Drive by Chennai: 1

 

Quirky!!

Published!

 

In the Fall of 2023, I had the fortune to participate in Kolaj Institute’s Folklore Collage Virtual Residency. There were other residencies on the same theme and the work created by the artists resulted in a new journal called Folklore Collage Society. I had the honor of having my art chosen to be the cover for volume1 of the journal (see above) All artists were asked to create accompanying text with the artwork and I was thrilled that my 1000 word article included in its entirety (see the video below).

Thanks Kolaj Institute!

Belinda Bauer:The Impossible Thing Review

I chose Belinda Bauer’s The Impossible Thing to read for ReadingWales’26 March event by BookerTalk. To take part in this event, we need to read a book from any genre written by an author from Wales. Belinda Bauer presently lives in Wales, where before turning to fiction writing, she was a court reporter at Cardiff and several of her books are set in Wales. She is an acclaimed award winning author. This was my first book by her. I picked up the book because it has a compelling story—beautifully written with engaging good guys, perfectly woven storylines with an evocative sense of place. It bills itself a crime novel—it is that but it is also a story of moral awakening of a young woman. It is also a tale of one stubborn determined bird. 

The story is set in dual timelines—The first part is set in the twenty years between the two world wars in northern Yorkshire by the rock cliffs over the coast of North Sea. The second part takes place in present-day rural Wales. There are two protagonists in each section— a girl and a bird in one; two 20something men in the other. The thread that connects the two parts is theft of bird eggs and their trafficking (legal and illegal) to traders and collectors. The narrative switches back and forth between the two timelines. 

The cracks on the cliffs of Yorkshire, where the story starts, are nesting grounds for millions of seabirds—“Gulls and fulmars and guillemots and puffins and gannets and kittiwakes and razorbills…every one of them drawn back every summer to the same face, the same place, the same tiny ledge, where it would lay its eggs and raise its chicks”. For the “climmers”, going down on the rope along the cliff face, four or five times a day, collecting 40 to 50 eggs per day, from March to July and selling them to traders and brokers gathered on the cliff top was lucrative, more lucrative than laboring on the farm. There was money to be made on each and every egg but colorful large eggs fetched the highest price. Stealing eggs from the nests and selling them for highest bidder was legal then and there was no moral qualms about either. Many farms along the cliff top lived well on stolen eggs but not the Sheppards of Metland farm. Their farm, unfortunately ended on an overhang which made it impossible to rope down the cliff wall and pluck eggs from under the birds. But the overhang had a crack through which a very tiny body could pass.  

While rest of the family toiled on the farm, Celie Sheppard, a six year old with a body so small that a wind could actually blow her away, takes the desperate risk to rope down through the crack in the overhang to steal some eggs because she wanted to eat omelettes.

“She could see hundreds of birds pressed against the cliff-face. And, as they shifted about, glimpses of eggs of every size and colour that she could imagine. They had chickens in the yard, of course, but they laid dull little brown eggs, and never enough to eat, only for selling. These eggs were two or three times that size, and speckled and spotted and splattered with brown and black on backgrounds that ranged from cream, through blue to green. Celie had never had a toy, but the thought of holding such eggs in her little hands made her nearly smile, with a feeling that was beyond hunger”.

When she ‘climmed’ the first time and got her first egg “ even though she had no way of knowing that night—wouldn’t understand for a good while—that was the egg that would change her life”. It was a guillemot egg—“ red in color, a deep, tapestry red, but grew lighter as it rose from the base, fading to a pretty pink blush at the very point. There was not a mark on it. Not a spot nor a squiggle to sully the perfection”. An “impossible thing”, this Metland egg as it came to be known, the one that would sell for £20, promised more if Celie brought one up the cliff top every year. Guillemots are creatures of habit—every year they nest on the same spot, lay the same colored egg and do so for thirty years. This bird too comes every year to the same “doomed” home to lay its egg and watch it taken away. In the struggle between survival and dominance, between the predator and victim, even a puny, scrawny child has more power than a bird. Does the bird feel the loss of its egg? Here is how the author describes it when the bird sees Cecie coming down the cliff: 

For the first time, the bird seemed to know what was about to happen. It did not flap. Flapping had never worked. It did not squawk, for squawking was pointless. It did not peck, for that had never stopped the thief. If birds can learn, it had learned. This time the bird just watched Celie approach… All around them a thousand guillemots shrieked warnings, and here and there exploded from the cliff in whirring sparks of chocolate wings. While this bird just watched her, and waited. Under its downy breast she could already see the prize. A tiny shock of red on the shaded wall. The bird shifted and the egg disappeared, and now there was nothing to distinguish this guillemot from any one of the thousand others under the Metland overhang. As if it knew it could not fight her, but hoped it might still deceive her…Gently, Celie reached under the bird. It turned its head away a degree, and half opened its beak and made a low grunt that Celie felt more than heard. Carefully she placed the egg in the satchel and tapped the rope. The bird sat and watched her all the way. 

Celie steals thirty eggs from that one guillemot over a period of fifteen years. She even becomes a minor celebrity; every summer tourists from all over England coming to watch her bring up that perfect red egg for everyone to ooh and aah over it. Yet, the author does not allow her to become a heartless waif. One summer she says no to climming and that’s when the collector and the thirty eggs disappear.

In the present day in The Brecon Beacons, Wales, Patrick Fort and Weird Nick, are trying to figure out why and who stole a wooden box containing a red egg that Nick had found in the attic. He had tried to sell it on eBay (because he needed the money for a gaming chair) but his listing is taken down since selling wild birds’ egg is illegal and then someone burgles his house and steals it and now Nick wants to get it back. Patrick is neurodivergent and Nick, a misfit, and both are living with their mothers. But they are sweet likeable characters and their interaction with each other is often lol funny. Their sleuthing exposes them to the world of illegal egg trafficking—a chronic egg thief, a vigilante officer of Royal Society of Protection of Birds and a curator of Museum of Natural History. Drawing inspiration from their Call of Duty slayings, they recover the thirty missing red Metland eggs, including Nick’s. In a scene that is almost cinematic, they metaphorically give the eggs back to the birds. 

The Impossible Thing is based on a true story—the original Metland Egg, all thirty of them are still missing. In the fictional version, Bauer gives them a heartwarming resolution.The novel is about poverty, deprivation, greed and obsession. It is also about redemption and grace. Fittingly, the bird has the last word:

And yet. 

Under one warm breast. 

Nestled against one tiny heart . . .

A single, perfect, red egg.

 

Name That Movie!

 

I created this movie quiz using large letter postcards that were so popular in the first-half of 20th century. A large selection of these are available in Wikimedia. I got printed a number of them at a copy shop and proceeded to create movie titles out of them. See if you can figure out the titles. 

Inheritance of Resistance

I started this artist book in 2019-20 following George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police. Then came Dobbs vs Jackson in 2022. What struck me forcibly was that we should never take our hard won rights and liberties for granted. Revanchist forces retreat temporarily and just wait in the wings for the right moment to take them all away. If we care about protecting our rights, we need to be not only vigilant ourselves but teach younger generations to be vigilant too. Help them understand our struggles, successes (and failures too) and give them the tools to continue to build upon the foundations we have laid. Our resistance is our legacy and their inheritance.

Chetna Maroo: Western Lane Review

For November Novellas reading challenge, I chose  Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (Publisher: Picador, 2023) after it popped up on several ‘best of’ lists in addition to 2023 Booker prize short list. Told in first person point of view of an eleven year old girl, it is a grief story, a sports story and a coming of age story. It is only moderately touching either singly or in combination.  

Simply put, it is a story about the death of a parent, the family that is left behind, grief that follows and the game of squash that rescues them. Squash is both a metaphor and  a frequent plot device that moves the narrative forward. There are plenty of observations and occasional action but little direct conversation. We know very little of what is going on inside any of the character’s head. Stuck in the isolation of their grief and unable to express and share it with each other, the family little by little sinks into desperate apathy.  All of these the author conveys in unfussy sparse prose.  Then an unexpected act of aggression (on the squash court) jolts the characters out of their inertia and make them take steps towards active living (a squash tournament helps with that). Overall, a slow predictable story that you can take it or leave it.

Magda Szabo: Abigail Review

Abigail by Magda Szabo is the second book I chose for Read Independent Publishers as well as for Hungarian Literature month at Winstonsdad’ Blog. I read and liked it when it was originally published by New York Review Books in the US in 2019 with a wonderful translation by Len Rix. I have not read any other book by Szabo but the particular appeal of this book is that it is a Bildungsroman—a coming of age story. I really love this genre and as Rix so convincingly puts it, “it is a novel one can and one should return” and I did.

Abigail is also a historic fiction, set during the penultimate phase of World War II. It is the story of a fourteen-year old girl, Gina Vitay, a motherless and only child of a general in the Hungarian army. She is loved and cherished by her father and other family members, and her life in Budapest has been a privileged and cultured one. When the novel begins, Gina’s beloved governess, a French woman, is sent back to her home country and Gina is told without any explanation that she will be attending a boarding school away from Budapest —a fact kept secret from rest of her family. She and her father have a close and loving relationship, and not knowing the reason why she is being so abruptly uprooted she is uncomprehending and heartbroken. The months between fall 1943 to spring 1944 that Gina spends at the  Bishop Matula Academy in a remote part of Hungary is the heart of the story. 

The first several weeks at Matula goes badly for her, totally through her own fault. Being told that she cannot communicate with any of her family or friends, she is desperately longing for all the things she had to let go—her beautiful home, her friends at school, her boyfriend, her aunt’s parties and soirées, trips to the theater. Matula is not a fun and frolic place—a former Calvinist seminary converted to a girls boarding school, its setup is puritanical, highly regimented and strictly monitored. Her classmates are welcoming but Gina finds them immature and their secret games utterly childish. She is scornful when the they confide that Abigail, the girl statue in the garden, comes to the aid of girls who need help. When asked to join in their game, she throws a massive hissy fit and tells on them to the administration. She is hoping that it would get her thrown out of the school but what it gets her is a complete ostracization by her classmates. Eventually, she breaks through that cold wall of exclusion but not before she makes a disastrous attempt to run away from the school. When she pleads with her father to take her with him and tells him of her escape attempt, he finally reveals the reason for hiding her in Matula: Her father is a member of an underground group of army leaders that has been opposed to collaborating with the German army and if it comes in and occupies Hungary, he will be arrested. And that puts Gina at risk because they will use her as a hostage to force him to confess the names of the other members of the dissident group. He makes her promise that she will keep this a secret and not attempt to leave Matula unless it is him or someone trusted by him come to take her. What a burden to put on a fourteen year old! Loving and dutiful daughter that she is, she makes her promise. 

Even though she desperately misses her father and is frightened for his safety, typical resilience of youth and companionship and solidarity of other girls help her settle in her new school. But not for long. When outside forces come knocking on Matula’s doors, she makes a near fatal mistake of putting her trust in the wrong person risking not just her life but also of other students and adults at the school. When the book ends, Gina is once again spirited away, this time incognito, in the care of strangers.

Abigail is a coming-of-age story but also a war time story of children caught up in the dangerous and bloody games that adults play. Whatever adults get out of this game, for children it is nothing but displacement, loss, trauma and sometimes even death. We know that Gina comes back to Matula a year later (after the war ends) and we also know that she grows into full adulthood, married with children. Though the book is written as the events unfold but we are also made to think that she is looking back trying to make sense of that confusing and painful period of her life. When I finished the book, I wished that Szabo had written a sequel. I  would have liked to know how she survives that one year of hiding, how she deals with the death of her father and what kind of adult she grows to be. 

The book is completely centered on Gina and Szabo does a beautiful job of describing her thoughts and capturing her interiority. Gina comes off as a typical teen but she is also an interesting mix of sharp and the dense. She is observant but proves incapable of putting together the clues to figure out the real person behind the mythical Abigail. She learns from her mistakes but not before she brings heaps of trouble on herself. She thinks she is alone in the world but does not see that there are people looking out for her. But her heart is good and we get the impression that whatever the future brings, she will be sustained by the memories of her father’s love and the moral anchoring that Matula gives her.