Springtime!

I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.
~ Vikram Seth

Bus tales

• I’m sitting in a bus for about 16 hours, cramped and exhausted and grimy. The bus is full of villagers who are coming to the city, probably to work as labourers in the construction sites. They have a haggard and unwashed look about them and they talk rather loudly. Obviously, some passengers were not too pleased when the bus stopped to pick these villagers. But, after the long overnight journey all are quiet and exhausted. Then, just when the bus is entering the city and passing by the railway station, a man shouts out to the woman sitting in front of me. He’s asking her to look at the train outside. This woman balances a child with her one spindly arm, lifts her veil, and looks out of the window. There’s a look of amazement in her face mixed with awe, curiosity, and excitement – everything that showed that she’s looking at train for the first time in her life.
  
  
• The bus I take out of the village square is being driven by an avuncular and jovial bus driver (a rare combination, I guess). He smiles easily, and smokes constantly. Holding a cigarette between his fingers, he often negotiates the sharp hilly bends with just one hand. Even with both hands, I realize, these roads will be considerably difficult to drive. To complicate things, this is an ancient bus that creaks with every movement. But then, he may have been driving all his life on these roads. He even seems to know his passengers. The teenage girls sitting by his seat bursts into giggles at something he says, villagers we pass by wave at him. All these, somehow, reminds me of this scene.
  
  
• On an extremely crowded bus, I am standing and trying to keep myself steady by holding on to the overhead rods. It doesn’t help. The roads are almost non-existent, and they pass through sharp bends on the hilly terrain. I’m barely standing, swaying more. But, my co-passengers of the bus, the local villagers, are not much bothered by any of these. They go about their usual business, which is mostly talking with each other. Nothing deters them – not the deafening roar of the bus, the steaming heat, or the delicate balancing act. In fact, they often chuckle as if on a joyride. Anyway, when it’s time to pay the bus fare, I’m struggling to take out money from my wallet. The bus conductor, seeing the plight of a hapless outsider, swiftly pulls out the exact notes from my wallet, keeps the fare, and also puts the change back. Now, that made me chuckle.
  

Secret taken to the grave

I believe in the refusal to take part.
I believe in the ruined career.
I believe in the wasted years of work.
I believe in the secret taken to the grave.
These words soar for me beyond all rules
without seeking support from actual examples.
My faith is strong, blind, and without foundation.

Discovery, Wislawa Szymborska

Notes from PIFF 2012

Of all the films that I watched at Pune International Film Festival (PIFF) 2012, I found a common theme running – and that’s the theme of family – of people you grow up with, stay together, and sometimes turn away from. I watched relatively less number of films – 14 in all – and I personally didn’t find my experience of PIFF this year to be as rewarding. There were reasons many – inconvenience of changed venues, some utterly juvenile crowd, and to some extent the films themselves. Anyway, here’s some notes of my viewings.

Café Lumiere, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s tribute to Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, is a film that captivated me with its beguiling sense alienation. The film shows us a young Japanese woman, Yoko, who is a freelance writer living alone in a Tokyo flat, and researching for her book on a Taiwanese composer. She does have a family – a father and step-mother – who don’t really understand her way of life, especially the fact that Yoko is pregnant, but doesn’t want to marry her boyfriend. That’s just the surface of the story, and much of the film’s beauty lie in the way it conjures up a sense of profundity while showing us nothing but the absolutely mundane. In some ways in reminded of Somewhere, a film I watched at last PIFF. Sample the opening scene: Yoko is just back from her research trip to Taiwan, and is talking on her cellphone while putting her washings on the tiny clothesline strung outside her window. We don’t know who she’s talking to, but her voice is friendly and intimate. Just then, there’s a sound of doorbell (it’s her landlady) and putting the phone down Yoko moves to the door to have a brief chitchat. The camera, however, does not follow her and remains fixed like a still observer. We see no one in the frame except the wet clothes fluttering in the breeze, interspersed with voices of people we haven’t known yet.

The other Hou Hsiao-hsien film I watched, A Summer at Grandpa’s, is different – with its straight narrative, greater movement, and seemingly picturesque depiction of rural Taiwan and all the fun of childhood. The story follows two siblings who are sent away to their grandparents’ place for the summer vacation as their severely ill mother undergoes treatment in the hospital. I had personal reasons to like the story since much of my summer vacations were likewise spent at my grandparents place, doing things the kids are shown doing in the film – taking a bath in the river, befriending the village boys, climbing trees, and idling away the days without a care in the world. The other reason I liked this viewing was because I watched this in a near-empty theater (this being an early morning show) and the audience was really well-behaved (something I found lacking this year). Thus, it became easy to get transported in scenes like the one where we see kids play (racing turtles) under a big tree. A long shot shows us the activity from afar: we see the breeze caught on the tree's leaves, there's birdsong in the background, and hear the excited shouts reverberating in an otherwise quiet morning.

Iranian film A Separation was a surprise. It’s excellent in many ways – the story reveals itself in many layers, the cast is well-chosen, and it subtly affects our thoughts. It raises questions without being too explicit and it remains humane even in the most critical moments. The film opens as Nader and Simin, a married couple, are arguing over a divorce. The wife wants a secure future for their teenage daughter and wants to settle abroad. The husband doesn’t want to leave because he has a father who has Alzheimer’s and needs care. Amidst this discord they had to hire a domestic help – a woman who has her own problems of a unemployed husband, financial trouble, and her pregnancy. From here the film takes off to confront us with several themes – on family, social status, legal proceedings, and the grey line that separates right and wrong. This is as taut as any well-made thriller. Glad that this film ran to a packed house.

There was a retrospective on Yasujiro Ozu this year and I caught two of his films – The End of Summer and Floating Weeds. I had been unfamiliar about Ozu’s films but had read him to be a fastidious filmmaker (known for his tatami-level unmoving camera) concerning mostly with traditional Japanese family drama. I found both the films excellent, Floating Weeds more so. While The End of Summer deals with a patriarch (and his escapades) of a large business family, Floating Weeds tells us the story of an itinerant master of a travelling theater group who has a past to confront. Much of the things Ozu dealt in his films are now strange and foreign to many. They are rooted in a past that has changed beyond recognition. In an age of excesses, they remind us what is to be gentle, meditative, and spartan. To end, a special mention for Haruko Sugimura, the actress who appear in both these films (she was a Ozu regular) and superbly acted in such contrasting roles – in one as a somewhat feisty talkative woman with emotional outbursts, and in the other as a gentle old mistress who is surprisingly dignified and reserved.

Transcribing

Out of whim I bought a pot of ink yesterday to try on the fountain pen I sometimes use. Since I found nothing original to test-write, I thought I'll transcribe something. The following lines, which I found quoted in an Alice Munro story I recently read, seemed good enough to begin with.

There is no sorrow
Time heals never;
No loss, betrayal,
Beyond repair.
Balm for the soul, then,
Though grave shall sever
Lover from loved
And all they share;
See, the sweet sun shines,
The shower is over,
Flowers preen their beauty,
The day how fair!
Brood not too closely
On love, on duty;
Friends long forgotten
May wait you where
Life with death
Brings all to an issue;
None will long mourn for you,
Pray for you, miss you,
Your place left vacant,
You not there.

These lines were originally written by Walter de la Mare (who, I confess, I never heard of) and the Alice Munro story, it appears, germinates from these very lines: ‘None will long mourn for you, / Pray for you, miss you, / Your place left vacant—’

Togetherness

There’s this little-known book At Home in the Himalayas that I read sometime back. It’s a non-fiction, sort of an autobiography, that chronicles the life of the author, Christina Noble, who comes from Scotland to the little town of Manali in the ’70s on a hiking trip. What began as a hiking trip soon became a way of life for her – she went about setting a business of arranging adventure trips, got involved in the local life, married and settled down with two young children, and spent a significant amount of years in the high Himalayas. In this book she recounts the experiences of those years – from the awe-inspiring beauty and grandeur of the high mountains, to the practicalities of setting up business with the help of local folks and dealing with the challenges of going about daily life. But, the most interesting bits come in the form of those little observations she has of the place and the people as well as her personal equations with them; she’s not an aloof observer and her tone is caring yet critical. So, there we get glimpses of domesticity, festival and feast, marriages and deaths, trust and betrayal – all noted with candid detail.

This is a long preamble, but probably a necessary one. What I wanted to write about is a section of this book – just a few odd paragraphs, really – that has uncannily stayed with me for a long time. In those paragraphs is described the scene and mood of a picnic. It’s towards the end of the book, and the author had already lived in the place for many long years, and has already formed a close-knit group of people who she deals with – her domestic helps, families she had known and lived with, her employees of the trekking business, her milkwomen, suppliers, and some other acquaintances. So, on the picnic day, we see all these people, along with their families and children, scrambling up the hill to a grassy meadow. Up there, frenetic activity is going on – a makeshift chulha is being dug, firewood is being gathered, pots and plates are being gathered, wild mushrooms are being plucked, vegetables are being cut, meat is being cleaned, and local brew is being poured. It’s busy yet leisurely and the bonhomie is captured with a detail that’s endearing and, in certain way, poignant. After the cooking and feasting, women sing and dance putting their sleeping babies on the grass, people laugh freely, and memories are reminisced. It’s plain, simple, and merry.

I’ve often thought about the scene and wondered what’s it that makes it so appealing to me. Given my unsocial self, it should just read like a plain high-spirited revelry. But, for some reason, it doesn’t; rather, I wonder what it’ll be like to have a day of such unadulterated fun.

Anyway, what brought this scene back to me tonight is a little endearing film named Pieces of April, which I watched while eating my cold leftover dinner from a small bowl.

Dashing

One of the first things I learned on the job – as a hassled-looking, grubby, emaciated, underpaid, overworked, and barely noticeable copy-editor – was the use of dashes. I mean the punctuation marks – en-dashes and em-dashes. I struggled then, and I still struggle, to get them correct. But, over the years I figured out a rule in my head to make use of en-dashes far more than em-dashes. Em-dashes—as you see—are “unappealingly long” (I’m filching a bit from Wikipedia here). And if you use spaced em-dashes — like this — it introduces an awfully wide break, which finicky readers may find unacceptable. So, my rule has been to use spaced en-dash – like this – at every place where I felt the need of an em-dash, which is mostly for parenthetical expressions and occasionally to elaborate something in a sentence. As should be evident by now, I like using dashes – en-dashes especially – so much that if I have to list my favorite punctuation marks, dashes are likely to stay at the top.

So, what is it about a dash that I like? I guess it’s the little wanderings it allow us mid-sentence. A dash is like a respite, a little escape, while not necessarily straying away completely. Well, of course not everyone thinks this way. More serious writers are likely to utilize dashes to infuse more supplementary ideas or give more elegant and winding sentences.

If I remember correctly, I didn’t like dashes at the beginning. As a rookie copy-editor it was a nightmare to proofread a GOP – that’s Galley of Pages, for the uninitiated – strewn with dashes. Justifying which one of these dashes stay put, and deciding which ones I strike off, were (to put it mildly) difficult. People who submits articles to scientific journals – though extremely sound in technical matters – are not always known for being careful with their language. It was rather scary to edit an article from, say, Taiwan, Sweden, or Turkey. And if they were full of strange punctuations we were in the soup.

But the initial dislike, in time, wore off. I moved from being the grubby, emaciated copy-editor to become the vain, well-fed guy who I’d have hated back in my copy-editing days. Anyway, some vestiges of copy-editing remained – often resurfacing when I had to re-read something I wrote and found them crawling with mistakes. I may not have made a competent copy-editor, but these moments told me I was not a complete failure either – I still had the eye to catch at least some of my mistakes, which I wish I never give away.

It’s only when I moved away from copy-editing that I found the pleasing sense of using a dash. I started using, and still use them – though often without fully understanding the grammatical intricacies. I hope the earnest copy-editors will ignore this fallen one of their flock. Please, allow me to use my dashes – however sloppily – and look elsewhere when I’m having some fun with them.