The Fundamental Book - Gabriel García Márquez
That afternoon he returned dejected to his office and consulted the dictionary with childish attention. Then he and I learned for the rest of our lives the difference between a dromedary and a camel. In the end he placed the glorious tome in my lap and said: “This book not only knows everything, but it’s also the only one that’s never wrong.”
It was a huge illustrated book, on its spine a colossal Atlas holding the vault of the universe on his shoulders. I did not know how to read or write, but I could imagine how correct the colonel was if the book had almost two thousand large, crowded pages with beautiful drawings. In church I had been surprised by the size of the missal, but the dictionary was thicker. It was like looking out at the entire world for the first time.
“How many words does it have?” I asked. “All of them,” said my grandfather.
The truth is that I did not need the written word at this time because I expressed everything that made an impression on me in drawings. At the age of four I had drawn a magician who cut off his wife’s head and put it back on again, just as Richardine had done in his act at the Olympia. The graphic sequence began with the decapitation by handsaw, continued with the triumphant display of the bleeding head, and ended with the wife, her head restored, thanking the audience for its applause. Comic strips had already been invented but I only saw them later in the color supplement to the Sunday papers. Then I began to invent graphic stories without dialogue. But when my grandfather gave me the dictionary, it roused so much curiosity in me about words that I read it as if it were a novel, in alphabetical order, with little understanding. That was my first contact with what would be the fundamental book in my destiny as a writer.
- from "Living To Tell The Tale"
Note: Don't all writers - by that I refer to those that take up upon themselves that sisyphean task of transmuting the ephemera of their minds into the more solid etchings on paper - at some point fall under a dictionary as under an avalanche, and surface holding fistfuls of words?
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Naina Thagh Lenge - Gulzar
Don’t believe the eyes
Don’t listen to what the eyes hear
Eyes just deceive you friend.
Wide awake they concoct black magic,
And when closed, they make your sleep barren.
They don't distinguish between good and bad, Or what is without and within. To strike out at will is their habit, And their poison is endlessly intoxicating. They sow rainbows in the clouds, And by dusk they bring in the rain.
And at night, they will walk you to heaven They will show you dreams of monsoons And lush greenery everywhere. No trust is left in the talk of these eyes, No receipt is issued for what they whisper All their words are made of air. Without rain spring, And spring without rain, Are just few illusions of these eyes.
Don’t believe the eyes. Don’t listen to what the eyes hear.
Translated from Hindustani
Note: I think I am in love with this song from "Omkaara" - it has something to do with the combination of Rahat Fateh Ali Khan's madcap wail-singing and Gulzar's rustic lyricism. And for some reason I think this song sonically echoes "Dil Se" in "Dil Se". What you say?
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The Case Of A Fake Hindu Miner
I received an email from K, who had been mucking around Buoyantville's archives, which asked me what was happening with the madcap novel I had outlined to write; some fragments of which can be found strewn here and there. Now I had put all that business in abeyance, unsure if I have skills and cunning I would require to pull it off, and also because I had (and have) doubts as to if the stuff I want to talk about is of interest to anyone at all. But K's email made me go back to the some of the source material I had scavenged online to provide historical scaffolding that would support my tales.
One of these historical sources is the California As I Saw It" section of the extensive American Memory project set up by The Library of Congress. This section, as its subtitle "First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900 " indicates, has various fascinating narratives on living and dying in what are essentially the Gold Rush years in California. And among all these narratives, a simple textual search brings up only one in which a desi, or a Hindu appears; that of Friedrich Gerstäcker's "Scenes of life in California".
As the Foreword to this book puts it, Herr. Gerstäcker was some kind of a German Bruce Chatwin of the 19th century. For example it says: "In 1849 Gerstäcker undertook a new voyage with the double purpose of collecting information for the use of emigrants and for new material for his books. This time financial troubles were greatly lessened for he was subsidized by the “Reichsmenesterium zu Frankfurt.” He went to Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, and to California, returning to Germany in 1852 by way of the Sandwich and Society Islands, Australia and the Dutch Indies. His accounts of these new travels appeared in Ausland and in another journal published at Augsburg. Later they were collected into book form, some of which were translated into English. In 1860 he visited the German colonies in South American in the interests of further immigration. His last visit to North America was in 1867 and 1868 in which again he went to South America." In this California book, Gerstäcker chronicled his experiences as a miner, and later as a merchandiser with other Germans in the middle of the California Gold Rush.
In two chapters titled "The Hindu" and "The Chase of The Indians", Gerstäcker records incidents triggered by the appearance of a Hindu, who makes the claim of having being robbed by the Indians of nineteen thousand dollars worth of gold dust. This triggers the greed of the whites in the mining camps, and they set off to retrieve this gold for themselves. In this process, they shoot an Indian as well as burn down their camp. Only later do they realize that the Hindu was a liar, and bring him to the rough frontier court. To further discover how the Hindu’s claims are unraveled, and how justice worked in the Wild Wild West, go take a look at these two fascinating narratives.
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