Being solemnly faithful to The Chosen One is, unarguably, a near-impossible task. I’m still reeling from how the writers in our First City’s June Special obliged us so. A favourite writer changes so often. You read a book, you’re swept away, and you hunger for the writer’s next one; in the meanwhile, another book beckons, you read it, and it captures you so subtly, you only know it days after you turned the last page. And even as you wallow in the bittersweet moments of having finished a book that’ll never be the same again (because now you can only re-read it, and you almost want to lock this time in that part of your brain that never ever forgets), there’s a dazzling new, stylish writer who could be new to the world, or just to you.
A favourite writer is someone who makes you giggle at first, perhaps, someone who shocks you later on, someone who reveals secret truths about experiences you haven’t had yet, someone who makes the ludicrous absolutely profound, and vice versa, someone who holds up a mirror to you, even, someone’s who’s simply hilarious, and someone who unleashes a sense of adventure and mystery. And all this could be accomplished by a single writer. Or a series of them.
There are a few first times you never ever forget, of course.
I’ll never forget reading, for instance, about Gregor Samsa’s overnight metamorphosis for the first time. It was a particularly hungover morning (not the best way to read it at all, because then the cockroach is forever fused in the mind with the sick feeling in your bloodstream), and being so struck, fascinated, discovering the word that could end and stop all conversations I figured, pretentious or otherwise - Kafka.
Or the first time I read about Salim’s pencil and a nation’s tryst with destiny, how the fantastical can even read like a book, awed by an author’s writing that is so markedly full of style. And again, the name conjures up everything good, bad and ugly about magic realism even today - Rushdie.
Or the first time The Famous Five entered my life and took over it completely. I’d seek out mysteries where there weren’t any (where was Maa’s purse last seen? Hmm?), and wished for a Timothy (what a brilliant dog!) to my George (never Anne, ‘cuz she was such a girl! Please, so not cool!), who would sniff-and-woof out the secret passageway to a mystery I could then crack. The famous five also introduced me to that feeling that only words in the hands of smart authors can evoke - of not knowing exactly what’s being talked about, but finding it very exciting nevertheless (Them eating bacon and ham for breakfast, is something I vividly remember as very tempting, until I discovered what it was and my vegetarian sensibilities reacted!). Ah, Enid Blyton!
Or reading
Needful Things on never-ending bus rides, and discovering what compulsive writing is (when you can’t tear your eyes away from it and risk missing your bus at the stop hence!). And then going onto discover other greater works from the author who gives horror new meaning - Stephen King. Just the name’s enough to recreate unpleasant, spine-chilling moments.
Or spending days enamoured and seduced by Milan Kundera and the brilliant ways in which he converted all of life into an argument, intellectualising even sex. Since then, writers have tried and failed miserably trying to imitate him.
Reading Anthony Doerr’s memoirs on a Roman holiday, and falling in love with his love of nature and French nights, a reader’s vicarious living of Anthony’s parenting experiences too. Or reading Uzma Aslam Khan’s
Geometry of God, a masterpiece, after being overwhelmed by her Tresspassing, and awaiting her next with something akin to a secret trepidation.
But I digress! This is about The Chosen One. It’s going to have rephrase as two’s company, in my case, though.
Douglas Noel Adams
So, here’s a writer (a favourite writer), who had a legendary reputation for not writing. His publisher had to move in with him, holding him imprisoned almost in a hotel room, so he wouldn’t miss the printers’ deadline again (And to him, we owe the priceless quote ‘I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by’). He’d always insisted that 42 ‘has no significance in relation to any other previous uses of the number 42’. He was also known for his huge collection of electric guitars and how he once performed at Earl’s Court with his mates, Pink Floyd. Man, was he cool! (And it’s still weird to use the past tense for a writer whose writing’s so alive, how he used technology in such writer-ly ways!)
His radio series started the year I was born. A year later, the book version appeared ‘based on the radio show’, still a good 16 years before I would lay my hands on it -
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - and find ultimate religious conversion. Here was humour, wit, meaning, ridicule, making a whole lotta sense, a pattern he followed in all of his books, through
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and
The Meaning of Liff and
The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul. Who can forget The Electric Monk (
a labour saving device that believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe), or the cow offering its different parts to a horrified set of diners at the restaurant at the end of the universe (and that’s ‘end’, in all its meanings)?
Douglas Adams was also a writer for whom existing words were never enough. How do you explain that feeling of ///, except by inventing that word, ///? And so he did, he changed the way people spoke, and gave us shortcuts - We all need a Babel Fish in the ear, some days, when the Boss speaks in one of his inscrutable meetings. We never forget to carry towels on trips, or at least, we joke about it. We all frown at the brew in cup, on some days, that’s almost but not quite unlike tea. (Club that with Babel Fish boss day, and that makes it a Monday). And after helping us understand life, the universe and everything (or just the bizarre randomness of anything and everything disconnected), he had an asteroid named after him. (Other writers on this list include Antoine St Exupery, Nabokov, Dickens, Tolkien, Milan Kundera, CS Lewis, Dostoevsky, Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell). But Douglas Adam’s the only one, I think, who’s had the honour of having one named after one of his characters. Yup, Arthur Dent.
“I wanted to be John Cleese”, he once said, “It took me some time to realise that the job was taken.” No one can now even attempt replacing Douglas Adams. (Oh, go away, Eoin Colfer!).
Amitav Ghosh I’m always at a place in life where I can say, ‘Well, the last time I read
Shadowlines…’ Because it’s always different from that first time I read
Shadowlines, when it was always about Ila and only Ila. The resonance of the journey, the ‘going away’ and the ‘coming home’, still mark impressions on the mind.
Amitav Ghosh writes books that are Melville and Conrad washed, but with such a distinct style. You can always tell it’s Amitav Ghosh, even in his travel writing, even in
The Imam and the Indian, even in his essays on the Andaman and Nicobar islands. It’s difficult to describe it, but it’s careful and deliberate, each word and expression weighed such that never is a page, a letter superfluous. He’s like the curious chronicler of our times, nonchalantly charting his own path through his novels and putting it out into the universe. Creating wonderful characters, people, who end up, in
Sea of Poppies, as
jahaj bhai and
behen, on one ship together, almost impossibly, but also inevitably. (“Because people are inexhaustible”, he’d said in a First City interview). A breaking wave in
The Hungry Tide, the Sunderbans rituals, are as alive as Piyali and Kanai and Fokir and the unlikely bond that forms between them in the pages of the novel. His books echo with a sense of the place (
In an Antique Land, most memorably), all the while dealing with human emotion and the drama of life.
If you think about it (and blogposts clearly urge you to!), he’s an anthropologist, a gifted, meticulous, extremely hardworking observer, really, but the best, the most superior, kinds. And this is Amitav Ghosh’s biggest achievement. (Bigger than even his tryst with language, which transforms and throbs with its own sonority in each of his novels, most brilliantly in
Sea of Poppies). He’s the only writer I know who can ease all that research and knowledge into wonderful, beautiful, compelling fiction - ease being the operative word. Because he makes it so effortless, you’ll think he was born speaking Laskari. That mammoth, gargantuan, academia that has gone into it never ever weighs his work down; it only sets it free. (A great sense of humour helps of course, something Amitav Ghosh has only perfected, in the journey from
Shadowlines to
Sea of Poppies).
Curiously, the only Amitav Ghosh I still haven’t read is his first one. And when I met the author during his recent book tour (the brilliant opportunity that First City is; thankyou, No Moss, for keeping this curious publication afloat for so long!), I bought a copy of
The Circle of Reason, so he could sign it. Which he did, of course, very (what’s-that-word) graciously. (Though he already had me at hello and crackle chocolate). But now each time I open to finally start it, I read and re-read Amitav Ghosh’s inscription, and put it back on the bookshelf. And I secretly know it’s because I want an unread Amitav Ghosh always lying around somewhere, in my reach. Life wouldn't be the same, else.
floatin'
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