It is odd to note that the commune of Saint-Denis is both a religious and a red-light zone. Hookers between the ages of 18 and 80 with bright red lips get their clients from the streets. I was not surprised to see such old hookers as in India, the newspapers feature an article at least once a week about the brutal rape of some infant or toddler who is killed and casually thrown in the nearest well. So, nothing about sex surprises me anymore, not even the fact that some men like to fuck 80-year-old women.
I have written extensively about contemporary Moroccan literature which has a deep connection with the politics that underpins my writing and its background philosophy. If you have read my previous novels, you will easily perceive that my writing has blood ties with the American Beat Movement. William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac chose their own paths and left America. Burroughs immersed himself in Arabian culture, Ginsberg went the Indian way and Kerouac became a follower of Tibetan Buddhism.
My writing is similar to Burroughs’ and I think it stems from the fact that I was raised in a place with Islamic connections. One of the cities Burroughs lived in was Tangiers, Morocco. I know that town’s every street and I can very well claim to more about it than someone who’s been born and raised there. Tangiers was a shelter of sorts for a number of American and European writers. This was because of the casual manner in which they looked upon homosexuality which was banned in America. When having sexual relations with fifteen-year-olds was a grave crime in a number of other countries, it was something quite casual in Morocco. Tangiers was also a popular destination as drugs like hashish were easily available.
There is a café in Tangiers called Hafa which is known for its mint tea and kief. Kief is a hookah containing tobacco, ganja and a variety of recreational drugs. The likes of Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Truman Capote had frequented this particular café which has been standing on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean since 1921.
Are you wondering why I’m writing all of this? Let’s suppose there’s a Tamil writer who’s been living in Tangiers for twenty years. Do you know what he will say? “There is no limit to Udhaya’s fibs. I have been living in Tangiers for twenty years and trust me, searching for a café called Hafa will be a futile exercise simply because such a café does not exist.”
Another Tamil writer will immediately jump into the picture and say, “What that clown Udhaya writes is not to be taken seriously. He writes jokes for us to laugh at.”
These are the absurd circumstances under which I write. There is just one teeny-tiny consolation. Whenever I feel suffocated by the situation in the Tamil literary world, I find some relief by showing my face in the English literary world. Recently, there was an international literary conference in Delhi during which I met several writers. When someone there mentioned that I’d translated Juan Rolfo into Tamil, a South American writer came over and embraced me.
4 – A Letter Written in the Sky
Dearest Udhaya,
I went to Arizona recently and had one hell of a psychedelic experience. I feel we should go there together someday. There was a sandstorm that blurred the entire city. This is a once-in-ten-years occurrence. Can you believe that? Because nothing was visible, traffic was at a standstill and even the airport shut down for a few hours. It was then that I began reading the soft copy of the Marginal Man. When the storm subsided, I hopped my plane to Paris and raced through the pages till I reached the end. You’ve mentioned that the book isn’t done yet. When will it be finished? I’m desperate to read it in its entirety and from the beginning.
I was looking at the sky through the airplane window every now and then while I was reading. The novel evoked such conflicting feelings at the same time – I felt calm and restless, clear and hazy.
Only a few things in my life have impacted me deeply. Marginal Man is one of them.
Ciao,
Anjali
P. S.: Thank you for encouraging me to write poetry. I’ve written two so far.
5 – Honey and Butter Never Sounded This Spicy!
One fine day, a four-page article accusing me of being a sex-psycho appeared in a leading magazine. The day this happened, other magazines refused to publish my articles.
Perundevi, who was closely associated with Jymka Saamiyar, declared one day, “I’m never more going to his ashram. He’s not a righteous man and he’s going to be destroyed.”
Three days after she said this, videos of Jymka’s sexual romps with an actress got leaked. When this happened, the public torched his ashram.
I wrote a series of articles about this charlatan, who had ruined families and brought disrepute to his saffron robes which symbolized the purest form of renunciation. Besides, I had bad blood with him because he tried to brainwash Perundevi and turn her into an ashram-worker.
Perundevi fell at my feet and begged me to desist.
“The saamiyar does black magic, Udhaya,” Perundevi said, trembling. “He will destroy you! Please stop writing about him.”
“One values one’s life above everything else, but I value my writing more than my life. Do you think I’m afraid of a scoundrel like Jymka?” I said, full of bravado.
The sound of the telephone ringing made my stomach churn. Every day, various newspapers kept calling me because they were going agog over one of my sex chats that had gone public.
Anjali and I have had several hundred spicy chats. So tell me, how the fuck can anyone publish it in a newspaper and accuse me of being a pervert and a psycho?
I was receiving legal notices from Jymka and his actress-girlfriend almost daily. That actress even gave an interview in which she lashed out at Perundevi and me. Jymka even went so far as to release a forged letter to the press which was supposed to have been from Perundevi about me, but neither of us took it up because Perundevi hated the limelight and she was acting like a child who’d just been raped. And Perundevi was the kind of woman who believed that if a wife complained about her husband to other people, she couldn’t be a good woman.
Oye, Udhaya! Did Anjali read that last line?
Keeping Perundevi’s mentality and convictions in mind, do you think she’d write a letter to a fucked up saamiyar saying…
My husband Udhaya is a womanizer. He lusts after the cow and the calf. He is an abusive alcoholic who beats me and my son.
Those publishers who tried to shame me didn’t realize that their publications were in fact shaming a woman. Did they think they were helping Perundevi by exposing her supposedly psychotic husband? They only caused her a great deal of mental trauma. I feared that Perundevi would lose her wits as her mother suffered from mental illness. The woman’s head conked when she was twenty-five and she suffered till she died in her eighties.
I was not at all bothered about them having stripped me naked and paraded me on a donkey in public for I am a shameless bastard who will just take all of this shit and use it as raw material for my writing. But this is not the case with Perundevi. She was a woman with a frail mind whose only mistake was marrying me, a writer. Perundevi was so shaken up by the entire affair that she would faint if anyone brought up the matter.
“I told you not to write about that scoundrel, Udhaya,” she said, sobbing.
I was reminded of what Hattori Hanzo said about revenge in Kill Bill: “Revenge is never a straight line. It’s a forest, and like a forest, it’s easy to lose your way, to get lost, to forget where you came from.” So, did I take revenge on Jymka or did he take revenge on me? But is the answer to that question important when you consider how an innocent woman suffered? And to think of how I stubbornly insisted that I wouldn’t cow in the face of Jymka’s threats!
It was because of Perundevi that I’d stopped going to the police about Jymka. If I’d persisted a little longer, I would have had the satisfaction of seeing him in cuffs and in jail for obscene forgery, for virtu
al rape. When I saw Perundevi suffering, I decided to let the matter go and I began to wonder if writing about Jymka was something worth doing at all.
The whole scenario reminded me of clichéd Tamil films where the villain, when he is unable to take revenge on the hero, kidnaps his daughter or his wife and threatens him.
If Perundevi had been like her mother, she would have lost her mind, but her spirituality had endowed her with the endurance to carry on.
A new birth is a miracle, but with Nalini, the house was like a place where someone had died. After the child was born, my mother did not come to help us. “How could you marry a Brahmin woman?” she asked me. I never spoke to her after that. Nalini’s parents, although they lived nearby, didn’t come forward either. They had a well whereas we had only a hand-pump. I had to take the baby’s soiled nappies to Nalini’s parents’ house to wash them at the well. I had to do a thorough cleaning job because we didn’t want the baby to suffer from rashes. My hands would ache from all the hauling I had to do unassisted under the blazing sun. By the time I finished, I’d be close to fainting from sheer exhaustion. We could have used diapers, but we didn’t have the money to afford them. After the washing of the nappies, I’d return home to find a hungry Nalini for whom I’d have to cook special food.
Nalini was in great pain as her breasts were producing excessive milk. She even told me that the pain in her breasts was worse than labor pain. When we went to the doctor, she was told she had two options: either use a manual breast pump or have the breasts removed. Nalini was all for removing her breasts as they felt very tender and she would writhe and scream at a mere touch. But when I refused to hear of a mastectomy, the doctor suggested that I suck the milk out myself. He said it wouldn’t cause much pain and he warned me not to ingest the milk as it had gone bad. I had to suck Nalini’s breasts at hourly intervals. It tasted rotten – like sewage water. I had to spit this sewage water into a vessel kept at hand. If I sucked too hard, Nalini would scream in pain.
In retrospect, I think the poisonous milk I was forced to suck was a product of Nalini’s then unexpressed hatred of me. This milk-sucking business carried on in the night as well, and as a result, I was unable to get proper sleep. Once I’d sucked out the milk, Nalini would temporarily feel better, but then, an hour later, she’d become hysterical again. One night, I was exhausted and fell asleep at her breast. Unable to bear the pain, she jumped up and screamed that she was going to take her life. At that moment, all I wanted was to chop her to pieces with an arivaal.
“This is why I said we shouldn’t have children!” I furiously yelled at her once, in the middle of the night. “You’re a lazy bitch who needs nine people to clean your ass. When you can’t take care of yourself, what makes you think you can take care of a child, you whore?”
Did Jymka and the progressive cunts who had fun releasing forged letters which described me as an abusive drunkard know that I’d washed a woman’s soiled menstrual cloths for several years?
Oftentimes I think of the curious case of a certain pair of Indian cricketers. One was a gentleman while the other was like me – he was into drinking, women and parties. And like me, he too had married and divorced. He was a better player than the gentleman, but because of his lifestyle and his bluntness, he attracted a lot of controversy that led to his premature exit from the cricket world. Even my frankness has cost me much in life.
This brutal honesty is something I’ve inherited from my ancestors. It has taken me sixty years to transcend the genetic memory of a people who had languished at the bottom of the social ladder. The cricketer I spoke of, like my family, belonged to a low caste. We can presume it was the elitist mentality in the cricket world that drove him to its margins and finally out. But if we wish to make progress in life and reach our goals, we must be mentally fortified so as to not be knocked out of the game by the elites.
Again I tell you, if you are a Tamil writer, you are an unfortunate wretch. Once, a writer from France visited Chennai’s Alliance Française and I went to meet him. The man had participated in a few literary meets and was received at the Alliance Française centers in the metros and in every university that offered a study program in French. After his visits, pictures of him were splashed in the papers. Several copies of his book – the only book he’d written – were distributed to the students who were asked to read it and come prepared for his lecture. And then there’s me, author of forty books, still waiting for that glorious day when a college will invite me as a guest speaker.
When I applied for a visa to Canada, I was refused as I didn’t have sufficient funds in my bank account. And since this reason was mentioned in my passport, it became an excuse for the embassies of other countries to deny me visas as well.
A sculptor, while breaking stones, came across a toad living in a cavity within a stone. When he saw that the cavity had water for the toad to survive in, he thought, “If Arangan* can sustain this toad, surely he will take care of me.” Infused with hyper-ecstasy and faith, he went into a trance and spent the rest of his life sans speaking or moving. During this time, Arangan, saying that Sri Ramanuja had sent him, visited his family every day with prasad from the temple. After the sculptor died, his wife went to Sri Ramanuja with a request to continue sending the prasad home. When Sri Ramanuja realized who had been taking the prasad to the sculptor’s family, he said, “You shall have your prasad and Arangan will not have to carry it to you.”
You could say that something similar had happened to me. At the age of twenty-three, I left my lover Mekhala behind in Thanjavur and went to Delhi to earn a livelihood. Once I landed in Delhi, I renounced the world. My life revolved around literature and cinema and Arangan ensured that I did not starve to death. But although he took care of my stomach, he did not take care of my bank account or help with the officials in the embassy.
I have extensively written about and translated the works of a number of French authors – Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Sartre, Camus, Céline, Genet and Perec to name a few. I spearheaded an entire movement on Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille in Tamil Nadu and I did all of this in a time when computers were not in widespread use.
Perec wrote a lipogrammatic novel – La Disparition. He wrote the entire novel omitting the letter ‘e,’ the most frequently used letter in French. Do you know why? Perec’s life was a lonely life. His father died during the Second World War when he was four and his mother died in a Nazi concentration camp when he was seven. Perec felt that his sense of self and identity had vanished. In French, it would be said that Perec wrote the novel “sans e” (pronounced “saanz uh”). “Sans e” is a homophone of “sans eux” (“without them”). This “without-ness” is the essence of La Disparition. The English translation of this novel is titled A Void and it also follows the lipogrammatic style. The most commonly used word in English is “the,” but this word does not occur in A Void. Similarly, when the novel was translated into Spanish, the letter ‘a,’ the most commonly used letter in the language was eschewed.
“How can one write in French without using the letter ‘e,’ and 311 pages at that?”
When I asked Anjali this question, she read out a few portions of the novel to me. Perec had mostly stuck with the past tenses. There are five forms of the past tense in French: the passé composé, the passé récent, the imparfait, the passé simple and the plus-que parfait. Of these, it is the passé composé which often uses the ‘e,’ so Perec avoided this form of the past tense and chose the imparfait and the passé simple in its stead. He also deftly sidestepped the ‘e’ with other strategies. For example, he wanted to convey that a man looked at his watch. The French word for “watch” is “l’horloge.” As it contains an ‘e,’ he writes something like this: Son Jaz marquait minuit vingt. “Jaz” does not mean watch, but it is the name of a brand. It would be like saying, “His Titan showed twenty minutes past midnight.” In other places, he uses abbreviations such as “PDG” instead o
f “Président Directeur Générale.” He also had to get around the conjunction “et” (“and”) with commas.
Even before I heard of Perec’s La Disparition, I’d written a lipogrammatic novel without the Tamil word “oru” (“a,” “an” or “one”). It is quite possible that mine is the only Indian-language lipogrammatic novel. But unfortunately, because the English and the Malayalam translations have not followed this style, hardly anyone is aware of this fact.
I have served the French for forty years from my humble abode; but to visit Paris, I had to undergo a grueling ordeal. Appar Peruman, unable to walk, crawled all the way to the mountain Kailash, and at one point, he was unable to proceed any further. In that bleak and helpless moment, god appeared to him and said, “You cannot go any further, but if you immerse yourself in the lake at Maansarovar, you will rise up in Thiruvaiyaru where I will grant you a vision of Kailash.” Methinks my Kailash is Chennai’s Alliance Française.
How I managed to get to Paris is a pitiful story. I had to tell lies of every sort to get my visa. At the French embassy, they looked at me like I was a refugee who was likely to apply for asylum the moment I landed in France. When I told them I was a writer, they looked at me skeptically. In Paris, all I did was wander around Sorbonne University like an orphan and stare goggle-eyed at the classroom where Foucault taught.
The Tamils know of French writers, but do the French know of Tamil writers? For how much longer are the Tamils going to keep translating and reading western literature? When are the westerners going to read us? The world is ignorant of Tamil literature because the Tamils are ignorant of Tamil writers. The only people they care to know about are Tamil actors and writers of dime novels. Under such circumstances, can I expect any recognition?
Marginal Man Page 39