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.

At the beginning of my sophomore year at Kharagpur, when I discovered poetry, or more precisely, when I was inflamed with what can be done with the English language, after reading Vikram Seth’s “The Golden Gate”, I took to spending quite a bit of time in the literature section of the humongous Central Library (a rare blessing in book starved India). This section, in an eloquent reflection on its usage, was banished to a dark attic like space within the library. In order to reach it, one climbed up three floors in a stairwell, which was quite often in the dark because no one could be bothered to replace fused light bulbs.

As for those fellow eccentrics, who could be occasionally found flitting about in those musty racks (Prof. Ramu of Mechanical Engineering is the most memorable of these people; he was then systematically chewing through the Harvard Classics’ Five Foot Shelf of Books), I suppose we evolved suitable responses in the low light conditions and daytime darkness in those rack in order to navigate the Dantesque steel-riveted stairs without breaking our necks. I had to put up with gaalis of my more normal friends, who had to occasionally came up there hunting for me in order to take me out carousing. I also must mention the few couples – a minor miracle in that sexless place with a 99:1 male female sex ratio - who sometimes came up there to get away from it all, i.e., to makeout, only to be startled by wild ghosts like me. I, however, always assisted Cupid by immediately moving my literary assignations elsewhere.

...

It was in those laybrinthine hours in which I read, unsystematically, quite a bit of poetry ranging from Shakespeare from that Five Foot Self to the more obscure poets in selnder volumes put out by Prof. Lal’s Calcutta based Writer’s Workshop. And like a paper chewing goat, with a mouth given to Brownian motion, I finally ended up reading a yellowing edition of “The Oxford Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets”. It was in this book that I first encountered the two poets who have stayed with me every since.

The first poet is Kamala Das, with her stringent and strangely wonderful feminist poems. For a long time afterwards, I have chanted these two lines from her poem “An Introduction”:

“I speak three languages, write in Two, dream in one. … I too call myself I.”

for they seem to summarize my attempts at negotiating and bridging rifts between language and identity.

The second poet was Arun Kolatkar, and the anthology had a selection of poems from his singular “Jejuri”. As it has been often described “Jejuri” on the surface is a very fine sequence of poems on the topic of a wry urbane intellectual’s pilgrimage into the religious country. But like good poetry, it is also more than that – it is a meditation on the clash of clocks, modernity's with the timeless's; on how “irrational” faith can still pervade a “rational” human being's thought; on how gods, those that will be worshipped and those who will remaind obscure, are born and die. And among all these “Jejuri” poems, I have returned to the poem “A Scratch” quite often, with its fantastic final two lines - “scratch a rock /and a legend springs” – these succinctly sums up many phenomena including some our attempts attempts at reconstructing of memory.

Recently it has come to my attention that the New York Review of Books has reissued Kolatkar’s “Jejuri” (previously they had revived Upamanyu Chatterjee's "English, August" for us), recently for those of us who have been unable to lay our hands on this book for a while. I am going to get it, and I think everyone else who reads poetry, or even otherwise, should do the same.

A Turkish novelist Elif Shafak on languages within herself:

"It was a choice motivated more by her passion for language, by the search for new modes of expression. "There are certain things I'd rather write in English, certain others I'd rather write in Turkish," she explains. "English, to me, is a more mathematical language, it is the language of precision. It embodies an amazing vocabulary and if you are looking for the 'precise word', it is right out there. Turkish, to me, is more sentimental, more emotional." English seems more suited for philosophy, analytical writing or humour, "but if I am writing on sorrow I'd rather use Turkish."

This also points to the idea of contamination or spillage, to use a Rushdie's turn of a phrase, with one language spilling into another, contaminating it. And also why doing translations from Urdu etc are useful in forging a kind of hybrid sensibility, similar to that of Agha Shahid Ali's "Ghazalesque"

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt's metaphors for the human condition

So here we are: not charioteers in charge of wild horses, but a self-reflexive rider sitting atop a large and lumbering automatic elephant that has plenty of its own ideas on how to do things. What has this got to do with happiness?

The answer to that is at the crux of this marvellous book. Haidt's key insight is that emotion is just the expression of the mechanisms by which rider and elephant interact. Happy people are the ones in whom the interaction is smooth, in whom the gears mesh, in whom the different levels add up to a more or less coherent whole. Unhappiness occurs when rider and elephant have major differences about how to do things, a fairly common situation since, while the rider tends to be more interested in happiness, the elephant is bent on achieving prestige and the possibilities for gene dissemination and survival that it brings.

In my case, the rider must be saying "Thou shalt think, create, and write", and the elephant perhaps is saying, "Enough of this monkishness. Let's get us some babes already yaar - we have gene dissemination to think of!" Or as Woody Allen put it more succinctly, in "Love & Death",

"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness."

From John Updike's latest novel, "The Terrorist",

Shaikh Rashid recites with great beauty of pronunciation the one hundred fourth sura, concerning Hutama, the Crushing Fire:

And who shall teach thee what the Crushing Fire is? It is God's kindled fire, Which shall mount above the hearts of the damned; It shall verily rise over them like a vault, On outstretched columns.

This is line that I have to, have to, use as a refrain somewhere: "Who shall teach thee what the Crushing Fire is?" This could be a line straight out of that an old Anglo Saxon epic.

Binyavanga Wainaina on "How to write about Africa" says

"Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans."

Substitute spices, curry, mangoes etc for desi writing, and you are on your way.