Indian Writing

Again and again through the day
I meet a cat.
In the tree’s shade, in the sun, in the crowding brown leaves.
After the success of a few fish bones
Or inside a skeleton of white earth
I find it, as absorbed in the purring
Of its heart as a bee.
Still it sharpens its claws on the gulmohar tree
And follows the sun all day long.

Now I see it and then it is gone,
Losing itself somewhere.
On the autumn evening I have watched it play,
Stroking the soft body of the saffron sun
With a white paw. Then it caught
The darkness in paws like small balls
And scattered it all over the earth.

— Jibanananda Das

Translation Lila Ray. Poem courtesy Minstrels.

There were many lovely moments in Mira Nair’s film adaptation of The Namesake. This moment in the airport, for instance, reminds me of the time we flew from Calcutta to Bombay after the sudden death of my mother’s father. I also got a fleeting sense of what life might have been like for my parents, living in Calcutta in those years, far from their families.

And Tabu and Irfan were lovely to watch, despite the uneven accents.

But no, the Calcutta shown in the film wasn’t as well done as one might expect… and I don’t mean merely the carelessness of, say, an Indusind Bank signboard in what is supposedly Howrah station of the mid-seventies (yes, I’m like that about detail, sorry). I mean, in the context of the following statement by Nair in a television interview:

You know what happens when these phirangs come from abroad. They just don’t have any relationship with our country. Look what happened with City of Joy. You can fling millions of dollars at things but that doesn’t make it real. Or that doesn’t make it moving or truthful.