When a conversation ceases, after a period of nearly ten months, on the discovery that the ship (or more modestly, perhaps a skiff ?) lovingly hand built, was in real time rotten - no make that riddled - with gaping lies and deceptions, and thus was slowly sinking among the drifting ice of words of useless justifications, and even more words of usless accusations, what is a bruised Robinson, who somehow managed to swim back to the island, left with?

A clutch of drafty poems, some twenty odd in number, which sing mostly of love that was real, for a woman who was not.

Robinson first thinks of using these as tinder for the first fire he lights on the island's shore, to keep warm, and to stare into for the forms of people whom he could talk to but cannot - his reticence to speak is an old habit. But one doesn't destroy one's own offspring. But one can keep one's own offspring as reserves, as offerings for the cannibals, i.e., silences who will soon return, smelling easy prey.

Earlier this week 'world renowned' (how does one measure renown, Maestro?) 'Peruvian' (now only by origin for he is Spanish by citizenship) novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was in town to deliver the Richard A. Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, in a dual purpose church down the street. Obviously, I went to hear what the Man had to say on the topics of 'Cervantes and Don Quixote' and Borges on two consecutive nights. I missed the third lecture on Ortega y Gasset because I was at a worksite, and also perhaps because I had never heard of him before.

I have in front of me a set of notes I took from the two lectures, and they are simply unreadable. The axiom 'thou shall not be able to pay attention to what is being said (or read in this case) and take legible notes at once' seemed to have held up. But for the sake of my kind readers (and 'peeps'), I engaged in heroic jujitsu, or more appropriately 'tilted at the windmills', to revel and reconstruct the following set of cryptic notes from Lecture Uno, 'Cervantes and Don Quixote'. Also don't ask where Senor Llosa ends, and where I begin in the following!

The torments of Cervantes, his dispossession, his prison spells, his long litany of debts, his inability to write verse, which in his era was the preferred mode of literary manifestation, and so ends us writing prose, which is close to the masses.

Don Quixote (DQ) as a fiction of fiction, and also as a literary criticism of then popular genre of novels of chivalry. DQ as a dream, as a way of escape from the heaviness of life, from the primitive cares, as a transformation of reality into fantasy, a breakdown of rational leading to foolish adventures into false reality and fantasy.

A short riff on the origins of novel as a transition from the perishable tradition of oral stories and ballads into a medium that is capable of creating alternative realities, as well the desire to escape from the real.

Balzac’s comment on how reading engenders ‘a private history of nations’

Initial definition of Pancho: someone whose matter suffocates the spirit

DQ is the original fanatic as he doesn’t have doubts about anything he believes to be true, and doesn’t believe he can ever make a mistake; this even when he ‘liberates’ those dangerous criminals from prison, or when he attacks goats and pilgrims as evils. [Does this mean Le Chosen One des Etats-Unis is just another DQ of our current crazy times?]

Other ominous signs in DQ: doesn’t have any sense of humor and is intolerant of criticism. In this DQ as a fore runner of the revolutionary Jacobeans of the French Republic with their elegant reason and rationality, the Aryan Nazis with their utopia devoid of all untermenschs, the Gulag commissars with their glorious revolution of the working class etc. [Should we add to this list the Glorious Heterosexual Christian Soldiers of these United States, who wait for the Rapture (Sweet Jesus! Come save us Lordy!) as they spread ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, at the end of smart missiles and cluster bombs?]

Pancho as the rough, the illiterate, the materialist, the ‘respector’ of social rules and customs who draws wisdom and sustenance against calamities caused by his master from popular and religious sayings, the ideal citizen, and as the doppelganger of DQ. And thus acting as an anchor, and preventing the novel from disintegrating and floating away into irredeemable fantasy. But this also sets the stage for a role reversal of sorts in the latter part of the novel, when Pancho and other observers of DQ encourage him to behave with his earlier outrageousness, and perhaps showing their other humanity by display the hungers for the unreal. This also as a symptom of how DQ’s contagious passion for living out fiction, which is to say to live many lives simultaneously, slowly spreads throughout the novel, to infect others, so much so that it is as if DQ has expanded to permeate all life!

DQ as a fictional character or a specter, who channels the human condition for fiction, to give up life and blood for the airy perch of a tale

Questions: Was it fiction that was the cause of DQ’s troubles, and nearly constant unhappiness? Also, politically, does the creation of DQ explain the ‘magic realism’ of Latin America? Also doesn’t behind the comedy of DQ and Pancho lay the larger personal law of freedom?

.....

Moving on to Lecture Dos, on Borges, before I was about to transcribe my chicken scrawl, I decided to look at what Senor Llosa had previously said/wrote about Borges in his book A Writer's Reality (a book which I had avidly read two years ago, with a pen in hand). And to my complete surprise, I discovered that the remarks Senor L had delivered on Borges two nights ago were identical to a I with the sentences (which were initially delivered as lectures at Syracuse University in 1989) I found in front of me on the printed pages of this book, complete with my crazy night time marginalia!

Anyway kind readers, this saved me the trouble of transcribing my jerky chicken scrawl for your edification. So if you want to know what Senor Llosa had to say (and say again a few nights ago, this time after excising those stray references to Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda, for Senor Llosa is a recovered Leftie, who had seen the light, as formulated by that darling of gringo right wing supplysiders’, Milton Friedman!), please read Chapter 1 of ‘A Writer’s Reality’.

And finally this is what Borges cooked up on Quixote in "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote". Also the Spanish original for those kind readers who can lea y entienda a Español! Gracias.

That being the Greek root of the word we all encounter when thoughts turn, nostalgically, towards the past, or alternatively, the vision looks homeward, even if 'home' never did have much of a physical existence, i.e., perhaps it was only a state of mind to which my mind yearned to return this evening.

So on encountering a post by Anand about taking a visitor to a graveyard in Delhi, where the graves date from the Raj era, my thoughts automatically turned to a similar graveyard that was situated behind my elementary school that I attended some twenty odd years ago. I had, in moments of boyhood bravado (bravado because graveyards, especially in the Hindu ecosystem, are considered very inauspicious places to visit much less spend time in), entered it to play in the cool shadows of the banyan trees, which had had nearly some hundred odd years to turn it into a hushed hall.

There were the usual graves of ‘firangis’ dead in a foreign land, dreaming perhaps of the Scottish highlands or Wordsworth-ian daffodils. More exact recollections of the dates on those gravestones are dim, for while I was aware at that point that some of those graves dated in the prior century, I didn’t have the critical machinery in place to pluck and weave such information into the weave of understanding of the place where I stood. But then this was one of the many perceptional cues that were missed, only perhaps not totally.

Thus began a very long Google adventure to unearth images from that geography, which soon ended in a pixel investigation of the memory’s alleys. While I was unsucessful in discovering any images of this graveyard (it is hard to discover images when one doesn't even know the specific name of a certain locale; 'British graveyard behind school' doesn't help!), here are a few other images that were found on this investigation:

[Exhibit A]

Click here for a larger image

Another view

Here you see the dargah (mosque) that stood on a hill about two miles away from the school. This was where I went to play hooky on those much anticipated final school exam afternoons. There was a small Hanuman shrine in a cave lower down on the slope that you see in this photo. As Arun Kolatkar in his book 'Jejuri' wrote in a poem titled, 'A Scratch'

what is god and what is stone the dividing line if it exists is very thin at jejuri and every other stone is god or his cousin

there is no crop other than god and god is harvested here
around the year and around the clock
out of the bad earth and the hard rock

that giant hunk of rock the size of a bedroom
is khandoba's wife turned to stone
the crack that runs right across is the scar
from his broadsword he struck her down with once
in a fit of rage

scratch a rock
and a legend springs

Also the railway station that you see in this photo is called Cavalary Barracks and still stands. However the Great Indian Railways, with minor exceptions, have phased out those nice steam engines (whose tonalities I, far removed in time, attempt to mimic to amuse others). Also a certain image from that time now comes to mind: a green field in the monsoons, a rock as a cricket wicket, schoolboys noisly playing a quick game of cricket, I am sitting higher up on a hillock, and watching a steam engine chug by at a distant level crossing. This image, by the way, has also been frozen in words variously by R.K.Narayan in his novels (for example in 'Swami and Friends', Swami watches the train in the distance rather than pay attention to one of his dictatorial school masters), and in celluloid by Satyajit Ray in 'Pather Panchali'

[Exhibit B]

A long article on Hyderbad's street names.

For the history buffs and readers with ample time to kill, a Project Guntenberg text titled "RAMBLES AND RECOLLECTIONS OF AN INDIAN OFFICIAL"

[Exhibit C]

from the fascinating geography site Great Mirror

A view of the bangle market (Chuudi Bazaar) where I was waylid by my co-spawn for my excellent bargaining skillz. First lesson, learn to say 'nakko'.

This was what the country side around the 'edge colony' (edge because it was on the edge of the city; thank god for such small luck of draws!) where I grew up looked like in the rainy season.

For other South Indian village pictures, including the ones above, click here and here. And here for a view of rural Indian markets, which can perhaps be found in this well preserved state even today.

To be continued same time, same place, next weekend. However before that here is a photo of a street sign in Hyderabad (Yes, we are like this only!):

The above photo comes from Rangachari Anand's fascinating album of street signs!