Old-fashioned ways..

As last week waned predictably away, I was overcome by a pleasant urge, one that of late has acquired a certain sense of the exotic. I decided, rather impulsively, to avoid both of the preoccupations that have come to define my weekends. Not only would I not linger over the most recent mundane detail that was holding back my research, I would also avoid the alternative, that of indulging in my acute talent for browsing wikipedia and the papers for hours while ruminating on nuggets of information and retaining nothing I can remember. Coming back to the urge, the mere mention of which has provoked in me hundreds of chracters' worth of procrastination already, I felt like reading the way I used to.

It wasn't long ago that every few days an appealing novel would draw me into its world. Oblivious to the goings on around me, I would create a niche for myself in the unlikeliest spot, holding up the book as I lay on my back, curling around it on 3 sides and reading sideways or lying on my stomach and propping myself on my elbow. I sometimes liked to hear myself read it aloud and some other times, flip through a damp squib, not willing to hold out hope for it to clear out. But, somewhere in between, I had gone from seeking out books at libraries to having a dozen titles in my own shelf, unread. It was only the arrival of the latest of my acquisitions from amazon[dot]com that seemed to shake me from the stupor. While I'd made another silly promise to myself to read them right away, I'd also inwardly deplored the very need to have to make such a promise at all. It might have been the cover art, or as I'd like to think it might be my newfound diligence, which as yet is too fledgling to be called work ethic, but I felt right then like old times, and my promise just seemed like it might be kept.

After having them linger far too long on my wishlist, and considering my birthday was a good half year away, last week I bought "The white tiger" (TWT) by Aravind Adiga and "Unaccustomed earth" (UE) by Jhumpa Lahiri. Both were widely publicised and mostly criticised favourably. TWT won the booker prize last year and UE was among the new york times's best fiction of the year. While Adiga explores the relentless churning and struggle that upward mobility is for many of India's underprivileged, Lahiri sticks to familiar turf, emotional tales of first and second generation Bengali Americans for whom success isn't about "making it", which they do by default, but navigating the various buoys tempestuous hearts share their waters with.

Being devilishly funny and commenting pithily on what Indian society really is for the forgotten majority who stand to gain little from the system, TWT is a far quicker read than its bulk suggests, chiefly because of the fast pace and ease of identification with the protagionist. After I shook off my initial qualms about openly rooting for a self-confessed murderer, the protagonist Balram Halwai and his drive to succeed made progressively interesting reading. In the new India, it takes what the book calls an entrepreneur to break the mould, socially against age old rules of what one is supposed to make of life and economically what they can practically make a living of. Besides the humour and incisive social commentary, what made the book special for me were two original (as far as I can tell) analogies on contemporary Indian life- the "rooster coop" that is traditional society and that the book's entrepreneurs have to defy and the "men with big bellies and men with small bellies" that is post independence India's answer to the caste system. It takes a deft touch to handle matters of such profound human suffering and angst with humour while also not being flippant. In my opinion, despite what the right-wing and ultra-assertive nouveau riche in India think, Adiga has achieved quite that.

UE, in many ways, is a perfect foil to TWT. The latter is fast paced, decidedly funny, trading in base emotions like lust, greed and fear among people trying their very best simply to survive and using personal narrative to critique an entire society. UE on the other hand is deliberately slow, sometimes dwelling on minutiae spread across years while charting entire lives, always serious in its tone, and dealing with issues like identity, self-image, guilt and existential angst that only arise when lives flourish, not simply make do. It is a collection of short stories, quite like her earlier work, Interpreter of maladies. They are about the same privileged, upper caste Bengali immigrants to the United states and their ivy league educated children who rebel in much the same teenage ways as before and accept much the same uneasy truces with their parents. There are subtle questions on whether their liasons and relationships with Americans feed on creeping self-hatred, being raised in a culture whose dominant physical images they were incapable, by nature, of meeting. Although not pointed to as such by Lahiri, the emptiness that characterises many a senility of a first generation immigrant character begs the question whether uprooting their prvilaged Indian lives for the American promise whose sheen only lasted as long as their youth did was worth it. Jhumpa Lahiri's strength is her magical ear for the innermost lubdubs of the heart. All the stories here, while not presenting an experience radically different from her previous works, do a better job at tugging at emotions and goes to the core of the human experience even while staying within the confines of the Bengali-American experience.

A great novel, they say, is about the human condition and what it means to be sapient. In their different ways, at their different scales, both TWT and UE are just that.