Bookwatch

Mutual ignorance

AMBLING in a Beijing park recently, a renowned Malayali writer came upon two old men gossiping about Chinese literature. "Do you know anything about Indian writers?" he enquired. They looked at each other doubtfully, then one ventured, "I know Tagore." The other piped up, "And I know Arundhati Roy." In between loomed the shadow.

The parable-like quality of this (true) story illustrates the profound mutual ignorance that the Chinese and Indians live in. Yet, if we read Ha Jin's slim, deceptively simple little novel In the Pond, it will be obvious how much we share. Petty bureaucrats and corrupt party functionaries hold people in thrall, with the power to dart into any aspect of their lives and dictate its course. How many babies? What kind of job? One-room warrens or two? In both countries, decisions can be helped along with the adroit gift of some alcohol. Officials powerful in one context are cringing in another and misery trickles down the line, collecting at the bottom. At the bottom of Ha Jin's novel is the tragi-comic Shao Bin, a gifted artist forced to remain a factory hand. Thrown into an improbable crusade against his corrupt bosses, Bin exposes them to the public through cartoons and artistically brush-worked letters. His absurd, touching story is similar in spirit to films like "Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron", and as rivetting.

Ha Jin has written other works of fiction and has won the Ernest Hemingway Prize and the Flannery O'Connor Award.

In the Pond, Ha Jin, Vintage, p.178, œ3.00.

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Witness to a myth

THE Ghost Who Walks, as anyone who has been to Netaji Bhavan in Kolkata knows, is not Phantom but Subhas Bose. This faintly surreal museum has in it, apart from meticulously preserved documents, historical curiosities like Netaji's bedroom - complete with his biochemic medicines and slippers. Headless mannequins stand in glass cases wearing his sherwanis and army fatigues, and there are walls and walls of photographs. In some of them he is a dashing, wind-blown fellow surrounded by soldiers, hopping in the high seas from German submarine to Jap, much as we change buses. Many of these images have contributed to the persistent myth-making around Bose. The Sign of the Tiger by Rudolph Hartog tells the story of Bose's years in Germany. Hartog was an interpreter in the Indian Legion - made up of Indian POWs from German prisons - created as a division of the German army to fight British forces in Europe. Notwithstanding a stilted style of writing and chunks of undigested documents that would have been better off in an appendix, this is an intriguing book, written from an eyewitness' perspective.

The Sign of the Tiger, Rudolph Hartog, Rupa, p.206, Rs. 395.

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Fictional settings

WITH books' pages in newspapers and magazines shrinking or disappearing, it is an unexpected pleasure that the coyly named Bombay glossy Man's World has published an issue (September) almost entirely devoted to books. The cover shows a pretty young thing amongst rumpled sheets uncertainly clutching a hardcover tome and making bedroom eyes at us. What unlikelier place for new fiction by Mahasweta Devi (preceded by a full page ad for "Gucci Rush, the new fragrance for women"), Amit Chaudhuri and Farrukh Dhondy! It also has Ruchir Joshi writing on writing and Ramachandra Guha on the pleasures of second-hand-book shopping.

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Simple pleasures

TALKING of writing on the pleasures of books, I thought there could be no better essays on this topic than those by Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris, the Confessions of a Common Reader, Farrar, Straus and Giroux); but seeing John Carey's Pure Pleasure, A Guide to the Twentieth Century's Most Enjoyable Books, I've changed my mind. This means there are at least two wonderful little books that by the sheer enjoyment they communicate, rehabilitate reading.

Fadiman's essays on fountain pens, flyleaf inscriptions, compulsive proof-reading (we know that disease), how her husband and she finally, neurotically, merged their individual libraries, and other bookish topics, are fun and erudite if sometimes a tiny bit self-important. John Carey picks fifty long-time favourites ("pure reading-pleasure was my criterion") on which he writes essays which for their insight, lucidity, enthusiasm and brevity, should be memorised by all reviewers of books. Incidentally, his list includes one book by an Indian writer: Vikram Seth's The Suitable Boy. "There is no topic," he comments, "on which enlightened English people feel more superior to Indians than that of arranged marriage...[but] so skilfully does Seth convey Mrs. Mehra's essential goodness that our urge to condemn is replaced by understanding."

Pure Pleasure, A Guide to the Twentieth Century's Most Enjoyable Books, John Carey, Faber, œ4.50.

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Many publishing houses that evoke visions of imposing secretaries and glossy front offices are actually mom-n'-pop shops that operate from dining tables and Godrej almirahs. India Ink, which published The God of Small Things, for example, has, appropriately enough, just grown even smaller. Tarun J. Tejpal, once a partner, is now busy with other things. It is being run by mountaineer, award-winning photographer and flautist Sanjeev Saith, who, like most such publishers, combines marketing, editing, design and production departments within his solitary frame. India Ink's next title is Civil Lines 5.

ANURADHA ROY

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