Slim Pickings

    Lit  5 Responses »
May 152006
 

Sonia Faleiro’s The Girl, a book I’d briefly men­tioned in this post at Sepia Mutiny, is a melan­choly novel set in Goa about two men and The Girl they both loved. The book begins with the young woman’s sui­cide — yet another tragedy in cursed Azul — and the two men are “achingly curi­ous” to find out why. And when one of them stum­bles upon her jour­nal, they use it to recon­struct her life lead­ing up to the sui­cide — the death of an unhappy woman whose last big hope had vanished.

Just a few pages into the novel, and it is obvi­ous that it is as much about show­cas­ing the writ­ing as it is about the actual plot. The Girl is a care­fully crafted book: every sen­tence is metic­u­lously assem­bled from delib­er­ately cho­sen words, each page is filled with pre­cise para­graphs con­struced from metic­u­lously assem­bled sentences.

There is plenty of word­play, and large doses of descrip­tive detail. Noth­ing is too insignif­i­cant to be let off with­out a metaphor or two, rang­ing from the inven­tive to the cliched.

Thus we have the earth “encrust­ing the cas­ket like pas­try bub­bling into hard­ness,” a bar and its loca­tion as mis­matched as “veg­e­tar­i­an­ism and a Goan” and as “pro­foundly antipodean” as the “Rua’s many lit­tle old ladies and the one young lady who lived oppo­site Breto’s in a stone man­sion, and many years later flung her­self into the well in the cor­ner of her garden.”

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 Posted by Karthik at 6:48 am

Introducing SilverScreen

   Movies, Etc.  6 Responses »
May 052006
 

Some­one talk­ing to me for the first time is usu­ally struck by two things: How incred­i­bly hand­some I am, and how incred­i­bly smart I am. If they can get over this, they’ll be struck by two more things: How much I love movies, and how much I love books.

Some­one meet­ing Manoj for the first time is usu­ally struck by two things: How much he loves movies, and how much he loves music. Ok, maybe they’ll also be struck by how smart he is. What­ever. That’s not the point.

So any­ways, Manoj and I spend the bet­ter part of our days IMing each other. In nor­mal Eng­lish, cap­i­tal­ized first words and all. (The only allowance for IMs­peak is the ubiq­ui­tous brb, which I thought was a mis­spelt female under­gar­ment when some­one first used it on me. Now I know, and love to use it coz it sounds so, um, kinky.)

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 Posted by Karthik at 12:17 pm

Friends, Rolexes and Shirtless Men

    Life  5 Responses »
May 032006
 

Pic­ture Cour­tesy Wikipedia

Golden drag­ons sit atop the strik­ing green fa�ade, flanked by golden arches on the left and (over­priced) gold topped taxis beneath. A unsightly blue roof stretches along the entire street, designed to keep out the ele­ments and what­ever lit­tle charm the façade has to offer. “Jalan Petal­ing,” the mul­ti­lin­gual sign­board sus­pended from the low­est tier says. Petal­ing Street.

Petal­ing Street, a nar­row stretch of road in down­town Kuala Lumpur is the green dragon facaded, blue roofed home to a gigan­tic flea mar­ket sell­ing boot­leg mer­chan­dise. Fit­tingly, the mar­ket oper­ates from dawn to mid­night, draw­ing an enor­mous throng of bar­gain hunters look­ing for Rolexes and Patek Philippes; Guesses, Guc­cis, Givenchys and Louis Vit­tons; Star Wars and Flight Plan and Sims and Civ­i­liza­tion and food.

A row of stores on each side of the street, and down the mid­dle of the street a dou­ble row of stores with their backs to each other, split­ting the nar­row alley into two nar­rower alleys. Enter through the left, bar­gain your way up the street till the end, gawk at the ven­dors sell­ing fried fish, and kabab rolls and ice kacang, and a Rolex or two; turn around and hag­gle back down the other way. Along the way, a sen­sual treat: the bright flouroscent light­ing, the smell of sweaty bod­ies laden with faux Ital­ian fash­ion goods mixed in with the the smell of bar­be­cued fish, the sounds of hag­glers hag­gling and touts touting.

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 Posted by Karthik at 11:09 am  Tagged with:

This will do just fine…

    Life  17 Responses »
May 022006
 

In which a forced break from blog­ging causes one to over­com­pen­sate by writ­ing an overly long post.

I was six­teen. She must’ve been a few years older.

I was the kid that snot­tily buried his head in a book through the hour­long bus ride to school, except to look at the occa­sional poster. After her, I was the kid that was start­ing to fan­ta­size about bury­ing the head else­where. Dirty thoughts, I know, but not as dirty as you think. I didn’t know all that then.

In truth, she wasn’t all that pretty. Thin and wiry and bespec­ta­cled and fair and squeaky and rude and unsmil­ing. But she wore excep­tion­ally short skirts that fell just below the knee. Can you imag­ine? And trav­eled the same route as me every sin­gle day for two years, stand­ing but a few feet away from me. And most impor­tant of all, she went to Nrimala[1] Col­lege. What could be hotter?

Ever since a we’d heard that story about a bunch of girls at Rin­mala who raped the milk­man that went to deliver milk to their hos­tel, the hot­ness quo­tient of every­one that spent any time at all in the gen­eral vicin­ity of the cam­pus had increased by sev­eral orders of mag­ni­tude in our eyes. Espe­cially because Rex — who assured us all that he knew — informed us that the story was very true. He also threw in a few details of the inci­dent — oh my! — that made me think that being a milk­man wouldn’t be a bad way to make a liv­ing. Wake up, clean bull­shit, milk cow, visit col­lege, get raped. Bliss.

Could the girl on the bus be a rapist, I won­dered. And then hastily assured myself that she couldn’t have been. Given the time of the inci­dent, she was prob­a­bly in this very bus when her class­mates were doing the nas­ties to the poor milk­man. Unless it was a pre­de­ter­mined crime, and she had stayed back that night. Quite pos­si­ble, you know, with these young col­lege going types.

Now, in case you think we believed every story we heard about IrN­mala, you are so wrong. That story about the girl and a bro­ken test tube for exam­ple: In spite of the obvi­ous truth that in those days — most young girls pos­sessed rather loose morals and were capa­ble of most acts of debauch­ery a male brain could think of, this one was a lit­tle too far­fetched to be true. Also, it coin­cided a lit­tle too well with our entry into the world of pipettes and burettes and — you guessed it — test tubes. So we only partly believed the story.

And then one day, the girl didn’t show up. After she kept up the habit of not show­ing up for a few more days, I knew I had lost her — either she had grad­u­ated or she had fled the law. It must’ve been the lat­ter — how could some­one grad­u­ate in Decem­ber anyway?

She had van­ished with­out a word, my schem­ing rapist shrew girl­friend. Thank God I hadn’t intro­duced her to my par­ents or bragged about her to Rex.

We’d been see­ing each other for a good year and a half, and what did I get out it? A sorry glimpse of knee.

This won’t do.

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 Posted by Karthik at 10:56 pm
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