Basheer, the sultan of love

                  You could mistake him for a wayside mendicant, snake oil seller, tea vendor, uncared grandpa....Anything but a romantic, a lunatic, a prolific teller of tales. Vaikkom Muhammed Basheer spent the last years of his eventful life with a friendly moniker, Beypore Sultan, ensconced in an easy chair under a Mangostene tree in the compound of his home. With birds, bees, butterflies and snakes for company. Through his last years he wore just a lungi, without covering his chest and spent his time on the writing board under the Mangostene Tree. He would reply to every letter from his many fans. 

    Last year I went to Alliance Francaise auditorium to see a play (Under the Mangostene Tree) based on Basheer's Stories. The play captured the essence of Basheer, his life and his stories. Most of his famous stories were written in the 1940s/50s. I read most of them while I was a schoolboy. I had missed the subtle humour, incisive observations and deep emotions of his characters. When I read them today I feel transported across time zones. Basheer's life is the stuff made of legends. He ran away from home, participated in the freedom movement, was jailed, took on many roles as English tutor, Beedi maker, palm reader, homeopath, face reader, sanyasi.....He spent time travelling the length and breadth of undivided India. His life  took many turns. He lived a rich but ordinary life. But he captured the romance of life, the humour and the sadness.
    Last month I saw a another play by the same theatre group called "Perch". This time it was called Moonlight and skytoffee. The stories were based on Basheer's stories "Love letter" and "Three card poker player's daughter". Although this time around it wasn't as good as "Under the Mangostene Tree", I was enchanted by the performance of Aparna Gopinath....lively, fiesty and full of beans. Skytofee and Moonshine being the secular kind of names that can be carried by the offspring of keshavan Nair and Saramma, the protagonists in "Premalekhanam" (Love Letter), one of Basheer's famous stories.
           "One Bhagavadgeeta and plenty boobs", is the title of a rather provocatively named story by Basheer.. But I don't remember any bigots in Kerala having an issue with that. As I mentioned elsewhere in this blog, when someone asked him what he would do if all Muslims in India are sent to Pakistan, he said he would masquerade as a Nambudiri Brahmin and continue living in India. Story goes that during his time in jail, he'd dress up as a Brahmin and murmur slokas and splash holy water on those entering the portals of the jail. It was seen as an eccentricity by other inmates. He worked as a sports goods seller and would go around in a bicycle dressed in jacket and suit and a bowler hat to boot. Story goes that he could instantly judge whether the hapless customer would buy or not. One day he fell from the bicycle and lay splayed on the road in full splendour,  sports goods scattered around him....
               Reading these romantic stories from the 1940s, we get a sense of the time. They were better times. And they were original stories, from the rich tapestry that was his life. Several of Basheer stories have been made into successful movies. One of the earliest ghost stories " Bhargavi Nilayam" was based on a Basheer story. The characters in his stories are the earthy, every day kind of guys. There was no right or wrong, good guys and bad guys. A Basheer character is unique in that they represent humans with all failings and eccentricities.
       Life is fun....because I have no one...murmurs another lonely soul from his stories. Those words could be a balm to lost souls. To the desperado who has reached the tether of life, it could be a shot of adrenaline. It is also the quest of the lonely soul for elusive love... An entreaty to love. And behind all that humour, there is that huge sense of loss
   Basheer found his life partner Fabi in 1959. Reading through his old letter many women wrote him it is clear that he could be flirtatious with his many fans. Fabi was not someone who could match his intellect. But every visitor to his home in Beypore was treated like family. He was immensely proud of Fabi's cooking and he loved her deeply.
   It is said that when Basheer returned five years after running away from home, he slowly knocked on the door at midnight and his Umma (mother) asked him to get in, wash his feet and sit for dinner. He asked his Umma how come there is food at midnight. Then it struck him....His mother has waited with his dinner for the past five years , hoping that her lost son would turn up one day.... 

Dealing with dirt

     

The sun is blazing hot. The stench is overpowering. The men and women were dressed in rags with a maroon waistcoat which distinguishes them as contract workers, not regular employees. Many of them appear to have crossed the normal age or state of health to be profitably employed. They are busy sorting through mounds of garbage which have just arrived in small trucks from the living quarters nearby. Many of them don't wear gloves as they shift all organic waste to huge pits. Cows and buffaloes are grazing nearby, trying to find something to eat from the garbage.
  If you want to know how lucky you are, I'd invite you to stand near these mounds of garbage where humans sift through the stuff that we throw away. Try to do that for about an hour in one week. Your world view will undergo radical changes. There are men and women, teetering on the edge of existence, segregating plastics, glass, cloth, styrofoam, aluminium packets etc from the large amount of food waste and other stinking rot that we throw away from our homes. 
       Two years back, in the workplace, we decided to segregate garbage into bio-waste and recyclable. This involved pressing the services of hundreds of contract employees to wade through the muck and clean a huge mound of garbage.  Earlier all that unsorted garbage had grown into a mini-mountain over the years, spreading its stench for miles and also igniting fires of its own volition. This attracted stray dogs, cattle and vicious criticism from a bunch of disgruntled employees living in the vicinity. At the end of a one month effort, this whole mound was demolished and we made pits to convert bio-waste into compost and sought the help of local authorities to dispose off the plastic and other solid waste.

   That’s when I had an inkling of something called garbage terrorism in our midst. The local authorities refused to take our garbage for disposal. Although they could not legally refuse. The municipality/ corporation said you deal with your dirt. You can’t dump it in our garbage yard. We were looking for solutions to deal with this huge stinking problem. We were told that there are dealers who are ready to pick up plastic and other waste. Meanwhile we kept the plastic and other waste tied neatly in big garbage bags and stored it in an old dilapidated building. The dealers came, took a look and said all that plastic will need secondary sorting and washing before they can take it for processing. That was an impossible task to carry out with our resources. We finally told the conservancy contractor to deal with it and dispose it off safely.

     So the contractor would take all those big garbage bags to the municipal dumping yard in the dead of the night to escape attention of municipal authorities and come back mission accomplished. In the Chennai Corporation controlled premises, the conservancy workers would often go on strikes that would lead to accumulation of garbage in the streets. Residents show their protest by dumping garbage on the front yard of the house where elected representatives live. In our over populated cities, garbage handling and availability of water are slowly growing into major going to be crises which are going to explode in our faces.

       Prosperity brings its own problems. And when there are too many people crossing the line of poverty, they are able to afford mobile phones, packaged food, white goods etc, all of which come in packages which are then thrown away. A new mattress is bought and the old one thrown away. Old non-functional mobile phones are given decent burial as new models take their place. Plastic bags, empty water bottles and many layered chips packets are strewn everywhere.
           And there is frenetic pace of construction going on everywhere in the city. This results in a lot of debris strewn around. The building contractors do not know where to dump them. One could see them dumped in the dividers of highways. It is such an unpleasant sight as one travels around. Isn't it possible to demarcate areas in each block for dumping construction debris?  A building contractor I knew told me that he pays off people to take away the debris and dump it surreptitiously in open areas in the dead of the night so that  future owners of the luxury apartment are spared the unseemly sight of it.
    Yeah...and what do we do to protect the interests of the scavenger class? Ask the politicians. They have passed a clutch of legislation banning manual scavenging. They have passed several acts for protection of contract labourers. Still scavengers die cleaning septic tanks very frequently. And the contractors  who employed them are arrested and thrown into jail for a few days to the cacophony of huge headlines in TV/print screaming about it. The position of contract workers who deal with garbage are at the bottom end of society. Many of them are addicted to alcohol. Can you blame them? After handling our garbage, they have to eat food. (Believe me, if you stand anywhere near these places, you can bid goodbye to your appetite for a long time till that memory and the stench lingers) We could invest in technology for cleaning sewages and septic tanks. But no....that requires a lot of managerial skills, coordination, planning, financial resources etc. Passing an Act in the Assembly or Parliament is the lazy man's easy way out. Throwing the contractor in jail might even fetch some votes. But nobody wants to go anywhere near those mounds of garbage to have an understanding of the problem its totality. We could make a difference from our small household by segregating the garbage. Start a small composting pit or a bin. We can make life a little easy for these forgotten souls who have to then segregate this garbage that we throw away.. But we are too busy aiming for the stars. We have bigger problems to deal with. Let us shut out that dirt from our lives
   I write this out of frustration. After trying so hard to make a small difference in the place where I work. 

Life of lies

     When I saw the young Markus Zusak at the Hindu Literary Festival speaking on the pangs of writing, I was ignorant of his novel "The Book Thief". He spoke about how he had to rewrite the book after finishing it once. These days I try to balance too many things in life and delving into a work of fiction is not a luxury I can afford anymore.

    Often I think of the many twists of life that landed me in a Babu's job.  Your world is consumed by lies. There are everyday events that goes to show how shallow and artificial our existence is.  I often wish I was that Babu who enjoys sunning himself in winter Delhi, enjoying munching peanuts and discussing the next pay upgradation. The beauty of good literature and exquisite music be damned. This is life and beneath this thin veneer of respectability, it is filled with lies. In an average day, I see government employees tampering evidence, concocting and planting false stories, running parallel businesses, collecting bribes, that too for decisions they have no means of influencing. 

   Reading a fine work of fiction is the last thing on my mind. But I plodded on with The Book Thief and I ended it with moist eyes towards the lyrical and melancholy end. It gave me some solace thinking how life must have been unfair to people torn by wars, Jews living in Germany in mid 1940s, how a barely literate accordionist-painter brings the joy of letters to a little girl, how a Jewish fist fighter given shelter in basement writes about ruling the world with words.....  

   It is a book that's narrated by death, about how it was such a beautiful day to die,  about a promised kiss, about the beauty and brutality of life. For once I was thrown back into the world of letters. I was grateful that I still have it in me to enjoy good literature. I read this book slowly ...at the rate of perhaps fifty pages a day. Trying to let the joy of words create mini-explosions in my mind. It is a sad book, and it almost reflected the state of things around me. 

    The other book that I relished reading was the Pigeon Tunnel by John Le Carre. This is the official memoirs of the man of whom I wrote glowingly elsewhere in this blog that, if he had chosen a different genre, he'd have snagged the Nobel for literature. I was always wonderstruck by the economy and careful usage of words that he deploys....almost like a battle where he chooses to field his little soldiers who constitute the big picture, the big war..... The most touching part of this book is where he writes of his father, a charlatan, serial debtor and not someone you could own up to. Somehow at the end of that sad narration, one could almost believe that his father made him who he became...A teller of tales. I have always gone through his books missing the plot completely. Totally absorbed in the build up of characters. George Smiley for one. I could almost see him. Loser in love, immersed in the job that is filled with lies of a different kind..... Somehow I see what we all are,  at the end of the day. Living a life of lies....

The Ivory Throne

                         I had sworn to myself that I won’t be buying any new books or borrowing any from the Eloor lending library until I have finished reading the stuff which already rests in a tidy pile near the bedside and in the bookshelf. I did a quick check of books bought but remained unread. I was astonished by the sheer numbers and also the huge investment it entailed from a Babu’s modest salary. Two things happened recently. A friend gave me a gift of Rs 5000 in the form of Amazon coupons. And here I am buying books of my choice in frenzy, an act that gives me true happiness. Secondly, the Missus handed me a copy of the Ivory Throne written by Manu S Pillai from the Library with an admonition that I ought to finish reading it soon.

   Since the huge tome of 550 odd pages had to be returned in about a fortnight’s time, I decided to read the first chapter which has a gist of Kerala history, a topic of interest to me. I disagreed with the establishment narrative and was about to return the book. I went ahead and read on. And I got totally absorbed in the book and finished it in three days flat in the midst of my hectic work life.

       The book primarily revolves around the women who constituted Travancore Royalty, more specifically, Rani Lakshmi Bayi, who reigned as regent (1924-31) until the prince attained adulthood and her cousin Sethu Parvati Bayi, the mother of the prince. A word about the young author. He is all of 27 years old, a graduate of Kings college London and has worked as Parliamentary assistant to Shashi Tharoor.  He has a very easy and readable style that keeps the reader engrossed in a tale full of machinations, intrigues, twists and the battles for riches and cash allowances to royalty.

      The Travancore kingdom pioneered several progressive measures and legislation. Some of these measures were during the reign of the Regent and some during the reign of Chithira Tirunal Maharajah (the prince who eventually ascended the throne). The central theme of this book is that the Maharani rose above the petty conflicts that plagued the Royal household, and laid the foundation to what became the most progressive state. Whereas the Prince’s mother had many insecurities and even resorted to Black Magic to cut short the reign of her cousin, the Regent. The nephew who succeeded her wasn’t so charitable either, cutting his aunt out of her sources of income as Attingal Rani which eventually led to her leaving Travancore to the cooler climes of Bangalore, shorn of royalty and spending a rich life with children, Grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The Regent’s husband was often (unfairly) accused of interfering with the administration. However the Regent introduced a large element of fairness into what was a tinderbox of communal passions where the Nairs, Christians and Ezhavas were fighting for a legitimate share of power. The Regent took many decisions that insulated her from this power play (like appointing an Anglo Indian Dewan) and also encouraged education of the girl child. She also issued the proclamation that opened the roads around the temples to all cases, a forerunner to eventually issuing the temple entry proclamation some years later.

   This reading led me to another book on the life of C P Ramaswamy Iyer written by A Sreedhara Menon (in Malayalam), which has been lying unread for the last one year. Sir CP, was originally the constitutional and legal adviser to the Maharajah Chithira Tirunal (the prince who eventually took over from the Regent) and eventually became the Dewan. He was absolutely loyal to the Maharajah and his mother. He went to meet Lord Willingdon, the then Viceroy with whom he shared a good professional relationship to terminate the Regency earlier than usual and coronate the King. This book gives credit to CP  for piloting the fortunes of the state in the name of the Maharajah.

          According to him the Regent was against issuing the Temple entry proclamation and merely got by with issuing transit rights to all castes on roads around the temples. If the family of the Regent comes across smelling roses in Manu S Pillai’s book, it is CP’s firm and progressive hand that characterized the golden era of Travancore, according to Menon. But the Maharajah hogged the limelight and CP was credited with most things that went wrong. But just a cursory reading of the various initiatives by Sir CP, would lead one to believe that the era of firm and progressive decision making in administration came to an end after Sir CP. The Left narrative has always characterized him as the villain, who has the blood of thousands in his hands as a result of police firing in Punnapra- Vayalar agitation. He also ran the State with an iron hand which stifled press freedom and other initiated many repressive acts that turned Travancore into a Police State. He even tried to retain sovereignty of the State of Travancore at the time of partition and finally advised the Maharajah against it on practical considerations.

          Manu Pillai’s book cites correspondence between the Regent, Dewan, Resident, Viceroy and others. It is educative to know how they used the English language with economy of words and beautiful turns of phrases. Even drab official letters are a study in elegance. This journey into the past was absorbing, to say the least. The bygone era had men and women of character. Even when they erred or failed to assess the pulse of the populace, one could never accuse them of having done it to line their pockets. History is often not fair to these souls who heralded the beginnings of a revolution, in education, equality of opportunity, industrialization and infrastructure.

Dylan – A personal history

  On a busy afternoon I received a text message on my phone from my friend, which I thought was a prank.  Bob Dylan wins the Nobel winner for literature. Then there were frenzied phone calls from friends of college network. It took some time to sink in. I had a nice hearty laugh. All you magic realists, Polish/Hungarian writers with un-pronounceable names, the little known poets who make political statements in obscurity. Eat your heart out.  Your time has come and gone. It is almost as though one among us, shorn of pretensions, has won it, finally.

            This was the original vagabond who cast a spell on the grass-induced stupor of our youth. The listeners of Dylan were a niche crowd. Bearded worthies in jeans and kurta, who rolled joints, read Camus and generally led an aimless life full of existential angst. (Most of them could be spotted driving swanky cars and leading professional lives today: that’s a different story altogether) They were the cerebral ones with heightened musical sensibility. It was nice to belong to that crowd. It was also a means to escape from reality of a rural, conservative society.

   For a generation that has access to Youtube videos and internet, it may not be very easy to understand how difficult it was to collect Bob Dylan songs in early 80s living in the outback of a Kerala town. I remember getting hold of an NRI friend who had the LPs of Dylan songs. I got them all recorded using a microphone in a cassette tape recorder. The quality wasn’t great, but our expectations of audio quality were pretty basic. Lossless audio was unknown to us. But we would listen many times and get a hang of the lyrics, which didn't make much sense.  

          But the Tambourine Man defined us. There was wild imagery, symbolism of a lost generation. The early songs were iconic. The lyrics were quoted in casual conversations, basement hash parties, love letters etc.  My mom would enter my room, listen for a while to that nasal, rheumy voice and ask me “Is he singing or saying?” Many unsuspecting mothers might be led to believe so, as he crooned “It aint me, Babe” or “All along the watchtower” that he was really just saying something against the background of guitar, harmonica and cymbals. If it was easier to listen to the melody of a Beatles song or the harmony of a Simon & Garfunkel, it took some time for Dylan to grow on you.

     Unbeknownst to most of us at that time, Bob Dylan would be reborn repeatedly in our life time. He had already gone electric when I started listening to him. But I would like to think of him as the rebel who crooned “The Times they are a-changing” at Newport folk festival with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica hung around his neck. A one man band, truly. The unwashed phenomenon who strayed into my life, said Joan Baez of Dylan, in that greatest love song “Diamonds and Rust”. What kind of man would leave a dusky attractive woman who wrote a great love song like that?   He is the one who is too good with words and keeping things vague, according to her. And her poetry was lousy , he said. I must have heard “Diamonds and Rust” a thousand times and imagined how this romance between two bright, talented minds blossomed and died.

       Years later, I would read his autobiography (Chronicles, Vol 1) and would be surprised to learn that he was always breaking the rules. Somewhere he talks of Picasso, who wasn't just loafing about on crowded sidewalks. He had fractured the art world and cracked it wide open. He was a revolutionary and Dylan wanted to be like that.

        He wrote some of the greatest Love songs. “Sara” (from the Desire album) “If you see her, say hello” (Blood on the Tracks) were some that carry that tinge of sadness of Love, unrequited or broken. There was a strong political sub-text in “The times they are a-changing, Desolation Row, and Blowing in the wind. There is the signature stamp of a hash-induced message when he says “Everybody must get stoned”or  Biblical overtones in the Slow Train coming. Dylan could come from nowhere and surprise you.  But then unpredictability was his forte. One could never slot him into the silos in the minds of listeners. Dylan would always break free and reinvent himself. Religion, war, Love, life itself, was a rediscovery for him. He reincarnated in many avatars that the rest of us took time to catch up. I had grown out of my obsession for his music by the time he won the Grammy award for “Modern Times”. I listened briefly to the album and decided that I am too old to keep pace with this 70 year old man.

   Leaonard Cohen next ?