CREATIVE JOURNEYS 5: Sampurna Chattarji

CREATIVE JOURNEYS 5: Sampurna Chattarji

Friday, 6 March 2015, 6.30 p.m. The British Council Library, Prestige Takt, 23 Kasturba Road Cross, Bangalore 

It’s been a decade since Sampurna Chattarji’s first of thirteen books came out. What has that journey across genres been like? Is there a narrative that holds it all together? In an attempt to answer some of these (and other) questions, Sampurna will share extracts from her work and experiences from her life as a poet, fiction-writer, children’s author, translator and general mad-hatter. 

Copyright for this text and extracts rests with Sampurna Chattarji © 2015

I will begin my talk this evening with Pessoa. Fernando Pessoa, who wrote much of his greatest poetry in the guise of his three main heteronyms—Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis—each of whom he equipped with invented biographies, and each of whom had a very distinct writing style and world view. In a letter he wrote (as himself) on 20^th January 1935 (the year he died), he says:

“What I am essentially—behind the involuntary masks of poet, logical reasoner and so forth—is a dramatist. My spontaneous tendency to depersonalization, which I mentioned in my last letter to explain the existence of my heteronyms, naturally leads to this definition. And so I do not evolve, I simply JOURNEY. (…) I continuously change personality, I keep enlarging (and here there is a kind of evolution) my capacity to create new characters, new forms of pretending that I understand the world, or, more accurately, that the world can be understood.”

Pessoa puts the word JOURNEY in capital letters as if he cannot emphasise it enough. What is interesting (and relevant to me) in this extract is the idea of the “involuntary mask” – the code-switching between personalities, the assumption not just of different personae, but also the appetite for enlarging one’s dramatic universe, for peopling it with “new characters, new forms of pretending”. And while I haven’t gone so far as to invent heteronyms for myself, I think the litany of descriptors I append after my name in every bio note comes from a similar place of Pessoan restlessness. In ‘Autopsychography’ (translated by Richard Zenith) there are these lines that speak directly to and of me: 

I’m a fugitive.

I was shut up in myself

As soon as I was born,

But I managed to flee.

If people get tired

Of being in the same place

Why shouldn’t they tire

Of having the same self?

My soul seeks me out,

But I keep on the run

And sincerely hope

I’ll never be found.

It’s both a running away from and a running towards. In the last decade I have been running away from Sampurna Chattarji, children’s author, towards Sampurna Chattarji, general mad-hatter, and the poet, the novelist, the translator have been the guises which have enabled me to escape being found.

So is this then, not a journey, not even an evolution, but simply some sort of grand deception?

I should hope not. I have always loved subterfuge, masquerade and shape-shifting for their tremendous potential to express essential truths. And so, permit me to read a poem from my second poetry book Absent Muses, titled, 

Masquerade 

This is the path of disguises.

A god lying across it like a log, 

waiting to trip you over.

A boulder shaped like a fish, 

misleading you with notions

of the sea.

A painted arrow, 

the daub of an alluvial hand.

This is the land of cold winds, 

the compass twirl of ice.

There could be a bridge.

Three billy goats gruff.

The bridge could be the spine of a fossil.

Drawbridge. 

Narrowing or widening as you walk, 

the bridge to hell or heaven.

All possibilities are coincidental 

where doppelgangers stalk.

So much slaughter under the bridge.

One stone could start an avalanche.

You are familiar with avalanches.

Who said the way would be easy?

Sharkfin, goatcheese, sabretooth, 

you are always moving 

towards the next disguise.

One day you will wrap 

the landscape around you like a cloak.

In your harlequin skin, 

your saffron ash, your polar fur, 

your bruises are hidden.

Tricksters leap from one memory 

to another, befuddling.

A lake asks questions, 

drugging you as you drink.

You fail the test.

You reach the end 

of the road.

Head bowed, minute, 

you wait at the edge of the cliff.

Inheritor of dust,

the smile has not left your lips.

You will wait an eternity, listening 

to the call of the road. 

And at last you will be content with stillness, 

you will let stillness 

be your last camouflage.

From Absent Muses (Poetrywala, 2010) pp 70-71

Looking back at this poem as if it were written by someone else (and it is written by someone else, a different me) – I find a clue in this line:

“All possibilities are coincidental/ where doppelgangers stalk.”

And in this:

“you are always moving/ towards the next disguise.”

Movement, without which no journey can take place. Not random movement, going nowhere fast, as it sometimes appears when one is in the thick of it, but one that has a secret coherence, a pattern that will be evident only when one is safely back home again, mapping it all down with the acuity of hindsight. In a poem called ‘One or Two Things About Home’ I find one of the few autobiographical references that reveal “where it was that I’m going, or where it is I’ve been”. I am moving – in the trajectory of the poem – across time, texts, and personal obsessions, and I will share just the last two verses with you: 

What is it about Hungary these days? Should I treat them as signs?

Why else should I be reading Sándor Márai, recalling Csoma de Kőrös, 

the Hungarian who walked to Tibet and died in Darjeeling?

If that’s not a sign, what is? Darjeeling, my home for thirteen years.

I left, at thirteen, and what it left me was a taste for mist 

and gloomy afternoons, a relish for steep roads and gabled roofs, 

a zest for steamed pork momos and cups and cups of tea. 

Not for Csoma de Kőrös, he died of malaria in Darjeeling.

And Márai committed suicide in San Diego. 

What is it about Hungarians and death?

You read too much, they tell me, 

into what is, after all, a series of chances. 

A chance gift, two chance gifts, no, three if you count the sausage.

The Hungarian Who Walked To Heaven, a short book.

Conversations in Bolzano, a tale of Casanova.

And the sausage.

And when Casanova speaks of Venice, lovingly, ravingly, 

he speaks to me of Calvino’s invisible city.

Oh, you read too much.

Go back to the Hungarians. “Who are the Hungarians?”

Lapps? Finns? Turks? Huns? Kőrös was keen to find out. 

Instead, he found a monastery, a bitter cold and a language 

he would learn, a grammar he would take back for the world.

Which journey ends the way you imagine? I try and imagine 

a journey on foot, in bitter cold, in rags. All I can summon up 

are prayer flags, the tall fluttering wisps of cloth I walked past everyday 

without noticing what they might be saying, blind to the language 

of signs made of wind and air, white on blue, white on grey, 

speaking to spirits that must have watched me go. And the more 

I’d like to stay with Hungary, the more Darjeeling comes back—

the sound of Buddhist gongs, the stench of horse dung, 

the juice of the Bhutan apple spurting on my tongue, the sight 

of a yellow light in fog—each separate and terrible, each sign 

invisible inside me, marking me for who I am, foretelling every 

word, every action, that I might one day make. 

It’s hard. 

Press deep, cut through to the bone.  

  From Absent Muses (Poetrywala, 2010) pp. 105-106

When I wrote, addressing Csoma de Kőrös, “Which journey ends the way you imagine?” I didn’t imagine that was a question I was really asking myself. In 1999 when I quit advertising to re-make myself as a writer, I had charted my course simply, clearly and with unshakeable conviction: I would write a novel. It would be published immediately. I would win instant acclaim and any number of literary prizes. I would be set for life. 

It was a simple 4-point programme that seemed staggeringly practical and achievable. The fact that none of it worked out in just that way is something that could – after a decade since the first of my 13 books came out – very well look like a gargantuan failure. Instead, I find myself laughing at the naiveté and brashness of my 28-year old self, and thanking the universe for two wonderful gifts: the delay and the detour. 

In 2001 I submitted a manuscript of short stories to Penguin and plunged – thanks to a series of unexpected incidents – into the multifarious multitudinous world of writing for children. In 2004, my first 2 books were published: Abol Tabol: the nonsense world of Sukumar Ray and The Greatest Stories Ever Told, both from Puffin, both unplanned, both an absolute challenge and delight to have done. Stories for anthologies and stand-alone children’s books began being commissioned and published with brilliant regularity, while simultaneously (and almost subterraneanly) I was writing my novels, gnawed by anxiety about the fate of my short stories, writing, in an attempt to overcome that anxiety another set of short stories! The children’s books kept coming and I kept vehemently disavowing and disowning the label of ‘children’s writer’. It wasn’t just the label I minded, the fear of being boxed and sealed forever in a category I hadn’t chosen, it was also my sincere belief in its untruth! My poetry was slowly and steadily being published, the only two prizes I ever got were for poetry, my first poetry book came out in 2007, I always wrote, “Sampurna Chattarji, poet” in my bio notes, I was slowly being recognized as a poet – but the output for children was (in my mind) threatening to obliterate everything else. 2008 saw the publication of 2 retellings, Mulla Nasruddin from Puffin and Three Brothers and the Flower of Gold from Scholastic. I was happy with these, they were creative retellings, my story-telling skills had been exercised and enhanced, they were original in a way I knew I could be proud of, but still the spectre lurked – the fear of being a retelling-queen, not a master-novelist. 2008 was also the year that my Abol Tabol translation was re-issued in the international Puffin Classic list, a wonderful unexpected honour, which made me happy, but not delirious. After all, I didn’t want to be labelled as a ‘translator’ either! I had begun translating for fun, it was never on the agenda, never part of my Grand Plan, and so naturally not as valuable as publishing my fiction for adults would have felt like. 

  

Looking back makes me wonder at how clueless I was then, how oblivious to the enormous richness of that time, the huge learning involved, the enormous privilege of having an audience of many eager, receptive and often adoring young kids, instead of a faithful audience of one. I couldn’t see where I was because I was too impatiently looking ahead to where I wanted to be. 

And that moment of seeming-arrival occurred in 2009, the day I held the first copy of my first novel Rupture in my hand. I can still remember the sensation of absolute fulfilment, the sheer tactile pleasure of the object that had been the objective of the journey I began in 1999. Here it was, at last. I remember saying to myself, rather dramatically, “If I died tomorrow, I would be fine with that.” It seemed I had finally arrived where I had wanted to be. 

Interestingly enough, 2009 was also the year that The Fried Frog and other Funny Freaky Foodie Feisty Poems came out from Scholastic. It has since gone into reprint at least 5 times, and Rupture only once, but for the first time, I do not value one more than the other. And that seems to me the place that I really was meant to reach – a place where my own hierarchies of achievement would cease to tyrannise me, would no longer rob me of the pleasure of each and every book, no longer prevent me from revelling utterly in the joys of each and every persona. 

Post 2009, the books came unaccompanied by the unseen dramas of my own dis-satisfactions and dis-contentments. Absent Muses in 2010, my second novel Land of the Well in 2012, both my first YA novel Ela and my first e-poetry book The Scorpion in 2013, along with – hold your breath – the book of Bombay stories that I had waltzed in to the Penguin office with way back in 2001 – Dirty Love. In the 12 intervening years, with all the digressions, detours, interruptions and interludes in my life, that book, originally called The Saint Who Resurrected a Goat, had changed as much as I had. It was a bolder, stronger, far more accomplished, intensely realized and better-written book than what it might have been had I been granted my wish of instant publication. Time was my co-author, delay my fellow-pilgrim, and my real journey had just begun. 

2014 saw the publication of my translation of the Bengali poet Joy Goswami’s Selected Poems, a book that was 9 years in the making. I had learnt patience, but most importantly, I had learnt that nothing was more important than the process itself, the agonizing wait, the ruthless recognition of one’s flaws, and the persistent desire for that chimera: perfection.

You may very well ask, “If at least half of my given personas were dictated by chance, not choice, then what’s all that guff I began with about masquerades, and multiple personas?” Pessoa chose his multiplicities, was I just the victim of mine?

The answer perhaps lies in what I write, not in what I say. What I have shared so far has been anecdotal, the circumstantial backdrop to my life as a published writer. I could – given my penchant for subterfuge – very well have pretended all of it was intended, volitional, each book a milestone on a well-charted never-doubted route. It is important to say that when I embrace disguise what I reject is dishonesty. What I am choosing is the disguise that liberates, the deception that reveals. 

I realized, while thinking about tonight’s talk, that multiple narratives and multiplicity of characters is something that runs through my writing, be it for adults or children. I realize how often (and how easily) I assume the male voice. Shashank in Mulla Nasruddin, the three boys in Three Brothers and the Flower of Gold, the nameless young protagonist in Land of the Well, the majority of characters in Rupture – all male. Jonaki, the crucible in whose imagination the action of Rupture unfolds, and so in a sense the most important figure in that fractured narrative, is a woman, yes, perhaps even my identifiable alter-ego, but the characters who move me are Biswajit, Tennyson, Nazrul, Neel, and Surinder. In Sight May Strike You Blind, my first poetry book, I was already playing with personas, inhabiting (in one section titled the Bodies of Women) the point of view of an admiring man, a painstaking painter, a judgemental woman, caught in the act of looking, of which Rilke wrote, “Looking is such a marvellous thing, of which we know but little.” It interested me to shift register depending on who was looking at whom or what, and in that shifting I found one of the continuities across my various avatars. “So much can happen when you’re just looking” says a girl moments before she kills herself in a short story of mine set in Kolkata, titled ‘Just Looking’. In Dirty Love, there are moments of intensity and luminosity when I am inside the mind and behind the eyes of my women characters. In Land of the Well I feel a great empathy for the women who are at one level predatorial and on another level deeply scarred. In Rupture, I know Mehjubin, I love her, but there is a strange opacity that prevents me from being her. It wasn’t till I wrote Ela that I entered and inhabited so fully the point of view of a girl, a thirteen-year old girl. Perhaps I had to be 43 years old in order to be able to do that! Be that as it may, the point I’m making is: my need for disguise. 

When I am Aslam, Mehjubin’s husband, Nazrul’s father, there is a tenderness I allow myself. This is the tenderness of becoming an ‘other’, as if distance were needed in order to be both gentle with myself and merciless in my search for meaning. When I am Aslam, speaking in his voice, I know and understand him implicitly. When I am the narrator, the author, I am in a place of necessary estrangement, necessary because that estrangement is what I must overcome every time I sit down to write. And so, if you’ll permit me, I will read a little section that seemed relevant, from Rupture, about Aslam. The narrator here is not me, the omniscient author, but the German artist who is a minor character in the book, living in the house where Mehjubin and Aslam work as cook and gardener respectively. 

IT IS HE WHO IS THE REAL TRAVELLER

Who is Aslam? I sketch him into my book, his beard is like

wire unsnagged from a fence. In his bony torso I see a cage of

dreams. He bears the asthmatic’s pose. But Aslam is not

asthmatic. He breathes freely, he owns what he breathes.

We speak in a language other than language, Aslam and I.

He has mastered the eloquence of gestures. There is a sternness

to him, a gravitas that pulls you into the centre of this wordless

communication. The fluency of his hands, the way he tied

my lungi, so many months ago, without smiling, but not

without tenderness. Sometimes, Aslam thinks I am a child,

no less foolish than his son. At other times, he thinks I am a

god. No, I would like him to think I’m a god. The god of the

rubbish dump. The god of the crow-wing, the festering crowd.

Aslam’s wife has never been impressed by my sketchbook.

I love her for that. She hides in her breast an enormous

scepticism towards me, and an equally vast affection. With

her, I thought I would speak the metallic click of the knitting

needle, the soft burr of the wool winding between knit and

purl. She laughed me out of that fancy!

Between myself, who has seen the world, and Aslam, who

has seen only this corner of it, it is Aslam who is the real

traveller. He has travelled through several versions of himself.

Versions or visions? I have seen those visions in the way he

walks and sits when no one is looking. When he thinks no

one is looking. In one, he was a hoodlum. Breaking car axles

and teeth, smashing fists into walls and flesh, not knowing

what hurt more, they or he. In that country, he burnt a bus,

piled rocks across roads and rail tracks to arrest all movement,

felt the heft of a wooden club fill his body with a sweet sense

of importance, the importance of being feared, the glory of

knowing that most things break if you hit them hard and

long enough. In that life, he ate little and spoke less. The

scarcity of words hungered him more than the meagreness of

food. He was thin, strong, he fed off every confrontation, and

in the nights, he dreamt his way into other lands, other lives.

The hoodlum travelled towards the machinist. The swagger

of his hips and his shoulders was now subdued by the decorum

of steel. Precision was a colour alien to his bruising fingers.

But he bowed before it, and it became him. He operated his

machine with the attentiveness of someone building a

spacecraft, flying a plane. On the day they set aside in this

land to worship Vishwakarma, divine architect, the god

without whom the machines would not work, without whom

the boiled, flattened and puffed rice would not reach their

children’s lips, Aslam put a garland around his machine,

marrying it. That was the beginning of Aslam’s great love for

gestures.

But who is Aslam?

In my book, he appears as fakir and tin-man, a spine that

bends to the ground to pluck a weed just as effortlessly as it

earths him, ramrod-straight, waiting for the bolt of lightning

that will single him out. His feet are always bare. I have

drawn him rubbing his thumb along the arch of his foot

diagonally. It is part caress, part absent-mindedness. He coaxes

his feet to stay firmly on the ground, no matter where the rest

of him may be.

His beard is wire, his feet brown root, his eye crystal, clouded

over only for those who do not know how to gaze into it.

It is being a father that has shaken Aslam’s universe. Here,

instead of a vision borne along by wings or wheels, is a real

spitting version of himself, leaping around him, daring him

to fight. He is father not just to a boy, but to an accumulation

of cells and bones, with a spirit inside it, a bottled genie who

wears his face, who carries in his hips and shoulders and fists

a memory of breakage.

It is to wipe that memory out that Aslam wants Nazrul

to go with me. My land is so far, so alien and unimaginable

he cannot summon it up out of his breath, his hands, his

profound sleep. He looked long and hard at the photo I

showed him of my house. There was puzzlement on his face

as he handed it back.

When Aslam, my wiry fakir, my rooted lightning-rod,

thought about the place he was sending his son, a tremor so

internal shook him that he lost his bearings, lost the composure

of one who believed that everything he had once travelled

towards was illusory. Two things had become real with the

suddenness of that bolt he thought he was ready for—his

son, and his son’s new home.

He is losing his son, and I—what am I hoping to gain?

Here is this boy, slight, with a desire to live so strong it might

drive him to its exact opposite. Here, before his father’s

wrath—for rage is Aslam’s code for love—Nazrul is seething,

disaffection under his chewed nails, his restless limbs. Will

he be happy with me, will he learn the German language his

father has no need for?

I am hoping that by keeping Nazrul by my side, I will

slowly reveal to myself who Aslam really is.

Until then, I will keep drawing him in all his maybe avatars,

running between the blades of a riksha, sleeping,

curled up in a ball by the railway station, red-eyed, blackheeled,

chopping off the head of a fish, painting a wall.

From Rupture (HarperCollins, 2009) pp. 277-279

Aslam has travelled through “several versions of himself” – “versions or visions” – I ask, as if I were asking that about myself. The ambiguity of the author not just about the characters she creates, but about the character that creates them in all their “maybe-avatars” – that is probably a secret animating principle in my work. Why else does Rupture have 9 characters across 5 cities, contained only by the time-frame of 24 hours, the tightrope I gave myself to cross this minefield of my own making? In Land of the Well, I thought I had abandoned that fracturing. But no, though it is set in one place (Goa), in one time (the monsoons), with one emotional fulcrum (the nameless dysfunctional bright boy), it does have again that splintering of points of view, that layering of stories, told by as many as 10 characters, each lurking behind a pseudonym, but each minutely defined, described and detailed. Who do you believe? What really happens? Who is at fault? Everything is uncertain, just as every attempt to be content with just one point of view is unsatisfying. The impulse to overcome the limitation of one, to be the many-bodied spirit, to have the freedom to move from one set of eyes to another, from one internal landscape to another, why else do I write? 

This protean impulse is present across my work, as is a preference for the mythic story. I only noticed this because an astute reader pointed it out. The mythologizing of story, the mythic figure of the storyteller, the eternal lure of the fabular. When thinking about how best to energize my retelling of the Panchatantra into something today’s kids might actually want to read, I realized the three princes for whom the Panchatantra was ostensibly written were my key. Those were the characters I could invent from scratch and I decided that these three, the original audience for Vishnu Sharma’s commissioned work of enlightenment and education, were going to be the narrators of my version. I was going to make them travel the same arc from audience to narrator that I had embarked upon myself. From being the ‘reasons’ for the text to exist, I wanted to propel them into the text itself. Resistant, participatory, interrogative, these three brothers would be my fictional authors, much as Vishnu Sharma is presented as the perhaps-fictional author of The Panchatantra. In Rupture, Tennyson is the mythmaker, inventing a history for himself in the absence of any recollected past. In Land of the Well, the boy – so hopeless at making friends and impressing people – has one hitherto unrealized gift, that of the adroit mythmaker, telling the story that gives the book its title, as well as (earlier in the book) spinning a yarn using the threads given to him by the two women who are ragging him. Here’s a taste of that:

‘All right then,’ Angie said, ‘shall we?’

She looked gleeful.

‘Right. You’re going to tell us a story.’

‘Not just any story,’ Poka said. ‘A story with a horse, a

fish, a cloud and a fruit in it. You get two minutes to think

about it and then you start.’

‘Forgot the crucial bit, sweets,’ Angie drawled. ‘It has to

be erotic.’

This was worse than Tiger’s test. Erotic? The word

loomed over the boy like the fruit Poka wanted in the

story. Red and poisonous. Did they mean a dirty story?

How could he? He had looked at enough pondy to know it

wasn’t about storytelling. Pictures yes, gross and shameful,

but not words. Surely these two didn’t want him to tell a

story with nasty words in it? He couldn’t.

‘Listen,’ Poka said (always the gentle one, his rescuer),

‘do you even know what erotic means?’

‘Let’s see what he thinks it means,’ Angie squealed. ‘Don’t

you dare help him!’

His lifeline snatched away, the boy stared at his toes.

Still sitting on the carpet, he could feel three sets of eyes

on him. They were waiting. This was supposed to be his

thinking time, not sitting-blankly-and-wilting time. Let’s

see what he thinks it means. A fruit a horse a fish a cloud.

How weird.

‘Thinking time up,’ said Angie efficiently and pressed

a knob on her watch. A manly watch, he’d noticed that

earlier, a solid knobby manly watch, out of synch with her

hot-bod vibes. Well, such observations wouldn’t do him any

good now. His time was up.

‘In a far country without any rain,’ he began, ‘a horse

wandered, riderless. It was a white horse, sacrificial, waiting

for the spurt of blood at the tip of the golden knife. It was the

aswamedha horse and it dreaded the moment of its death.

But it had to keep running, running through countries,

claiming each land that it galloped through for its king.

Forward was the only way it knew, that white horse. And

so, driven by thirst and dread, it ran.’

With an electrifying gladness the boy knew he had

caught their attention. Angie’s hands had started braiding

Poka’s long silky hair, fi ne braids which she wove nimbly

with unseeing hands. Her eyes were on him, listening.

‘At last the horse came to a place where instead of open

fields like the ones he’d left behind, there stood a wall of

wire. Twisted wire woven into a wall. The horse felt the

stab of something unfriendly against his muzzle and he

neighed. It was too high for him to jump over. His body

would catch on the twisted wire and he would die like a fly

in a metal web. He would die anyway, but that was later. It

was now that he was concerned with. As far as he looked

to right and left—the wall stretched, nasty and invincible.

The horse pawed the ground. He could not go back. He

thought of all the brave horses of legend and how they

would have leaped, but he could not. He loved his white

mane too much, his perfect silver hooves, his bright eyes

that the queen used to kiss with her soft mouth. He loved

himself too much and he wanted to live, if only to feel the

queen’s warm thighs astride him as she rode him every

morning, undetected by the king. He would have to return

to her, but not the way he had come. That path was closed

to him.

‘He pawed the ground again. The ground was sandy, the

loose earth came away easily under his sharp hooves. He

remembered a dog he had once seen in the royal compound.

Digging the ground, nosing in and coming up triumphant

with a bone. Memory flared in him like a bright fi re and

he snorted hot air and began. The earth flew. A hole had

appeared at the white horse’s feet. He would dig until the

light came in from the other side, that’s when he would

know he could pass safely through.

‘And then he saw it.

‘It was a golden light, nothing like the blue air around

him. The blue air was pale and nothing shone in it, not even

the sun. The golden light from the hole at his feet shone like

the ring that pierced the queen’s nose. He, pierced through

the nose with the bridle, she, pierced with her ring. He felt

weak with longing. He bent his face to the light. It shone

golden and smelt sweet. His knees trembled.

‘“Devour me,” said the light. “Devour me and throw my

seed back into this hole. I will grow into a tree taller than

the wall of wire. My roots will spread under the earth to the

other side. Immense roots, they will break open a hole in

the wall, large enough for you to ride through without the

wire catching your perfect white mane. And once you have

crossed, I will throw one fruit down to you which you must

carry between your teeth, uneaten, until you return. Give it

to no one, least of all yourself.”

‘The horse understood. He devoured the light and it was

heavenly. He had tasted apples from the royal orchard,

sweet and crunchy between his great white teeth, he had

tasted sugar from the queen’s powdered, perfumed hands,

but never had he tasted anything this sweet. It melted him,

it melted inside him. He ate it all, and when the softness

and wetness gave way to a hard centre, only then did he

remember about the seed.

‘Regretfully—for he yearned to suck the seed until it

yielded everything, yearned to bite that hardness until it

broke—he threw the seed into the hole and pawed the earth

back into place. He would have to wait. The light had said

it would grow. Out of the flat dry earth a tall tree, erect

and bursting with hidden fruit. He could hardly wait. He

scanned the sky. Not a cloud. When would the rain come

that would flower the seed into being? His own thirst came

back to torment him like a goad. The blue air pressed down

on him, hard and shiny. He broke into a sweat. What if the

light had lied? What if he was doomed to stay here forever,

next to this impassable wire wall, unable to go backwards

or forwards, trapped and doomed to die friendless and

alone? The soft strangling of the silken cloth that awaited

him was far better than this death. Big drops of sweat fell on

the ground where the horse stood and darkened the sandy

earth. It was the sweat of fear and desire, it reeked of lost

hope, and it fell off him in drops as stinging as tears.

‘The horse was so afraid of dying there, alone, that he

didn’t notice when the green shoot poked through the

ground like a tongue. The ground where he stood was

damp, and still he wept tears of sweat and still the pushing

plant grew. It grew and grew until it towered above the

horse, and only when the green shade softened the hard

blue air did the horse look up and see what had happened.

The ground trembled as the immense tree’s roots pushed

their way under the hem of the wire wall and rose groaning

on the other side. It lifted the wire wall with it as it went.

A hole appeared where there had been a mesh of thickly

intertwining wire. The horse could not believe his eyes.

Snorting, he trotted forward, and delicately, fearing a snag

on his splendid white mane, he eased himself through

the hole.

‘He was through! He raised his hot eyes up to the

towering tree and he thanked it. “Here,” said the tree in

answer and it dropped one single fruit at the horse’s waiting

feet. Gently the horse held it between his great white teeth

and began the long journey home.

‘Briskly, he trotted. Silvery, he flew. And all the while,

between his teeth, the golden fruit. His lips quivered at the

thought of the sweetness so close, so denied. He trembled

at the thought of his teeth bruising the fruit’s fi ne skin.

Riderless, the horse kept on running. It was flatland still,

but turning green. The yellow sand was left behind and

now he saw before him a river. It was a timid river, running

shyly at his feet. He would cross it in a minute. But as

soon as he put his foreleg into the river’s cool water, he

heard a voice.

‘“Wait, silver horse,” the voice said. “I cannot let you

pass until you have answered my riddle.”

‘The horse felt impatient. Who was this? Who dared to

bar his way, he, the aswamedha? War would be waged on

that impudent being! But where was it?

‘“At your feet, silver horse,” the voice said.

‘The horse looked down. Near the leg that was still in

the water there swam a tiny fish with scales as silvery as his

hoof. He could have kicked it out of the way! But something

stopped him. Gently he placed the beautiful unbruised fruit

on the riverbank and said, “What is your riddle?”’

(Angie had stopped making braids. Her hands lay on

Poka’s shoulders. Poka’s unbraided hair lay spread across

Angie’s lap.)

‘“What tastes sweeter, the flesh of a fruit or the flesh of

a fish?”

‘The horse snorted. What sort of question was that?

‘“The flesh of a fruit of course,” he said, huffily. “Now

let me pass.”

‘But the fish would not let him go so easily.

‘“How can you be so sure?” it asked. “What about the

fruit you’ve placed on the riverbank? How do you know it

is sweet?”

‘“Because I have tasted one just like it,” the horse said.

‘“But all fruits are not the same,” the fish said. “How do

you know this one is not bitter?”

‘The horse was filled with rage. The sweet flesh he had

carried all this while, trying not to think about it and yet

unable to think about anything else. How dare the fish

suggest this divine thing was bitter?

‘“Try it yourself and see,” he snorted, forgetting what the

light had told him.

‘“I cannot,” said the little fish. “The fruit is my sister. I

cannot eat my own sister. But you can. Eat it here in front

of me and tell me if it is sweet, and if it is, I will swallow the

first hook of the morning and die for being so impudent,

and you can cross in peace.”

‘The horse forgot everything. Give it to no one, least of

all yourself, the light had told him. But his mouth was mad

with the smell of the fruit nestled so long against his tongue.

He bent his face and delicately picking up the golden

unspoilt fruit, he ate it. He felt the juice burst inside him

like a shower. He felt the pulp slide down his throat like a

caress. And when he crunched the tiny seed barely bigger

than an almond, he felt an excruciating pain that sliced him

along the belly and brought him shivering to his knees.

‘The fish had gone. The water of that timid river was

bursting the banks. Roaring, wet with fury, it rolled over

him and he drowned, dreaming of the queen’s juice-stained

lips, her perfect golden hands.’

From Land of the Well (HarperCollins, 2012) pp.101-106

In Ela, the adopted girl has to go on a quest, the toughest quest of all – in search of the answer to the question, “Who am I?” This is where the crack in her selfhood allows her to step through into a mirror-world of fantasy. This is not the western fantasy world of teenage vampires and magicians. This is a world of grizzled boatmen, mangrove islands, a community of child rag-pickers presided over by a strange boy she meets in that other-world, which in the oddest way reflects and throws an unnerving, uncanny light on this-world. It is only when Ela takes charge of her own story, and chooses to invent her own mythology, that she is able to deal with the trauma and heal herself. In this, her self-created fantasy, she is nameless, and all-powerful, she is The Girl Who Was Hatched From An Egg. 

In Dirty Love, in the story Insectboy, the lad with crippled legs reinvents himself as “the boy with the longest legs of steel”. As he speaks to the white tourist outside a coffee shop in Colaba, he creates a story that reveals his rich inner life, his ability to mesh fact and fantasy, also his yearning to be other than he is, even if that other is inanimate, to be “no longer flesh and blood and bone but silk and steel and stone” filled with “an endless inhuman joy that would destroy who he was, who he had been”:

‘Once,’ Insectboy said, abandoning the enticement of English

and speaking in his own tongue. ‘Once, there was a boy with the

longest legs of steel. He was so tall he could see over the tops of

buildings. At night when the city was asleep he walked around,

stepping over the buildings as if they were road dividers. GPO, VT,

Laxmi Building, BSNL, InterContinental, President, Museum,

Gallery, Taj, Maker Tower, Oberoi, Ambassador, Gateway of

India, Afghan Church, Mantralaya, High Court, what part of

his world had he not seen from the sky? He saw such strange

things on the tops of buildings—motorcycles and rooms filled

with pigeons and garden chairs growing around pots and pots of

flowers. He saw very young women and very old men dreaming

on the rooftops, and he never disturbed them. He saw a fire eating

a very tall building once, and from the roof, he lifted a whole

family that the firemen had forgotten to save, or been unable to

reach even with their longest ladders. He put them down, all the

way down near the sea, where they could forget the smell and

the sound of burning.

‘It was only at night that the boy could stand up to his full

height because there was no room in the crowded city for him

to unfold and unfold and unfold his mighty steel legs in the day.

Put them away, his mother shouted. Shut up and sit down or I’ll

break your legs, his father yelled. Mummy, his sister screamed,

he’s kicking me again in his sleep. They lived under a plastic sheet

in the rain, under the sky in the summer, only his father had a

cot, his mother, his sister and he slept on the piece of pavement

that they considered theirs. Down the road from their home was

the Sterling picture hall where he had never seen a picture. He

sat on the clean white steps whenever he could, he watched the

lines of people going in, he watched the big boys selling tickets

in black, he imagined what the seats were like and how far they

would tilt back and how close the screen would be. He hid away

his secret all day. At night, he went home, made himself small, and

when they all finally slept, he woke, and stretched and stretched

and stretched.’

She was silent, but her lips were no longer slack. They were

listening, like the rest of her tense, pinned, wired little white body.

‘One night, the boy decided to go farther than he had ever

gone before. The piece of sea he loved the most was the one

garlanded by the Queen’s Necklace. But there were other parts of

the sea he had never been to. Haji Ali, Worli, Bandra, the names

were like a necklace too. He had only heard of them, the sea in

which the holy mosque floated like a miracle at high tide, the sea

along which people walked on rock, the sea beside which whole

families played on sand and in which only the daredevils swam.

The city was separated by so many seas! So many cities separated

him from that one sea . . . He would cross from one to the other,

he would make this important journey. He knew his legs were

long enough to dig right down to the bottom of the water, no

matter how deep. He would not take the land at all. From water

to water, he would move like a giant god. He liked the idea of

the waves splashing against his mighty steel legs.

‘So he started stepping over the heads of the buildings, the

Maidan, the Station, the Stadium, splash, he was in the middle

of Backbay. Looking back at the lights, he felt dizzy with the

beauty of it. But he had to go forward, not back. Extending his

mighty legs, he walked, in three steps he was rounding Raj Bhavan,

where was the magical mosque? He saw before him the way the

sea curved and curved, beckoning him.

‘He walked, not forgetting to look at the land, where there

were parks, there were buildings that might have hidden so

many beautiful things, he had heard of the tank where the water

never dried, where Ram’s arrow had fallen, where lamps were

floated every year, he wished he could step ashore for a second

and see it. But he had promised he would take the sea, not the

road! Baanganga would have to wait for another night. He walked

with giant strides and then right before him was the Dargah. It

was like a fairy tale, an island of light in the middle of the dark

water. It was so small, a small sparkling white stone of worship,

but it looked like nothing could damage it, not even the greatest

storm. He bowed his head, like his mother had taught him, then

stepping reverently around it he walked into what seemed like

the longest stretch of all.

‘The road ran all along the sea. No one was walking on it. He

was alone in the night, the lights were not as dazzling here, he

missed his part of the world, he wondered if he should turn back,

was this Worli, hadn’t he journeyed far enough? He wondered if

he could already smell Mahim, or if he was only wishing he could

smell it because that would tell him how far he had come, when

suddenly, the water changed.

‘The waves became warmer, heavier. They felt alive, like hands

and tongues. He felt the hands slapping his legs but not pushing

him away. They liked him! He felt like giggling as they tickled

him, he felt aroused, as if any minute now he might burst open.

He felt the tongues pushing into him, tasting the strength of his

legs all along their length to his knees. He felt like kissing the

surface of the water that pleased him so much. He bent down.

He bent down down down from his enormous height until he felt

the crack in his waist that warned him not to bend any more. His

face was skimming the surface of the sea. His legs were dug deep

in, steady as pillars. Hands touched his face, drew away from it

invisible threads of silk, he was the finest strongest silk, and they

were unweaving him, they were drawing him across the surface

of the sea in a net that would span the earth, they were playing

him like a giant harp through which the wind would blow and

make a music sent from heaven, he was being broken apart by

soft and skilful hands, no longer flesh and blood and bone, but

silk and steel and stone, he was being shaped and reshaped into

an arch of light, he was breaking slowly into an endless, inhuman

joy that would destroy who he was, who he had been, and hold

him in this strange new pose, his arms so intensely far away from

his legs, his heart no longer only at the centre of him but all over

his new body, his body laid down like a bridge across the water,

this warm dark living water that he now stretched across as if he

were a supple wire along which humans could safely glide. He

would never go back to the southern tip where he had lived all

his short, secret life, he would stay here forever, rooted in the sea,

this strange new enormous beautiful thing he had always wanted

to become, no need ever again to be small and folded, no need

to hide, here he would stay for all the world to see, linking two

parts of land to two parts of sea for ever.’

Insectboy stopped speaking, and looked at her. The white

woman was weeping silently, her tears seemed golden as they

streamed down her cheeks, and fell on her T-shirt. She made no

attempt to hide them, to wipe them.

From ‘Insectboy’ Dirty Love (Penguin, 2013) pp. 16-20

And so, in conclusion, to morph and mutate, to transcend the fixity of the given self, that desire is perhaps what cuts across the many themes, the many forms, the many genres in my writerly life. I haven’t spoken much this evening about my activities as a translator, and so I think I will end by reading a section that addresses that lacuna, while simultaneously expressing the need to be possessed and the impossibility of being just one:

“To translate,” he said, “is to move a body from one place to another.” 

Is that why she doesn’t live in the city anymore? Why she roams the scrub hills, looking for brush to burn? Is that why she has to count—nose, eyes, teeth, toes— to figure out what she left behind when she moved? It all adds up, intact. And yet, that must be why she feels like someone else, like someone else moved in, speaking a lingo that shocks her, all those words she thought she’d forgotten. 

The new occupant lives in her body like she owns it, fills out her cheeks, hollows out her ribs, makes her limbs lighter, then heavier, makes her want to walk instead of sleep, makes her want to weep instead of talk, makes her want to move a body from one place to another. Maybe it’s just a way of getting her old self back. Maybe nothing will be the same again.

From ‘Five Different Words for Love’ Absent Muses (Poetrywala,  2010) pp. 99

Copyright for this text and extracts rests with Sampurna Chattarji © 2015