facing the mirror: lesbian writing from india

Ashwini Sukthankar (ed.)

(I can't find a copy of it to buy online, but find extracts here: Google Books)

This is a collection of short stories that I read some five years ago. I found it in the library at TISS, borrowed it immediately and swallowed it whole. I don't remember too many of those stories right now to write about the book, but I do remember feeling a sense of amazement and revolution when I read it.  

I'm only making a note of it here because I tried to remember the name of this collection about five months ago but I couldn't. I came across it all of a sudden when I was reading something else entirely. 

If you do find it somewhere, please either buy me a copy or be a pirate and send me a photocopy!

tender is the night

by F Scott Fitzgerald

Close to the end of this book, I got very very sad. It wasn't really a tearing-up kind of sadness. It was a more moving sadness about loneliness, love, age, powerlessness, about loss and failure; but not any of these things by themselves. And then, when I finished reading the book, I did something I haven't done in a long time. I flipped it and started over. I started to read it again, watching for depth where earlier I only read with curiosity.

I fell in love with this book about at the same point at which everyone in the book fell in love with the Divers: at their party on the terrace. But the moments leading up to it, the flirting so to speak, was exquisite. The passage about Nicole in her garden, for instance:

"Along the walls on the village side all was dusty, the wriggling vines, the lemon and eucalyptus trees, the casual wheel-barrow, left only a moment since, but already grown into the path, atrophied and faintly rotten."

And then, the party reached its climax: there were fireflies by the cliff, and the table they were sitting at seemed to have risen towards the sky like a mechanical dancing platform.

There's so many little things that I love about this book.

"Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?"  

It's such a beautiful line. Used in so many ways. Used for so many things. Used for one thing, most of all. Rosemary. The first time I came across it, I giggled a little. It is the first time Dick imagines Rosemary with someone else:

"Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary’s cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret warmth within.

- Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?
- Please do. It's too light in here."

(Although my favorite usage is where he says it at the end of a chapter. Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?)

It's very difficult to try and write about a book that is considered a classic. People have read in so many ways that I can't even count, and they've been doing it for the better part of a century. I feel really out of my depth, even trying. The last time I felt like this about something I fell in love with was when I watched Rear Window and Birds. Even before I could think about something to say about it, I was bombarded with hundreds of exciting people saying exciting things about Hitchcock. (I googled Tender is the Night and one of the first things I came across was "Metaphysics of Style and Tender is the Night." Really?!)

I know this is a very fractured post that isn't really saying anything but that's the way I feel about this book right now. I'm very moved, and I really don't know how to talk about it.

Anyway, I'm a bit obsessed with this book and Fitzgerald for the moment. There's that.

bookstores


I love bookstores.

Big, chain ones with outlets all over the country; small, tiny ones in which only one person can actually fit; lovely, comfortable ones that play the blues in a corner; beautiful bookstores for which I am willing to visit a whole new country; bookstores with reading rooms that even F Scott Fitzgerald used to frequent; stalls that sell second-hand books or pirated books; vendors on footpaths with old, fraying books; bookstores whose books only the shopkeepers can find. 

You can gauge reading habits of a whole town from its bookstores, sometimes. 

I know that Landmark in Hyderabad has a horrible collection, but Landmark in Madras is always rich in the books they have. Blossoms in Bangalore is possibly my most favorite bookstore of all time. Bookstores in Delhi are usually eclectic. They have shelves and shelves full of academic books (neatly arranged by printing press) often just behind the section with poetry or graphic novels. They'll have three different translations of Marx or Dostoevsky and depending on how the bookshop owner leans politically, he'll tell you which one to buy. (I've come across very few women who sell books. Barring the Full Circle in GK, I can't remember a single one). Bombay is strange about its bookstores. They're commercial and mindless, except may be Strand when it's in a good mood. I never found a bookstore I liked in all my time in Bombay.

Bookstores are how I find new things to read. They are where I experiment. They open my eyes to new books, writers, genres, ideas, styles like nothing else. I have never made a friend in a bookstore, but I've never needed anybody's company but my own in one. Sure, I buy more off Flipkart and Infibeam these days, but I mostly buy books that I've already looked longingly at in a bookstore or read parts of in a library or borrowed from someone else. But I do it only because the discounts are amazing when I buy them online. (Student, okay?) 

Bookstores make me happy in any shape and form. 

They make me happy because I always end up looking at more books than I can buy. (They make me sad for about the same reason). I have found the strangest, loveliest books just browsing in bookstores. It's how I found American Gods by Neil Gaiman (at Blossoms, was I 15?). It's how I found Kari by Amruta Patil (in Chennai, I was bored), Em and the Big Hoom, Hush, Sita's Ramayana (all in Yodakin while waiting for people to show up). Spending hours and hours in bookstores with friends or cousins, before or after or during coffee also yielded great results. I was introduced to lots of wonderful books like this: Nick Hornby, Aminatta Forna, Sandman (frikkin' Sandman!), Jasper Fforde. Actually, if I think about it, that's how I spent much of my time as a kid in Walden, with my grandfather.  

Bookstores make me happy for the smell of old paper and the promise of a new book. I know it's a romantic thing to say and we're all against the idea of being romantic about bookstores these days, but I don't think I'm going to apologise for it. I love bookstores because I can get lost in them. (Not like a library, where the book isn't yours to write your name in and hide in your cupboard or write little notes in and stick pretty flags in).

Bookstores make me happy, and that's about that.