TSUNDOKU. Little full lives

I have been thinking of my own ordinary life as I read about others — the books this month have that as their general theme: lives examined. As writers, we all spend a greater part of our days navel-gazing, but maybe some navels are more interesting than others, some little lives full to the brim with anecdotes, joys and sorrows. On the other hand, it was Socrates who famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”, so maybe we should all turn microscopes on ourselves, thinking about our choices, instead of just floating down the river with everyone else. A caveat though: Socrates said this just before he was sentenced to death (he had to choose between that and exile), therefore we should perhaps just stick to going where life takes us. That took a philosophical turn! This month’s books might spur you on to your own mini existential crisis, but let’s hope they only inspire that reaction in me, since crises in general can be uncomfortable things.

     You probably heard of Gurmehar Kaur before she became an author. To summarise: student catapulted into the public gaze thanks to her anger and activism, and has since emerged as a young woman full of poise and grace despite being so much in the public eye. Recently Kaur’s book, Small Acts of Freedom — a sort of memoir about the impact of losing her soldier father as well as the life of her mother — came out to rave reviews, even though I have noticed that people tend to condescend to authors younger than 30. These reviews not only lacked the usual patronising tone, they spoke of the merits of the book without having to go so much into the history of the author herself — all rare things that made me intensely curious about it. I wasn’t disappointed. Small Acts of Freedom is an intensely personal book, almost, thanks to the tone and some bits of language, like you are reading a diary. Some bits stand out: little Kaur finding her grandmother’s passport and reading the word “Pakistan” in it, the intense betrayal she feels. Having to walk up to her teacher’s desk every year with an excuse note for “father’s death anniversary” and hating the expression on her teacher’s face. It would have been a different book if she wrote it when she was older — sometimes the turns of phrase are self-conscious and slightly stilted — but I think part of what appealed to me was the rawness of it all. You won’t be able to stop thinking about it anyway.

Perhaps it was the recently concluded 2018 edition of Jaipur Literature Festival that sent me running back into the arms of a collection of short stories I have read over and over again. But Nell Freudenberger’s debut collection, Lucky Girls , never got the admiration I always thought it deserved.

  Sure, it came out in a pre-literature festival era, but I’m yet to read another piece of fiction that deals with being a foreigner in India with more ease. Mostly, you wind up feeling slightly embarrassed for the protagonist, with every sentence you are reminded that they are White and Outsiders and Alone, but with Freudenberger’s characters — mostly women, mostly in South East Asia and India — you are so emphatic that you could be one of them, even though you have never lived anywhere further away than 1,500 km from where you were born. The girls are volunteers in Thailand, lonely mistresses in Delhi, returning to senile fathers also in Delhi, and diplomat’s children in Mumbai looking for home. (There is one more girl who appears in a letter she is writing to someone else, but I have never read that story, not finding it as appealing as the others, even though I’ve read the book over a dozen times.) The stories are still fresh though, even as I read them years later, and the expat’s view continues to charm me.

I have been dipping into MFK Fisher’s collection of autobiographical essays, The Gastronomical Me , every night, and this is also disastrous for my waistline because Fisher is one of the best food writers I have ever read, and also because this book is all about how she moved to Dijon in France with her husband right before World War II, and the things they ate.

   Oh, the things they ate. There was a description of gruyere bought in a local market, grated so it fell on your piece of paper as soft as a cloud. Or just a throwaway line about hard bread, or a pie she had once as a child, when her father pulled out a jar of cream to spoon on top or an oyster at a school dance. But more than the food — which is ostensibly what the book is about — there are also vivid descriptions of the people Fisher runs into, her landlords, the ship’s captain, how her husband and she want to celebrate and how they pick their way through a little inn so they can enter the far more famous establishment behind it. And when she goes into a whole rant about how she hates cooking for people who refuse to eat anything except that which they get at home, you want to stand up in your chair and cheer for her across the decades, because I hate it too, Mrs Fisher! She has almost become a friend, except that very busy and accomplished friend whom you’re half-afraid of, but also extremely pleased each time they invite you over for dinner. It’ll definitely make you want more out of Zomato reviews at any rate.

 

 

 

 

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of five books with a sixth, The One Who Swam With The Fishes ; out now in bookstores; @reddymadhavan