Day of the Kite

The 17th day of a sultry September.

I open my eyes to a rain-washed dawn. Looking at the calendar I realize, today marks the auspicious beginning of the Bengali month of Ashwin. Ashwin and Kaartik - the twin months of Sharat, that sees many of the Hindu festivities. Looking out of my bedside window, I see tiny specs of color in motion, thronging the rectangular sky. Blinking away leftovers of sleep, I marvel at the flying kites. Really, this early?

Of course, today it is the day of the ghuri (the kite), the day of appeasing Vishwakarma, the Hindu god of architecture and engineering. He will be worshipped in garages and factories. In roadside pandals that will appear out of thin air overnight. And didn’t I taste the medley of Kuman Sanu, Abhijeet, Asha Bhosle, Kishore Kumar (chartbusting Bollywood playback singers) invading my ears from makeshift pandals already? They blend sorely with the recorded voices of Kanika Bandopadhyay, Debabrata Biswas (singers of Tagore songs), wafting in from the traffic signal posts. Yes, the present government of Bengal has made sure that we, the Bengalis, do not forget our cultural heritage and has planted sound boxes at every traffic posts that churn out songs of yore to both willing and unwilling listeners.


OK, now back to Vishwakarma. Armed with four hands, this bejeweled deity exudes immense confidence in his steady clay gaze. He holds a water-pot, a book, a noose and a craftsman's hammer in his hands (he has four, remember!). The locally worshipped pandal variant is however perched on an elephant (he had already figured out the impossibility of affording gas/petrol for his cars. An elephant is more economical. Think of the rising prices!). He will hold court for two whole days. Sometimes, three, depending upon the municipal corporation's mood.

Colorful ghuris (kites) make for the backdrop of his two-day court. Typically all factories observe this occasion to worship the engineering expert for obvious reasons. And even though the Internet will throw up an image of a silver haired and silver bearded god seated on a golden throne as Vishwakarma, you will never see an older version anywhere in the pandals. It is always a very muscular, very young Vishwakarma, sporting jet black tresses reaching evenly toned shoulders and a matching mustache – resembling a south Indian super star – that you will find at the pandals. We, the race of idol worshippers, like our Gods young, as much as our matinee idols.

My earliest memory of this festival is from my school bus, having told by my bus-driver kaku (we were taught early to create family ties with everyone we met!) that the bus needed to be adorned with flowers (plastic and real) on that special day. And that some incense sticks had to be stuck at the front. I had asked why would he want to worship an inanimate thing that didn’t even come in the shape of a human husk. He told me that if the engine got all hot and angry, it would not show up next day at my doorstep. I was convinced.


I didn’t want to miss school.

Suddenly I was very aware of van-full and truckloads of handsome heroic gods passing me by on the road. Stalls materialized in a flash selling the clay models, which funnily looked cast of the same mold as that of Durga’s second son Kartikeya (another Hindu god, worshipped for his valour, who for some strange reason likes to sit on a peacock).

And thus I was introduced to this veritable super power behind buses, trucks, rickshaws, buildings, and monuments.


Few days prior to the festival, provisional shops would start selling kites (I still don’t know the connection) and spools of thread. Boys would get busy crushing glass shards to smear on their kite threads ahead of their kite-flying tournaments. “Bhokatta!” came swimming through the autumn air as a war cry of sorts. I never caught the full word but it sounded identical to a primitive exhilaration of victory after the opponent’s kite was cut short. A running rally of boys would emerge from nowhere chasing the orphaned paper art. Sometimes a stray one would land on my terrace and I wouldn't know what to do with it.

In some households today they will worship ovens and hobs (ranna pujo) and not cook for a few days thereafter. It always struck me as odd the way we confer life on non-living things like clay idols, cereals and cooking gadgets. But then there is no questioning faith wherever it stems from - self-belief, handed down heritage or rituals imposed. What matters to me is that festivals such as this spread an air of acceptance and gratitude and reinforces the community feeling.


When I was a girl growing up in Behala (a suburb near Kolkata), the crazy bhashan (immersion) dance of rickshaw pullers, after bottles of bangla (cheap local liquor) would scare me out of my wits. I would walk quickly away from their carnival averting my eyes from the procession of revellers. Dancing their way through, they would follow the garlanded idol on a van to a nearby pond for immersion at the end of their festival. I was worlds away from this gang in every way, only too willing to gun down the noise-makers, their loud-speakers blaring non-stop Bollywood numbers. Add to that my ear-drums taking a beating with the frenzied drum rolls in full volume.

Religion! Blah, the opiate of the crude mass at work!


My father would often plead with the crazed revellers to tone it down. “Kaku, ei toh ekdeen, ektu shojjho korun”, they would plead in return (“It’s just one day, uncle, please bear with us”). I would fume inwardly over the uncouth rituals, promising myself that someday I would live far away from this madding melee of melody.


Today I live in an apartment complex, which is impervious to all external noise. I don’t get to hear any of the Vishwakarma pujo cacophony. So maybe I miss being angry a tiny bit. I scramble out of the posh boundaries to take a peek at the revelry outside.


Today, I look close and hard at the same celebration with interest and affection. Somehow these two days of license seems more warranted by days of hard labor that the rickshaw pullers, auto/taxi/bus drivers, road workers, miners, garage mechanics and factory workers put in all year round. They deserve so much more to have shown us, the bhodroloks (the genteel) how to celebrate life even in the face of challenging circumstances. With the economy looking low, these are the people who bear the hardest brunt of it all. Yet they are the Vishwakarmas of our daily life, they carve out their niche for themselves without so much of any external aid. They steer our engines of well being, they reassert our faith in saying “I can!” to all the hurdles.


It is amazing how a rickshaw puller still finds reason to whistle away to glory while picking up his passengers for a mere 10 buck note – that too after haggling for his dues. Auto-wallahs still hum “All izzz well” while squeezing in between strangers on his front seat and riding his flimsy chariot on three puny wheels. Factory workers, car mechanics, goldsmiths, cobblers – our subaltern sidekicks living on the margins of a society that cannot do without them – will dance and sing to the beats of drums and hindi pop numbers today.

Festivities have begun. I look up at the sky and see the kites grow in numbers as the day progresses. That is how I like to see my spirits soar, breaking into multiple colors of life – up, up and away!


Happy Vishwakarma pujo to all of you!

My Treat

Must be sickening selflove that makes me hold myself
Shameless for you to see
Or idleness of a brain sedate with analgesics.

The round rocks beneath my feet cook in the sun
Sea sprays salt into my curls
I bake in the blaze for your supper.
We feast together, on each other.

My name is red.
Remember.

© Sudeshna Sanyal 2013 ~

I walk again...

Your prayer worked.
My feet shuffle again through a solitary night sky.
Walking now snail steps in caution.
No more the restless need for motion
To defy gravity or to deny the scare of the red ball called the sun.

I have seen the green, the amber and the red
I have listened to sirens in my head
Now I only listen to my lips that don't move anymore in service.
I lean on you, my mate, my friend,
I inch closer to your unshaven chin, to feel the breath
And hear the silence of your prayer,
The miracle of human kindness.

I know you pray for me.
I wish I could pray for myself...

© Sudeshna Sanyal 2013 ~

Freedom Song

I had picked my hovel of straws until you came with the promise of marbled palace. Of illusions, now I know.
I had come to terms with my anonymity when you came with public display of love. People noticed me. I was in talks.
I fought myself many times before I fought your shower of allowances, I was needy. You recognized the early signs.
I knew how it would all end even before I joined your choreographed exchange of excuses. The end never changes anyways.
I am alright now. Back in my hovel making small talk with a woman I knew once upon a time. She looks the same, but only sounds different.
I remember I had seen her wearing my skin before you came and left footprints all over it. She still wears it now.
Only with an unreserved finality in the folds. She is free. She knows.
Freedom seeps in through the cracks you left unattended.

No, I will not die of a broken heart or a worn out skin shared with a half-known woman.
No one ever does.
Moreover, I now have company and conversation.
And a confidante.
An entry free with an exit. The world keeps its balance.

© Sudeshna Sanyal 2013 ~

Not being on demand, without an apology

I was going through a time when I was not tagged to any specific project at work. They have a name for such unclaimed baggage like me – I was an ODS (On Demand Service) resource. I was the extra hand who could be handed down the last minute erratic demand from strangers that no one foresaw coming. I was on a career limbo, so to speak. So while I waited for that random thankless chore to pour in, I wanted to look busy at my desk, lest they tagged me as disused excess. There is a corporate jargon for such frills around the workplace - the bench. Hah, as if it was any less inglorious than the wobbly seats on wheels they provide the unbenched. But there was that demon called 'cost cutting' - you never knew when you would be queued up to whet that pink axe. It was all about a lean, mean enterprise. Skinny still in demand, I tell you. Fatty, out!

Enough loose prattle, I am lying! I am trying to turn my histrionics on just for the effects. I am switching full-on my random unrehearsed drama because demand calls for it. I needed a context that shouldn't have sounded outlandish. I am not sure if I have been able to muster some reason, salvage some excuse for the casual rant here. That I am going to muse on demand - specifically mine, or the lack thereof, in the world that I inhabit. Demand - the word kind of bugs me. I turned to my friend, philosopher and my vocabulary guide - yes, you guessed right - The Google God!

And here is what I found:

Demand is an economic principle that describes a consumer’s desire and willingness to pay a price for a specific good or service. Holding all other factors constant, the price of a good or service increases as its demand increases and vice versa.

Quite a disappointment, that was. Here I was pinning my hopes on one glorious word that rationalized my existence - to tell me that I was On Demand (both in and out of office, as I liked to think). And as capricious luck would have it, I was rendered a mere pawn in the larger scheme of the world's financial machinations. I was a commodity! A product! I was buy-able, sale-able.  I came in with a price and also had a well defined market to determine the tag. What was worse, I realized all women (or men?) were similarly positioned. And I found there were levels in availability, visibility, to make judgments on a woman's worth remarkably easy.

Rosea Lake's viral Judgments 

So what/who determined my demand? How much was I willing to give of me at a given point of time and what price my consumers were willing to pay for it. In short, you never defined your own value and therefore, never your own demand. Your availability at a given point in time and your consumer did. But who were these consumers, I wondered and realized it was all those people around you and me - friends, colleagues, partners, kids, parents. People who chipped off parts of you every day. People, you fed each of your waking hour, with varying degrees of your existence. Strangely enough all existence smacked of business and profit, supply and demand. The better the supply, the lesser the demand, Google said. So going by my track record of giving way over than was necessary, I could see a distinct possibility of my demand dwindling in future. So I had to make sure, I wasn't giving too much.

Where should it all begin then? They say charity begins at home. And the home is where the heart is, right? By that logic, my mission of being uncharitable had to begin here - right at the heart of the matter. The idea was to become unproductive, under-utilized, un-reproductive, undesirable, and unlovable. In short - unthinking, unloving, and ungiving. That wasn't quite so short, now was it?

Did anyone have a problem with that? Yeah, you bet, I did. I was on a mission to ensure that my supply was artificially diminished so that I could be looking at a rising demand curve. Curve, eh? Well, ahem...yes curve. I had them aplenty. Of the mental kind - all that thinking had rounded off all my dents and caves into convex mounds of adipose. All that exercise of the cerebral kind had left little time to pay tribute to the divine chisel that must have once intended to carve out a potentially decent body.  I often think if there is a scan done of my mind, the report will run into reams of zigzags of winding lines. But for a woman, curvaceous or otherwise, her demand had to be measured (almost always) in her ability to lay bare her curves - quite literally and figuratively. But wait, who said anything about the curves of the mind?

Tahitian women bathing by Gauguin

A woman who has a curvaceous mind, had twists and turns and alleys and by-lanes down her head, and can proudly lay it all bare for the world to see - can never be on demand. I for that matter have found myself increasingly unwanted by those who would prefer a mindless bimbo to a mindful one. Most men still fall for women. They profess eternal love at the start. Most begin at the bust-line and travel as far as the hem-line to unravel the mystery called woman. Out aloud they swear it is only the beautiful mind that they see through all that is on display. And then stupid woman, there you are, smiling blissfully at the thought of having found someone who doesn't want your clothes. You think your skirt is held high not by that elastic or the hook, but by your dignity before you find yourself ugly. Yes, ugly. Because what you have to offer them, is not what they actually want. They are after a more tangible topography.

So you see, I was wrong at the very beginning. My mission of being on demand by cutting the self-supply short would never work. Because I had limitless supply of a mind that thought freely. So zero demand by the law of demand-supply. And very slim supply of voluntary fleshly offering as the culmination of man-woman bond, which might have triggered an initial demand of sorts but was bound to wear even the most patient waiter out in the end. Though I have nothing against the corporal bond and think people who can willingly engage in it without attaching much thought into the emotional implications are remarkable by all means. But was I not limiting my demand theory only to the field of sexual politics between man and woman?

Two Women by Gauguin

What about friendship? I drew an equal blank even there. Whoever said 'friends never judge' was an imbecile of the top order and I am sure was left without any. You think your friend is going for the wrong job? Or choosing the color for her wedding gown that makes her look like an aubergine in a bed of roses? Or that her latest Facebook profile picture shows too much of a cleavage that could let loose a brigade of booty-hunters spamming into her inbox? Or she is settling for the guy who you know should be tested for STDs? And you want to tell her all that, right? Well, think again. You might be losing a friend for life. So you think the idea is to cut short your supply of friendly advice in fear of a lifelong loss of camaraderie. And keep fueling your demand as her best friend? Sounds easy? Not really. When your friend falters, fails, cuts and bruises, she would jump to blame you for being the non-committal bitch who was never any good. What about your workplace? You end up sidelined for peripheral stuff if you play hard-to-get. And if you are ever so visible, you could be risking an over-exposure. Working too hard for too long could make you kind of taken for granted. Who cared, anyway? So no luck there as well.

What about your kids' then? Surely there wasn't any transactional aspect in there, right? Could you possibly risk your child's well-being by limiting yourself when you gave them your love, showered them with presents, guided them in life? You couldn't train your heart to stop when it came to your offsprings. Or your parents? Would you hold back anything from those who raised you, nurtured you, except maybe the blame that they could have done a better job of it? I know I couldn't.

Femmes by Gauguin

So I came to the end of my mission. And I concluded that no matter what I did, unless I changed my charitable heart, I would never improve my demand. Change, I might, someday. But not for a demand enhancement of my breed. I realized I really didn't care for relationships of the conditional kind. There would always be "a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite." I was unwilling to feed that appetite stooping to mediocrity of the mind - which I assure you, is the first casualty in any advertised drive to artificially augment demand. All this while as I went harping on the dynamic economics of a consumer market, I was not for once thinking of myself as a product or a commodity, but of a woman who could be loved, desired, cherished for her inherent womanliness. All that neediness in me just makes me want to puke! Ugh...

Here as some saving grace, I quickly attach another saying. The German philosopher Nietzsche once said that "the demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions." So I wasn't going to pretend to be in demand ever, to be lovable, desirable to people who wanted stuff in return. Or maybe more so to people who could love unconditionally. Because, did I deserve to be loved that well? I wasn't all that great, was I? I knew I could be very unlovable! But if I be loved someday, I demanded to be loved not without esteem for the mind I wear as my crown. I demanded to be loved with the freedom to not love in return. I would not trade in love. Balzac wrote somewhere that "Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love" - I refused to be on demand for a love that paid me little or no esteem. Payment, if at all, had to be in terms of esteem. And I held that at an higher order than mere love.

© Sudeshna Sanyal 2013 ~

The Coil

You call her crooked. 
You see her twisted half-smile. 
Maybe she is not all that straight. Broken and put back together again. 
A curly fry that you like to lick all the time.
Well, you are hooked alright.

Lay off the winding road to her zigzag mind then,
Lay your straightness off her twists and turns.
There is a twist at the end of all tales;
Maybe there is a bend that you don't see coming yet 
To yours. 
Coil up, simple man.
She won't uncoil for you. Or for the world outside
Her twisted mind. 

© Sudeshna Sanyal 2013 ~

The Sense of an Ending: My Misreading of a Beginning

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.”

 ― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

Julian Barnes

No, don't believe him, that man pictured above. Despite Barnes’ claim above, his Booker winning book, The Sense of an Ending does not explain things at all. In fact Barnes demolishes the role of an omniscient narrator and any attempt to explain life or make any sense of the world – past or present. An utterly hopeless and forgetful storyteller, Tony Webster, the narrator of the book can only underpin the philosophical impossibility of knowing anything for sure.

And there is no “because” offered in the string of events remembered by him or rediscovered through memories of other characters in the story. Well, you could say, that was another clever technique where the reader is left with her freedom of choice, on an open ended narrative – with more than one possible interpretation - or ending. But that would not qualify The Sense of an Ending in the genre that it has won the Man Booker for, would it? Open ended denouement is the forte of short stories, and that just increases the problematic of my reading.


An Unexplained Literary Excess 

I had not intended to write a book review per se. No one had commissioned me to write one, so I wasn't even going to get paid for it. I did not fool myself with the false notion of possessing a critical insight - not anymore. I was a corporate communication specialist. I was paid every month to clip my wings of poesy to court the jargon jester of a technology and consulting paradise. I wasn't engaging in an academic pitch armed with post-modern theories to make a clever dash at deconstructing the narrative. I was an ordinary reader; not an authority on fiction or meta-fiction by any stretch of anyone's imagination. My assessment was bound to be naive, not to mention ungainly, like a precocious toddler attempting to catwalk in high heels.

I didn't want to share my reading of a book with anyone who hadn't read it. Nor did I want to write it for the reader who had. I believe each reading is unique, different from the other. So what good would my review be to anyone? Who would read it? And more importantly, why would anyone? So what was the whole point in my literary exercise or excess? Excess, as if reading the book twice wasn't enough. I had to intensify my involvement by getting myself drawn into a conversation with myself. I assure you, I had reasons.

I am unabashedly a closet writer, and in an open relationship with Literature. "Open relationship" has its benefits. You can come and go as you like. So I am under no moral obligation not to cheat. And I cheat shamelessly - either with Mr Consulting Chatter or  Mr Jargon Jeopardy or Mr Techie Twit through my working week. Only my weekends are for Literature. Maybe the freedom he allows me makes me want to go back - again and again.

Many of the literature I have read, though canonical and celebrated all across the published literary world have seldom touched me personally. Reading Marlow, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Lawrence, and Joyce in university had taken me to new imaginative heights. But not one single of their books had anything to do with the world I inhabited. Very few of the British literature really spoke to us. For that matter, I do not still quite identify with Barnes’ English world. My intermittent sojourns in England have not been potent enough to diminish the glory of the ordinary daffodils to me, yet. While in school, I had imagined the weedy blossom to be an exotic orchid that made poets break forth into lyrical poetry – and I am sure I wasn't the only kid who painted bizarre pictures of red, blue and purple daffodils in the canvas of our third-world minds. Google Image Search had not yet arrived to curb our flights of fancy with real time photographic representations of the first-world flora and fauna.

In that sense, The Sense of an Ending was a rare treat that finally reflected my own narrative crisis. Though I hasten to add, I do not find the story extraordinary in any sense, no matter how striking the Oedipal twist in the end was. I wanted to hold on to and inspect a few emotions that stirred within me like dull dead roots after a spell of spring rain (Is it some beatific irony that I reread the book just at a time when a cold January was waning into an early spring?).

Well, there was another reason. I wasn't sure if I could call my reading of the novella (150 pages, just!) an edifying experience. There wasn't any moral message in the story about life or about storytelling, only the blatant immorality of the absence of any. There was an implicit instruction that memory was an unreliable tool to reconstruct the past. But haven’t we all read too much meta-history or meta-fiction already? Why was it that I could not take an objective view of the book at all like good critics did? Why was it getting personal the moment I wanted to rethink my reading of the book? The fact remained that I had so many conflicting and confused thoughts in me after I finished reading the book, that I thought only writing the bones down would make me feel more at ease and help un-clutter my mind.

Rewriting the Text of Our Lives

Historians, I am told, often write from the political vantage of power and history is what the winning side put down on paper as documented evidence. I have a history too, like everybody else – a personal history. Lately I have been thinking about my life a lot, questioning my worth as a thinking being. I have been revisiting my growing up years to find that maybe I had not done my best. Self doubt is not a good thing when it comes to self appraisal. And to realize that you never really know what happened, what you did, and if you went wrong or right in your past, makes you wobble on your feet a little. Do I see an autobiography coming, somewhere?

My desire to look at myself as a good person, I realized, has changed the way I have rebuilt my past. I wanted to look my memory in the eye. And see how my desire to see myself better had changed my gaze – my reclaiming of past – both real and imagined; fact and fiction. But for that I needed to tackle the issue at hand. The book, and my feelings about it.

The austerely erect cursor blinked at me from the perfect spotlessness of a new MS word document; I hadn't named it. Not just yet. The negotiation between my fingers, my head, and the unrelenting cursor was going to take some time. A re-reading could begin only if I could arrive at one neatly coherent thought. A thought that followed my overwhelmed first reading. There were too many - my first uncensored thought about the book – what, just another psychological novel? That giving way to a subsequent thought – wait, this sounds oddly familiar. And finally – oh boy, I wasn't prepared for this!

Constructing A Recap 

The plot recap for the book is kind of easy. It doesn't have much in terms of action. Very quickly, once again let me run through the plot, or the lack thereof. The Sense of an Ending is about closure. About an ending. No, not of a life well spent or anything as cliched as that. It is about the multiple senses or meanings that we make of imagined endings. You see, I couldn't keep my lecture to myself even when I am telling you the story of the story.

So here goes the story. A man in his 60s, Tony Webster is a lonesome divorce who narrates the story of his past, or the past as he has chosen to remember or forget. The novel is divided into two parts, called "One" and "Two".

Part One opens with a claim that the narrator, Tony will only return to “approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty” in his story. He used to be part of a sixth form four-member clique in a central London school in the 1960s along with Alex, Colin, and the precociously philosophical Adrian. It was as much a time of growing up into needless rebellion as for showing off some newly learned philosophical jargon.

Towards the end of their school days, a boy in their school, Robson of Science Sixth had commits suicide. and students around murmur that he had killed himself to escape the shame of getting a girl pregnant. The four friends discuss the philosophical difficulty of knowing exactly what happened.

While at Bristol University, Tony dates a girl Veronica, at whose Chislehurst family home, in Kent he spends an uncomfortable weekend. Their relationship terminates in bitterness - Tony congratulates himself that there is nothing to be guilty of, “No one had got pregnant, no one had got killed”. On a second reading, you  nod knowingly at the seemingly innocent irony played out in this statement.

In his final year at university Tony receives a letter from Adrian (who had gone to Cambridge, quite understandably, given his cerebral brilliance) that says he is dating Veronica. Tony replies rather unkindly to the letter. Some months later he is told that Adrian has committed suicide - with a suicide note that ascribes a philosophical duty to examine the nature of life, and then a right to end it - to all rational beings. Tony applauds Adrian's impeccable logic and envies his clarity of mind. Then there is a quick fast forward through the following uneventful forty years of his life - carefully spent - to the present tense, for the reader - that is me. And maybe you.

Part Two begins, with the arrival of a lawyer's letter to Tony informing him that Mrs Ford, Veronica's mother has bequeathed him £500 and a notebook from his dead friend Adrian. In the process of retrieving the legacy from a very reluctant and elusive Veronica, Tony rediscovers his unremembered past - or that part that had been hidden away from him. That past that he had safely and unknowingly taught himself to forget.  This leads Tony to re-evaluate the story he has narrated in Part One.

By the time you finish Part Two, you have arrived at an ending of your own, and that negates Part One as a flawed reordering of remembered events. Tony rereads his own letter to Adrian and realizes what a selfish moron he had been in his wish to curse his best friend for dating his ex-girlfriend Veronica. Remorse engulfs him. And a dogged pursuit of Adrian's diary and a group of care workers leads him on to facts that point to an affair between Adrian and Mrs. Ford that might have culminated into a handicapped son born to them. Tony gives up chasing his inheritance after realizing that he did not deserve to be left with Adrian’s diary. In the end, he has no way of knowing if Adrian had died of the same guilt that drove Robson to his death.

Of Memory and Desire

Now why did I choose to remember the first few lines of Eliot’s iconic poem, The Waste Land? It is because the symbolism of The Sense of an Ending resonates so much with that of the poem. Sex and death are two most important thematic principles that appear early in both the book and the poem - holding the narrations together. Phil Dixon’s English class has T.S. Eliot's focus on “Birth, Copulation and Death” – life was about just that. Curiously, both the novel and the poem draw heavily on memory and our way of looking at it. On sex, birth and death. And on mythology too - Eros and Thanatos (mentioned by Adrian); Sisyphus and Oedipus (my references). Fertility rites have gone awry in both the poem and the novella - one cursed with an arid land, a sterile king, while the other with an orphaned and abnormal progeny.

The novel is a confessional prose running along the stream of forgotten and remembered consciousness merging imperceptibly in the fabric of the plot. Tony is admittedly an undependable narrator, an erratic storyteller, who frequently mixes up memory and desire. The book beautifully brings out the contrast between what had really happened and what Tony actually remembers. And most importantly, the role of time, in the order of things remembered. Barnes throws the theme of his story right at your face in the very beginning:


“I remember, in no particular order: 
 – a shiny inner wrist; 
– steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it; 
– gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house; 
– a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams; 
– another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface; 
– bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door. 

This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”

Remembrance of things past. Always a challenge, though never really seemingly so, always a task nobody really understood well. Some pasts go missing, until some relic of memory crops up. Some pasts are seized, only to be lost again. And some are never found at all. Tony remembers his youth as he should. There is nothing remarkable in his past. He is an ordinary man with an ordinary past. Until Adrian’s diary surfaces – challenging the limits of his knowledge and remembrance. Tony’s memory of his weekend at Veronica’s house in Kent is fraught with the same uncertainty.

"I was so ill at ease that I spent the entire weekend constipated: this is my principal factual memory. The rest consists of impressions and half-memories which may therefore be self-serving.”

One wonders if the rest of it was all made up, to build up on a deliberately flawed perception of Veronica and her mother - only to be broken in the aftermath. Veronica’s mother is remembered marginally with a rejoinder at the time when Tony was leaving Chislehurst, driven in the family car, by the loud red-faced Mr. Ford, the father. “I like your mum”. A letter from the mum is also mentioned after Tony and Veronica had broken up and although Tony had wished he had kept it as a souvenir, he could now only search his memory for evidence:

“a dashing woman who broke an egg, cooked me another, and told me not to take any shit from her daughter.”

Even the way Tony remembers the beginning of the end of their relationship smacks of manipulative remembering.

"In my mind this was the beginning of the end of our relationship. Or have I just remembered it this way to make it seem so, and to apportion blame?”

We want our history to be kind and lenient to us despite all the wrongs we have done. Either we condone our crimes by deliberate silences, or we recreate it by telling ourselves lies. Writers with caliber do not like to use coincidences in their plots, since readers like me, want to see everything happening for a reason in literature. I am still looking for a reason behind Adrian's death, of what happened to Mrs. and Mr. Ford, of how Veronica had lived her life.


Lest we forget…RIP, Robson, Adrian and HISTORY!

Despite a lack of sentimental nostalgia for his schooldays Tony must begin at the beginning. He begins with his school as a backdrop for a threesome clique that comprised of Alex, Colin and Tony himself. Adrian Finn, the tall shy new guy who had a philosophical answer to every question, was a late entry to their school and eventually to their clique.

Interestingly enough, the first class that Tony finds worth remembering Adrian from is a history class with Old Joe Hunt teaching the reign of Henry VIII. When asked about his thoughts on the period under review, the precocious Adrian sums it up as a time when “something happened”, much like he would sum up all historical periods. This sets the tone for the rest of the theme – history as “something happening” – that “something” open to interpretation, to forgetting and reclaiming – as one desired.

Later in another history class Adrian refuses to ascribe the blame of World War I to any single individual or event, no matter how significantly they have gone down in history. He said:

“That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”

Repeatedly Barnes puts down history or time as something of a mutable dimension, frequently changed by dominant emotions. Even the mark of their bond – the wearing of their watches on the inside of their wrist – makes time a personal thing – fraught with shared emotions.

There is talk of great literature in the narration. And how life became worthy only if it imitated great literature. By that standard, Tony, Alex and Colin’s life had looked rather mundane. Only Adrian's life looked like what novels were made of – coming of a broken home. “Maybe your mum has a young lover?” Adrian was asked. Again a premonition of what is to follow in Adrian’s subsequent shape as a “young lover” for an older mother we meet later in the course of narration. We never know what happens for sure.

The utter unknowability of motives behind actions is stressed time and again. In their final history lesson, Adrian quotes a fictitious French historian Patrick Lagrange:

"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."

Is it not fitting to quote a non-existent imaginary historian for a quote that describes the inaccuracy of memory in constructing any reliable platforms of history? Tony, the narrator is not without self doubts:

“Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.”

The Sense of an Ending sets out to explore the gaps between these memories and the narratives. How clever to create such a passage from a seemingly celebrated historian that exposes the imperfection of memory and the inadequacy of documenting it – and the illusory certainty of all of it? Even the history master in class, Old Joe Hunt had not questioned the veracity of the quote or the historian in question. And with an unreliable narrator in Tony, we don’t know if Barnes intended the invention to be attributed to the faulty storyteller whose memory doesn't serve him right, or is it intended as Adrian’s fabrication to fool Hunt. Does Tony remember correctly? Did Adrian really make such a quote? Or is Tony making it all up? Is it Barnes’s cryptic commentary on the contexuality of novel as an impossible source of all reliable knowledge? And his dismissal of history as a source of known truths?

Barnes’s clever deconstructive narrative technique exposes the lies we tell ourselves, that end up walking around as truths, highlights the repetitions that reinforce inaccurate memories as reality, and how we all write our own histories by telling ourselves stories that are either false or half-truths. Eventually we succeed in grooming ourselves as failed historians – having re-read our own lives in deliberate selections of what we want to remember and how. Selective historicity.

The novel, therefore, mirrors an imperfect reading, not to mention an imperfect writing of itself – of its kind. This explains my confusion with the impact of my own reading of it. This explains why I turned to writing this out to make a semblance of sense. And why I thought writing this would help me understand the novel better. After all it is on the individual reader to agree or disagree with what the book engages us in – the eternal dilemma between personal memory and its inevitable loss.

Ironed Out Beginnings! 

The masterstroke of a bit of a dramatic irony is played out early in the story – though we are only aware of it on a second reading, when we have already read the story once. Suicide happens twice. Or rather is made to happen. Suicide is about agency, about controlling one’s destiny. About the exercise of free will in deciding when and how to end one’s own life. So it doesn't happen as chance or accident . It is made to happen. Always. And therein it differs from death that happens to people.

It took an apparently fleeting center stage when Robson of Science Sixth ended his own life, after making his girlfriend pregnant. Later the topic of discussions shifted around ordinary and slip knots and an analysis of which one brought a faster release from life. There was also considerable interest in the character of the impregnated girl – a tarty shop assistant or an older woman? Barnes’ humor is never seemingly obvious. Robson’s suicide had a mathematical analysis to Tony's clique – he was maintaining the numerical constant in the world’s population – you added a life in an unmarried womb, you took away a life, even if it was your own. The nondescript Robson had acquired an exceptional status in their eyes – having found a girlfriend to have sex with, at a time, when their collective life was more or less girl-less and hinged on finding admission into a respectable university. Again to the clique, Robson’s “Sorry, Mum” had fallen far short of a suicide note, seemingly unfair as they thought they had deserved an elaborate disclosure. The absence of the prime actor in the drama of suicide, be it Robson or Adrian, now dead, only stresses the philosophical impossibility of knowing what happened without their living testimony.

Ironically, it is Adrian who had redefined suicide for his clique at school as the only philosophical question, after his intellectual guru Camus. And then had killed himself while he is in college. The book doesn't narrate the incident, nor is there any visual description to describe the scene of the suicide other than Tony's imagined scene of Adrian's bathwater gone cold. No reason for Adrian's suicide is offered, other than his suicide note that emphasized the role of the owner's right in ending one's own life. It is left for the reader to make conjectures. And to me, Robson seems to be an ominous precursor – a prophetic, pathetic prequel to Adrian’s death.

Referring to Robson’s suicide in his final history class, Adrian had challenged the master Hunt into a duel of historiography. Adrian had told the class that with Robson not present among them, nor leaving them any documented evidence, no one could ever vouch for what really triggered his end.

“Did Robson have any other motives or reasons beyond the obvious ones? What was his state of mind? Can we be sure the child was his?...You see the problem, Sir?...nothing can make up for the absence of Robson’s testimony, sir ” 

This is a same telling set of questions that would echo in the reader’s mind when the answers go missing years later, in Adrian’s suicide.

The novel ends with Veronica apparently burning Adrian’s diary thereby killing any possibility on Tony’s part (and in turn mine) to find out what really happened to Adrian. To Veronica and to Mrs. Ford. The burned diary amounts to loss – of memory, of evidence, of history. But then our narrator has retreated again into his self doubting paranoia. So I, as a reader have no way of being sure, who is playing with my senses: Barnes, Tony or Adrian? Or me myself enmeshed in a heteroglossia of voices that continue to haunt my readings? Maybe this then is the beginning of my misreading.

And a tiny voice keeps echoing inside the room of my head with what Paula Gunn Allen had said, though in a feminist context: "The root of oppression is loss of memory."

[All images are courtesy Google Image Search - yes, they have killed my ridiculous imaginings but what the heck, also helped me with some visual relief!]