|
Literary Review
Out of the oven
|
Though God's Oven was her idea and she chose Moraes as co-author, it wasn't perceived quite that way by others. Things, however, have a way of getting equated, says SARAYU SRIVATSA.
|
"WHY did you choose her to write with you?" A pretty journalist dressed in black trousers, a grey silk blouse and a cobalt blue scarf thrown around her neck, asked Dom.
It was January 2003 and Dom Moraes and I were in Kolkata for the launch of the book Out of God's Oven that we had co-authored.
I sat upright, chuffed; I looked up at Dom and waited to hear him say great things about my writing. To my utter horror he told the journalist about the virtues of collaboration and the particular advantage when it was a man-woman one. He spoke from the corner of his mouth like Humphrey Bogart. "Women can see things that we men fail to," he said with a charming smile. "They also work very hard. She does."
He was used to giving interviews; he had written over 30 books, most of them, good. This was my second. I didn't know how to handle interviewers. So, unlike him, I was honest.
So when she arched one tweezed eyebrow, blinked the kohled eye located immediately below it, sweetly smiled with one half of her lips and asked me from the other part of her mouth, "Were you not intimidated writing with him? He's a famous writer. And you are not really known." I told her quite honestly that I was somewhat known as an architect. I had no problem writing with a famous writer. And before I could say more on this subject Dom cautioned me with a glance.
I accosted him behind the gracious lady's back with angry words. "Why didn't you tell her the truth? Why didn't you tell her that the book was my idea in the first place? And that I chose you? Why... "
He smiled in that infuriating manner, a part of his inheritance he assures me, he said, "I told her what I thought would be good for the sales of our book."
The book was an accident like most things are. What I mean by this is that it had started long before it had started consciously in our minds. It started with the stories I told Dom about my grandmother and how I grew up in her Brahmin middleclass home in Thanjavur. He was bewildered by my stories. And I was bewildered that he was. And all the time I believed I was telling him about my pieces of India, I was also listening to his account of it. They were different.
When I was a girl my grandmother had told me the story of God's Oven and how god had made a man with rice dough and kept it for too long in the oven and the dough was burnt. So he made it the Shudra, the low-caste. Then he made another that turned out brown. That became the non-Brahmin. In the end he made a beautiful dough-man, white as cream, this became the Brahmin.
Having carefully tutored me in the Rule of 3, she made me practise it daily. She would insist that I should never give the ball of tamarind to Munniamma in her hand. She was a low-caste woman. She would tell me to leave it at a distance from her where she washing the utensils.
Doesn't she mind? I asked my grandmother. She replied unflappably, "We all have our uses ma; we all have one-one role to play. We do what we have to do. Nicely. She does what she has to. Nicely. She's used to it."
Each day Munniamma would collect cow dung of the young calf, roll them into long dumplings in her fist, then dry them in the sun. When she had enough of them, she would heap them in a pyramid, cover them with rice husk and leave some hot coals on top. The pyramid would smoulder for days. Then when the husk had fully burnt, she would remove them and inside the cow dung dumplings would have turned to smooth white powder. Light as wind.
My grandmother would collect the powder, store it in a glass bottle and leave it in god's room. Each morning she would smear her forehead with it, and put a pinch in my mouth. It tasted nice. I asked her, "Did a Shudra not touch it? Was it not cow shit?"
She replied devotedly, "This is vibhuti. It is holy powder of the gods."
I told Dom these stories. He told me about his father, Frank Moraes, naxalites, tribals, dacoits and Dalits. I asked him whether he would write a book with me. "Let's put our stories together with the stories of other people."
We worked on a plan. In the book we took our positions and adopted our roles. He became the outsider. I became the insider. We wrote not as two authors but two characters who lived within the book. As characters we put down our experiences, feelings and thoughts honestly, without intellectualising them. We did not conceal our flaws. We did not swathe those of others. This was the whole point of the book. I am not sure if many have seen it like this.
Munniamma of my childhood days was used to certain ways. She played her prescribed role without protest. But in the writing of this book I found myself in situations, which even if they were amusing, somewhat infuriated me. We interviewed a number of men in Kolkata: artists, economists, writers, filmmakers. They invited Dom and me into their living rooms. The men talked to Dom. Even when I asked the question, they talked to Dom. I assumed it to be a typical Bengali trait. I switched on my recorder, took out my notepad. Just as I was getting into the heat of the interview, the women talked to me about Sandesh or the making of the perfect samosa, which they called Shingara. One of them asked me whether I would like to go shopping for Tangail sarees. Another coerced me into the kitchen to help her with the tea. "Let the men talk peacefully no. My husband is a great fan of that Dom Morris. His son, I think lives in Bombay. He is a poet."
In Lucknow our friend Nasir Ahmed had fixed all our appointments. We went from one Nawab to another. They bowed graciously, sat decorously, one hand positioned midair like a dancer's mudra, and the words they uttered slipped exquisitely out of their mouths like a broken string of pearls. I could almost hold their words in the cup of my palms. But I was angry.
Nasir introduced Dom and told each of the Nawabs about the book he was writing but failed to tell them that I was writing it with him. Sometimes he didn't introduce me at all. So I sat amidst ceiling-high cupboards, on velvet-lined chairs, surrounded by ancient artefacts, under a large chandelier that gave poor light, staring into gilded mirrors, a frown on my brow, my lips in a pout, I became a part of the atmosphere.
But later, after I had got what we had come for, I confronted Nasir. Why? I demanded to know. Why?
"They are old fashioned," he said with a giggle. "Women don't have much position in Lucknow you see. If I had told them you were co-authoring this book with Dom they would not think it to be a serious book. I was only trying to help you."
When I think back now I know Dom did not intimidate me. I was not unnerved about writing with him. In fact our second book is already with our publisher and will be out in July this year. It was some people who made me uncomfortable and realise how unchanged we were.
But things have a way of getting equated. And most of the time it happens only if one can take time off from concerns of the self and be able to laugh at one's own situation. We were in Thiruvananthapuram. We had just talked to the resident editor of Malayala Manorama. We walked out of the office towards our hired Ambassador. As Dom walked towards the car, an elderly man dressed in a shirt and veshti ran out of the building. "Sir, sir, please wait sir," he hollered. Dom stopped.
The man ran up to him. "Please sir, could I shake your hand?" Dom smiled. He looked at me, then smiled the Humphrey Bogart smile. He loved such moments. I smiled back sourly. After all the old man wasn't asking to shake my hand.
The man pumped Dom's hand with vigour. Up-down, up-down. "It's such an honour sir." Up-down, up-down. "So good, so good. My friends will never believe it. If I were to tell thim that I shook the hand of the son of the great writer Frank Moraes."
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
