At the Chennai Lit for Life festival last October I heard murmurs about Civil Lines. Civil Lines 6 is the first issue of this “literary miscellany” in a decade. Its editors are known for their idiosyncratic and Delhi-centric but usually unerring taste, and here is what they have lined up.
Ruchir Joshi's prose is musical, once you vault over his obligatory jazz opening. His tale is set in Calcutta, as the city mourns the death of the poet (don't ask which one, to a Calcutta man there is only one). The extract here is from a novel in progress, which will be called “The Great Eastern Hotel”, and the characters are already large as life. Their stories lead one into the next like those endless rooms in Tagore's mansion, and we need to know what will happen to the white woman with a camera, the young babu who has lost his wallet, the pickpocket who took it off him, the Fagin who employs the pickpocket. We need to know exactly what they will do to each other next.
Naresh Fernandes talks about the skeletons of a recluse and his dog found in a Bandra house. The man's sister and her family lived just next door, and the entire neighbourhood knew him, and yet his bones were discovered months after he had died. In conversational and highly readable prose, Fernandes describes a community and records how Dr. Peter Rebello fell through its cracks.
Manu Herbstein's “Building Bridges” is memorable, for all the wrong reasons. In this parade of miscellany, Herbstein, winner of the Commonwealth Prize for a novel about the slave trade, offers random memories and near-anecdotes in which he drops famous names. There are actual bridges built, since Herbstein worked for Gammon, but the title appears to be a metaphor for something and we are led on, wondering, with increasing outrage, if we'll ever reach dry land again. Once you win the Commonwealth Prize, can you just put anything in print? Is that the way it's going to be?
Things get better in Anand Balakrishnan's essay on his various encounters with failure in the Middle East. He meets many people and travels to the right places at newsworthy times. It is the kind of thing we read dutifully, until the very end, when his teacher of Arabic with one word yanks us into the ethos of jihad.
“The Adventures of Idi Amin Dada” is Binyavanga Wainaina's poignant tale about a houseboy working for a Gujarati family in Kenya. He is a boxer, an ex-soldier and a ladies' man, and he is exploited in various ways by the family. In “Mobius” and “Nest”, Rimli Sengupta writes two stories brief as sonnets, with a kick-in-the-mouth ending. Nilanjana Roy in “Sugarcane” writes about a girl growing up with her mother and grandmother in a house visited sometimes by ghosts in the back garden and sometimes by a divorced aunt. It seems as if it will be an amusing episode about her aunt's gift of Parisian bras versus the respectable innerwear Uma's mother insists on her wearing. But the story turns heavy with sorrow.
Indian saga
Benjamin Siegel's “Raagtime” is a history of the renowned art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy and his nearly unknown wife. A Yorkshire woman, Ann Richardson, under the stage name Ratna Devi, performed a repertoire of Indian music for audiences across the United States. Her marriage with Coomaraswamy was stormy, doubly adulterous, and she faded with America's “Indian moment” before the Great Depression. It is perhaps common for a historian to take sides and decide which personage has fallen into undeserved obscurity and which one has achieved an “unctuous celebrity”. Siegel attributes the sleaziness of this relationship to Coomaraswamy, and he makes a convincing case.
Reaching out to us with immediacy rather than polish, Gauri Gill offers an unpretentious photo essay that evokes Nizamuddin at night. It closes a collection of strong fiction and clean reportage mixed with some inexplicably mundane writing. Since Civil Lines 7 will no doubt be some time in the making, we have plenty of time to mull over this mix.
