The Reader Travels

I’m currently reading Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, set in modern day Mumbai.  It’s led me to research the geography of India, to see which state Mumbai is in and what languages they speak.  There’s a glossary at the back of the book to teach me words I do not understand. I feel the tensions between the birds of different feathers, lines drawn between people of different faiths and those from different states and countries. I would love to see a Mumbai version of the movie Crash. It is perhaps a more apt setting even than Los Angeles.

When I saw the first story on Yahoo!’s home page about the attacks, I was drawn immediately, connected in a way I never expected to be.  My heart doesn’t often bleed.  I usually see things through a logical eye that accepts that humans will wreak suffering upon each other out of hatred and insecurity, in the name of their god or their country.  Sad, but inevitable.  Yet I still imagined myself there, since the literary word had already brought me to this land a half a world away.

So, even though there is violence and suffering the world over, tonight my warm wishes go out to the city of Mumbai, in the state of Maharashtra, in the land of India. May the waters of the Arabian Sea bring comfort and healing.

We took our little dog for a walk in the park last weekend, and as we were leaving, I looked out the window and said, “Golly, are those men playing cricket?” And indeed, they were.

Cricket may have originated in England, but it comes to Dallas/Fort Worth by way of India. Certainly, imperialism has its evils, but a world of common language and common sports can be a beautiful thing.

It makes me think of the movie Lagaan, if only because it’s about British people teaching Indian people how to play cricket. The story itself is a classic sports tale of underdogs beating their oppressors, all with the color, music, energy and long-lasting entertainment of Bollywood.

It was a strange thing for me to see cricket in Texas, so I had to look it up to find out how widespread the sport is here. It seems that lots of people are playing cricket in the Big D. And suddenly, I’m having the urge to buy the world a Coke, but only the kind you can buy outside of the US in places where they don’t put high fructose corn syrup in everything.

What a world.

My first review for The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge takes us to the three Indian states of Punjab, West Bengal and Maharashtra, with a brief trip to the beach in Goa.

Monica Pradhan’s The Hindi Bindi Club shares some history, customs and flavors from the various parts of India, flashes of color floating in the melting pot of America. The recipes made my mouth water, and the cultural references were educational. But overall, the characters and their stories lacked substance and seemed only to stand as a vehicle for the research performed by the author.

It’s the story of three young American women who don’t like each other very much, but their mothers are best friends, sharing a homeland in common. Even though the mothers are all from India, they come from different states, each with its own customs and language.

The mothers were halfway interesting, and the best parts of the book involved the one named Saroj Chawla, a spunky business woman born in the town of Lahore which became part of Pakistan when the borders were drawn in the 1940s. Her family was uprooted, and her struggle with animosity toward Muslims and the memory of her childhood Muslim friend makes for a real and sympathetic story.

I would have liked to see Saroj’s story in more detail, for all the others were dull, cliché tales of modern Americans shooting e-mails and calling each other on their cell phones, embracing pharmaceuticals and online dating. I suppose you might consider that Monica Pradhan was trying to make it a point that regardless of their Indian origins, these people lead ordinary American lives, but I think she might have taken that concept a little too far.

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» For an Indian American book I actually liked see Present Tension from the November ‘06 archives.

Something of the divine has touched me this week. I started a new book, Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert. A dozen books were waiting on my shelves to be read, and none of them seemed right, until I spotted this one, a recent birthday gift from a dear friend. I felt something akin to relief when I opened its pages and started to read.

In the opening chapters, she spoke of her failed marriage, and how she cried on her bathroom floor every night until one day she found herself praying to God for the first time in her life. When God told her (in her own voice) to go back to bed, she did. I closed the book and slept with her.

The next morning, I woke to a letter from my husband telling me he had this strangely out-of-character thought that God might be challenging him so he could be a better person. There was something in his letter that connected with the chapters I had read the night before, so I left them for him to read. After he read them, he said, “That’s just plain spooky.” And I had to agree.

As I read further, something else she wrote connected with me. She said to a Balinese medicine man, “I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.” This is an important theme for the memoir, and an important theme for me too. To deny myself the pleasure of love and good food and wine is to deny myself a connection with the divine.

Last night I spent the evening with my three best friends in celebration of an upcoming wedding. We ate a wonderful meal at a Spanish restaurant we’d never been to before, and afterward we had wine and chocolate while listening to live jazz music and sharing gifts with the bride to be. I stared across the table at these three women I love, watching them laugh, loving their talk of language and connecting with people across the world, and I felt blessed.

Today I am resting. I wrote in my journal, read part of my book, took a long nap with the dog and watched a movie. The movie was Babette’s Feast about these two austere women in Denmark who have devoted their lives to the memory of their father, a pastor and leader in their small community. They give shelter and work to a Parisian woman exiled from her home, and she teaches them about the enjoyment of life, love and good food.

At the feast we hear the words of the long-dead father spoken by one who remembered them. “For mercy and truth are met together. And righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.”

The Namesake took me on a journey from India to New England and back to India, and when I put the book down, it guided me forward to Russia.

Gogol’s parents moved from India to the United States, landing in the Boston area, where Gogol’s father taught school. Their early adventures include a small drama around the naming of their son, exploring the Bengali traditions and failing at them in this foreign place.

Because Gogol’s father is a huge fan of Russian literature, he names his son after his favorite author, Nikolai Gogol. The novel makes several references to the Russian’s famous short story, “The Overcoat.” So, of course, that was the next stop for my journey.

I read “The Overcoat” looking for a connection between the two stories. What I found was a brief exploration of Russian child naming traditions with the hero’s mother also failing to follow them. Like Gogol Ganguli, Akaky Akakievich had a hard time fitting in too.

So be careful what you name your child, my friends. You could end up like Sonny and Cher, naming their child Chastity, as if they never wanted her to ever have sex with men. They got what they asked for, right?

My man used to ask me why our gay friends always wanted to hang out at gay bars. After all, we don’t always want to hang out at straight bars. They should live a little, mix it up, you know?

The reason was obvious to me. People want to hang out where they can be comfortable being themselves. And Gogol Ganguli’s parents in The Namesake want to hang out with other Bengali people because there is comfort in sameness. Strangers in a strange land, they cling to home by flocking together.

One of my best friends is from China, and she doesn’t understand her Chinese friends and their need to hang out with only other Chinese people. As far as she’s concerned being from China is just a granfalloon (see Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut).

On the surface my friends all look very different. But despite age, race, religion, nationality and sexual orientation, we are the same in crucial ways. We flock together because we can see that sameness, beyond, above and beneath the surface.

I love you guys!

I’m not sure who “they” are, but they say that with good writing, the writer disappears, so you never think about technique; you just get swept away in the story. I really enjoyed Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, but I was a little distracted for the first few chapters, because everything was happening in the present tense. I was watching things happen, but I wasn’t swept away.

The way she wrote, it felt like she was setting up the scene, and at any moment, she would start telling the story. When I realized that the whole novel was written this way, I had to set the book down and take a breath before I could go on.

Then I got swept away. And when it was all over, I thought about the writer again and her choice to write the story of Gogol Ganguli and his family like it was happening right now and forever. It’s the story of a family who moves to a faraway place and holds onto the little pieces of their culture that they can grasp in the foreign land. It’s the story of people feeling like they don’t belong, like they will always be different from everyone around them.

It’s a universal story, an eternal one. It’s happening. Now.

I love to watch Mira Nair’s movies, especially the ones filled with the color and beauty of India, like Monsoon Wedding and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. One movie she directed that didn’t take place in India was Vanity Fair, but it too had her color and beauty infused into it.

I had a problem with her take on the story, though. The vivid colors and the Indian imagery were great, the production splendid, but she made the main character into a heroine, when Thackeray specifically stated in the subtitle that his story had no hero. Nair white-washed the utter bitch that was Becky Sharp, back stabbing, trash talking, shallow, lying, cheating… And on top of that she was a truly crappy mother, but even that was someone else’s fault in the movie.

Okay, so after watching the DVD interviews, it seems that Nair was bewitched by Becky as a young girl and always saw her as a great, yet flawed heroine. So, maybe she just wanted the rest of the world to see Becky with her same delusion. That’s okay, right? Image is everything.

It seems the founders of my little Dallas suburb were fans of literature, just like me. After all, they named the town after “America’s first man of letters,” Washington Irving. Credited with creating the short story, Irving was from New York City and served as a US ambassador in England and Spain.

Nowadays, there’s a very talented author also by the name of Irving who likes to take us to places like Toronto and Vienna and, yes, Bombay. John Irving’s A Son of the Circus took me to all three, and what a whirlwind adventure it was — serial murders and long-lost twins and Bollywood actors and proselytizing priests and dwarves and contortionists and other great circus acts.

John Irving gets a lot of flack for being too popular, but even the worst John Irving books are thought provoking and fun to read (and A Son of the Circus is one of his best). Yes, Irving is guilty of repeating themes and symbols in his novels, but for me, it’s an adventure to explore the symbolism of his life and find connecting roads that make me appreciate the journey that much more.

Lots of people in the US are fascinated with India. It was the birthplace of Buddhism and other such Eastern philosophies. Yoga is huge among the Burkinstock crowd, and even Madonna is doing it. Then there’s the whole tantric philosophy espoused by such great individuals as Sting and Scarlett Johansson (rumor has it).

I live in a Dallas suburb called Irving, current home of the Dallas Cowboys, though the football team will soon be moving out of our lovely little town. Irving takes pride in its cultural diversity, and includes a large population of Indian immigrants. We have an old theatre dedicated to playing Bollywood movies, and a whole host of Indian restaurants and import stores that bridge the miles between Texas and India.

The first book that took me to India was an epic tale called Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra. If you sit a monkey at a typewriter, he might not come up with the complete works of Shakespeare, but he could tell some incredible stories about the magic of India. The truth is that Shakespeare is simply not colorful enough for a monkey’s sensibilities. But India… ah. The monkey likey.