The Hindu Business Line : Books that bind

"I SAW the Captain regarding me with brown, friendly and what I came to learn later from hearsay, unreliable eyes. He had such deep-black hair that it might well have been dyed and a long thin nose which reminded me of a pair of scissors left partly ajar, as though his nose was preparing to trim the military moustache just below it."

Over the last few days one has read and re-read this line and been trying to locate a nose chipping at a moustache. The reader meets up with the piece of literature in the second page of the 189-pages Graham Greene novel, The Captain and the Enemy, which one had picked up from the pavement near Bandra Station (East). That day the appointments with a few bankers at the Bandra-Kurla Complex got cancelled and one had time to look at the wares a Muslim spreads out for the discerning Mumbaikar.

The hard-bound novel in top condition cost Rs 40 and one did not haggle as Graham Greene is a favourite with me. He is an easy storyteller and his lines spin images bearing the early vintage greens on trees of a Mumbai spring. He belongs to the society of master storytellers such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Evelyn Waugh. It took me four days to read the book twice though the plot does not match the tales Greene sets out to unwind in Monsignor Quixote and The Power and the Glory.

One read Greene in between trudging through Love in the Time of Cholera of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with Greene providing relief from a desperately tiring Marquez. It has taken this writer six months to complete One Hundred years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, which in some ways resembles Sarat Babu's Devdas.

For a novel to have the Fevicol effect on a reader, the novelist has to have a lithe and liquid imagination, which can seep through human beings to construct events. For a time, Marquez holds the reader before dropping him loose and alone on the road. One continued with Marquezonly because of having spent some money on buying the books. Magic realism, like miracles proffered by quasi-saints, stuns or injures for a few minutes or hours. When you pull out of the torpor, you do not go again for the book or the quasi saint.

Take Love in the Time of Cholera, which is basically about a love affair between Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, which goes on and on before the reader develops a disgust for any affair, love or non-love. In between the reader has to taste one kg packs of sex strewn liberally in the two volumes, more so in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Now one is scared to pick up the autobiography of Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale, translated by Edith Grossman, which one bought at Strand at a concessional price of Rs 400. Not many will agree with this view but at least for this writer no more of Marquez, having had a venomous dose.

It could also be that those brought up on Chekov and Narayan, may not be able to take in modern writing with its splintered styles and injured images derived from modern living styles, which at a bare minimum is violent, non-stop. Modern writers do not let the readers snooze in peace.

There is no joy in modern literature for the reader and the writer. To keep oneself intact, one opted for the Rupa Book of Great Animal Stories, edited by Ruskin Bond and Hindi: Handpicked Fictions, edited and translated by Sara Rai. Increasingly, one has fastened on to modern Hindi writing, prose and verse, as they do speak about human beings living in north India and most can relate to them.

If one buys a Katha Book, 10 per cent of the jacket price goes to help educate a child at the Katha School of Entrepreneurship. Some of the Triple A rated writers like Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh and Mohan Rakesh are there.

Particularly impressive is the short story of Shrikant Verma, The Funeral Procession though for style Muktibodh scores in The Fire.

Chunnilal Sharma, alias Chunnu, M.Sc., Assistant Teacher, looks out from the kitchen and Muktibodh writes: " The shore of the lake was lost in a blue grey mist. But over the green treetops glimmering in the water, the possibility of a ruddy glow presented itself. Gazing at the scene spreading into the distance, he stood motionless. Its cool freshness banished the gloom from his heart, replacing it with a strange dancing rhythm."

It was the same many years ago when I was having a cup of coffee in the verandah at my home in Kottarakara when the rains came along like Mumbai's crowds at railway stations and rubbed away the horizon for a few minutes.