This re-imagining of "Madame Bovary"'s ending by Julian Barnes proved to be a comfort because of the opening preface:

"A hundred and fifty years ago tomorrow, on October 1 1856, the first episode of Madame Bovary appeared in the Revue de Paris. The serialisation was a benign act of nepotism by one of the magazine's editors, Maxime Du Camp, towards an old friend of his from student days, Gustave Flaubert. This debut came at the late age of 35: Flaubert had put himself through a long and silent apprenticeship, working out his youthful romanticism, discovering a harder and more objective way of writing, and discarding - or at least, refusing to publish - almost everything he wrote. When his collected juvenilia finally appeared in 2001 (Oeuvres de Jeunesse, Pléiade edition), they were seen to take up almost as many pages as the subsequent novels of his maturity. Flaubert had always been wary of publication, and said that when it came to finally displaying himself, he would only do so "in full armour".

But there is always an entry-point for an unexpected knife: the first episode of Madame Bovary appeared with the author's name misspelt as "Faubert"."

Why you ask? Two reasons.

First, as I was ruminating in a conversation last night, in 1.5 years I will hit (the sell by date) 30 sans any literary fame (or for that matter any other kind of fame), which is what one of the "selves" claims to desire. So Flaubert's life provides me a convinient cover to delude myself with literary pretensions until I am 35. And if nothing happens even by then, I have Whitman lined up to provide further cover until I hit 39. Thus, even if I don't do a whit of writing till then, I will invoke Flaubert and fib by saying that I shall appear "in full armour" only. Second, that mis-spelling - "Faubert" - is comforting because it has already happened to me.

Wayang Kulit* – the Javanese shadow puppet show from last night in which Bihma discusses the autumn weather, quips that he should get tenure for he has a PhD in eating, cooking and wrestling; in which graceful Arjuna - whose latter despair on the eve of the Great War is so familiar from repeated listening of the Bhagavad Gita chanted in Sanskrit - kills an ogre-demon in the kingdom of Virata with Pashupati - the snake-headed missile supplied by Lord Shiva (arms dealing like whoring, I suppose, is an ancient profession).

Half the people around you** didn't seem to get much of the drama; they kept dribbling away in ones and twos. But maybe it was because many of them were family units, and the kids were getting sleepy and antsy. In the gaps in the puppet master’s narrative, as the gamelan tinkled and clanged, you made funny faces at a little girl clutching a big floppy toy; she giggled and attempted to hide behind her mother as if we were playing “I spy”, which, come to think of it now, we are all the time, shadow puppets crossing and uncrossing, playing ‘I spy”.

Revisiting those Great Stories was like revisiting old grandfatherly houses with shutters drawn down, summer heat lolling outside, the cool of lime plaster against your cheek as you drowsily page an Amar Chitra Katha that you had already devoured on the way home from the lending library. Perhaps this also has to do with reading longer versions of these stories in the English retelling by C. Rajagopalachari?***

This note follows from an abandoned attempt to shoe some of the hazy thoughts lurking under these experiences from last night into a “Luc Bat” - a Vietnamese poetry form with alternating lines of 6 and 8 syllables, which on ending touches its nose with its feet.

*Wayang Kulit is an interesting case of early (Attn: Mr. Thomas Friedman, the world was always “flat”) cultural exchange: one or the other South Indian variant of “Tholu Bommalata” (in Telugu) jumped across the Bay of Bengal, and morphed into this even more intricate Javanese version. Also, given that Tholu Bommalata is a dying art form in urbanizing India, it makes me happy to read that Wayang Lait is still flourishing in Indonesia and Malaysia.