House and Heart

 

What happens here goes on for some time. Has gone on for some time. Trees used to grow with wood so hard it lined the walls of all the capable buildings in town. Sometimes the sky is so black it looks cleaner than anything could ever be. Now it’s rather sheep and puddles and stomachs never in need of a laxative push.

The allotments are cracked and studded with broken buckets. Space is marked and people do their best, but somewhere somebody made a false prophecy for the land that is roasted by degrees of heat and sun, washed up in weather and nobody tames it. We’re all out measuring weather’s weight, factoring the pulse of weeds against the waft of rooms that stink of pancakes, steak and orange juice.

Today it is mud. If it were flooded with water, you might row around in a wide loop with little ducks everywhere because we love them. Instead some leaves shuffle by with indecision, others suck up the breeze, scooting past the plastic rims, licking their rounds before bedding down to nestle, stuck in wet straw. That is the bottle’s play of plastic light, how it flits like a tiny disc in all the hollow things, like a clock or a memoir or the moon.

Prudence plays a small role in the conduct of this place – there is grass that seems able to converse with everything – with the rabbles of dogs and rabbit hutches, with the new trains and their slick blitz, the older ones all mechanical clang in the air’s draft – puffed out – and further across the earth just a big sleepy ventilation. This one is a landscape sold on the merits of all the other landscapes, on the nice horizontal sketches of museums and the peculiar power of invented lives that look very much like our own.

The animals know more, we think. They happen upon their information in the manner of the barn with its sure cocks and happy roosters. They know the remedy for this mental trick is buried in another trick, the joke of substance in absentia. He tells us so: one bird with his squawk, yellow beak sideways, no blinks, mocking the other birds for even thinking about landing. Whole suburbs are founded on these gestures of claiming territory. On claiming inconvenience.
In the year when there was snow all over and only the beakers and a few stalks cracked a path through the whiteness, people brought their horses here and pounded their pubics around on brown leather saddles. There was no dust to settle in, no ridges of mutual support for the overlooked physics of dirt. It was wet and white and a little green, like salt or coriander.

People lost their keys from pockets and the losers would scrabble around, fingers frozen, realising they could no longer justify their margins of existence, their fragile positions of simply being a breathing vessel on this giant blue planet. The creases and stains of other people roughed up the land. A time of frozen plenty. Feet shod dirt on carpets. Worms fattened, buried deep till summer. And with all the necessary authority of it coming, weather went off again, falling right off the edge of the Earth’s sinking bowl. Rarely did anyone stop to note even a finger or a foot, and if we did, we were not factoring in the occurrence of the shared skin and creases, the truth that all this same stuff covered each of us, stopped us leaking out, held us soft and terrible like fragile enamel.

Like a single sick giggle, everything was doomed with early disillusionment. What happened was whole cycles of people feeling murderous about one another. What happened was pale bodies full of cheap wine. What happened was cultural shoes snapped at the heel, men and women run ragged whipping their heads and exposing teeth and hair to the sky for breaking. Most people in their small houses got through each day simply by hating their neighbours. Days clocked up and it was hard to tell if we were charmed by time or the weather.

It was a season of communal malaise. Of narrative struggle. People looked how the seasick look at maps and dream of land. How the hungry see a wrapper, a skeleton fish and trace the edges of their own bones with a slow finger feeling morose and giddy-eyed.

Many people in towns grew fat, whilst those in the country stayed thin in apology to nature, their bodies a solemn alignment of the dignities of careful growth, clever promises made to make the trees carry on with buds and fuzz and lichen. In the town there were idle feet, often centigrades rocketing to one impossibility or another. It was slums and edifices, murky sky and gin palaces; it was idle land, fresh air, bright sunshine and no public spirit. Infidelity kept them warm and cold. Couples split and rearranged, with mouth-first landings somewhere moist and unusual. There was always somebody half naked, congested in their cubbyhole homes like so many shrews and voles and mice.

In the country they’d never fell a tree and make an axe handle. They were reverent and slow-fingered. In the towns, they stuffed anything that would burn into their fireplaces and carried on breathing the rotten air. The table was laid and they were divorced in time for tea. They didn’t look after their bones and would do anything to escape the house. People paid each other to keep at a distance, living out their own gloomy ironies of feeling connected via transaction. They humped their sofas and each other, mislead in their conception that heat meant empathy and therefore intimacy. When fingers got stuck in bottles and limbs stood grey-clothed in empty bathtubs they wondered whether this was the plunge of great erotic feeling, of unparalleled velocity.
We acquire our own versions of happiness. We pick them up at the chemist. We will meet the daughter of a pharmacist, a magician, the unwitting farmers, the florist, dusty curates, all of them touched by the blow of a fortune teller. Which body belongs to the future mother? Which tousled hot head to the boy with the battered bottom? The big hands and squeezed hearts belong to the busted marriage pair, their molars hanging out unhinged, their intestines blocked with impotent sludge, spud skin and unzipped flies. Once the sore of domestic morbidity cracks, it tends to spread at speed.
There is a house in the distance. A few all around. It’s big like a town. Some buildings with their backs ripped off send staircases sloping right out into air. They’re covered over with boards and belts of warning orange, but people go in and out, their decisions predicated, naturally, on conditions of weather. We stay put and look up at the trees and the blocks of buildings overlapping them, taking little time to calculate the degrees of calibration offered by either god or architect. There is no looking at the corners with their nice bricks or cornicing, thinking how neatly one inorganic block folds into the bright breast of natural things. No. Not that. We drink coffee and gallop from building roof to tree canopy, barely noting the difference between slate or leaf.

From where we can see it now, the view is stretched out. If we lie on our side or close one eye the view feels heavy, looser on the edges. We can angle our own choice perspective. What should feel like pollution feels rather like a suggestive hanging on, as though all these silhouettes of everything and nothing that float on by in layers could be caught and dragged back into a shapely form. We could pull time from the top or bottom and should choose a landscape suitable to our condition.

The sun whips the railway into little shards. The smell of hot tracks, their groan in the heat. We watch the train lines black and unmoving and make chromatic rhymes with the mashed-up flies and spiders of autumn, black too but talcumed now in the dust. We could imagine ourselves packaged aboard those trains, finally chopping the scene to bits in escape, seeing anew something ravishing, some palomino horses in a field or cement in factories with their piles scooped and troubled like concentric hairdos. Those troubles not designed to trouble us, or not yet anyway.

Anachronistic heavens, we all stood under them. The HaHa house stands too in rubble like some murderer in ruins. We called it that when the two top windows fell out and in absence of a door or in fact any certain relationship to soil or sky it sagged downwards in a crudely propped guffaw. Each step around the house had a different hue of desperation. And each brick, with all its acid brothers and acid sisters of mortar and their uniquely aggregated pity, had its own melody.

Golden Gingko used to blossom all around. Grass bent as it shouldn’t, snapping off in the wind. Grass turned to hay, sweet straws, battered-blown across the land. Only recently some amicable nobody folded plastics over the windows, coarse ridge-sewn plastics – banners for breathing – and now all the condensation hangs in the bottom edges with weed decks thudding and daily unravelling threads so you can’t pick window from wall.

They used to be touched by light, the windows; not broken by it, but opened up, polished. The house was named a wonder with its hyacinths, sloping grounds and happy rush of folks about. Not a burglar’s dozen like now with the copper wrenched out and carried away for cash. Something of structure had made an invisible leap out the window with those burglars, its own soiled body visible for just a moment as water had lurched out where the copper was sawn and the radiators rang themselves cold against the wall in alarm.

We wondered whether the house mourned for a repossession of indoor and outdoor space, or yins and yangs and all the half-hidden parts that no longer got their shapes to rhyme together. That rather just rested in a foggy doze. In times of rain and wind, the house accommodated for mood by flinging tiles off its roof, a cascade of roofs, onto the ground, the roof garden. The physics of the roof with its mimicry of the physics of breasts was always on a slow downwards fall. In summer – a hoppy brew – it stank of ferns; the only yeast of subversion. The little place sat there in weather taking its whacks.
We have been watching for some time. May we be forgiven. We Messrs. with eyes all over. When we took a jug with both hands and scooped its heavy bottom up to pour, the weather flowed out of it. We looked at the water in our glass, observed the specks and their impossible swirl and knew answers lay in an observation of closeness that sometimes meant staring at nothing much at all.

 

This is an excerpt from The Boiled in Between by Helen Marten, out with Prototype. 

Image, Helen Marten, Untitled, coloured pencil on paper, 2020, Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ. 

The post Messrs. External & Bodily appeared first on Granta.

Heather Griffin shares her tips on how to create supporting roles in fiction that come off as more than just a flavorless side dish. Rather, supporting roles can sometimes steal the show.

“Every dinner needs a side dish, on a slightly smaller plate.”

When you are having a meal in a Michelin 3-star restaurant, the side dish still plays a significant role in the whole meal. Even sometime the side dish would affect customers’ evaluations. In every story, the main characters are the main dishes like Wagyu Beef or Matsutake, the supporting roles are the side dishes like salad. Sometimes, the side dish might be more impressive and outstanding than the main dish.

When creating a romance story, some writers, especially rookies, tend to pay more attention to design the main characters. They spend a lot of time considering the main characters. From the terms of physiology, sociology, and psychology, they aim to create a “perfect” main character. By contrast, when they create supporting roles, they just like making a salad with overnight cabbage. The flat supporting roles will make the whole story tasty like the flavorless salad.

(Exploring Star Wars and the Hero’s Journey.)

I assume that you have heard about the Hero’s Journey. In a hero’s journey, he or she cannot achieve the gift of the Goddess without any tasks and trials. When the hero or heroine faces a challenge, the challenge might be launched by a supporting role—the enemy. To pass the test, the hero needs supporting roles, such as mentors and allies, to help. This concept indicates the importance of supporting roles.

But how to create a colorful supporting character? To create a vivid supporting character, the process is similar to designing a leading role. In Dreame Writing Courses, three basic dimensions are highlighted.

1. Physiology. Including sex, age, appearance, habitual action, etc.
2. Sociology. What should be considered in this term are class, occupation, home life, social circle, etc.
3. Psychology. Including personal ambition, temperament, attitude, abilities, and so on. With this dimension, a character’s personality will be formed.

To create a character properly needs practice, it is good to be mindful of who your characters are within these dimensions’ context. You should clearly know how they will react to every situation, their behaviors should be well-founded in the contexts of physiology, sociology, and psychology. Otherwise, readers might think one character is flat or “out-of-character.”

Especially when writing the supporting roles, the word counts for them are limited in most situations. Authors keen to set the suspense for main characters. At the very beginning stage, authors might provide the hero or heroine with two completely opposite characteristics in different dimensions (like she is poor but joins an upper-class institution). This setting would attract readers to expect the following story. In terms of the supporting characters, the author cannot use plenty of lines to explain the crack between these contexts. So when creating a supporting role, writers should make the person’s physiological factors, social background, and personality mutually consistent.

Supporting roles are different from the main characters. When creating a supporting role, you should design the distinguishing feature. Meanwhile, planning a relationship between the supporting role and the leading roles.

1. Creating the distinguishing feature

As mentioned before, supporting characters do not feature as prominently as main characters do, so the writer is forced to develop them with a limited number of words. In limited word counts, you should enhance the character’s personality from behavior and language. Habitual behavior, foibles, or pet phrases can serve to endear a character to readers. These small details can also reinforce the reader’s impression of a character.

For example, if you want to create a supporting character who is rich but arrogant, when this rich man talks to the main character, he might have no eye contact with the hero and use overbearing words. In this way, you can show the man’s distinguishing feature effectively.

2. Building a relationship between the supporting role and the leading roles

There are two kinds of relationships—unity relationships and hostility relationships. In a unity relationship, the supporting role’s responsibility is a kind elder, a mentor, or a friend, who would always give a helping hand to our hero or heroine.

By contrast, in a hostility relationship, the supporting character must be an antagonist, the main character’s worst enemy; a betrayer who betraying the protagonist and getting the protagonist into trouble; a clown, a comic character who causes problems for the leading roles.

Here is an example from one of the most famous novels, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, by J.K. Rowling. In this story, Peter Pettigrew betrays the Potters, and Voldemort is the antagonist, the most powerful enemy that Harry will face. The Dursleys are certainly clowns. They mistreated Harry, but they were punished, and the punishment they received was dramatic and hilarious.

Harry Potter’s world is magnificent; the story is pushed by a large number of roles. However, most of them are supporting roles, or let us call them the general supporting roles. They just promote the storyline in a certain area, they’re like NPCs in a video game. Besides, some supporting roles are designed for story clues. These roles appear in the whole story, especially in an important plot, they could drive the protagonist to keep growing. Just think about Dumbledore.

Another fascinating thing about supporting characters is, some popular roles might have their derivative stories. It is a new trend in today’s book industry. If one supporting role is outstanding, readers would be not satisfied with the finite lines in the original works. So many writers start to create “side dish” stories, to complete supporting roles and find the new possibility of plots.

“Do not ignore supporting roles.” Every experienced editor and successful author would talk like this. For different authors, they would have different creative methods to create supporting roles. This process makes every story unique. But the mature authors’ common ground is they always keep the design process logical; they always think of the characters as real people. Before the book is published to the public, you never know which character would be their favorite. A mature writer designs all the characters with deliberation. As a reader, we are lucky to experience the story with diverse angles.

*****

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1

The lore of the fragment was what brought us together, like wasps licking a wooden frame to build their nests. Each time we heard the story we took some of it back, in our mouths, like damp chemicals or pulp + saliva. Then spat it out to fill a hole or make the wall stronger.

I am new to writing. Is the notebook a time crystal?

Mother: ‘Behind the curtain of blood I saw a shape.’ That shape was an equation. Equation, constellation. What happens when we experience the Mother’s love?

Father: ‘I saw a terrible thing. It was after the war. A mother on the ground . . . her baby rooting for milk, suckling her . . . even though . . .’

Is the Mother a gap on the physical level that links human beings together in a sense of united loss?

Tried to get these questions out. Can’t focus.

Mother: ‘What would you like to feel?’

Father: ‘Get me tea, and the paper.’

These are examples of communal lore. How we were when we were together and what it was like when we were apart. Also: orange grasses, foxglove, conifer, mango, dolphin, bitch.

I heard a story of a Mother and Father who loved each other so much they had an operation to remove the hearts from their bodies then sew them into each other’s parts.

It must have been so chilly, like an eclipse made visible only when photographed, when the time came to lift the organs out with a powerful, single movement and give them to a nurse.

‘I tell her that rocks like meteorites retain light, a sensible energy thought into substance by experiencing it,’ writes the poet of another era, putting forward an idea of writing that resembles transcription, connection with a reader, but also loss.

A scrawl, a scribble.

I’m no saint.

 

2

I want to live a simple, beautiful life with memories and friends. I do not want to die of carotid ill-health or by the hand of another.

In stating what I want and what I do not want, I practice a form of positive desire, the spirituality of a bygone era.

Imagine a February morning in 1997 or 2019, the bright green grass and the ten black ravens hopping across the lawn on the outskirts of a city filled with knaves, dolls, bears and gymnasts, but also clerics who abandoned their calling to become what we all were in the end: a ruined self.

Now gone.

Something happened.

If an ancestor is someone you can still tell a story of, then perhaps I am not a descendant.

On the planet Avaaz, where a city once was, is now a hole. Imagine a house bursting into flames in the rear-view mirror of a yellow-and-black taxi.

At the rim of this hole are low hills or mounds, forest-green and gleaming with bouncy eyes. Rat, lion, piglet, boar, cat, dog, snake, cow, sheep, rabbit, horse. Ex-zoo, this is less a wilderness than the end of cages. Here, the lion eats the horse, the snake bites the dog, and the rat nips at the heel of the cow.

Can animals save us, or will it be the plants who become conscious, adept, empathetic: the functional adults of our universe?

To answer these questions, I left my home for the rim.

I was a child and perhaps I am still a child.

Lick a rose for its dew.

Wash your face when it rains.

Don’t drink from the tap.

I know what to do.

 

3

Imagine reincarnating as a sea creature.

Imagine reincarnating in 1993, if you were born in 2023. Or 2121, if you were born in 2021.

Can we reincarnate in a society or an ocean that precedes us in the timeline of a) antiquity or b) apocalypse? Imagine the shattered turquoise or aquamarine shard of the fresco, underfoot. Imagine family time.

Turns out the apocalypse is boring and sensible, a combination of sugars, fats, and trying to come up with a cunning plan.

My suicide is more beautiful than your life, murmurs Father on the floor of the stable, where he has curled up in the place where horses once lay to take his pills.

If you are reading these words in the last century, I understand that you loved a film called Melancholia starring Kiefer Sutherland. If you are reading these words in the coming century, Kiefer Sutherland was a loser poet. He was not a friend to his daughter or wife. Another planet appeared in the sky, a charged form of nudity that illuminated the siblings in the film, as well as the parent–child bond.

Who is reading these words?

Who is your partner in life?

Was the person who saved our planet a devoted scientist who made room for new feelings in the space between their body and yours?

What saved us in the end? Was it food?

Meanwhile, the sun evolves every single day into something else, something further from ‘sun’.

Because I was not part of a group, I knew that sexual trauma was a likelihood.

This is why I had to leave.

Like a vector, I parsed the countryside, nibbling stream mint, cowslip, lily and dill.

To survive.

 

4

The city is behind me now, releasing energy that is immediately channelled to anyone who needs it.

Self-induced stress and fear are the most toxic things to the system, said Mother one day, on the couch. I remember what she said because the next day her loving support was gone.

Do you know why? Ancestor, why didn’t you change your ways in advance of the destruction that rendered memories into oil? Descendant, contextually, you’re a miracle.

Below the flag of Avaaz and above the harbour, a body emerges from an outline of golden light: the citizen host. No, I don’t know who this is.

I ran from the glowing body that was unrecognisable to me.

It was stressful. I was scared. It was toxic!

The body I saw was like an invisible painting that becomes apparent when water is dropped upon it.

I ran from this new art.

Towards the trees where something, I could hear, was making a sound.

A sound, a prefix, a tone.

‘Attune yourself to inner magnetism,’ said the predator.

But I fled – something the predator did not expect.

Ancestor, what did you do in such moments, when all those sweet things were in smithereens? How did you skirt the new dominance? What were your strategies and formulas? How did you remember your Mother’s face in ordinary moments? Did you have access to what we know now, the idea of the body as remembering everything that ever happened? Tell me about the dandelion and the pear tree. Tell me where you are from.

Descendant, if you are child, when the world splits into three parts, flee.

To the rim.

 

5

I saw an amazing thing as I lay in the straw.

Last night, I dreamed that behind the waterfall was a form of writing I could not read, something like a scrawled prescription or scroll with only the letters H, I, N and E still legible.

The night decants the moonlight over the nettles along the brook. ‘Solidarity not charity,’ chants the leader of a temporary camp, in the paternalistic tone I’ve come to recognise as a weak disguise. So, I push on, slipping away from the fire, walking as far as I can beneath the full moon the colour of a ripe plum.

August + December – February = June?

The footpath throws me into time and I walk until there it is, like the skirt of a dress filled with snakes or doves, or the roar of a cafeteria.

The waterfall.

Behind the waterfall is a cave.

I step out onto the wet, broad stone without shame or anger.

Am I a moon bird?

Look how lightly I step from the bank to the ledge, my right hand clinging to the stone of the cliff and the fingertips of my left hand extending towards, then through, the water.

Then all of me is inside, not outside.

This is what I see: a small fire, recently lit and fragrant, packed tightly into a circle of heavy stones. Each stone has a red oval painted on its roundest part, ringed with gold paint, then a thinner line of turquoise pigment or dye.

There’s a kerosene stove with a kettle on it, singing at the boil.

A low wooden desk with a cushion to sit on. Someone has painted the cream fabric of the cushion with lemon, emerald-green and red paisley swirls. On the desk, wrapped in gold silk, is a book. Nobody is here. In this context, I hear two words.

Open it.

 

6

Kneel down in the boggling mud.

So icy.

Here.

Yes, I am speaking now. As Pinky scrambles up the scree.

Imagine a flame balanced in a bowl of water or in the bubbling spring at the origin of rivers, hovering there.

Here, a third stream comes from underneath with the energy of a fountain. Is this the history of rivers? Is an origin a confluence?

Dear Pinky, in the fourteenth minute of this new galaxy and in the last few moments of your own childhood, I am communicating with you.

Like this.

Pinky, can you hear me?

This is the place.

Put your hand in the water. Yes, that’s it . . . as far as it can go.

Blood angels calve in the moonlight, but you’ll never see such a thing.

There. That’s it. Pull it out now.

Right out of the water and the mud and the flame and the ice and the muck and the bright.

That’s it, my lovely.

Reach in.

Can you hear me?

‘Yes, I can hear you.’ – Pinky to Hildegard, who has begun to speak.

 

7

There are forests here and snowdrops in abundance. I never imagined being here. Did you?

From agar, from flock, from lovers, from bodies that flush with warmth, from the cultural memory of lighthouses, polar bears, the revolutionary nature of young people all over the earth, something was preserved. I can feel it here, for the first time, with you.

Imagine a bunch of carrots with soil still caked on them, green tops like ferns. Or imagine the sound of a wooden flute beyond the Mughal labyrinth. Imagine the national flowers of contested regions. Every person who travelled here is unsteady, I can feel that.

Dehydrated.

If home is found on both sides of the globe, home is of course here, and always a missed land, said the poet, with whom we can still feel an emotional affinity, though he is long gone. The delicate works of that earlier time will never be kept on record now. It is up to us to memorise them; poems by people who have been incarcerated, poems by people who left their homes, poems constructed with paper and string.

Things that happened, things that might happen, on the planet Avaaz.

Here is the fragment.

[Pinky Agarwalia gestures to a chunk of ice on the tall wooden table, addressing the group. The ice is luminous, almost neon, rotating to the left then back again (twitching) without any effort or contact from Pinky herself, or the members of her audience, who are seated on the floor or leaning against the sides of the cave.]

‘As you can see,’ continues Pinky in a formal tone, ‘the fragment is a six-dimensional object that we have to integrate. It’s evolving. We don’t have much time.’

The ice has a lower luminosity than what it contains and so the light from the fragment crosses two frequencies, like an unknown language. Some photons can’t escape the staggered mesh.

How will we melt this ice that does not melt when we heat it or crack when we smash it on the ground?

Pinky taps the book.

 

8

An unknown language is a rose meteor, because what doesn’t ebb off leaves lines.

An unknown language is held in a quasi-steady state until someone reads it for the first time. Then it becomes toroidal, streaming lines.

An unknown language is non-dimensional and so it can’t be written down. So, what are you looking at?

You need a code to look at the unknown language.

Encased in ice, a word vibrates.

Discontinuous spikes pulse in the body of the viewer.

It helps to wear damp silk. The coolness calms the vagus nerve, a nerve that wraps around the heart as it travels from gut to brain.

The fragment of an unknown language is unstable, convective, buoyant, and can’t be extracted, just as the real universe can’t be plotted.

Is the one you love a proxy for radiance? (Hildegard, the chameleon)

Is the fragment a cosmological simulation? (Hildegard, who ingested galantine, converting the energy of her life into an identity as bright as six billion suns.)

An unknown language comes from a foreign place, like a sample of the life once lived there.

An unknown language is a very rich source, a repository of shared information, like an amethyst cave at the place where the river meets the sea.

Herbs and bodywork relieve the build-up of tension. (Hildegard, off-message)

Hildegard, you were so close to me at the origin of rivers and then in the cave. Was it you who were so recently there, stoking the fire with the toe of your pointed boot?

Hildegard, your metamorphosis, like an animal or fish, keeps slipping through my hands.

I follow your command.

 

9

Like a text that is destined to be read as a sign might, the book was a series of commands. As Pinky read each sentence in turn, the words lit up with a weak flame, one by one, so that when Pinky finished reading, there was no book.

Red flowers, a moorhen. Pinky waited until the spring came before she left the cave and returned to the camp below, where other orphans had gathered, sitting with their backs to nature out of a sadness they couldn’t stop.

To whisper, follow me.

Up and up to the origin of rivers went the children, on Pinky’s heel.

For her eyes were shining.

Whoever followed her stopped asking, What is happening to me?

Hot water sipped upon waking. A branch to chew on that cleaned the teeth and nourished the breath. Vegetables, seeds, black tea. ‘Mandala for the undefended heart,’ said Pinky, when one of the orphans asked her what she was drawing.

The cave was like a violet door in the side of the mountain.

There was a way to enter and another way to leave, to relieve the bowels in a wood, a shovel in hand to dig a hole and refill it.

I can compete with you in the body I have. This was a new thought, one of many the orphans had, individually.

Soon it was time to gather.

‘It’s time,’ said Pinky.

Let’s begin.

Once they were ready, the children or near-children or ex-children gathered in a circle within view of the cascade, which was Prussian blue and sparkling in the early morning light.

In the middle was the block of ice.

 

10

With the fingertip of your fourth finger touch the bone of your heart and with your other hand touch the ground.

In the years to come, we would learn from our failures and write about what we left behind. Our writing took the form of stories and poems, which we shared in the woodland clearing where we met to learn from each other. There wasn’t a university in our future, and there never would be again. Instead, we apprenticed to our elders, then shared in their care.

That morning, the morning of our first ritual, we looked at each other like shy swans, bending our necks to look down, and then up again.

Pinky, now our leader, repeated the instructions in a clear voice, and we remembered the book which had set itself on fire as she read, each word in turn. Was this our mythology?

The paper’s hiss. Ash on the fingertips. ABC flame.

The final instruction was this: Bring to mind an experience of hatred.

The gold light descended then from the crown to the heart, dissolving the head of the enemy, the regret, the pain.

Pinky set the chunk of ice at the centre of our circle, on the ground.

We visualised the gold light extending from our hearts.

To pierce the chemistry of the fragment.

Imagine twenty spokes of the brightest light you have ever seen.

As the ice shatters, a sound is released.

A new sound which reaches us as pale green light, vibrating lightly, lightly, like bees but also flowers.

Is a stamen a tuning fork? The Pleiades, above us, tilt.

In synchrony.

Was this the moment that our species took a turn?

 

 

author’s notes: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise on Stars (2020) and Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazal, ‘Land’ (2001), are the two works of poetry I reference. The line ‘I saw an amazing thing as I lay in the straw’ is from a monologue I memorised as a teenager, but I have perhaps misremembered as I cannot find the source text. The phrase ‘shy swans’ derives from a description of ponies in James Wright’s ‘A Blessing’: ‘They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. / There is no loneliness like theirs.’ The spacetime vocabulary comes out of talks and lectures at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology in 2019 and early 2020. The way of speaking to ancestors and descendants, across time, comes from Joanna Macy’s The Work That Reconnects, a practice I was first introduced to by Regina Smith at Naropa University. The imagery of ‘national flowers of contested regions’ comes from Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi’s Efflorescence series (2013–19), and their installation at Kettle’s Yard, part of the exhibition Homelands: Art from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan (2019). The cave behind the waterfall is a cave I myself visited as a child. There, I was served tea by the person who lived inside it, perched on a hand-woven stool. The curtain of blood appearing in the mind, and through it the equation’s proof, comes from a story of the mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose vision of Mahalakshmi this was. The phrase ‘unknown language’ comes from Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth-century mystic, as channelled by Pinky Agarwalia, an orphan of what was once Earth and is now Avaaz. Pinky divines then perpetuates Hildegard’s instructions in 2121, the year of devastating ecological norms, species mutation, and new ideas of education, healing and love. Imagine quantum laser beams shining from the shabby little hearts of twenty orphans in a variant of the spiritual practice, Chöd. Imagine an alphabetic fragment encased in ice that does not melt in fire nor shatter when you throw it on the ground. The ice signifies, perhaps, forms of trauma that are intractable, yet which also preserve something, or protect it from destruction. Are all biographies a study of surviving something we were only passing through?

 

This is an excerpt from Unknown Language by Hildegard of Bingen and Huw Lemmey, published by Ignota Books. Don’t miss the launch party on Zoom on Thursday 17 September, 7 p.m. BST; 2 p.m. EDT; 11 p.m. PDT.

The post Pinky Agarwalia: Biography of a Child Saint in Ten Parts appeared first on Granta.

When I wrote my first novel, The House With a Thousand Stories, I drew inspiration not only from great 20th-century novels like Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and important Indian English novels like Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, but also from fiction written in the regional languages of India. My first language is Assamese but I also know how to read Bangla and Hindi. At home, we had a large stock of Bangla, Assamese, and some English books. The library I regularly visited had delicious thrillers written in Hindi that I devoured during summer vacations. All of these languages translated world classics, too. I read most of the great Russian novels in Assamese, some British and American classics by Twain and Dickens in Hindi, Bengali, and Assamese. Perhaps this is why every time a Western newspaper comes up with a recommended list of novels about India I find them insufficient. These lists always contain books written originally in English. Due to British colonialism, there is no doubt a large body of important Indian literary works that are read globally are written in English. But there is a problem here: only ten percent of India’s population knows English, and this group of people gets to represent India through their works.

Only ten percent of India’s population knows English, and this group gets to represent India through their works.

The rest of India’s population— who don’t have the privilege of learning English or away from the wealthy metropolitan centers of opportunities and thus English learning and discourse—read and write in one of the many official languages in India. India’s constitution lists 22 significant languages such as Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Tamil, Gujrati, Kashmiri, Hindi, etc.—and that’s not including the thousands of dialects and tribal languages in which people write as well. These languages have a long and continuous written tradition. For instance, Assamese—my first language—has a literary tradition reaching back to the 5th century. With the arrival of print culture in the modern period, Assamese literature, like all other Indian literary cultures, flourished. A large amount of this was anti-colonial literature that led to the growth of nationalist consciousness and eventually contributed to British colonizers’ ejection from India. 

The colonial administration systematically tried to replace these strong literary cultures with English. But they failed. A complex body of literature emerged from this linguistic violence on India’s native intellectual culture and subsequent resistance. Modern Indian literature draws nutrients not only from South Asia’s indigenous traditions, but also from literary cultures in the U.K., Europe, Latin America, Russia, China, and the United States (because the colonial administration taught English widely and thus we natives could now read in English). 

Every Western list of books from India that doesn’t feature a single work written in one of India’s many languages reinforces colonial stereotypes.

Hence, every time a Western publication makes a list of books from India and doesn’t feature a single work written in one of India’s many languages, it reinforces colonial stereotypes and erodes the process of decolonization. It reestablishes the hegemony of the English language and wipes the rich local traditions that are longer and richer. The novels in this list—widely considered as modern Indian classics—attempt to challenge the Western stereotype that Indians primarily read in English or that Indian literature is written predominantly in English. In fact, in the last two or three decades, the reading public has shifted towards local consuming more and more literary works translated from Indian languages. I also belong to a generation of new writers from India who are comfortable writing in both English and a regional language. The future is at least bilingual, if not multilingual. 

Pages Stained With Blood by Indira Goswami, translated from Assamese by Pradip Acharya

Set against the Anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 that followed the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, this is (as you might guess from the title) a bloody book. The novel follows the life of a young professor at Delhi University who witnesses the pogrom first-hand. The author, Indira Goswami, is one of the most loved writers in India and her deeply transgressvive, feminist, genre-bending autofictional novels won her the highest literary honor of the country, the Jnanpith Award. This book evokes Delhi and its history in a way that it is hard to forget, and rarely seen in Indian English fiction or popular orientalist narrative nonfiction. In the middle of this chaos, there is a love story that will stab your heart and make you smile. 

Tamas by Bhisham Sahni, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell

Set against the backdrop of the communal riots around the partition of India in 1947, Sahni’s novel opens with a harrowing scene that perhaps has no parallel in Indian fiction: a long chapter that shows a man trying to kill a pig so that he can desecrate the local mosque with the pig corpse to incite a riot. This war, between the pig that wants to live and the man that is trying to kill it but isn’t able to, reminds me of Santiago’s struggle with the fish in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The novel is a post-mortem of the turbulent period following partition, when communal riots killed close to a million, and the trauma that continues to haunt the subcontinent even to this date. Tamas has been translated into English and other languages many times, but I love the translation by American literary translator Daisy Rockwell. 

On a Wing and a Prayer by Arun Sarma, translated from Assamese by Maitreyee Siddhanta Chakravarty

These days, the Indian right wing often finds a new language, new terms, new concepts to demonize Muslims and minorities. One of their recent, ridiculous terms is “Love-Jihad,” the (self-evidently absurd) claim that conniving Muslim men are spreading Islam by tricking innocent Hindu girls into marriage. This book counters that parodic view, with a love story that is also a complex picture of one of the most persecuted minorities in India: the people of Bangladeshi origin in India’s Northeast. The novel is a meticulous picture of pre-independence rural India, and has one of my most favorite characters: Gojen, a lower-caste Hindu man who falls in love with Hasina, a girl from the immigrant Muslim community from erstwhile East Pakistan. Arun Sharma won the Sahitya Akademi Prize for his book.

Naalukettu: The House Around the Courtyard by M. T. Vasudevan Nair, translated from Malayalam by Gita Krishnamurthy

Set in the South Indian state of Kerala, among the matrilineal Nair community, the novel follows the life of Appuni, whose mother is asked to leave the house for marrying against her family’s wishes. Appuni grows up listening to stories about his wealthy, powerful, upper-caste family, and the large house around the courtyard where the family lived. When he goes to claim a place in that location, he is rejected, which plants the seeds of revenge in his heart. This is considered a classic in Indian literature, and it’s hard to believe that it was M. T. Vasudevan Nair’s first novel (which also won him the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Prize in 1959). 

The First Promise by Ashapurna Debi, translated from Bengali by Indira Chowdhury

The first installment in a mammoth trilogy, this novel follows the life of child-bride Satya in 19th-century India. Rebellious, feisty, always questioning, Satya never loses an argument: why are women not allowed to read when the deity of knowledge is a woman who sits on a swan? Why can’t I call a British doctor to treat my husband who is suffering from typhoid? Why wouldn’t widows be allowed to marry? Set amid the growth of nationalist anti-colonial consciousness in colonial Bengal, the novel is about the domestic history of women who carried the “first promise” of hope and change for a progressive, liberal future, who are forgotten by public history. “My novel leans on the backbone of petty, daily activities,” Ashapurna Debi, who produced more than 150 novels, wrote in the introduction to the novel’s Assamese edition.

Sonam by Yeshe Dorje Thongchi, translated from Assamese by Mridula Baroaah

Set among the Brokpas, a polyandric indigenous community, this a fiercely feminist, women-centric novel. The central character, Sonam, chooses to have two men in her life because her husband Lobjang, the love of her life, has to live away from home for long durations to earn for the family. It is hard for Sonam to deal with her loneliness and desires, and she decides to opt for a second husband after discussing with Lobjang. Like most love triangles, this leads to conflict, tragedy, and reconciliation. Often compared with Chinua Achebe, Yeshe Dorje Thongchi is a writer from Arunachal, who belongs to the small Serdukpen tribe that numbers no more than 4,000. 

Zindaginama by Krishna Sobti, translated from Hindi by Neel K Mani

I love a good plot, but I couldn’t make this list without including this unruly novel that defies all expectations. I wonder if Zindaginama, which means the saga of life or the story of life, baffles us deliberately by mimicking the messiness of life in the best possible way? Sobti’s magnum opus is set in a small village in Punjab. If you pick this novel hoping to get a narrative thread that you can follow through the nearly 500 pages, you would be disappointed. But if you allow yourself to experience the sounds, the mingling, coalescing narrative threads, you would experience an intimate portrait of life in India before partition where many communities lived together for generations, with comparatively less acrimony and hatred!

Those Days by Sunil Gangopadhyay, translated from Bangla by Aruna Chakravarti

Those Days, set in colonial Bengal, charts the life of many historical and fictional characters who worked towards the reformation of India. If you have enjoyed sprawling novels such as Anna Karenina you will enjoy this novel, but it is much more than that: the plot is tighter, faster; the details are meticulous; the characters unforgettable. Even the historical characters feel fresh and new in Gangapadhyay’s writing. It is a historical novel, but becomes far more than the portrait of an era when India was entering modernity since you will remember the novel for life of the protagonist Nabinkumar, who is in the middle of these changes. 

The Hour Before Dawn by Bhabendranath Saikia, translated from Assamese by Maitreyee S. C.

Occasionally, an Indian writer in English will emerge and claim that it is daring to write about poverty in India. What surprises me most is that there are thousands of novels set in India that are about poor people and their problems. The characters are in The Hour Before Dawn are poor, living in rural India, but their poverty is not a plot device. Menoka, the protagonist, is involved in an extra-marital relationship with the local petty thief. The novel explores the transgressions of Menoka and the costs she would pay for it, along with providing a meticulous picture of rural India.

The Gift of a Cow by Munshi Premchand, translated from Hindi by Gordon C. Roadarmel

Comparable with Dickens, Balzc, or Gorky, Munshi Premchand wrote fiction about the poor peasants and their desires, aspirations, and struggles in colonial, semi-feudal India, in the critical-realist mode. In this novel, Hori, a peasant, is tired of living in poverty and starts hoping to own a few acres of land and a cow so that he can cultivate on his own. In a narrative that challenges caste, colonialism and class, Premchand tells us in great details why Hori’s dream remains unfulfilled.

Cuckold by Kiran Nagarkar, translated from Marathi by the author

Cuckold challenges you to read it: for its massive brick-like size and length, its rich imagination of the sixteenth-century kingdom of Mewar, and the difficult subject matter about a beloved mystic poet called Meerabai who was so obsessed with her love and attachment to the God Krishna that her husband felt abandoned. It is hard not to know about Meerabai or listen to her songs if you have grown up in India. Nagarkar chooses to narrate the novel from the point of view of her husband, Maharaja Kumar, providing the portrait of a complex person, statesman, husband, son; and yet, the novel manages to tell us a lot about Meerabai, and fall in love with her once again.

The Crooked Line by Ismat Chughtai, translated from Urdu by Tahira Naqvi

Written by one of my favorite fiction writers, The Crooked Line explores the life of Shaman, growing up in a North Indian Muslim household around the time of India’s independence. Chughtai, known for her controversial queer love story “Lihaaf,” wrote often about the experience of regular Muslim women in India. Like many of Chughtai’s earlier heroines, Shaman is rebellious, doesn’t do things that the society expects her to do as a woman, and even desires women in the novel. Part of the Progressive Writers Movement that started before Indian independence, Chughtai uses the form of the novel and the social realist mode to critique idiosyncrasies and conservative attitudes of Indian Muslims. It is a delight to read Chughtai’s fiction: with her quick, lively dialogues, layered but colloquial narration, and tinge of humor, she is one of the finest. 

Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man by U. R. Ananthamurthy, translated from Kannada by A. K. Ramanujan

Originally written in Kannada, and translated by the MacArthur “genius grant winner” A.K. Ramanujan, this book is part of almost all Indian literature classes. Set in a Southern Indian village in the state of Tamil Nadu, Samskara explores the stringent and puritanical traditions of an upper-caste Brahmin community in modern India. Praneshacharya, the main character, is married to a disabled woman. He takes care of her, more out of a sense of duty, than love, and believes that he is leading a virtuous, moral life. But when Narranappa, the rebellious man from this village who rejected the age-old traditions dies, Praneshacharya’s loyalty to the Brahmanical traditions start to wither away until he finds himself in a surprising path of transgression, doing things he never thought he would ever do. U. R. Ananthamurthy was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize and this novel.

Sangati: Events by Bama, translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmstrom

Made up of a series of anecdotes or vignettes, Sangati is another novel that seeks to defy the conventions of the novel form. These anecdotes often celebrate the lives of Dalit women from the Periyar community in the state of Tamil Nadu and are juxtaposed with deep analysis and reflections in the narrator’s voice. This is one of the most important texts that informed Dalit feminism in India. 

River of Fire by Qurratulain Hyder, translated from Urdu by the author

Hyder’s magnum opus is an astonishingly ambitious book. The story starts in the ancient city of Sravasti in the 5th century BCE during Buddha’s lifetime, and ends in modern India at the cusp of independence in the city of Lucknow. Covering multiple epochs through a wide cast of characters in the sub-continent, the book follows the same set of characters through different periods, using them as canvases to depict the moral, philosophical, literary and intellectual tussles of those eras, and perhaps to suggest a long, continuous subcontinental intellectual tradition.

The post 15 Modern Indian Classics in Translation appeared first on Electric Literature.