Herald
Dear friend,
More than one journalist of late has written about the resonant image in Nirala’s memoir: of the poet seeing the Ganga, “swollen with bodies” as he passes the river on his way to his wife’s home, where she lies dying. Having immodestly read the memoir in its entirety, a different sentence sticks in my mind. He writes: “The custom was to abandon one’s house during the plague and encamp in orchards.” It is from the day he brings his wife home for the first time. Years later, the flu kills her, and so many others, that Nirala can only say, laconically: “My family was wiped out in the blink of an eye.” He doesn’t say much more than this. It is a memoir of comic abruptness; his English translator Satti Khanna has a good afterword in A Life Misspent about this feature of his writing. I find myself thinking a lot about the orchards these days.
I have nothing to self-promote, but so many friends and favourites have been updating their newsletters I thought some of you might want to read one of mine too. To psychoanalyse my reading habits, about ten days ago I impulse-bought Daniel Mendelsohn’s translations of Cavafy, the poet who, I think, really gave me my first grown-up sense of what it meant to fantasise about being away, or elsewhere. It’s been an enjoyable re-union. At the risk of being too on the nose in these times, here is one poem:
Nero’s Deadline
Nero wasn’t worried when he heard
the prophecy of the Delphic Oracle.
“Let him beware the age of seventy-three.”
He still had time to enjoy himself.
He is thirty years old. It’s quite sufficient,
this deadline that the god is giving him,
for him to think about dangers yet to come.
Now to Rome he’ll be returning a little wearied,
but exquisitely wearied by this trip
Which had been endless days of diversion––
in the theatres, in the gardens, the gymnasia…
Evenings of the cities of Achaea…
Ah, the pleasure of naked bodies above all…
So Nero. And in Spain, Galba
was secretly assembling his army and preparing it:
the old man, seventy-three years old.
It was published in 1918.
Inevitably, Netflix: my friends and I have used the past week of social distancing to finally power through Crash Landing On You, the fantastic new melodrama about two Koreans from either side of the border falling in love. If you, like me, grew up as the last generation of Indians to be fans of Hindi movies made by Partition refugees, I recommend it.
In my weekly books column for Mumbai Mirror I’ve been writing about Nirala and pandemics, but also about S Hareesh, Supriya Gandhi, Akhil Katyal and others. You can read the columns here.
The Lit Pickers is still airing; thanks to everyone who’s listened and said they’ve enjoyed it. We even made it to #1 on Apple Podcasts’ Indian charts one week. We hope to record a season finale along the lines of an AMA, so if you have any questions or requests related to books and reading, please write in. Or if you have an isolation recommendation, of course. And if you don’t already subscribe to my co-host Deepanjana’s newsletter Dear Reader, here it is.
I’ll write again next month.
Supriya