, succinct tone with which Kapoor, playing a morally upright police officer, delivered that one line in response to a rather grandiose boast by his wayward, smuggler brother, Bachchan, remains one of Hindi cinema’s most defining moments.

Even though “Merey paas ma hai” has now become a cinematic cliché in India, it is also a great example of a no-fuss actor-star delivering from the gut of his lifelong exposure to the craft. 

I surprised Kapoor by deliberately not asking about that line. “You have said and done it. There is nothing more to dwell on,” I said. On that note, we shook hands. That was 31 years ago.(Now 36 years ago) I never met him after that.

Dalai Lama’s thrilling and life-threatening escape from Lhasa, 64 years ago today

The 14th Dalai Lama fleeing Tibet into exile with Khampa (men from the Eastern province of Kham) bodyguards in March, 1959. (Photo/OHHDL)

By Mayank Chhaya

Sixty-four years ago today 24-year-old Tenzin Gyatso, better known as the 14^th Dalai Lama, escaped from his 1000-room residence of the Potala Palace on a harrowing three-week journey to India. Close to six and half decades after being forced to flee in the face of threats to his life, the Dalai Lama is as far away from his former home as he has ever been.

Although Tibet’s tensions with China were steadily building up since an army of 80,000 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army had crossed the Drichu river east of Chamdo in October, 1950, it was on March 10, 1959 that things came to a boil for the Dalai Lama.

On November 17, 1950, the 15-year-old Dalai Lama was officially enthroned as the temporal leader of some six million Tibetans. The next nine years witnessed Sino-Tibetan relations steadily deteriorate with Beijing intensifying its stranglehold on what is one fourth of China. According to the Dalai Lama’s official biography, “The next nine years saw His Holiness trying to evade a full-scale military takeover of Tibet by China on the one hand and placating the growing resentment among Tibetan resistance fighters against the Chinese aggressors on the other. His Holiness made a historic visit to China from July 1954 to June 1955 and met with Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders, including Chou Enlai, Zhu Teh and Deng Xiaoping. From November 1956 to March 1957 His Holiness visited India to participate in the 2500th Buddha Jayanti celebrations. When the young Dalai Lama was taking his final monastic examinations in Lhasa in the winter of 1958/59 disheartening reports of increasing brutality against his people continued to pour in.”

It was on March 10, 1959 that Chinese General Zhang Chenwu invited the Dalai Lama to attend a theatrical performance by a Chinese dance troupe. On the face of it, it was an innocuous invitation. However, when the Chinese authorities revised the invitation new conditions that no Tibetan soldiers should accompany the Dalai Lama and that his bodyguards be unarmed, alarms went of in the Potala.

Here is an excerpt about what transpired from my authorized 2007 biography of the Dalai Lama ‘Man, Monk, Mystic’ published in close to 25 languages worldwide.

“I remember as 1959 began I was so preoccupied with the finals of Geshe Lharampa, [the doctorate in Buddhist philosophy with emphasis on metaphysics]. Metaphysics is a very tough subject and requires a lot of concentration. Even the Dalai Lama has to study seriously. He cannot cheat and pass,” the Dalai Lama said, laughing. “But I also had the events outside the Jokhang (temple) on my mind. Lhasa was not happy those days. People were angry at the presence of the PLA.”

On March 1, 1959, two junior Chinese army officers paid a visit to the Dalai Lama at the Jokhang, is the spiritual hub of Tibetan Buddhism. Built in 647 during the rule of Songtsen Gampo, the temple was also a place of learning for the Dalai Lamas. The ostensible reason for the visit by the two soldiers was to invite him for a performance and tea at the Chinese army headquarters. They wanted him to commit to a date right then. “I said I could do so only once the ceremonies surrounding my final exams were completed,” the Dalai Lama said.

Tempa Tsering (the Dalai Lama’s brother-in-law) put the invitation in perspective. “This visit was extraordinary for many reasons but I can tell you the two most important ones. For one invitations of such nature are always conveyed through the Kashag [the Tibetan cabinet]. For another, such parties were normally held at the palace and not at the military headquarters. Something was not right about that invitation,” he said.

 “In those days of 1959 there was something odd in Lhasa’s air. You could sense that we were in serious trouble and that had nothing to with just the presence of a large number Chinese troops. They were merely symptoms of the time,” the Dalai Lama’s elder brother Thubten Jigme Norbu said.

Five days after the two junior army officers met the Dalai Lama at the Jokhang, General Tan Kuan-sen, one of the three military bosses of Lhasa, called the chief official abbot to inquire when the Dalai Lama would attend the performance at the army camp. After some back and forth March 10 was fixed. March 8 was Women’s Day on which the Chinese general Tan Kuan-sen used to hector the people of Lhasa and threaten to bomb monasteries unless the Khampas relented in their attacks.

On the morning of March 9 two Chinese officers visited the commander of the Dalai Lama’s bodyguards., requesting that the commander meet Brigadier Fu at the military headquarters. What Fu had to tell the commander was portentous. Fu said the Dalai Lama’s visit to the army headquarters from the Norbulingka Palace would have to be without any ceremony. No bodyguards would be allowed to accompany the Dalai Lama and no Tibetan soldiers would not be allowed inside the headquarters.

“That seemed like a clear signal since His Holiness was always accompanied by a retinue of 25 armed guards on such visits. People of Lhasa would invariably line up the route of his journey. What the Chinese were asking us to do sounded very suspicious,” Tsering said.

 “I was told by my aides that the Chinese were up to no good. I did not want to make an issue out of it since I wanted to gauge the Chinese mind,” the Dalai Lama said. However, Lhasa’s citizenry thought otherwise. On the day of the scheduled visit some 300,000 Tibetans surrounded the palace in order to prevent the Dalai Lama from visiting the Chinese headquarters.

“I remember the huge crowd outside the palace. I remember people were quite anxious. I remember that they did not want me to leave the palace because they feared for my safety. They thought I might be forcibly taken to Beijing to attend the Chinese National Assembly. Looking at their emotions I had no choice but to decide against the visit to the army headquarters,” the Dalai Lama said.

That decision turned out to be fateful. From that point onward life started spiraling out of control in Lhasa. Two days later thousands of women took to the streets carrying banners “Tibet for Tibetans”. A delegation of women presented an appeal for help to the Indian Consulate. An Indian diplomatic source, who was present at the time, said, “Although the people in Lhasa seemed feisty and determined to take on the Chinese, it was obvious to anyone who bothered to go beyond the obvious that the Tibetans had already lost their land to the PLA. I knew we were seeing the last days of an autonomous Tibet.”

With the Dalai Lama turning down the invitation, the battle lines were drawn in Lhasa between the Tibetans and the Chinese. Mimang Tsongdu members went around barricading narrow streets even as the Chinese troops were fortifying their positions.

The Dalai Lama and his aides began to plan a move that was to change his life and the history of Tibet for ever. They decided to escape.

“I knew my stay in Lhasa was no longer tenable. In my private moments I felt sad that I had no option but to leave,” the Dalai Lama recalled nearly 40 years (t is 64 years now) later, sitting on an ochre-colored sofa in his private study in McLeod Ganj one afternoon. He looked reflective, nostalgic and somewhat emotional. “You see too much was going on for me to stay. My aides thought if I had to leave in order to stay alive.”

According to Tibetan records, on March 15, 3000 of the Dalai Lama's bodyguards left Lhasa to take up their positions along his likely escape route. The Khampa tribesmen, whom the Chinese wanted the Dalai Lama to rein in, deployed some of their most trusted men at strategic points. Nearly 50,000 Chinese troops were breathing down in Lhasa armed with heavy arms and outnumbering the Tibetan forces several times over.

On March 17, Lhasa woke up with knots in its stomach.  Something seemed amiss. By the afternoon, the Chinese gave up all pretense of a “peaceful accession” of Tibet. The army fired two mortar shells at the summer palace of Norbulingka. Their rounds fell short of the palace walls but landed close enough for the Dalai Lama to make up his mind.

“Everybody in the palace said I ought to leave immediately. I was not sure since I wanted to stay back for the people of my country. I was told if I stayed alive I could still make a difference,” the Dalai Lama said.

The penultimate hour came at 10 p.m. that night. In an action fraught with symbolism the time the Dalai Lama was forced to discard his ochre robes and instead wear a soldier's uniform and carry a gun. He set out on the long journey to India. Two days later fierce fighting broke out with poorly armed civilian Tibetans engaging the Chinese troops in hand-to-hand combat. Hundreds of shells were fired at the Norbulingka. Tibetan sources say thousands were killed in the next few days. Two hundred members of the Dalai Lama’s bodyguards were executed publicly by a firing squad. Three of Lhasa's most important monasteries, Ganden, Sera, and Drepung were bombed and severely damaged. According to one estimate over 86,000 Tibetans were killed in a span of a few days in the aftermath of the Dalai Lama’s escape.

After two weeks of treacherous mountainous journey on horseback, the Dalai Lama and the officials accompanying him reached the Indian border at Khenzimane Pass on March 31, 1959. 

The more I gather, the more it scatters

Ben Whishaw as Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Tom Tykwer’s ‘Perfume: The Story of a Murderer”

I am in the mood to repost something I had written 12 years ago about my strong olfactory sense.  So here it is:

July 17, 2011

I am no Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Patrick Suskind’s ‘Perfume: The Story of a Murderer’' but I have had my moments. And here I am referring strictly to the olfactory genius of the protagonist of the novel and its fantastic movie version of the same name. What becomes of Jean-Baptiste as he goes about trying to capture feminine fragrances to create the ultimate perfume is revolting and terrifying in a tragic way. Mercifully, that did not happen to me.

Before I began using nasal drops every night to subside my inflamed passages more than 30 years ago, I was gifted with a particularly sharp sense of smell. In a way this runs in the family as all my siblings have demonstrated some degree of elevated sense of smell. For instance, I remember all of us could tell from a mere whiff  whether the daal in the neighbor’s kitchen was any more safe to eat. This was before the middle class in India could afford refrigerators.

However,the excessive use of the nasal drops has very significantly blunted my olfactories over the years and I no longer consider myself out of the ordinary. So when I first saw Tom Tykwer’s brilliant 2006 film version of Suskind’s 1985 novel, I thanked in my mind the manufacturers of the nasal drops. Who knows where my sense of smell would have led me?

These thoughts came to my mind while reading an article in The Boston Globe by Courtney Humphries about a growing movement to preserve smells and their history. The movement may also lead to recording for future generations smells that may be lost because of natural attrition. It has been known that while smells are by their very nature ephemeral, they do remain embedded in one’s memory for a long time. “Smell is unique among the senses in the way it is processed by the brain - olfactory information travels directly to a brain region linked with the hippocampus and the amygdala, sites of memory and emotion. Scientists have suggested that the way smell is processed makes smell memories particularly strong and persistent,” Humphries reports.

She also mentions James McHugh, an assistant professor of religion at University of Southern California, who while studying Sanskrit as part of his dissertation at Harvard found detailed olfactory information in ancient and medieval texts. Based on McHugh’s descriptions of some of this literature, perfumer Christophe Laudamiel created “two scents that represented a Brahmin’s ideal - clarified butter, milk, mango blossoms, honey, and sandalwood - and his worst nightmare - smoke, rotting flesh, alcohol, and garlic.”

Despite having lost a lot of my olfactory sharpness I am still primarily driven by smells and fragrances. In what their French makers might consider sacrilege, every morning I splash and spray two or three different kinds of colognes and perfumes. Since their quantities vary randomly, they create a new fragrance everyday. Some of my mixtures sometimes contain a hint of what my wife wears and that invariably brings me great compliments from people irrespective of their gender. One of these days I am going to add a dash of toilet freshener to see what that does.

Speaking of fragrances, let me end today with these charming lines from poet Alam Taab Tashna’s ghazal ‘Voh ke har ahd-e-mohabbat.” The lines go:

मेरे पेहलु में वोह आया भी तो खुशबू की तरह

मैं उसे जितना समेटूँ बिखरता जाए

(Mere pehlu mein voh aya bhi to khushboo ki tarha

Mein usey jitna sametun voh bikharta jaye.)

She came to me like a fragrance, The more I gather it, the more it scatters

Note to self: That’s the power of smells and fragrances. They waft from the ancient to the medieval to the modern and from laboratories to literature to movies to poetry and yet not be fully captivated.

Here is to the exceptionally eclectic Jhaverchand Meghani

Jhaverchand Meghani’s at his newspaper desk

(Photo: www.jhaverchandmeghani.com)

I had written this piece on August 28, 2016 on Jhaverchand Meghani's 120th birth anniversary. It works just as well today on his 76th death anniversary.

August 28, 2016

There are those who are more than the sum of their parts. The great Gujarati folklorist, poet, novelist, journalist, singer and thinker Jhaverchand Meghani (August 28, 1896-March 9, 1947), whose 120th birth anniversary falls today, was one of them.

Speaking of his parts, he wrote 14 novels, four plays, nine collections of poetry, 19 biographies, 11 short stories, 11 folk songs, 13 folk tales and 13 collections of folklore and literary criticisms. These add up to create a Gujarati cultural icon whom Gandhi described as “Krishna’s flute” and a “national poet laureate.” While he was creating all those works, he was also immersed in India’s campaign for independence. Sardar Patel called him a leading figure in India’s struggle for independence who spent his entire life in that pursuit.

Meghani led an enormously rich literary, cultural, political and social life that led him to the colossal figures of his time, including Rabindranath Tagore sometime in 1933 in Bombay. According to Meghani’s official website, the great painter Nandlal Bose had heard Meghani sing his own Gujarati folk songs and was enraptured. He persuaded Tagore to meet Meghani while in Bombay. Their meeting was an unqualified success with Tagore being spell-bound by Meghani’s literary and musical passion. The website quotes Tagore as saying, "Much as I wish to visit Gujarat again, I am afraid I won't be able to make it. Why not, then, you come over to Santiniketan ? We shall compare notes and publish jointly English translation of selected things. Do therefore come. But, yes, in winter --- not summer when the heat is scorching over there."

Meghani’s journalistic connection came in the form of his assignment as a columnist at the Janmbhoomi newspaper in 1934. As part of his passion to  “raze the walls of discrimination” between the educated and the unlettered, Meghani’s column titled ‘Kalam ane Kitab’ (The Pen & the Book) encouraged readership outside the scholarly domain to get involved with literature.

When one thinks of Gujarati literary giants such as Meghani and scores of others one feels how skewed the reputation of the state has been because of its historically flourishing mercantile and entrepreneurial culture. There is a legion of non-Gujaratis who would never suspect the state of having any connection to a world-class literary tradition. Meghani and many like him would be happily counted among world-class figures.

I have a collection of his novellas. This morning I chose a random short story titled ‘Shikar’ (The Hunt). It is a story about how a group of men are tasked with having to scare a leopard out of a forest into the open so that a local governor—presumably English—can then hunt it down. It is a simple story but Meghani tells it with such literary relish even though it barely stretching 2000 words. In describing a patch of an extraordinarily fertile land, he begins by saying, “Time must have used lightening as a plough here.”

He vividly describes the leopard, which is resting in the morning after a rich nightly hunt. “A long leopard is panting and resting in the hollow of a tree, its white stomach spread and puffing like a cushy mattress.” The leopard, of course, has to be driven out of its slumber without being harmed because the governor must not be denied the pleasure of having hunted it while it was alive. As the advance hunting party approaches the forest with much commotion, Meghani writes, “He (the leopard) does not respond to every noise but does occasionally bare its dagger-like teeth and shake his head as if mocking and saying ‘With which cow have you set up my engagement (In the sense of wedding) today?’”

The leopard is very hard to move away of its domain and out into the the thinning forest line where the governor and his party is waiting ready to shoot. Eventually, a member of the advance hunting party has to skillfully shoot the beast into one of its legs. He limps out to be shot by the governor and others. As the animal emerges from the woods, Meghani has the governor say out triumphantly in English , “Yes! There..there’s the milk white stomach. Shoot.” They all do indiscriminately because there was no need to take a precise aim on a wounded leopard.

“Before the day-end at the edge of the forest ten motors (motorcars) kicked up clouds of dust. The dust settled back again into the lap of the earth. The sun went to the sun’s house…..” And then Meghani ends with a characteristic literary flourish about those last remaining men of the advance party: “The villagers carried the carcass of the dead day and returned to their village.”

Here is to the great Jhaverchand Meghani.

"In the heart of darkness, my dear, I always spread light"

Today marks the 41st death anniversary of Professor Raghupati Sahay 'Firaq' Gorakhpuri. Not that such anniversaries mean anything but as pegs go it is as good as any to hang a piece on. I had done an impromptu post about the great poet-teacher on June 13, 2013. I am republishing it. As it happens with all great poets who create a large body of work Firaq too gets distilled down to a few verses. The one that I remembered this morning is:

तुम मुखातिब भी हो,करीब भी हो

तुम को देखें के तुमसे बात करें

(Tum mukhatib bhi ho, karib bhi

Tum ko dekhen ke tum se baat karen)

(You are here and you are near

Should I gaze at you or should I talk?)

June 13, 2013

Raghupati Sahay ‘Firaq Gorakhpuri’ has long been one of my favorite literary figures. Regarded as one of the most important names in Urdu poetry, literary criticism and language scholarship, Firaq, which means separation in Urdu, was one of those naturally charismatic people. A thinker of subtle but charming self-absorption, he was at equal ease teaching English literature (his professional calling) and creating and reciting his Urdu/Persian poetry.

It is a pity that there is a sparse audio-visual record of Firaq because he was such an effortlessly cinematic figure and could have lent himself to a terrific full-length documentary feature. I have seen few people who smoke cigarettes with such relish and yet such detachment at once.

There is a short documentary about him, which was made by India’s Films Division in 1971, available on YouTube. He was already 75 then. Born in 1896, he died in 1982 at 85. There are also a couple of other sessions from a different video about where he holds forth on how language often rises from much more intimate sources such as individual families. (See the video above). It has one of those rare stimulating conversations carried out by Firaq, unmindful of and unselfconscious about the presence of TV cameras. With his cigarette dangling he discusses finer points of language.

He makes a couple of striking points when he says, "Bhasha ka base illiteracy hai. (The base of language is illiteracy) aur literature kehte hain brilliant illiteracy ko. (Literature is brilliant illiteracy).” He also says that brilliant literature should not be defined by the use of words that ordinary, perhaps even illiterate, people do not use.

“Great literature aur brilliant literature wahi hai ki itne bade bachche ko jo labz malum hai us se who Gita likh le,” ( Great literature and brilliant literature is one where the words that a child this small knows can use to write the Gita),” Firaq says.

He illustrates his point about the accessibility of great literature by giving the example of Charles Dickens and how his cleaning lady could enjoy his books in her free time. He says the great Hindi writer Premchand and Surdas both had this facility.

I admit to not having read Firaq much but from whatever little one has read one can infer his intellectual depth. I say infer because Firaq was a great proponent of being able to infer when one is not well-versed with something.

Obviously gifted with a charming sense of humor and great skill as raconteur, Firaq’s presence at poetic conventions was a major draw. There are a couple of places in this documentary where Firaq opens his recitation with humor. In one he describes how a man falls inside a well. A poet happens to pass by and he too falls inside the well. Rather than looking for ways to rescue themselves, the poet declares that he would recite some verses from his poetry. The other funny incident that Firaq narrates is about a haunted house which no one wanted to buy. A poet, unable to find any home for himself, decides to buy it. He then drives the ghosts away by reciting his poetry.

There is so much to quote from Firaq’s great body of poetic works but for the purposes of this post I would like to cite just one throwaway line from this documentary.

ज़ुल्मात के सीने में हमदम

मैं रोज़ चराग़ाँ करता हूँ

(Zulmaat ke seeney mein humdum

Main roz charaghan karta hoon.)

In the heart of darkness, my dear

I always spread light (His literal words are ‘I light lamps everyday’)

Firaq’s poetry was also defined by the influence of nature, something he said he was inspired to do by the likes of Wordsworth. Perhaps I am wrong but one no longer finds this level of erudition and this finesses and sophistication in articulation of great ideas that the literary giants such Prof. Sahay commanded with such lightness of touch. He had once said that a civilization like India has had to balance for millennia before it acquired its greatness.

Vinod Kumar Shukla—A man of lucid quietude

Poet, writer and essayist Vinod Kumar Shukla

PEN America has announced recipients of two monumental career achievement honors, one of whom happens to be the much celebrated Hindi short story writer, novelist, poet, and essayist Vinod Kumar Shukla. I discovered Shukla only about a decade ago and was moved enough to write a short piece on October 11, 2013. It is only opportune that I republish that piece to coincide with his PEN America honor.

October 11,2013

It is utterly joyous serendipity to have discovered Hindi poet and writer Vinod Kumar Shukla.

The discovery came this morning via Facebook, courtesy of friend Umesh Pant. Umesh posted an interview with Shukla that was done by Rakesh Shrimal, editor of “Pustak Varta” (roughly ‘Book Talk’). The interview itself was posted on a blog called ‘Pakhi’, which I suppose means bird. So Shukla has had to travel some distance to reach me. It reflects poorly on me that I was unaware of him until today.

I have a weakness for the well-spoken and the well-written, irrespective of whether I agree with the content of what is being spoken or written. I read everything first from the standpoint of whether it is readable. Substance is important, of course, but substance is like a destination and writing is like the path that leads to it. If the path is uneven, strewn with poorly constructed phrases and sentences, one tends to veer away from the substance.

It turns out Shukla is a highly respected writer and poet known for his austere yet deep rumination on life and all that happens within as well outside. A writer who can title one of his books ‘Deewar Mein Ek Khirkee Rahati Thi’ (A Window Lived in a Wall) gets my vote every time.

A very cursory look at Shukla’s works, as available on the net, tells me that he is a man of lucid quietude. He comes across as someone who has a particularly distilled creative expression. He is also someone who is very visual. In his interview with ‘Pustak Varta’he says, “I don’t think in language. Ideas come to me visually. I think visually.”

Watching a two part conversation with him on YouTube, I was struck by the opening lines of part 1. In Hindi it says, “Shuruat ka koi sandarbh nahi hota, Kuchh hona hi us ka sandarbh hai jaise bansuri ka hona hi sangeet ka sandarbh hai.” My free rendition of this would be “A beginning has no context. That it is there is its context quite like the flute is the context for music.” It is a striking thought, particularly the idea that a beginning has no context. That could well be applied to the universe presuming it had what our restricted comprehension calls a beginning. I digress.

I chanced upon some English translation of Shukla’s poetry on Poetry International Rotterdam.

And I, the city man,
separate from nature so
that I leave the tree behind and sit in the bus.
Sitting in the bus, I wish
that there were trees on both sides of the road.
In my room
I have hung a picture of an entire forest

 

A man sat in desperation
I did not know the man.
But I knew the desperation.
. . . We walked together.
We did not know each other.
But we knew walking together.

In his interview with ‘Pustak Varta’ , Shukla makes a fine point about the difference between writing prose and poetry: “Gadya likhna, likhne mein sahaj shuruat hai, par baad mein kavita ki tarh kathin. Kavita kathin shuruat hai par baad mein gadya ki tarha sahaj.” (To begin writing prose is natural but it later turns out to be difficult like poetry. Writing poetry is difficult in the beginning but becomes as natural later like prose.)

In a remarkable show of democratic generosity, in contrast to literary exclusivism and conceit of many other writers, Shukla says in the same interview, “Everybody should write at least one book. There is no person or life about whom something cannot be written. Everyone can write about themselves and others.” This view comes so frighteningly close to mine that for a moment I thought I had said it.

I find that writing of this kind, by which I mean literary interviews and essays, are infinitely better crafted in Hindi and other Indian languages in India than what one gets to see in the country’s English media. For one, it does not feel grafted. It feels to be part of the habitat and therefore more authentic. English is now an Indian language but it still betrays its otherness when its practitioners fail to indigenize it.

There is no harbinger that ushers poetry

Poets would know this well. Poetic impulses are utterly unpredictable. They rise when they choose to rise. There is no harbinger that ushers poetry. It just conjures up spontaneously. 

An example of this happened this morning on my morning walk. I have to walk indoors these days because of the winter. I do so listening to Hindi movie songs on my mobile . This morning I was listening to a Mala Sinha special on Saregama Radio's "Weekend Classic with Ruchi." Incidentally, I have no compelling reason to mention either the name of the radio station or the show and its host. I do so because it is in good taste. And, of course, Ruchi sounds cute although I have chosen not to Google her images in order to sustain my imagination about what she may look like. 

Speaking of the unpredictability of poetry, even while writing the last sentence about not searching for Ruchi's images, this line was immaculately born:

हुस्न तसव्वुर में रहे तो बेहतर
गर रूह-ब-रूह हो जाये तो मुश्किल

But I digressed. I was telling you about what happened while listening to the Mala Sinha special. One song that is almost mandatory in any show about Mala Sinha is the enduring masterpiece 'आप की नज़रों ने समझा ' ("Aap ki nazron ne samjha") from the 1962 film 'Anpadh' . It was written by Raja Mehdi Ali Khan, sung by Lata Mangeshkar and composed by Madan Mohan. 

The third and final antara in the song begins with "पड़ गईं दिल पर मेरे,आप की परछाइयाँ ". 

What I am about to tell you is exactly how it happened. I froze mid-step at परछाइयाँ and scribbled the following lines behind an official letter from the Department of Health Services, State of Illinois, as if they were fully formed. If it sounds magical, because it is. If the handwriting is not fully legible, that is because I scribbled the lines in a hurry lest they evanesced. 

सिर्फ मैं ही था मौजूद
फिर इतनी परछाइयाँ क्यूँ थीं

सिर्फ मैं ही था अकेला
फिर इतनी तन्हाईयाँ क्यूँ थीं 

--मयंक छाया

It is not my case at all that these lines are great poetry (actually, they are) but only an illustration of how a creative mind works.

I played a song likely composed in 1961, the year I was born in Ahmedabad. The song was composed by Madan Mohan in Bombay with the lyrics by Khan. That era was obviously much before the internet, mobile phone and instant musical gratification.  I listened to it 61 years hence in Naperville on a wintry, foggy morning on my mobile phone while walking inside my apartment.

And then these lines were born. Brilliantly exhilarating. 

 

 

Hungry, hungry hominins ate hippos some 3 million years ago

Stone tools found at Nyayanga, Lake Victoria in Kenya (Photo courtesy: Science)

Many of you might have heard of the popular toy 'Hungry Hungry Hippos' where four toy hippopotamuses eat toy marbles. It is a fun game. 

Well, this post is not about hungry, hungry hippos. It is about hungry, hungry hominins who ate hippos instead some three million years ago. And that does not sound like fun.

Hippo--MC

A paper published in the journal Science says that an archaeological excavation on the shore of Lake Victoria in Kenya has found hundreds of stone tools and fossils dating back to as early as three million years ago. This is the oldest known case of tools being used by hominins, which is a group of primates including us, homo sapiens. Until recently the use of stone tools was believed to go back to between 2.6 million and 2 million years ago. The Nyayanga, Lake Victoria excavation pushes that time back to between 3 million and 2.6 million years ago.

The paper by Thomas W. Plummer of the Department of Anthropology, Queens College, New York and others, says "Oldowan tools were not only present, but were also being used to process a variety of foods, including hippopotamus."

"Thus, it appears that these tools were widespread much earlier than previous estimates and were widely used for food processing. Which hominins were using these tools remains uncertain, but Paranthropus fossils occur at the site," the paper says. The find suggested distribution spread over an area of 1300 kilometers. 

Hence my characterization of hungry, hungry hominins eating hippos. The team found tool-damaged hippo bones clearly suggesting that hippos were on the menu of Nyayanga hominins. I was just trying to visualize a bunch of hominins roaming around the lake with those tools butchering hippos. 

"The behaviors preserved at Nyayanga are at least 600,000 years older than prior evidence of megafaunal carcass and plant processing and substantially predate the increase in absolute brain size documented in the genus Homo after 2 Ma," the paper says. Ma, for your benefit, is mega annum, the unit for one million years. 

Of Quaoar and a meaningless universe

At 6.5 billion kilometers from us exists a dwarf-planet called Quaoar. The trans-Neptunian body has a radius of just 555 kilometers or a diameter of about 1110 kilometers. The dwarf-planet is part of the Kuiper Belt and is half the size of Pluto which was demoted from a ninth planet to a dwarf-planet by the International Astronomical Unit in 2006 much to the chagrin of Pluto lovers. So Quaoar is really dwarf.

Scientists at the University of Sheffield in England led by Professor Vik Dhillon have now found that Quaoar has rings around it and that too at a distance they should not be. They are similar to Saturn, which, incidentally, is 116,500 kilometers in diameter, making it 104 times the size of Quaoar. What this means is that planetary bodies and dwarf-planetary bodies can have rings notwithstanding such a massive difference in their sizes. 

A paper published in Nature says what is extraordinary about the Quaoar rings is that they are located outside what is known as the Roche limit. Given its distance from us, it is nearly impossible to view it directly. Hence scientists have to do it during what is known as occultation when it passes directly in from of the sun giving it a silhouette that we can observe. As it passed in front of the sun, there was one sharp dip in the sunlight was observed which was expected. What was not expected was that there were two smaller dips in the sunlight, one before and the other after. That indicated the presence of rings.

What has intrigued scientists is that the rings are at a distance more than seven planetary radii or in other words they should have been at about 3885 kilometers but in reality they are twice as far away. The seven radii limit is known as the Roche limit. The distance of the Quaoar rings have confounded scientists.

Beyond these specifics, I have always marveled at how we are so blissfully oblivious to billions of parallel worlds that exist in the universe with no apparent purpose or meaning at all. That brings me to my eternal question in Hindi addressed to Jupiter but one that applies to everything in the universe. "Yeh Jupiter karta kya hai, yaar? (What does Jupiter do?). Add to that "Yeh Quaoar karta kya hai, yaar?"

Rest in Joy Funeral Home

By Mayank Chhaya

I am 85 and precariously close to needing the services of my own funeral home myself. But until such time as I do, I offer it to those who indeed need them.

I am a lifelong bachelor and a celibate to boot. I have no family. From what I was told, I was left as an infant outside an orphanage wrapped in the Sunday edition of The Morning Star. Ironically, the newspaper had a lead feature about how a remarkably humane role the orphanage played in our small town.

I have a name but there is no point telling you that because we are unlikely to meet after you have read this story. This is a one-off encounter.

Like all mornings, I came to my funeral home that Friday morning at 7.08 a.m. There is no particular significance to that specific time. When I opened the funeral home 50 years ago the time was 7.08 a.m. I made it a practice since to open at that time.

I have noticed that in the last couple of months, the business has come to a dead halt. I have barely sold two cascades and one cremation; not enough to get by. I need more deaths but I cannot say that publicly because, you know…

I cleaned the reception counter with a musk-flavored glass cleaner and replaced yesterday’s flowers with a fresh bunch. Just as I was about to turn on the music, the door opened. An immaculately dressed man, apparently in his 60s, walked in. He wore a dark grey tweed coat, light blue shirt, aqua blue tie with a yellow flower in the center and dark blue corduroy. His rust brown shoes were sharply polished. His silver fox hair was slicked back on the sides and somewhat windblown on top.

He wore a fragrance that intrigued me.

“What cologne are you wearing?” I asked.

He smiled and said, “Oh, that’s sandalwood.”

“It is lovely,” I said.

“I smell musk in the air,” he said waving his right hand as if he were painting that fragrance.

“Yes, that’s the cleaner for my glass,” I said.

“Aah,” he responded with a dazzling smile.

“What can I do for you, young man?” I asked.

“How much are your cremation services?” he asked in a manner that was so completely shorn of emotions that for a moment I thought he might as well be asking the price of the expensive shoes he was wearing.

I was thrown off a bit by the question even though funeral services are something I have dealt with for 50 years now. It was something in the way he spoke that unsettled me a bit.

“Oh, let’s see. That depends on a few details such as what kind of casket, whether there will be a memorial service before the cremation and so on,” I said regaining my composure.

“There will be no memorial service. Just an ordinary casket, your cheapest one, and straight into the crematorium. There will be a couple of people in attendance but they will stay until the cremation starts. There is nothing else needed,” he said.

Those details unsettled me even more. I began to think that there was something amiss. However, it was not my place to say anything.

“Our primary package is $3200, all inclusive,” I said.

“Alright,” he said even as he reached for his wallet.

He took out his debit card. The swiftness with which he did that added to my discomfiture. Remember, I have done this for 50 years and there is not much that makes me uncomfortable. He did even though he was perfectly civil and calm.

“I will need the paperwork, including the death certificate for the deceased before I process a payment,” I said.

He thought for a bit and said, “I understand but I am merely paying for a friend. The two people who will accompany the deceased will bring the paperwork. I am going out of town directly from here. I will not be back.”

This was out of the ordinary; something I had never done before but like I said the business had been slow and I needed the money. I decided to go ahead with the payment.

We shook hands and, as he was leaving, he said, “Valentino. That’s me. It was a pleasure meeting you.”

He walked away with next to no effort, almost as if he glided.

I got on with the normal business of the day such as finalizing fliers to be mailed to those households with people in a certain age group. Funeral services can be costly and I always encourage people to prepare for them.

It was around 6 p.m. that I received a call.

“Mr. Garcia, I am calling with reference from Valentino,” the caller said.

“Oh yes, how can I be of assistance?” I asked.

“We will need your cremation services tomorrow morning. Valentino might have told you that there will be no memorial service,” the caller said.

“Yes, he did indeed,” I said.

With no other appointment for the day, I decided to close the home.

Next morning, I was back at 7.08 a.m. The cremation was scheduled for 10.30 a.m. I prepared the casket that was part of the package Valentino had paid for.

Around 10 a.m. a hearse pulled in followed by a car and a police cruiser. A body bag was wheeled in on a gurney by the hearse operator who was followed by a woman police officer and a young couple.

The police officer said, “The paperwork is in order. It was death by a single gunshot to the chest.”

“May I see the body?” I asked the officer who said, “Of course, of course.”

I unzipped the bag and was stunned to see what I saw. It was an immaculately dressed man. He wore a dark grey tweed coat, light blue shirt, aqua blue tie with a yellow flower in the center and dark blue corduroy. His rust brown shoes were sharply polished. His silver fox hair was slicked back on the sides and somewhat windblown on top.

Th only difference was his shirt had been changed to white and tie to olive green with “Valentino”  embroidered on it in golden thread. The fragrance was still that of sandalwood.

On an impulse, I decided to close down the funeral home business after that cremation.

Next morning, The Morning Star reported that a 65-year-old man named Valentino had taken his own life, leaving behind a note that said, “I would like to leave my last two bottles of sandalwood cologne for the owner of ‘Rest in Joy Funeral Home’.

Copyright Mayank Chhaya, 2023