The Festival and the story

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‘A Glass of Yak’s Blood is a devastating work on family, corporate culture and sexual insecurities which come with age.’

A Glass of Yak’s blood

Could A glass of Yak’s blood treat the illness of Rajib? Read to discover.

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Krishna Bhatt – The Underclass Lover

Introduction

If you meet a stranger from a place far away, do you try to define him through the books you have read of his culture or you go by the talks you have with him?

A good literature

Awards no more signify excellence in a discipline but are meant to reward a mediocrity which is steadily sucking the vigour out of the human civilization.

The Nobel award in literature is a case in point, which is recently being given often to the writers writing the most innocuous type of romantic poems or the equivalent kind of short stories, or composing folk songs.

Displaying a zero political consciousness in a work of literature is the most favourable quality of a literary man these days, when everything has been mainstreamed so rigourously by the education of the universities, which need movie-stars to promote their courses.

It gives an impression if the world is almost a conflict free zone now and can indulge permanently in the finer emotions the love brings to life.

It is an about turn since the days of yore, when the acerbic writers writing in favour of the power-that-be were being rewarded with most of the literary awards.

It was better as compared to the present situation, as it created a sharp literary response from amongst the other side of the divide.

But now it seems if the literature no more has the resources to kick the world out of its comfort zone to intellectually renew it perpetually to salvage it from falling in a torpor which leads to the black hole of degradation, and the final, consequent annihilation.

Having taken away that venom thus, from the literature, the decline in other forms of human enterprises is bound to set in.

There have been a number of Nobel laureates in economics from the third world countries, who have written speculative theories about the prevalence of poverty in their countries of origin but have failed spectacularly to recommend a solution.

Having originated from where they have, they have possibly accepted the poverty as fait accompli of their brethren, about which nothing can be done. So they too have accepted their karma in a way and that of their subject, in which they were trained in a Western university.

That, no matter how knowledgeable they become, they cannot have a solution. Strangely, a few such laureates were seen vying for a high political office in their countries of origin, entirely giving up on academics after winning the Nobel thereby.

In a way they have become like beauty-queens of their disciplines, from this part of the world–which is so full of tragedies, mostly man-made. They could be looked at in admiration for their accomplishments by their universities and its young students. A learning which is as impotent as Casanova: the impotent god of male beauty.

In order to make the beauty-queens and the values they represent look more egalitarian, it was only recently that the women of colour were started being rewarded with the beauty crowns.

The politics and the commercial interests of the first world in the third world made sure that they always remained the women of colour for nearly a decade.

Now this charity has been extended to a few disciplines of academics too, which have the possibility of making endless speculations without making any recommendations.

So the pure science Nobel awards remain still far from the reach of the people of colour, except for a few exceptions. For, that scientific temperament is still out of the possibility in the people of these cultures, which espouse the philosophy of karma so eternally.

In a way the pandemic plaguing the humanity now is a cruel reminder to it, that its failure recently has been total.  A good literature might have kept the world in an ever present pandemic like terror, to save it from the present predicament caused by a new pandemic.

Dog Years by Gunter Grass : It makes one’s heart bleed for the pathos of the writer of this novel.

What a dogged reading. Looks if nothing is going to happen. None of the character talks with himself to bring out any kind of insight. There is a parasitic dependence on the things without to have any movement in the story. It at times is a dog thinking and reasoning like a man and the other way for a man. What is the point if it is as uncertain and as non-starter as it appears, if not a sudden quirk or a twist in the story occurs, which makes it worth to continue?
Before you reach the middle of the book Gunter Grass begins to overwhelm with the brilliant way he uncovers the distress and consequences of the war under Hitler in the country. An elderly school teacher, a neighbor of the narrator Harry, who taught literature and writing methods, often by leaving them alone, to his students, besides other subjects, disappears for his crime of failing to celebrate the birthday of Hitler. He was charged with eating the candies the school administration has allocated for his students.
The cousin of the Harry named Tulla, who he fingers at times beside the daughter of the disappeared school teacher, Jenny, to check the depth of their holes–as he puts it, speculates that the teacher has been taken to a place from where a heap of freshly collected human bones have been dumped in open in their town, which foul the air of it all the time and attract a large number of rats and crows. Tulla brings a human skull from there to prove her point.
Sex scenes, more often than not, by Gunter Grass, are not the tenderest and delicate type. They are vicious, crude and occur like an act of sabotage. Taking a reader by complete surprise, besides the characters performing it. Similar can be said about the writing style. It makes things obscure in the way they are described in a convoluted language which often is difficult to get hold of. By keeping the going on a scene surprises by its sudden arrival, for it is shocking not only for what it is but also for the lucid and forth-coming language in which it is described.
One hopes the original German language edition reads better than its translation. Also that, a better translated version comes soon in English, which also cares about readability as well. For the subject is the most deadly war one has known; written by someone who fought it as well. Little other literature is available on this subject otherwise–from the side which lost it.
Tulla takes Harry and Jenny to a leech infested area and makes them attach leeches to their bodies and feed them till they are fully fed on their blood and become easily detachable. Then she collects those leeches and cooks them in a tin pot till they become a thick paste, then she eats it and asks them to eat it as well. Tulla thinks this is how her brother, somewhere fighting in France, might survive the war. But he is killed soon. In their early teens, these three characters try strange things to deal with the effect the war has created in their lives.
When, after his disappearance, the school teacher’s daughter is taken away by a middle-aged dance master and a probable Nazi official, who wants to keep her as a mistress while she learns dance in Berlin, she comes to knock at the door of Harry’s to say her goodbye. Harry and his parents do not open the door. But She and Harry continue to write each other till a long time later.
A Poignant and heart-breaking scene is when Harry, now inducted finally into the army at the age of sixteen, comes to say goodbye to Tulla, who is pregnant now at the same age by a person she never discloses. She is now working as a bus conductor to support herself. She wanted Harry to make her pregnant but he always declined this possibility. She offers him bundles of ticket as a souvenir with which he plays-with his fingers, just like a child.
It makes Tulla laugh. How the war was sucking in and destroying the lives of young children fills one with a profound sadness. A while ago, a bomb drops at a place where Jenny was performing and both her toes were amputated to end her dancing career. But the war was to last another three years. Tulla asks Harry to pay the bus fare for the distance he traveled with his modest luggage, before he leaves to join his duty in a war turning increasingly bloody.
The third and the last part of the novel deals with post war years in the country. Grass deals with so many trends in a desultory manner in the beginning. He picks technology, economy, politics and much more randomly and in an arcane language, without making any point clearly.
But soon he picks the people trying to practice a conscious collective amnesia to forget the bad memories of the war. But then a glass comes to the market for children of ten years of age, a time since the war has ended, which makes them see the past of their parents clearly. They see all the murders and other crimes which their parents have committed but never discussed. It leads to an epidemic of psychiatric diseases in the children using those glasses and many of them commit suicide.
But, some how, behind the religion, liberalism and progress, the society tries to hide from its past. The author sarcastically deals with the hypocrisy of the society to collectively forget a criminal past. It shows how neatly and effectively the author is capable of dealing with the things he really feels are important before he goes absent-minded again and talks about so many generalities in a language which is difficult to decipher.
In a way he expiates alone for the scores of unacknowledged sins committed by the society he belongs to. There are not many writers courageous enough to take up such a thankless task, though many other countries have perpetrated no less horrendous crimes on mankind than the Nazi violence.
On the contrary, all the efforts in literature mostly have been to make that past obscure enough, so that any future inquiry is preempted. In it not only the writers from the side of the perpetrators, but also a few from the victims’ side, too have contributed.
It makes one’s heart bleed for the pathos of the writer of this novel.

Brothers Karamazov, By F Dostoevsky: Characters with many layers like a Russian doll

Characters with many layers like a Russian doll

After three hundred pages you have an impression if the story is gaining momentum. Not quite so. You have to read another two hundred pages to find that things are now actually leading to the event which the author had in mind all the way. The big distraction is that a character is being called by four different pet names which are mercifully shorter than his real name.
The life described is stifled and stultified by the conditions around–till it suffocates. Landlords philander and drink recklessly and compete with their own sons to win a lover. The tyranny is so deep that the serfs are deeply scrutinized to see if they are rebelling against the state or the religion. They are engaged in an intellectual discussion only to make that inquiry. It is on top of the physical or sexual exploitation they are subjected to in the estate of a landlord, where they can live for many generations with their legal or illegal children. It was possibly a little better and a little worse than the slavery world witnessed due to colonialism at that time. For it was possibly not as penurious but emotionally was more exploitative.
But deep down the life was far more intellectual than in many other societies of the contemporary era.
The renowned poets and authors are frequently referred to. At times in a very discreet manner to remind a reader that the rebellion was never tolerated in the Russia of that era and any literary work with such undertones were silenced not too long after it surfaced.
One such instance is the reference to the banned poetry journal published by Pushkin twenty years before this novel was written. It is so discreet that one has to read the three-line paragraph many times to realize that the author wants to turn the table on the world around him all the way while writing such a lengthy novel. In a literate society revolt is crushed in a literature long before it grips the society.
Always aware of their class, the underclass characters in the book are conditioned enough to behave in a way which is politically correct to the core. Inviting ire of the power-that-be is something no one wants among them. So they witness but never interfere in the wasteful and indulgent lives of their higher class masters. But in their heart they harbour all kind of emotions including the idea of liquidation of a master.
This book the author wrote after the death of his beloved young infant son, one came to know, who was epileptic. There is a character who is epileptic in this book also it deals with the death of a young boy. Also there are other impressions of the life of writer in the characters of this novel.
The author lived only for a few months after his this last novel was published.
However, the Russian revolution completed only after thirty five years of his death. If one is looking for the conditions in the society which lead to violent revolutions like the Russian one, they are described in this book.
The apparently quaint and self-satisfied life of the rural Russia, where religion was used as a tool to perpetuate the system which is so unfair for the large majority, entailed what ensued.
It might not have been a surprise to this author, if he had lived longer, to witness the revolution unfolding and concluding.
The Translation by Mcduff is good enough for me. It effectively portrayed the ailing landlord too, among many other things, who sends a young man, one of the brothers Karamazov, seeking loan from him to a person who remained drunk for two days before he dismisses him with an utter disdain for his folly. This young man is planning to runaway with his young lover, who is almost a prostitute, who his father, another big landlord of the town, wants to marry as well. When he explains this matter to others to win the loan to finance his plans, no one seems interested and instead ridicules him behind him. The book is full of such characters and events which portray the life of the country then at a great length.
It took a long journey and waiting over the drunkard for two days for him to realize that the first landlord was only tricking him to ridicule him by sending him to some one who will simply scoff at his plans. But he does not mind it and is busy to find someone else who might lend him the money.
This book is described as the best ever novel by any writer in any language by some critics. One never came across any other one which under took a more comprehensive project while holding the attention of a reader as well.
Having been written such a long time ago, the book details everything. At times the furniture of a room during an important scene is dealt with–with a long description, which is very distracting. At times the author, speaking as a first person, warns that if he went into the full such detail of a person or a setting or a place, it might entail writing an entire book independently. So he is sparing those details–(and the reader as well, possibly). In modern times an author has no such authority over a reader to patronize him in such a manner.
However, lasting nearly a thousand pages, the book is full of characters being introduced as a sub plot often, who frequently make long discourses; mostly trying to make clear their position on religion or politics or other issues, before they do something which might actually give impetus to the story.
At times a character may speak for five pages without the paragraph being broken.
When the book reaches the denouement, the murder around which the story is built almost loses its importance and a character starts arguing at length with his alter self, trying to make several things clear with himself. He possibly has a psychiatric issue or too much time for intrigue; however, in the earlier part of the story, he is too clever to be a madman and seeks his interests with a great focus. But he is not alone in that. Most of the characters had many layers of thinking which they reveal one by one as the book progresses: Just like the layers of a Russian doll emerging one by one.

Yet another remarkable character is a fatherless, thirteen-year old boy Kolya, who reads widely from the books left behind by his father and tries to surprise the established intellectuals of the town and his friends with his knowledge. He at times pretends to know what he actually does not, in doing so; but he never fails to deal with an adult on equal terms and his peers as his underlings. In his younger days, he once slept on a railway track, on the prompting of his friends, and let a train pass over him. It was to prove that he is desperate character and it made him famous in the town.
So, most of the important characters are well-literate in this story, including a servant of the father Karamazov, who actually is suspected by all of being an illicit son of him. Father Karamazov is later murdered and his two sons and his servant are the main suspect.
Even the women looking for a financially profitable relationship with a high official or a landlord discuss a column published in a journal or newspaper published in St. Petersburg, which speculate about the people and society of their town. At times a character casually passes a serious literary judgement like if Lev Tolstoy can not actually write.
If it was not for the lockdown and isolation Covid19 imposed, one might have never had the chance to go back to a book long back abandoned after reading a few pages. The complicated names, slow pace and the formidable size of the book are not an appetizer really.
All very well but one feels that it could have been avoided and the book shortened to keep focus on the main story of the novel. It is the last book of the author which he wrote while he was in a fragile stage so possibly he wanted to say everything he had to, or having been co-opted into the system at this stage, he wants to make every character politically correct mostly, to save his position in the system. But he has less control over them and they surprise a reader often.
Because, a trained engineer Dostoevsky, after launching his literary career, suffered greatly in the earlier part of his life. By a General, who was an uncle of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, the literary group he was a member of, which did the crime of reading a banned literature, was sent to the notorious Siberian prison where they were to be executed by a firing squad.
While a few have been killed possibly, and he was the third in the line to be fired at, a missive from the Czar himself arrives and the remaining members including Dostoevsky were saved from being executed and were subjected to live for many years in sub human conditions in the jail. It all was before he wrote any literature seriously. So it had an impact on most of his writing.
The book has characters who are often corrupt to the core. A landlord and his sons have affairs with common women. The women know it all but vie with each other to win a common lover. His sons and the servants at his home want to eliminate him. All the characters mostly know each other and create intrigues against one another. It defines their whole life, as they seldom are involved in some other business or intellectual pursuit.
If it was not a murder mystery, about which even the author is not much bothered towards the end, then too the book is readable for the way it explains the social situation of the country.
The court scene in the end does not conclude the story by saying clearly who committed the murder, though it lasts more than one hundred fifty pages. One of the brothers Karamazov, who is convicted by the court, who is very sick after the verdict has been given, always maintains that he is not guilty; the other brother of him, who claims in the court to have committed the murder, is so sick with brain fever that the court and people think if he is having hallucination due to his condition. The third suspect, the servant and a suspected illicit son of father Karamazov, who is very sick during the trial and commits suicide on the eve of the verdict day, does so without saying clearly if he was guilty or not in his suicide note.
Another character dies who is a sickly child, who always is tormented by the insulting way people treat his father for being a drunkard and underclass and a former low-ranking soldier.
Possibly the author himself was very sick at this stage and dies a few months after this book was published. He writes so many things in such a great detail but finally himself loses focus from the story.
He often makes the dubious kind of characters in this book look like the people who are cynical and rebellious. But the upper class people too are very conservative. The Father Karamazov is an erstwhile under class who becomes rich due to his chance marriage to a wealthy women and once she dies he indulges in all kinds of excesses.
The system is so corrupt that the convicted Karamazov is already planning an escape to America while on his journey to the jail somewhere in Siberia–by bribing the guards.
It is a relief to have finally completed the books after dropping it so many times.

Nemesis by Philip Roth: A review of a novel about an epidemic during a pandemic.

When you drop a book and then return to it often only to realize that you want to get away from it at the earliest again and won’t return to it any time soon–is a feeling which fills you with sadness.
The changing scenes and the moods of the characters fail to charm you because it all sounds superficial and sterile.
None of the characters seems invested in anything he or she says in dialogues which are dull, rhetorical and devoid of any emotions. They could have said anything or everything without meaning any of them.
The background is perfect for a book as the second world war is going on in far away locations and an epidemic has taken hold of the immediate world. It must have forced anyone with any developed sensibility to look for deeper meanings in the everyday phenomena like God, nature and the inadequacy of human beings to deal with relationships one falls into and other vicissitudes of life.
Out of it something could have come which might have enamoured one, or engaged one, or entertained one; or enlightened one.
So finding nothing that delights or surprises one even after coming back to a book recalling that life around is similarly beset with an epidemic now besides the problems of other hues–as was the times in which this book is set, is a feeling of an infinite loss.
Touching all kinds of emotions without dealing with any of them to an appropriate extent betrays that the work one has in hand, to regale oneself, was done only half-heartedly. Possibly it was already sold before it was even created. So it is not honest and sincere. It is rather smug, self-sufficient and arrogant.
May be you live till another pandemic strikes the world near you to return to this book again, if not earlier. Also hope that by that time you are conditioned or have mellowed enough to appreciate this work from a writer who is mostly regarded very highly. For the other kind of writings available could be even more prosaic.
Or, may be, you develop an art of feigning emotions half-heartedly, like the characters of this novel, to like this book. In any case, the relief is that the book is short and your patience will not be tested long–longer than the time you survive daily life and the periodic pandemics.
Because the failing could be on the part of a reader too. But one can not be sure either.

I will try!

It was the book shop I went to visit in Bag Bazar after many years.
Earlier I lived in Exhibition road area and often went to this shop for it had a good collection of fiction, non-fiction and other books of general interest.
It was a unique shop in this regard as all other shops in Bag Bazar and Putli Sadak area mostly sold text books as there were so many university campuses around and the roads remain crowded with students throughout the day and evening.
The students were often also smartly- clad-in-dress students of a women’s college in the area. When you are young you want to be around such company hoping to make an acquaintance with a suitable woman.
It was a time when Late Princess Shruti, the only daughter of King Birendra, too studied in that campus. However, it was said that she came and left in a car and only her closest friends had a time to look at her and talk to her. Only a few people ever claimed to have seen her at the campus.
The bookseller running the shop was an elderly man with a kind face. He often was himself reading a book silently. He barely smiled at a customer who entered his shop before his gaze returned to the book he was reading.
He did not mind if a customer lingered long in his shop and browsed through many books before he left the shop without buying any. He just smiled again at him while he left.
He smoked often on his seat when he took a break from his reading. So in his shop there was always a residual reek of tobacco all the time.
Mixing with the scent of books and glue it formed an aroma I liked, while I leisurely perused the books I took out from shelves one by one. I carefully placed each of them back from where I had taken them as I did not want to bother the seller with any additional work on account of my visit to his shop.
It was from here that I purchased many titles of Charles Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, V S Naipaul and many others. Those titles still remain with me after more than twenty years. Finding Diary of the last Indian Viceroy Lord Mountbatain and the stories of Gay De Maupassant were some spectacular discoveries I made at that shop. These writers enriched my world tremendously. I kept rereading their work as they answered best my anxieties in different stages of my life.
I also bought from here many books which I abandoned too. One such book was by a classical English writer half of which was written in Greek between English.
With the time however, my reading became diverse like the contents of my life. I had now my wife and children who were growing up fast demanding a great deal of my time and other resources.
Also, I shifted to a locality in the south of Kathmandu which had lower house rent and from where Bag Bazar appeared too far away and the Himalayan Mountains glittered in the north every morning as the sun rose. It all occupied me so totally that I was almost under a spell to only focus on the urgent matters and not to indulge.
So I did not go to this shop for a long time.
Finding the garlanded framed photo of the bookseller just above his seat was deeply saddening. His son, sitting on his seat, on asking informed me that a few years back his father passed away and since then he has been looking after the shop.
He just smiled as I said sorry at it. Then I went to look for a few titles inside the shop.
I found that now this shop had so many titles from Nepali authors too who wrote both in Nepali and English. Beside now it sold many text books too.
Many of the books were on a heavy discount. Among them I found a book which was a collection of articles from a journalist who wrote routinely for newspapers in older days. It was a collection of those articles.
I was never a big fan of his writing and mostly ignored his columns which appeared on every weekend issue of The Rising Nepal on Fridays and other newly arrived English dailies and weeklies. He then had a good following and readers were found talking about his columns in a social gathering.
I had heard some time before about the death of that columnist. He had lived to the age beyond seventy writing his scandalous columns almost till the end while living a life mostly supported by business and political interests he promoted in his writing, rather than by his writing.
Now finding his book in my hand at a discounted price my heart filled with ambiguity. I knew his name so well that I could not ignore his presence in the book shop. By his admirers he was possibly entirely forgotten as his book had no takers and it was on a discount.
I decided to buy his book less for reading more for keeping as a souvenir.
In a way it will help me to invoke the nostalgia of the age which is slipping away slowly for those too who have survived it, not to mention those who have passed on with it.
For the ever changing dynamics of time has demolished many old structures and has created so many new landmarks at their place that one feels at a loss while seeing a familiar old city disappearing and a new one emerging which has no sign of the one that has been replaced. It is largely true for the people too.
In such a tumultuous age, may be, only a writer one was familiar with, could help one relive the age which seems so distant now.
It was my love for the form not the content that I decided to buy the book, which had brought together me as a reader, him as a columnist and the book seller who sold his work. We were complete strangers otherwise.
Before I left the shop the son of the late book seller asked me to visit again. He was neither a smoker nor a reader—I had noticed. His eyes were restless, besides. He was a man very different from his father.
I said I will Try.
K C Bhatt