That Girl

There's something about a book and a girl reading it in a cafe. She appears to be distant; a mirage of the unattainable. She's smart at instinctively tucking herself in a corner, next to a beautiful French window, allowing the sunlight to fall on her face--not too much, just enough. Behind those reedy-framed spectacles {that'd probably leave behind a dimple on her nose} she hides, poring over her book. Her body is folded into a slouch and her head is tipped as she thumbs her way through the book with the grace of a hummingbird. You try to catch a glimpse of her bright, almond-shaped eyes that are set beautifully apart beneath a fringe that curtains her forehead. But she's far too occupied to respond to your telepathic advances.

She looks up only to order a mug of hot chocolate and requests the colour of the mug to be yellow. You wonder if someone is joining her. She looks at her watch, shrugs and returns to burying her nose into the book. Below the table, her toe dangles a misty-grey leather chappal with practiced precision. You wonder what she's reading--Science fiction? Epic wars? A self-help book? Biography on Lennon? 1984? The Shadow Lines? Chetan Bhagat? {You promptly erase the last option; she doesn't seem the half-girlfriend sort--you have far greater expectations from her, figuratively and literally}.

There is something about a girl reading a book, you tell yourself. But there is something else particularly about her. She seems to compose an air of remarkable self-assurance. The kinesics are there. Surely, she's charming and witty too. At cue, your mind drifts off to another world: you wonder what life would be like if the two of you were married. Would your mother get along? Would she get along with your dog, named Cat? You're almost down to considering the names of your kids--S and R {the alphabets would be determined by you, she could choose the names}.

With the sound of a door opening, the day-dream seems to be thrashed with a loud thud. A woman rushes in with the flame of golden sunlight behind her. "Kavita!" The woman shrieks. And the love of your life looks up, throws the book aside and leaps across to kiss her. They hold each other for considerable time and then kiss again.

You shrug and return to your lemonade. 

{stories, love, scribbles, books, literature, hot chocolate, tiny visual tales}

Rana Dasgupta's Capital: Shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award

(c) Radhika Iyengar 2015

Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi is an ambitious departure from Rana Dasgupta’s previous work. He maps, with acute patience, the turbulent history of a city that was built, torn apart, ravaged and rebuilt over centuries—the aftermath of which provide important brushstrokes to the portrait of contemporary Delhi. The book shifts back and forth chronologically, juxtaposing modern-day events with the city’s macabre past in order to supply a wider context to the construction of an informed narrative about modern Delhi. The pages are littered with historical playbacks that sweep across centuries—the magnificent Mughal reign, the British raj, the catastrophic 1984 riots, the economic liberalization, which are juxtaposed with eye-opening personal accounts of those who inhabit this enigmatic city from varying economic strata.

In the light of the book recently making it to the Crossword Book Award shortlist, I revisited an interview I had done with him not too long ago.

With two award-winning novels behind you, what prompted you to write about Delhi, its people and its history?

I would say that two things prompted me. One is that, not much has been written about contemporary Delhi. Through books, we know a lot about early-independence Delhi and we know a lot about Mughal Delhi—these are Delhis that appear again and again in literature. Even contemporary writers, who write about Delhi, find themselves constantly going back to the Mughal period because that’s what is ‘literary’, in a way. But I felt that the city I was living in on a day-today basis, what I was reading about in the papers, what I was seeing on the streets, needed to also be described and recorded, because it is a very intense reality. It is a reality that all of us in our lives try to understand and discuss why things are the way they are. And I thought that this was a book-length project. It required you to go back to the traumas of partition and even pre-partition history to understand that. The other thing was that in Indian history, the rise of Delhi in the last 20 years marks a new kind of period. What happened to us in the post 1991 period is that we saw a new kind of Indian commerce where big businesses were attached to Indian politics. There was a drift of the business people to Delhi from all over the country and outside, to knock on the doors of politics— to network and do deals with politicians. So I thought it was important to describe and document this as well.

What informed your decision to take a journalistic route while writing about Delhi? 

By the time I started writing the book on Delhi, I had been living here for a decade. I felt that it had been a very extraordinary decade, not just in my life, but in the life of the city. And this needed to be written about. I always felt that it needed to be written about in non-fiction terms, because I just thought it was more extraordinary than to make up. I mean, I don’t know what you felt about the stories that you read, but these personalities cannot be persons who could be made up, and that’s the whole point. 

In one of your essays, you describe Delhi as ‘an impenetrable, wary city.’ How did you get an impenetrable city to open up to you? 

Well, I think, it’s like a club. I mean, it’s a club kind of a city, which is to say that it is impenetrable to the outsider, but when you have lived here for a while, then a lot of those doors open because you start to have your own networks and you begin to know people. So like a club, if you have the right introduction to somebody then the people are quite open. So as I have said in the book, people are amazingly open when their friend says, ‘Speak to this guy.’ I spent about 18 months just being passed from one person to another, asking people for their stories. I also think that people really like to talk. One of the things that is common to all the characters that appear in this book—some of them are rich, some of them are poor, some of them are intellectual, some of them are not—is that all of them have a very, very intense inner life. They are conscious that things are changing every day. So when I actually sat them down, they told me about how their family functioned or how they made money. There was a lot for them to say since they had been having this inner monologue a lot. So it became an ambiguous kind of a relationship, almost like a therapist, where it wasn’t clear anymore who was driving the conversation or who was getting the most value out of it. Also, I was a mere outsider to these people. I didn’t go to school with them, so they knew I wouldn’t judge them in the same way the people who knew them personally would. I was kind of an empty figure, which made it easier for them to talk about intimate things.

Delhi has been described as a very cold city. A lot of the voices that you bring in from different pockets of Delhi are extremely bitter. Were you conscious of this? 

I am aware that I have written a very dark book about Delhi, but it’s probably because it does strike me as a very dark city. What I think is that there is a difference between the intimate and collective. What I find in the city is that the intimate space can be very warm. People are very good at maintaining friendships in the city; they take a lot of care of their family and friends. At home, guests are hosted extravagantly. And this is married to a deep wariness of what is outside the home. And I think that fear and suspicion is related to the very violent history of the city, where every generation has seen the collective rise up in insane ways. I mean, of course 1947 was the most traumatic of those moments, and again so was 1984. So when one talks about the city, it’s important to talk about the collective experiences, which is where I find a lot of darkness, a lot of fear, a lot of bitterness. And therefore, I think one of the reasons why the desire for money is so big in the city is because with money comes some kind of insulation from the city. You can employ people, you can live in guarded neighbourhoods and you can basically not feel the worst effects of this kind of fear and apprehension.

{delhi, books, non-fiction, crossword book award shortlist, rana dasgupta, author, writing, literature}

Bookmarked: Call Me Ishmael

Remember that crazy, indescribable feeling that you experience when you've just finished reading the last page of a book? That feeling when you cannot wait to tap your friend on his/her shoulder and say, "Oh, you absolutely must read this book!"   Books are a necessity for the soul, I believe. There is some overpowering sense of magic that exists in them. The magic of touring our fingers across the book's spine; in opening the first page and reading the first line; of living with the characters and imagining ourselves to be like those characters; of escaping our world and existing in another one, just for a while. And sometimes, just finding ourselves in those pages and smiling while sipping on a cup of masala chai.

Call Me Ishmael is a website that is a quasi-book club which also functions as a repository of beautiful human stories and experiences. It invites anonymous people [bibliophiles like you and me] to call from random parts of the world and narrate an experience about a book they read that changed their lives. The callers are nameless, yet all of them share that remarkable bond of treasuring books and keeping them close to their heart. Every day, Call Me Ishmael handpicks one voicemail, transcribes it and sends it out to the universe, for souls like us to listen to. 

To me, each voicemail is like a billet-doux dedicated to the unceasingly imaginative and phenomenal world of literature. These letters exist, I believe, to inspire us...to the extent that, in some strange, inexplicable way, there is always something that hits a chord within and I always have something to take away after I've finished listening to an experience. My favourite is the one on The Diary of Anne Frank, and I think that a lot of people are inspired to survive in this terrifying world through the books they've read. 

I managed to reach out to Logan Smalley, a TED fellow who is the Director at Call Me Ishmael. Thankfully, he was ready to give me his time of day, so I picked his brain about the inspiration behind this simple, yet beautiful idea. 

What sparked, Call Me Ishmael?

Call Me Ishmael actually has a somewhat bohemian origin story. At a pub in the West Village in New York City, some friends and I were discussing books and websites we love over beers. We were riffing on an idea about creating a blog named, Call Me Ishmael, and thought: what if Ishmael had a cell phone? We launched the site six months later. 

"Call Me Ishmael" is the opening sentence of Moby Dick by Herman Melville. We have, of course, taken a bit of liberty to re-imagine that line as more of an invitation to pick up a telephone than a mysterious start to a Great American Novel. At his core, Ishmael is the perfect narrator. He's open-minded, has a constantly evolving view of the world and doesn't judge the characters and stories that unfold before him in Moby Dick. Likewise, our Ishmael (or at least, his cell phone) isn't a critic of the calls and stories he receives, but a curious observer and collector. The CMI team is also fascinated with the lore of Moby Dick, so yes, if you spy a stray wale tail, it's in homage to that great book! 

Many callers use Call Me Ishmael as a medium to share their feelings, narrate their darkest secrets or talk about a life-changing moment. Do you believe this project is therapeutic in some way?

Sometimes the best therapy in the world is simply to say something out loud. However, it can be very difficult to share secrets with friends, family or people who see you on a regular basis. Call Me Ishmael is anonymous, so there is a freedom to say things that might otherwise be very difficult to communicate.

How do you curate the posts? What draws you to a particular voicemail?

Our favourite calls are the ones that tell a very specific story about a book. We get tons of enthusiastic, intelligent, funny calls that review or summarize books, and those are amazing too, but what our listeners are really drawn towards are the calls that tell one unique story that no one else in the world has experienced. We like calls that answer questions like: How did you come to own your copy of the book? Were you in a public place when a book was so powerful that it made you embarrassingly burst into tears? One of the best examples is a caller who loved a book of poetry so much that she decided to read it out loud to the trees in a public park.

How many calls do you receive on a daily basis? Have there been instances where the callers have returned?

Our call volume varies; on slower days we average about 25 calls, but when one of our favourite authors shared the site with his Facebook fans, we got over 400 voicemails within an hour of the post. All calls are anonymous, so it's tricky to tell for sure if the same storytellers are returning to talk about different books, but readers have repeatedly asked if they, "can call back again?" The answer, of course, is yes. 

Where all have the readers called from?

We've added stories from all over the world to our library of calls. Everywhere from Ecuador to the UK to the Philippines. None from India yet, though, we'd love some of your readers to be the first!

Lastly, where do you see this project heading? Do you intend on compiling these letters and publish them in a book?

In the coming weeks, we will be launching a new program that inspires our community to call in about specific themes, authors or books. We've been imagining how Call Me Ishmael could use technology to reinvent book clubs. In a way, a book of the typed transcripts is always in the works. We just haven't bound them, yet. The typed pages are currently scattered all around my walls and living room, like a bookish version of A Beautiful Mind. 

If you have a story to share about a fantastic book that you just read, you know who to call. 

{books, Call Me Ishmael, narratives, stories, voicemails, anonymous}