No Presents Please

by Jayant Kaikini

  She was a street orphan picked up by a van and brought to the remand home in Chembur. A woman called Lokhandebai used to teach the kids songs and prayers in the remand home. When she played the harmonium, a child used to sit very close to her and sing intensely as though her vocal cords would burst. Lokhandebai called her Asavari; it was supposed to be the name of a raga. Even after the teacher left, everyone in the remand home continued to call the girl ‘Miss Lokhandebai’s Asavari’ and so, her name became Asavari Lokhande. The indistinct memory of the woman with her soft touch, clad in a pale yellow sari, who seemed like the mother she had never seen, stayed with Asavari only because of the name which was now hers and which she had seen no reason to discard. She had told Popat this story at least a hundred times. But in this impersonal public moment, she could not see how to console Popat for his distress at the sight of her last name. Frightened at how the draft invitation had changed his very language, she scratched out her surname and instantly felt unburdened. She looked towards him, as if to say ‘Khush?’

  ‘It’s Mumbai which has fed us and raised us. We shouldn’t offend Mumbai by taking on random people’s names,’ said Popat in a defeated voice.

  In front of them thousands of names went to and fro in the trains. Looking at the flood of people coming out of the trains, Popat said, ‘See Asavari, look at the fake good fortune of these bastards. Each one of them knows his caste. Because each one of them knows who their parents are. Now see how they go hither and thither holding their caste in their hands, as though they’d stolen it … We don’t need to bother with all that, do we?’ He began to laugh loudly. Asavari got up, saying she was getting late.

  Mr Tripathi of the curly grey hair, owner of the platform book stall, wrote out the invitation draft afresh for them in his clear handwriting. Casting a happy glance at the couple, he joked, ‘Have you looked for a kholi to rent, or are you planning to set up house on the last bench on platform number three?’

  While he was writing out the invitation, his lower lip twisted a little to one side, and Asavari asked, ‘Nowadays people write “Your blessings are our gift” and “No presents please” – should we write those too?’

  ‘That’s a rich-people style, my daughter,’ said Tripathi. ‘That’s not for us. If anyone gives you something lovingly, don’t refuse it. Yours is a new household, you’ll need everything. All the best to you,’ he said, handing over the piece of paper.

  They both felt that he was wishing them on behalf of the entire world, and felt like touching his feet. But they were hidden deep inside his stall, behind the rows of magazines. Not knowing what else to do, they sketched a bow. Understanding what they meant, Tripathi said, ‘Jeete raho, live long.’ As they both turned to leave, Tripathi shouted after them, ‘Arre, Popat, your name doesn’t look so good on the invitation card. Get a new name. Naya naam, nayi zindagi – new name, new life.’

  The two climbed up onto the iron bridge of the station and stood, holding onto the grill. From here they could see all the three platforms. On the rails lay the afternoon sun, as if about to commit suicide. Suddenly, Popat turned into a spinning top. His entire world was standing on tiptoe, begging for a new name. ‘What Tripathi said was right, Asavari. This is my only chance. Quick, quick, give me a new name,’ he said excitedly.

  Asavari stroked his back and said ‘Cheh…’

  ‘No, no. No cheh or chih. Hurry, look for a name. It’ll make everything new. Everything will change. Nothing stylish, nothing fancy … just give me a new name … hurry … We have to give the printer the card before three o’clock. Hurry!’ said Popat, tugging her arm.

  Asavari did not know what to think. A train drew into the station and deposited thousands of names at their feet. How many different kinds of names there were, each with its distinct features, clothing, memories, scent, its own heaven and hell. Popat shook her. ‘Swapnil? Hanh? How’s Swapnil? I heard that name on TV once. Write it down … hurry. Swapnil. Get the spelling from Tripathi if you like,’ he said, trembling with excitement. He looked like someone hanging onto the wings of a plane at the very last moment, after it had already taken flight.

  Frightened that her entire beloved universe was being destroyed by this scrap of an invitation, Asavari held his shoulders with both her hands. ‘What’s happened to you, Popat? Everything’s fine, Popat. Aren’t you my own Popat?’ She spoke softly. His eyes, searching for a new name, looked quite different than how she knew them. She felt she had to save things from destruction right now. Perhaps it could only be done by tearing up the draft invitation. She tore the invitation, crumpled the pieces into a ball, and swung her arm to throw it away. At the last minute, as though it was a sacred flower given to her from someone’s puja, she held herself back and put away the ball of paper inside her purse. Popat had been staring in astonishment, waiting to see where the paper ball would fall. In that moment, the distant half-finished flyover, the iron spikes, the faraway trucks, the construction rubble, the approaching trains, all looked like children’s toys to Popat.

  ‘No Presents Please’, 2000

  P.S.

  Insights, Interviews & More…

  Outsider—Insiderism: Translating

  Mumbai’s Cultural Vernacular

  TEJASWINI NIRANJANA

  Not a Tourist in the Lives He Writes

  About: A Discussion on Jayant Kaikini’s

  Stories

  TEJASWINI NIRANJANA,

  SURABHI SHARMA,

  NISHA SUSAN, ASHWIN KUMAR A.P.

  Outsider-Insiderism: Translating Mumbai’s Cultural Vernacular Tejaswini Niranjana

  Undertaking this translation was for me a coming to terms with the ruse of the ordinary that Jayant Kaikini has mastered. While ‘ruse’ is often understood as subterfuge or deception, I read it as a gentle narrative trick, so evident in every single story of this collection. The trick, then, is to begin with an extremely ‘ordinary’ person or situation, sometimes both – a middle-aged bachelor, a married couple growing indifferent to one another, a mischievous little boy terrorizing his neighbours. Gradually, as the story unfurls, the bachelor is plunged into commotion over a marriage proposal and his very connection to the city changes; the couple’s apartment is occupied by a girlfriend who becomes close to the wife; the little boy is taken away to be put into a remand home in Bombay. The ordinary often reveals itself as surreal – as it does when the mirrors come to life with the bachelor’s inner turmoil, the two women become a two-headed, four-breasted creature that drives out the man of the house, and the little boy copes with chawl life and cats howling in cages.

  The challenge for me, then, was to maintain the ordinariness of the narrative until it could be maintained no longer, and to let the translation lead the reader along without drawing attention to itself. At the same time, when the surreal began to seep into the story, and the ruse of the ordinary opened out on to a different terrain of engagement for the characters, the translation had to find the right words to signal this ‘turn’.

  I am not a prolific translator and I don’t usually take up commissioned translations. I translate something if I can make it my own, something I’m also personally invested in. And I’ve always been invested in Jayant Kaikini’s stories, both for their brilliance of technique and the obsession with Bombay, which mirrored mine. The first time I engaged intensely with his work was when I translated his poetry into English in the late 1970s, and I feel that something of the kind of engagement poetry requires has come into this translation as well, in terms of the mode of translation. It is worth recalling here that Jayant was originally a poet who became a fiction writer. His fiction captures some of the economy of modern Kannada poetry in phrase and structure, and I would like to think my translation has tried to do the same thing. So through the translation of fiction, I’m invoking the past of our old connection with poetry, so that somehow the old connection and the new are talking to one another.

  We selected the stories together, but I kept pushing for my favourite o
nes. We had a debate over re-translating some stories that had already appeared in print. There were three of those – ‘Dagadu Parab’s Wedding Horse’, ‘Unframed’ and ‘Mogri’s World’. Since I couldn’t visualize an anthology of Jayant’s fiction in English without these iconic stories, I have taken the liberty of translating them once more so as to match the language and style of the rest of the stories. The translations in this book were done in many places, several of them in Bombay. There was always a special thrill to be working on them during my regular Bombay visits. I’d be travelling in a local train and suddenly I’d think of something and send Jayant an SMS to which he’d reply instantly. Sometimes I would find myself in places like Flora Fountain, the Gateway of India, Opera House or the deepest suburbs, and look at them through Jayant’s characters: wasn’t that Mogri clinging to the handrail in the women’s compartment of the Churchgate–Borivali slow train, wasn’t that Paali getting into a boat at the Gateway, wasn’t that Kunjbihari leaning out of his taxi at the airport, and wasn’t that Dagadu with the horses on Juhu beach?

  As an outsider to Bombay myself, I probably see the city with the same affection and curiosity that Jayant displays. That’s also the special bond I have with the stories – which are about somewhat displaced people, they aren’t the local elite, they aren’t even long-term residents, many of them are migrants or drifters. We know that since the beginnings of Bombay’s rise as a metropolis, over 80 per cent of the population was born outside the city. And that makes for a very unique cityscape. So, there’s a stability to Bombay – perhaps the shape of the buildings, the settled-ness of its urbanity – and at the same time there’s a deep instability because of the constant coming and going of people. Jayant has been going back for nearly forty years, and I perhaps for a little less, but there’s always something recognizable about the city, like Jayant’s anecdote, and those of so many others, about the auto driver who will give him back two rupees as change even after a ride at midnight. That sense of being both insider and outsider in relation to Bombay that Jayant and I share is one of the reasons for the bond between writer and translator.

  I began working on the translations with a sense of relief that the writer was not using a little-known dialect and that the writing seemed, at first glance, not to pose any problems of comprehension. A friend had likened Jayant’s style to the idea of Roland Barthes’s white writing. How this would translate in our context is that the writing is not coloured by ethnic or regional origin. Most other Kannada writers, on the other hand, do ‘colour’ their writing. Curiously, my father, the novelist Niranjana, whose work I have translated and who would perhaps not have shared anything with Jayant except the fascination with Bombay, wrote prose in a particular way in the 1960s as a deliberate modernist gesture. For him, the concern was to overcome the caste markers of his protagonists by making the writing plain. His style was to work with short sentences and plainness of speech. To always choose the Kannada word over the Sanskrit word. I actually find elements of that deliberate plainness in Jayant’s writing. But here the difference is that the writing is also trying to deal with a situation where the characters are not speaking Kannada although their dialogue is being reported to us in the language.

  The difficulty was to retain in my translation the flavour of the speech, the hybrid Hindi–Urdu–Dakhani speech which is the cultural vernacular of Bombay and is signalled prominently in all the stories. In the flow of plain Kannada writing, these hybrid phrases are signposts that function in such a way as to mark, in Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s phrase, a sort of territorial realism. Jayant and I argued about how much of this to translate into English. After he complained about my frugality, I put back some of the phrases I’d removed or translated out. But I also worried about the book that we were setting adrift in the world, away from Bombay, and the fact that it would acquire readers without proficiency in Hindustani. I solved that problem by doing parallel translations – leaving in the Hindustani word but giving the meaning in English either close by or elsewhere in the sentence so that the attentive reader eventually understands the meaning. This way, nothing goes completely unexplained, even as the public language of the city makes itself heard in the sentences.

  The fascinating mismatch between Jayant’s protagonists and the language they speak in the fiction leads us to a seemingly unrelated issue, thinking about which might tell us more about the relative lack of Kannada critical writing on his work. Like the eminent playwright Girish Karnad, Jayant is also a Konkani speaker who writes in Kannada, but this does not completely explain the lack of attention paid to his fiction. Ashwin Kumar has remarked that there are very few Kannada writers who don’t think of themselves as public intellectuals. As important as the fact that they are novelists is the fact that they are social critics. Jayant’s own personality is such that he has not been politically involved in the context of Karnataka. But if we attempt to explain this outside of the frame of individual preference, an explanation with limited weight, we may want to note that in what Jayant’s stories talk about, we cannot see any automatic constituency that he represents or speaks for. One cannot be a representative of these ‘riff-raff’ migrants who are the majority of Jayant’s characters because they are not a unified linguistic constituency. Since, in India, we have literary formation, linguistic formation and political formation all coming together, the writer as public intellectual is one who speaks from out of this combined formation. Hence although Jayant writes in Kannada, people may wonder if he is a ‘Kannada writer’. The language of Jayant Kaikini’s fiction – as well as the characters who populate the stories – exceed the post-Independence dynamic that ties language to identity. In doing this, they speak to the experience of the city which smoulders in these pages.

  I give thanks to Tanveer Hasan, who offered me indispensable multi-lingual advice.

  Tejaswini Niranjana

  Bangalore, April 2016

  Not a Tourist in the Lives He Writes About: A Discussion on Jayant Kaikini’s Stories Jayant Kaikini’s Stories

  Dramatis Personae:

  Surabhi Sharma: film-maker and long-time fan of JK’s fiction, interested in converting some of it to feature-length screenplays

  Nisha Susan: journalist and fiction-writer in English

  Ashwin Kumar A.P.: researcher and fiction addict (both Kannada and English)

  Tejaswini Niranjana: translator and fiction lover

  Surabhi: When I read Jayant’s stories, my first excitement was about seeing a Bombay written about that was my Bombay, which was not the ‘south-Bombay Bombay’ nor the ‘mill Bombay’. This was my Bombay of Mulund, Andheri, Teli Galli where I lived as a child. This is the suburban Bombay that somehow gets completely erased from newspapers (unless there’s some big disaster), from literature, from film. But this was one’s lived experience of Bombay. To start re-thinking these inner lives of the Bombay we were all living, without it becoming a ‘thing’ – you know, a local train, Marine Drive, the Gateway of India – none of it becomes an item in Jayant’s fiction. I keep using the word ‘landscape’ while talking about his stories because it is meshed with a lived experience of a city that may appear generic, but is very specific to the Bombay experience. Difficult to articulate what separates the two – the generic and the specific. Once I met Jayant and made him read out a story to me – he read every sentence of ‘A Spare Pair of Legs’ in Kannada and translated it for me in Hindi–English, which helped me get into it in a way earlier translations had not, where you get the plot, but not the story. I wrote down the sentences in Hindi (and weirdly enough not in English) and this helped me grasp the story better.

  I find that his stories collapse and expand time in the most counter-intuitive way: the part of the story you think will get expanded is done away with in three sentences, and the part of the story which you think is the texture or the description becomes the plot. For example, take ‘City Without Mirrors’. You get the story of this man through the description of his room. And then the trai
n ride he takes – the ride expands while his meeting with the man is shrunk. This is what’s most difficult. I’ve been happily writing screenplays for all the stories, just for myself. It’s when you’re writing a screenplay that you come across this problem. And then you realize what specificity of Bombay and generic nature of urban experience Jayant is playing with. It’s not that there’s a set pattern. In ‘Opera House’ for instance, or ‘No Presents Please’ (which I want to set on the Eastern Express Highway!), or the little boy in ‘City Without Mirrors’ who says ‘my father lives there (in Cuddapah)’ – there you have to locate it in a real place when you’re writing a screenplay, and you have to make it a real Bombay place, but the plot which gives you the urban experience has been shrunk!

  Nisha: I can give one more example. In ‘Mogri’s World’, the character goes with Yamuna to the abortion clinic – the Pearl abortion clinic – Pearl Centre which we see the ads for in the local trains – and you think something will happen there to change her life. But no, it’s on the train ride that she realizes this is shit and I don’t want to do this anymore.

  Surabhi: So, in the plot there is not much attempt to capture the specificity of the city, and this therefore shrinks. Whereas in some detail, the city will explode – as it does in ‘Truckful of Chrysanthemums’. Or the Shivaji statue in Thane in ‘Dagadu Parab’s Wedding Horse’. You think something will happen there near the statue, but it doesn’t, although it’s what holds the story together. It’s Juhu Beach, that becomes important.

  I try to break the plot down scene by scene when I’m writing the screenplay. When Jayant shrinks something, it’s very tempting for me to fill it up somehow, but that destroys the rhythm of the story. That should never happen, but when you’re making a film you must explain that background, so I’ve been playing with using voiceover – and this too is hard. Jayant keeps shifting the narrative point of view – it suddenly becomes interior monologue, sometimes it’s third person – ‘Inside the Inner Room’ is classic in this regard. You keep shifting the voiceover across all the three characters, and every once in a while an outside person’s voice also starts describing the scene. As a result, these elements of storytelling create a stylistic problem and that’s where I’m sometimes stuck. It’s not just Kennedy Bridge or Teli Galli that makes it Bombay, and you have to keep asking: what is it about that urban experience which is central to the story that makes it ‘Bombay’? And the story keeps shifting gears. So just when you think you’ve got it … it’s moved again!