Gunjon ka Gunj Pahargunj

Pahargunj: Storehouse of stories

The English had imported the suffix "Gunj" from Egypt's "Geniza", meaning a storehouse, and strewn the suffix liberally all over India. By that, Pahargunj would mean storehouse on a mountain. It is, rather, a mountain of a storehouse. In the crammed lanes you get everything from Hare Krishna tees, to Che Guevara bags, to weed, to leather boots, to trinkets, to books and music from across the globe, to 'Hotel Decent'. And you can also buy whips of leather for your sadistic boss and your masochistic self!

Pahargunj is also a geniza of stories. They are unending and fascinating, like the one we did yesterday about a Hollander having married a beggar in Pahargunj. The buildings are so clustered that it’s tough to discern one from the other. But one building is very striking- the one that houses Camran Lodge. It’s built in marble, and has fine embellishments to it. The building pulled us in. Faiz Farooqui, who runs the lodge, told us about the history of the place, which is very much a micro picture of what was happening in 1947. It was intended to be a mosque, and was being built by a tribe of Muslim stone carvers who stayed in the then predominantly Muslim Pahargunj. Partition happened, the Muslims of the area had to pack up, and the Hindus from Pakistan came in. The building was occupied by the refugees then, and later “anti-social” elements occupied it till the late 1970s till Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad’s helped in having it vacated. The top floor is now used as a mosque, the outer cubicles as shops, and the rest as the lodge. It was meant to be a “Muslim musafirkhana” specifically as approved by the Waqf board, but of late the lodge runners have started letting it out to everyone, “minus the criminals,” Farooqui tells. The rates are dirt cheap for staying in the lodge, starting from hundred rupees.

We walk on, and see the demography of the area changed in a peculiar manner. The bustling streets have always been known for a cosmopolitan crowd, but fifty per cent of the foreign populace is now Israeli, we are told by a bookseller, whose shelves are stacked with books in Hebrew. As you walk further into the market, you’ll notice shops with Hebrew signboards. McLeod Gunj is known for Israeli visitors, but even there you won’t find Israeli signboards. You’ll see STD booths specifically shouting “Call Israel at 7 rupees a minute”. We walked into a leather shop with a Hebrew signboard. It’s run by Kashmiris who came here 20 years ago, and they have “good relations with the Israelis,” the owner says.

When enough of dekko has been done, and you're in a "thought for food" mode, you'd discover that food festivals are not the only place that offer world cuisine. As we said, Pahargunj has it all. You get Israeli, Russian, Lebanese, Itlaian, Spanish menus all rolled into one, in most restaurants. We hopped into Sam's Café, a rooftop restaurant. A rooftop with flowers and green grass in Pahargunj is the rarest sight. They have French, American, Isreali and other breakfasts; but we started with Milky Potato soup, (must be a Russian one), which was warm, creamy, yum.

Ajay Guest House is a stone's throw away, and besides the German bakery that they have, there is a cool leather goods shop, and a painter who does trance paintings-smoking Rishis, purple witch and all that including many reproductions of Dali. The bakery also offers a multinational variety with pancakes, muselis, lasagne, pizzas and more. And there are a hundred bars with beer almost a marked price. The next time you’re planning an adventurous evening, you know where to go.

pan-opt-icon

I went to see an art exhibition with two high flyers, a poet by the name of ‘Tanha’, and a historian-in-the-making who the poet called ‘Kanha’ for his way with words and girls, and to rhyme with the way he pronounced ‘Tanha’ in his American accent. The exhibition had 19th century paintings of Victorian women. “They are still celebrating the lores and mores of socio somatic snobbery,” said Tanha, almost disgusted.
“I don’t know what that means but your language sounds snobbish to me,” I chuckled.
“Well, he is right,” Kanha came on his side, “these Victorian women were trained to have hourglass figures, to wear tight robes that would stifle them, to sing, to dance to please the men. And the man would then make paintings of them. And the dainty women would faint on the slightest sign of bad air or bad news. They had to faint, otherwise they were not ‘ladies’.”
“In other words, the fainty snobbery of the dainty women was a social phemomenon,” Tanha recited.
“And they would have to be brought back to their senses by smelling salts, also called salts of hartshorn,” Kanha said.
“Heart’s horn sounds interesting to me. The men’s heart in depression over their beloved’s fall would make them blow a horn. What a metaphor,” I said, hoping to get a compliment from the poet.
“Nincompoop,” said the poet, “hart is a male deer from whose antlers ammonia is produced, from which smelling salts are made.”
“I am sorry, but I thought you’d like my little lovelorn ghazal,” I said apologetically.
“Did you know that ghazal comes from gazelle, or kasturi mrig. It is once in many years that a deer gets kasturi in its belly. And it knows it is doomed, going to be hunted down. It’s cry is the spirit a ghazal tries to capture,” Tanha said, almost in tears.
“Tanha, my friend, don’t weep here,” I said, “they have CCTVs here.”
“Oh the panopitcon,” said Kanha, “Jeremy Bentham dead is more powerful than Jeremy Bentham alive.”
“I had heard that about Julius Caesar, but what about Bentham?” I asked
“Well he designed a prison in which the jailer could watch everyone from a tower, but the prisoners could not either see each other or if anyone was sitting in the tower.”As we walked out, Tanha chewed on a pan, and spat it on the wall near the gate, and said, “No panopticon can stop me from spitting the pan.”

Sutta Monger

In da house

My friend Vikram smokes costly cigarettes. A single cigarette can cost thousands, he’s such a connoisseur.

The costliest he smoked was in a train. Those were the days when smoking wasn’t banned in trains. So he stood at the door, with earphones in his ear that were singing retro songs to him courtesy the walkman that was strapped to the belt above the left pocket. He thought it would be a great idea to inhale the fresh air of the endless plains and exhale his beloved ‘smoke’. So he put his hand in his pocket, took out a cigarette, lit it, puffed in. After a while he realized that the song had stopped playing. He reached for his walkman. As he was taking out his cigarette, the instrument decided to go for a walk in the UP plains, courtesy the pull of his hand. His was shaken but not stirred, and finished his sutta. It was a borrowed walkman, and the cigarette cost him Rs 2503.

Another costly smokey affair was again to do with a train. After long days of wandering during the vacation, Vikram had fifty bucks left in his pocket, just the right amount to take a general ticket back home from his last wandering spot. He had gone there to meet a friend who had a dialogue from Sholay for every situation in life. Vikram didn’t know there had been a train fire a few days back, and that inhaling the plains and puffing out tobacco was no longer possible. So, waiting for the train, he lit up a cigarette. Four cops pounced upon him together to collect their booty. Booty he had none, and so he refused to stop smoking, and offered to go to the jail. Friend’s friend had to come. He said, “Ab tera kya hoga kaalia,” but after joking a bit, paid for him. That sutta cost him Rs 203.

Another time, my friend acquired a new pair of frameless glasses. He used to go back to his flat at ten every night after dropping his girlfriend to her paying guest accommodation. Good boy didn’t smoke in front of her, but ran every day after dropping her, to a sutta shop that used to close five minutes after her place. That day either her PG shut later, or the shop shut earlier, but he saw the shutter coming down, and ran like Ben Johnson. Off went the specs, but he got his smoke. That cigarette cost him Rs 1003.

Surreal and Sadiyal

Gunda is a cult classic, and I being an AC of Gunda and Mithun da, had written a long article about Gunda fan club which worships the movie that has three rapes, thirteen murders and all dialogues in rhymes. The IITians had started the fan club, and so I was invited to their campus by a five-point-someone (FPS) for a screening of Loha, the complementary movie of Gunda. In one sequence, Shakti Kapoor comes to the adda of the villain and declares that he has tied bombs all around him and he’ll blow the place. So he blows the bomb and himself, and everybody else is left laughing.
“Quite a sadiyal movie,” I said, “How can a suicide bomber blow up while the rest are left blowing up their chewing gums?”
“That’s the beauty my friend. It is not sadiyal, it is surreal. It’s psychedelic, it’s science fiction, it is…”“Chill, I said. What is so surreal about it? Mithun da just must have decided that he’ll kill the villain, so he changed the script.”
“Come on, can’t you see the very elementary things,” FPS retorted.
“It is alimentary for sure. My alimentary canal and stomach are churning after seeing these random scenes,” I said.
“Come on dude. Surrealism is the reality. There are surreal numbers as well. Did you know there is a book called Surreal Numbers: How Two Ex-Students Turned on to Pure Mathematics and Found Total Happiness by Donald Knuth? It is the first novel arguably where mathematical concepts were presented through fictional tale,” FPS puffed on his cigarette with glee.
“And what could surreal numbers possibly be?” I asked, perplexed.
“Any number. Rational, irrational, infinitesimal, real, unreal,” he replied.
“Any number is surreal? That means all things real are surreal?” I exclaimed.
“Exactly,” said my friend, “you what Dali had said when he was called an eccentric? He said, ‘There’s only one difference between the madman and me. I am not mad.’”
“Yaar tum to dada ho,” I chuckled.
“Ya ya I believe in Dadaism, but not so much as in surrealism. The Dadaists believed that too much rational thought had brought about the misery of the world. They protested but did not evolve new forms, you see.”
I had figured out Gandhigiri a few days back but did not know they already had a counter-weapon in Dadaism.

beauty and the beast

We had the film Frankenstein for our film and literature course. The brightest girl in the class, Jharna, could be quite eponymous while watching horror films. So, behind her specs, she had a jharna flowing from her eyes. She twitched her fingers, occasionally plucked on the neighbour’s sleeve, and watched with rapt attention – one with the film.

So we teased her. “You are an unfeeling brute, what will you understand,” she retorted. “Come, it’s just one of those regular old horror films. It doesn’t even match the horror of the technology driven horror films of now,” I said. Another friend commented that a 19th century novel with funny English of that time isn’t quite indulging. He would realize very soon what it is like to pull a scholar into such a discussion.

“Did you know that the novel by Mary Shelley on which this film is based is the beginning of the genre of horror?” she asked.
“Might be,” my friend said, “but a woman cannot conjure up stories like say Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”“You are a thorough patriarch,” she said, “Did you know that this novel is a statement against patriarchy by Mary Shelley?”
That we didn’t know, for all that the novel is about is a war between Frankenstein, the scientist, and the monster he has created out of dead people. It’s about only men, so how could it possibly be a statement against men?
“Mary Shelley’s father William Godwin was believer in Utopia. But Utopia, which is often considered idyllic is not quite idyllic. There’s quite a lot of politics to it. Godwin’s utopia proposed that there’ll be world full of men who will live happily with themselves. It shows the kind of hold men have had over academia to have ignored this fact for so long,” she said.
“The monster in Frankenstein is a manifestation of that,” she continued, “a man making a man. Against nature’s law. And see what happens to that world. Mary was her mother’s daughter. Mary Wollstonecraft was the first one to write about the vindication of the rights of women.”
“But why were you crying so much then if the movie is against patriarchy,” I asked.
“Because poor Frankenstein is hounded so badly by the monster,” she replied.

The story after Tees January

History has been written uptill Gandhi, and history is still Gandhi. There have been many books about Gandhi in the past few months. Tushar Gandhi feels it is coincidental with writers and deliberate with publishers post-Munnabhai. Ramachandra Guha won’t be happy with this introduction, for he insists that his new book India After Gandhi is not about Gandhi. “The keyword is ‘after’ and not ‘Gandhi’,” he says, “no one has taken post-independence history seriously. Historians are obsessed with Gandhi. History ends at January 30, 1948.I have spent years researching and thinking.”

Guha is precise in saying this, for the book is humungous, and deliberates upon issues and events at great length. Guha says he has a deep and abiding interest in Gandi, but the time after him has been ‘not studied and misunderstood.” There has been criticism, particularly by Amit Chaudhuri, that Guha hasn’t said much about cultural forms. “This is Bengali criticism,” Guha retorts, “No work of history is ever complete. Whatever you write, there’ll be such criticism. I took eight years to write these 800 pages.”

Guha has been a voracious writer of non-fiction, but to the question of venturing into fiction, he says, “it is beyond my competence. There is no dearth of historical books to write. It is very fortunate for a historian to be born in India.”

Does Guha, an alumnus of St. Stephen’s, believe in something called the Stephanian school of writing? “ In that college I learnt nothing about scholarship,” he chuckles, “it’s my years in Calcutta, Uttaranchal and Bangalore that have shaped me as a writer.” In college he was “a second class economics student and a second class cricketer,” and was therefore just “happy”. After the happy holidays, he ventured into serious scholarship that’s produced books on ecology, cricket, a biography of a missionary who settled in India, and more.

Every Indian is a scholar on Indian politics, and therefore this book is not to be missed to add to your scholarship.

Meeting a namesake

It was the fourth time I was meeting Vikram Seth after we had decided that March the 13 was an auspicious day. The other three had been professional visits, and this time he was on a personal visit to home. At the first meeting, he was excited that I was his namesake, for he was called Amit in his childhood. I never had thought before this that Amit is a very exciting name, for whenever you turn back hearing this name, someone else is being called. It is a coincidence that a series of short stories that I had written have a common protagonist called Vikram. Interestingly, there’s a Vikram Seth poem called Distressful Homonyms, and I am more than tempted to quote the first six lines from the poem:

Since for me now you have no warmth to spareI sense I must adopt a sane and spare Philosophy to ease a restless stateFuelled by this uncaring. It will state A very meagre truth: love like the restOf our emotions, sometimes needs a rest.

So we met to exchange greetings and ideas two days before the Ides of March at his Noida house. I cannot reach on time. So even though I had been waiting for days, I did not reach on time, and told him the traffic police had foiled my efforts. His wry smile told me he thought otherwise, but he was least irritated. “Let’s take a walk in the park, otherwise we’ll not be able to talk,” he said. So we went to the park and again decided that clockwise was a better direction to move in.

The subject of being Humnaan always comes in, and I was reminded of the poem quoted above. “Oh that was written when I was your age you know, the time when one is lovelorn,” he chuckled. His looked off into another time. I wondered what it would have been to drop out of a Stanford PhD after ten years of being in it, to decide to take destiny’s call of being a writer, when you were already past your twenties.

Vikram listened to me intently as if I were a close friend as I rambled about Alice’s grave in Pune with haunting epitaph, an Anglo-Indian beggar who spoke queen’s English, a military coup in a steel city, short story as a lost form. And he gave me the first lesson on becoming a writer, “When you staple pages, do not staple them diagonally on the left hand corner. They tear away.” I had taken a book for an autograph in which he signed as ‘Amit.’