It's an overdrawn afternoon in Guwahati. I am hardly back from the week-long trip accompanied by Dad to some undisclosed nooks across the country. Logic and normalcy dictate that I go back to my room, take a long, relaxing shower, put on some Irish music (which I recently dabbled with and therefore, love to flaunt!) and doze. On the contrary, I alighted from the tiny-doored auto, which is absolutely a Guwahati specialty (They make you feel like you hired a cab at half the price. So it seems that you reside in your own tiny space of solidarity, ie. if one's thoughts are not completely focused on claustrophobia.), lugged my way through the lush, green expanse preceding the Computer Center, a couple of outrageous red travel-bags in hand, and here I am, decked in clothes filthy from last night, covered in airplane germs manically typing things, gray, that I HAVE to get out of my system.
A lot happened in the hours that I traveled. It all started with my rushing to the Traveler's store at NSCBI Airport and hurriedly picking up a copy of Hosseini's latest. And The Mountains Echoed, without any ado, as I had been meaning to read his third masterpiece since a painfully long time indeed. Then came the folding of pages as an outrageous act of bookmarking, much to the chagrin of a middle-aged CIL employee, and a self-confessed avid bibliophile. This was followed by a long-forgotten and blissfully so, bout of novel-induced tear-stemming. You think mere words imprinted on sheets of paper have far less impact on you as compared to characters figuratively jumping and pumping salty water into your Dua-layers (sorry! I had been DYING to use that term!) but prolific and profound writers have, time and again, moved the most stoic of hearts. I shall take the liberty of reminding you I was traveling, while I had been reading. Neither social expectations of behavioral composure, nor repeated asking-after of the flight attendants deterred me nor inspired me to make my outbursts a little less discreet. At the end of the journey, I was almost sure they took me as some severely wronged maiden or the victim of a premature divorce.
"It would be trite to say that you're all grown-up, so I won't. But you do look ravishing, Pari." She pinched the lapel of her raincoat. "What, in this Clouseau outfit?" Collette had told her it was a stupid habit, this self-deprecating clowning around with which Pari tried to mask her nervousness around men she was attracted to."
Sounds too familiar to be accidentally stumbled upon in a novel. Rankles an impermeable membrane lodged much too deep within to feign stoic. Aplomb with the usual menagerie of heart-bound, unswerving and fresh-from-the-back-garden outlooks, Hosseini ruffles the veneers of familiarity, which earlier existed so inconspicuously within our own positrim, that it was almost acceptable to deny its actuality.
"But if the account Maman had given of her life in the interview was a lie, then where did the images of her work come from? Where was the wellspring for words that were honest and lovely and brutal and sad? Was she merely a gifted trickster? A magician, with a pen for a wand, able to move an audience by conjuring emotions she had never known herself? Was that even possible?"
Again, unsophisticated perfectness. Homespun questions, only too justified to be questioned by multitudes capable of abiding to nothing beyond responsiveness. People who find the fact that erratic human behavior and free will, of action and thoughts, are too other-worldly, too crude, too inartistic to be celebrated. Even the possibility of inception of opinions about inexperienced matters eludes them. A fact both to be pitied, for its stark nudity, and admired, for its rationality.
"Mama believed in loyalty above all, even at the cost of self-denial. Especially at the cost of self-denial."
Self-denial, sacrifice, reveling in the thought of misery and self-inflicted pain-frequently adjudged as sainthood and ostensibly synonymous with being virtuous. That thin line between truth, loyalty and other niceties and dream-slaughter and soul-gashing, often more than less, irreparably blurred by cultural nuances of goodness. Taking the liberty to be a little more capitalistic than I would care giving myself credit for, it would take millions of years, masses of unprecedented visionaries, narcissistic ghetto-dwellers and irrefutable argumentativeness to repaint the divide.
"This is an old habit, this joke making and clowning in the face of badluck, this disdain of hers for the slightest show of self-pity. It has the paradoxical-and I know-calculated-effect of both shrinking and augmenting the misfortune."
What you and I would most likely attribute to a twisted case of "coping-mechanism", Hosseini channelizes this seemingly unreal irony into an entirely different metier of "abandonment". The impatience and intolerance of blatant outrage and partisanship. The escapade into a world of joy, so rightly earned, and expectancy of justice.
"I am not saying Manaar changed everything. He didn't. I stumble around the world for still naother year before I finally find myself at a corner desk in an Athens library, looking down at a medical school application. <Sic. the author writes about other frivolities depicting how effectively Manaar vanished from his thoughts when he was busy upending other and even, less important frivolities, and appearing to abate the idea of how magnanimously Manaar affected him in totallity> But in my quiet moments, in those long rides in the back of a bus or the bed of a truck, my mind always always circles back to Manaar."
What could plausibly define the beauty of it, other than the little piece of artifact Medini (refer my Book-key nomenclature for friends) posted on my wall this evening?! :)
There were more, but the Bong Kaku sitting beside me got enraged by my unethical treatment of books, and busied himself by smoothing out all the previously folded tidbits in the novel while I was gone for the better part of an hour from my assigned seat! So when M reads it later, she can add-on! :P
A lot happened in the hours that I traveled. It all started with my rushing to the Traveler's store at NSCBI Airport and hurriedly picking up a copy of Hosseini's latest. And The Mountains Echoed, without any ado, as I had been meaning to read his third masterpiece since a painfully long time indeed. Then came the folding of pages as an outrageous act of bookmarking, much to the chagrin of a middle-aged CIL employee, and a self-confessed avid bibliophile. This was followed by a long-forgotten and blissfully so, bout of novel-induced tear-stemming. You think mere words imprinted on sheets of paper have far less impact on you as compared to characters figuratively jumping and pumping salty water into your Dua-layers (sorry! I had been DYING to use that term!) but prolific and profound writers have, time and again, moved the most stoic of hearts. I shall take the liberty of reminding you I was traveling, while I had been reading. Neither social expectations of behavioral composure, nor repeated asking-after of the flight attendants deterred me nor inspired me to make my outbursts a little less discreet. At the end of the journey, I was almost sure they took me as some severely wronged maiden or the victim of a premature divorce.
"It would be trite to say that you're all grown-up, so I won't. But you do look ravishing, Pari." She pinched the lapel of her raincoat. "What, in this Clouseau outfit?" Collette had told her it was a stupid habit, this self-deprecating clowning around with which Pari tried to mask her nervousness around men she was attracted to."
Sounds too familiar to be accidentally stumbled upon in a novel. Rankles an impermeable membrane lodged much too deep within to feign stoic. Aplomb with the usual menagerie of heart-bound, unswerving and fresh-from-the-back-garden outlooks, Hosseini ruffles the veneers of familiarity, which earlier existed so inconspicuously within our own positrim, that it was almost acceptable to deny its actuality.
"But if the account Maman had given of her life in the interview was a lie, then where did the images of her work come from? Where was the wellspring for words that were honest and lovely and brutal and sad? Was she merely a gifted trickster? A magician, with a pen for a wand, able to move an audience by conjuring emotions she had never known herself? Was that even possible?"
Again, unsophisticated perfectness. Homespun questions, only too justified to be questioned by multitudes capable of abiding to nothing beyond responsiveness. People who find the fact that erratic human behavior and free will, of action and thoughts, are too other-worldly, too crude, too inartistic to be celebrated. Even the possibility of inception of opinions about inexperienced matters eludes them. A fact both to be pitied, for its stark nudity, and admired, for its rationality.
"Mama believed in loyalty above all, even at the cost of self-denial. Especially at the cost of self-denial."
Self-denial, sacrifice, reveling in the thought of misery and self-inflicted pain-frequently adjudged as sainthood and ostensibly synonymous with being virtuous. That thin line between truth, loyalty and other niceties and dream-slaughter and soul-gashing, often more than less, irreparably blurred by cultural nuances of goodness. Taking the liberty to be a little more capitalistic than I would care giving myself credit for, it would take millions of years, masses of unprecedented visionaries, narcissistic ghetto-dwellers and irrefutable argumentativeness to repaint the divide.
"This is an old habit, this joke making and clowning in the face of badluck, this disdain of hers for the slightest show of self-pity. It has the paradoxical-and I know-calculated-effect of both shrinking and augmenting the misfortune."
What you and I would most likely attribute to a twisted case of "coping-mechanism", Hosseini channelizes this seemingly unreal irony into an entirely different metier of "abandonment". The impatience and intolerance of blatant outrage and partisanship. The escapade into a world of joy, so rightly earned, and expectancy of justice.
"I am not saying Manaar changed everything. He didn't. I stumble around the world for still naother year before I finally find myself at a corner desk in an Athens library, looking down at a medical school application. <Sic. the author writes about other frivolities depicting how effectively Manaar vanished from his thoughts when he was busy upending other and even, less important frivolities, and appearing to abate the idea of how magnanimously Manaar affected him in totallity> But in my quiet moments, in those long rides in the back of a bus or the bed of a truck, my mind always always circles back to Manaar."
What could plausibly define the beauty of it, other than the little piece of artifact Medini (refer my Book-key nomenclature for friends) posted on my wall this evening?! :)
There were more, but the Bong Kaku sitting beside me got enraged by my unethical treatment of books, and busied himself by smoothing out all the previously folded tidbits in the novel while I was gone for the better part of an hour from my assigned seat! So when M reads it later, she can add-on! :P
