My grand-uncle T.S.Satyan’s photographs are on display at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Rampart Row, Kala Ghoda. The exhibition came to Mumbai from Tasveer.
Satyan is now 86. He is based in Mysore, but was here for two days for the show opening.
Read this 2002 article by Theodore Bhaskaran about Satyan’s work over here.
And here is something Satyan wrote in 1950.
T.N.Shanbhag, who passed away on February 27 this year, aged 85, was one of India’s great bookmen. He had a simple but clear understanding of the business of books: that there would always be people who wanted to buy them, and that they would buy them as long as they were able to afford them. This was how the legendary Strand discount was born.
It was a simple formula: a flat twenty per cent off on any book in the shop, unless the book was already being sold at a special price. The formula has remained the bookshop’s fundamental principle for over six decades.
Whether you’re a shop regular or a one-time visitor, you never have to remember to insist on the discount or even to ask for it; the person making up the bill will simply include it at the end, neither reluctantly nor with a flourish as if he is doing you a favour, but most matter-of-factly, because it is not just part of the store’s business policy but part of its ethic. They will never try to get away with not giving you the discount.
Shanbhag began his bookshop in 1948, inside the premises of the old Strand Cinema in Colaba from where the shop got its name. He used to call it a “hole in the wall”, but in its location off Pherozeshah Mehta Road in the Fort area, the Strand Book Stall today has the space for several thousand books from all over the world, packed into shelves all the way to the top as well as on the mezzanine floor at the end of a narrow staircase, along with assorted delights from all over India - the latest issue of Biblio, a couple of new arrivals from the Seagull in Kolkata, several slim delights for children from the Chennai-based Tara Books - and, not least of all, several salespersons who arrange themselves unobtrusively alongside the shelves.
Unbelievably, there is even space for a few chairs in case you want to browse. And you’ll never have the salespersons hovering over your shoulder asking if they can help you. They know that if you’re looking for something in particular, you’ll ask them. The rest of the time, you’re left alone.
At any time during the day, one of the salespersons is always on the phone, taking orders for books from the thousands of regular customers: from The Joy of Sex (which must surely be one of their most popular orders) to the new memoir by Azar Nafisi, chances are they’ll already have it tucked away somewhere; if not, they can get it for you, and always at twenty per cent off. Strand regulars also know that the most interesting books are always the ones kept in small piles near the phone with slips of paper tucked into the pages: those are the books that people have specially ordered, and there are almost always some interesting finds there. If you want one of those very badly, then they might just decide to give you the only copy they have and quietly order another one for the other customer.
One of the highlights of every new year, along with the classical music Janfest at St.Xavier’s and later the Kala Ghoda Festival, is the Strand Book Sale. All roads lead to the festive atmosphere of Sunderbai Hall in the New Marine Lines for the two week duration of the display. Inside the great hall is a great hunger for books. Mumbai is not a demonstrative city, and it is careful about getting as much as it can for its money; but inside the Strand sale, you will find ordinary citizens thrilling in the extraordinary experience of walking through a vast hall full of books.
Mumbai is used to crowds, and this one leaves the book-buyers unfazed. Their hands will ache from holding the steel handles of the plastic shopping baskets, but they will move along with the mass of people, criss-crossing the hall like a temple crowd, loading their baskets with books. Moms and dads will alternately babysit their children in the play area outside while the other parent battles through the crowds inside to emerge with their arms laden down with Strand’s well-known plastic bags.
The Strand sale is an inducement to excess, an orgy of book-buying. Nothing seems too expensive, not even when it’s finally your turn in the billing queue and the billing assistant tots up your total in an untidy scrawl over two or three pages of their little white and blue billing books. Then you cross over to the payment counter to get your card swiped, the charge-slip is impaled at the top of a small mountain of charge-slips, and you get the brief, efficient flash of a smile from the normally impassive counter assistant who hands you your bags when you show them your copy of the bill stamped “Paid”.
Did you really buy so many books? Where on earth will you keep them? The questions fleetingly cross your mind. But once a book has gone into one of those orange, blue or red baskets, it will come out only to be paid for, packed into the Strand bags, and opened and read on the long train ride or drive home.
At the launch of the Nano, “a voice-over comparing the car’s introduction to the scaling of Mount Everest, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb.”
Er, the Tiananmen square protests?
…”An Atlas of Impossible Longing” by Anuradha Roy. It’s the story of three generations of a Bengali family in the first half of the twentieth century. There are some lovely things in the book, such as this excerpt.
I admired many things about the film, including the fact that it was made at all. It was uncompromising in what it set out to do.
One of the saddest moments: an elderly musician, Khan Saheb (Naseeruddin Shah) recollects the first time he saw the tomb of Wali Gujarati, and when for a few moments Khan Saheb, Panditji and a little mouse sat together in the hush of the tomb. The question that Khan Saheb seems to be asking is: when Wali’s tomb disappeared during the riots, how much else - graciousness, tolerance - vanished along with it?
Picture above: a young boy returns to the Shah Alam refugee camp after a fruitless search for his father.
Here is a short story by Asghar Wajahat, The Spirits of Shah Alam Camp.
Oh, this little film is such a delight.
Directed by scriptwriter extraordinaire Sooni Taraporevala, with her two lovely kids playing two of the main roles in the film along with Sohrab Ardeshir, Boman Irani, Imaad Shah, and all sorts of dear Bombay faces including Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal, Cyrus Broacha, and Kunal Vijaykar.
I read this P.D.James novel for a book club meeting this month. Pity that I ended up not being able to attend the meeting (which was to happen at the newly redone Tea Centre) because I was stuck near the airport, in traffic, after seeing off my father and brother. Sometimes I wonder what we’re doing living in a city where you can’t even predict how long it will take to get from one place to another.
Anyway, I enjoyed the book. It’s an Adam Dalgleish novel, 14th in the series (and likely to be the last, as Dalgleish occasionally reflects within the novel), and I’ve generally liked reading about this Jaguar-driving detective who is also a published poet. I enjoy reading P.D.James: especially the geography, the rich, detailed landscapes, the intricate descriptions of houses and living spaces (in this case, not only a sprawling Tudor manor in Dorset, but also a cottage on the manor estate, and a narrow London house, in the wonderfully-named Absolution Alley, which has one room on each floor, beginning with mullioned windows on the ground floor and opening out to the sky on the top floor).
Rhoda Gradwyn is an investigative journalist who checks in at an exclusive private clinic in a Dorset country manor for plastic surgery to remove a scar on her cheek. It’s no spoiler when I tell you that she is murdered soon after, because that information is provided to us in the first line of the novel. It looks like the work of an insider, and James provides a variety of suspects, endowing each of them with a detailed back story and, of course, a possible motive. These include the surgeon, George Chandler-Powell (but would he really murder his patient after putting in so much work on reconstructing her cheek?); his assistant Marcus Westhall who is just going off to Africa; Marcus’s sister Candace, who assists at the clinic office, and who was never really very happy with the idea of an investigative journalist coming to Cheverell Manor; and Flavia Holland, the attractive nurse in charge at the clinic. Then there is Helena Haverland, nee Cressett, whose family once owned the manor but who now works here as a general administrator; her old governess, Lettie Frensham, who assists with the bookkeeping at the clinic; Kimberley Bostock, the assistant cook and her very competent husband Dean, who dreams of opening their own restaurant; Sharon Bateman, the girl who helps with the cleaning and who is obsessed with the macabre story of a with-burning at the nearby Cheverell Stones; and Mox, the gardener. Oh, and there’s Robin Boyton, the Westhalls’ cousin and a close friend of Rhoda Gradwyn, who has come to stay in one of the estate cottages during Rhoda’s recovery.
A number of delectable red herrings are strewn along the way, including the fictional plot of another detective novel. The police procedural part of the novel is nicely done, beginning with the phone call that pulls Dalgleish out of his meeting with fiancee Emma Lavenham’s Oscar Wilde-spouting professor father. He is assisted by the intelligent and competent Kate Miskin (though there’s a crying scene that I wish James hadn’t thrust on her) and the very good-looking Benton-Smith.
While the main action is restricted to the manor, the estate and a nearby cottage that becomes the incident room for Dalgleish’s team, I also like the way in which James manages to bring into the novel a number of telling observations about class, race, same-sex relationships, urban violence, and contemporary life. Even characters who appear over just a page or two are vividly sketched: an intelligent priest, a dedicated educator, a bright and professional literary agent.
Quite an achievement for the 88-year old crime writer.
Though our short break in Kodaikanal was anything but quiet, with the two boys making a racket through most of the day and well into the night. Highlights of the trip:
- the children’s delight at seeing the mountains for the first time. D, on seeing a pine tree in the cottage garden: “Very long tree… very nice!” And he loved collecting the pine cones, which he initially thought were a kind of pineapple. M, with his more limited vocabulary: “There! There! There!” pointing to the lake and the boats.
- the peace and calm. Kodaikanal is one of the quiet secrets of the south. Of our five days, we spent one day getting there and another getting back: it’s a two-hour flight to Coimbatore and then a four-hour drive to Kodai. The drive up from Coimbatore is flat and uneventful, except for a series of lazily turning windmills, until we cross Palani. After that, it’s about two gorgeous hours and 14 hairpin bends up the mountains, through some lovely tall green-brown forests.
- the weather, which was completely different on each day that we spent there: actually hot the first day, cool and cloudy the next, then wet and grey, and finally, on the day of our return drive down the hills, clouded with mist.
- the very child-friendly Carlton Hotel, our two adjoining cottages, the spacious grounds, the lovely lake view; the boating, and most importantly, the children’s play area;
- the quick and painless round of sightseeing (Coaker’s Walk, in bright sunshine; the 500-year old tree in the forest; the pine forest; the Suicide Point; the Pillar Rock; the Guna Caves; and, one misty afternoon, the Kurinji Andavar Kovil);
- the slow, winding drives to nearby villages, the superb views, the colours of the forest, the deep valley filling up with mist;
- the home-made chocolates (at Fays); the fried momos (at Tibetan Brothers); the cheese (from Cinnabar, at the Potter’s Shed); the filter coffee and idli-sambar (at the very down-to-earth Astoria, don’t be fooled by the posh-sounding name);
- the bright cheery stuffed toys and stuff, at Kopedeg (especially a large green toy parrot on a wooden perch) and Re’s (little toy animals in Kalamkari fabric);
- hand-knitted sweaters, lavishly embroidered sarees, and handmade jewellery at Corsocks. I even found a little something, embroidered all over with flowers, that was apparently meant to be a dinner roll holder. The saleswoman told me it’s a favourite among their visitors.
*****
As for the title of this post. I managed to catch up with some reading, and one of the books I read was “A Nice Quiet Holiday”, a debut mystery novel by Aditya Sudarshan. The narrator, Anant, is a young law clerk on a hill break with his boss and mentor, a Sessions Judge. But their holiday in the fictional town of Bhairavgarh, in Uttarakhand, is anything but nice or quiet: with a murder, much blood, a court scene, and the town simmering with resentment about an AIDS report published by an NGO. Not sure why the novel is being described as a literary thriller though. It’s a nice quick read at 224 pages. Well structured, with short crisp chapters, an intelligent narrator, and lots of house guests sitting about in a large house on the hillside. I look forward to reading about the Judge and his law clerk again.
Everyone should see this film.
Went to the Strand Book Stall this evening, partly just to make sure it was still there. Silly, I know, and I hadn’t seen the Shanbhags at the shop for months now - but still. I picked up a copy of Roberto Bolano’s 2666, which The Complete Review calls “nearly perfect”; a collection of post-Independence Indian poetry in English edited by Eunice de Souza for the National Book Trust; and a copy of M.C.Chagla’s autobiography, Roses in December, as a 73rd birthday gift for my father. It was a book that my mother had admired greatly. The title comes from a J.M.Barrie quote: “God gave us memory that we might have roses in December.”
Orhan Pamuk will make an appearance in Mumbai this week, reading from his work. Here is the opening of Snow:
The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.
He’d boarded the bus from Erzurum to Kars with only seconds to spare. He’d just come into the station on a bus from Istanbul—a snowy, stormy, two-day journey—and was rushing up and down the dirty wet corridors with his bag in tow, looking for his connection, when someone told him the bus for Kars was leaving immediately.
He’d managed to find it, an ancient Magirus, but the conductor had just shut the luggage compartment and, being “in a hurry,” refused to open it again. That’s why our traveler had taken his bag on board with him; the big dark-red Bally valise was now wedged between his legs. He was sitting next to the window and wearing a thick charcoal coat he’d bought at a Frankfurt Kaufhof five years earlier. We should note straightaway that this soft, downy beauty of a coat would cause him shame and disquiet during the days he was to spend in Kars, while also furnishing a sense of security.
As soon as the bus set off, our traveler glued his eyes to the window next to him; perhaps hoping to see something new, he peered into the wretched little shops and bakeries and broken-down coffeehouses that lined the streets of Erzurum’s outlying suburbs, and as he did it began to snow. It was heavier and thicker than the snow he’d seen between Istanbul and Erzurum. If he hadn’t been so tired, if he’d paid a bit more attention to the snowflakes swirling out of the sky like feathers, he might have realized that he was traveling straight into a blizzard; he might have seen at the start that he was setting out on a journey that would change his life forever and chosen to turn back.
But the thought didn’t even cross his mind. As evening fell, he lost himself in the light still lingering in the sky above; in the snowflakes whirling ever more wildly in the wind he saw nothing of the impending blizzard but rather a promise, a sign pointing the way back to the happiness and purity he had known, once, as a child. Our traveler had spent his years of happiness and childhood in Istanbul; he’d returned a week ago, for the first time in twelve years, to attend his mother’s funeral, and having stayed there four days he decided to take this trip to Kars. Years later, he would still recall the extraordinary beauty of the snow that night; the happiness it brought him was far greater than any he’d known in Istanbul. He was a poet and, as he himself had written—in an early poem still largely unknown to Turkish readers—it snows only once in our dreams.
