Indian Writing

Reading that Amitav Ghosh’s new novel Sea of Poppies is on this year’s Man Booker shortlist, my thoughts went back to one summer in Bangalore many years ago, when I was teaching one of Ghosh’s prose pieces to a class of teenage schoolboys. Titled The Imam and the Indian, it was part of an anthology included in their English syllabus.

The boys were restless and bright and awkward, as boys of that age tend to be. As for me, I had chalk dust on my hands, notebooks to correct, and this wasn’t quite my idea of fun. I didn’t plan to teach full-time; I was just waiting for the exam results that would let me make my career in the civil service. Nor did the boys particularly seem to want to read a bunch of stories - they wanted to be doing sums or experiments instead, things that would presumably help them better prepare for their future as engineers and doctors.

So there we were, slightly suspicious of each other: I of their desire to enter into the stories with imagination, and they of my ability to give them enough notes to clear their exams decently.

We had already read two stories from the syllabus, both slightly melancholy pieces that didn’t really work for them. Not that the boys only wanted cheery stuff, in fact I think a couple of end-of-the-world scenarios might have helped things along a bit. But they didn’t have the patience to read about regrets, missed opportunities or a life of sacrifice.

The Amitav Ghosh piece, I thought, might be different. An Indian student of anthropology doing fieldwork in an Egyptian village gets into an argument with an elderly cleric about the relative superiority of their countries: perhaps there was something here, I thought, that might spark off something in their imagination.

There they sat, faces blank, pens poised, waiting to scratch their spiky notes on fresh pages of their English notebooks, and we looked for ways to enter the story. Some starting points came from the class themselves. “What’s anthropology?” asked one boy. He was actually curious. Voices chimed in with alternatives: archaeology, astrology, astronomy. Soon it was a joke.

When I told them, the questions followed thick and fast. You mean there are people who actually get paid to go look at people? - And study their cultures, I reminded. - Why would you want to do that?- To better understand ourselves, among other things, maybe?- But they’re different from us!- Precisely…

They weren’t convinced. To live in a village for months together, trying to understand a different culture? I could see their minds boggling. Meanwhile, time was ticking by, class periods were only 35 minutes long, and we needed to get into the story. We decided on role-playing. One boy would be the narrator, another the Imam, another the Rat – coveted role! – and so on. Because the entire thing was in first-person narration, they would take turns for the narrator’s role.

Awkwardly, one boy stood up and began reading:

“I first met the Imam of the village and Khamees the Rat at about the same time…”

A man named Khamees, a rat. But the boys, used to more literal stuff, were confused.

“I didn’t really ‘meet’ the Imam: I inflicted myself upon him. Perhaps that explains what happened.

Still, there was nothing else I could have done…”

At first there was a burst of protests, interjections, questions, murmurs: what was the different between ‘meeting’ someone and inflicting oneself on them? (They liked that) How did that explain anything? Why did Tradition have a capital T?

Wait, I said. Wait for the whole story.

Now the voice changed. It was another boy’s turn to stand and read.

I expected giggles again when the narrator went to meet the Imam, embarking on the formal ritual of greeting: “Welcome.” “Welcome to you.” “You have brought light.” “The light is yours.” And so on.

But there was an odd hush, as if despite themselves, the boys were being drawn into the story of this unlikely encounter. Why was the Imam bitter about the past? Why did he dislike the narrator? What was the source of his unhappiness?

When Khamees the Rat reappeared, a few lines later, there was a little gasp of excitement. Here was humour, here was gentle heckling. Stuff they recognised.

“Aren’t you the Indian doctor?” asks one of the villagers. Yes, says the narrator, and who is he?

‘”He’s a rat,” someone answered, raising a gale of laughter.’

Khamees wants to know whether he can reach India by riding on his donkey for thirty days. This, too, the boys found funny, but in an absent-minded sort of way, because the reading had already moved on, and what really interested them now was the description of the villagers’ heritage of travel. An Egyptian village from where men have traveled to other countries, driven by wars, money, jobs or just wanderlust! The boys sensed the romance of travel. They could understand restlessness, could smell it in the pages.

Funnily, they also liked Khamees the Rat, who of course had never traveled anywhere except in his hilarious imaginings. When the narrator moves to sit with Khamees, saying, “I liked him at once.” The boys liked Khamees too, in that open, instinctive sort of way. I think they could understand the easy friendship, the recognition of a shared view of life.

Was it the role-playing, or the speaking aloud of words that sounded somewhat strange in our voices, or just the shared laughter – I mean, Khamees the Rat? – but whatever it was, we had each discovered something new about each other. I had underestimated the boys and their capacity to respond to literature. As for them, I think the boys had discovered, however briefly, the beauty that stories can reveal. I like to think that in later years some of them returned to the story, and to other works of fiction, and with each experience, discovered more about themselves and their world.

(A version of this appeared in my MW column this month)