keyaar.in / Exif: Blog

Books, Derailleurs

→ December 24, 2017 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink

Just Ride is a painfully (!) practical guide to cycling without the gear obsession and adding things to the bike while hoping to shave off milligrams. This, as I am burning bandwidth looking for a positively eyelet-infested tour-ready frame.

Tim Crabbe’s Rider and Robert Penn’s It’s All About the Bike are excellent reads too, to help put you in the mood for a long ride. It is Gironimo next.


Pucchakari Tales

→ October 24, 2017 | Reading time: 3 minutes | Permalink

Chabter after enchanting, dark, pin-prickly self aware Chabter, Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People consumes the reader in whole, like the countless Pravasis and suitcases sprouting limbs littered allover its stories. The writing’s self-awareness stops just short of being too sweet to swallow, the bitterness too heady to spit. I read it like I used to read Stephen King back in highschool (during the run through Dreamcatcher, our motherly librarian was concerned). I was moved to tears many inappropriate times in state transport buses and sprawled atop awkward couch layouts during afternoon indulgences in the studio.

He writes as if he knows—exactly, down to the quirky typographic detail—how someone is going to read not the lines but the inbetweens. You could see, with eyes half-closed, all the revisions the text must have been through, lighting pages up like Christmas trees in heat. For example (despite attempts, there are no stone-set rules in how Malayalam words ought to be anglicised*) he transliterates vegetable into Pucchakkari. A belittling† piece on the platter. In an Arundhati Roy book, this would’ve read like kulcha bait. Not in Unnikrishnan’s Chabters. Here, their visa out of linguistic self-harm is a knowing nod from the author, from behind the printed page. That is to say, I maybe imagining things. Pucchakkari and Kadakkaran blend in, with no (apologetic, italicised) footnote in view.

There is a Kiran Nagarkaresque rhythm to the sentences—the wordplay is effortless, long sentences bookended by short, punchy ones. The blessings of a coconut oiled tongue, alien but comfortably so, shines through. The more out-of-the-ordinary parts and the magically realist parts read like there were carefully measured, quality-controlled substances involved. Even then, the prose is grounded, the wackiness hitting you in ways least expected. Sentences deliver aftershocks way beyond their designated periods. Some don’t even wait to grow up to adult-sized sentences to drive home the despair. A two page Chabter (Google ‘Pucchakari’ and look at the Books result) on Gulf Malayalee nouns turns sinister word-sized-sentence after word-sized-sentence.‡

The type treatments and typesetting complement the content too; the blacked out words aren’t gimmicky, the illustrations aren’t afterthoughts. My only gripe with the design department is a misplaced diacritic late into the book. The Rodrigo-Corral cover tops the package off nicely, equal parts architectural plan and slice of the temporary, replaceable lives inside.


* A user-friendly version would say Pachchakkari, but that sounds pedestrian. Think Poppadoms over Pappatams.

† Puccham is denigration. Pachcha is green. Kari is a lady who trades in precedents.

‡ As I was reading this, I was mentally putting the terms in a spreadsheet, trying to find method to sort the madness into something as effective as the one in the book.



Reading in Crowded State Transport Buses

→ August 9, 2017 | Reading time: 2 minutes | Permalink

Living out in the village has its advantages; it’s already taken me more than a week to get to the final chapter of Rushdie’s delicious take on storytelling in Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty‑Eight Nights, with all the weeding-during-monsoons, rushed coconut-felling, felled-coconut-gathering, sorting, husking, marriage-attending, milk-buying, curry-leaf picking and slow wireless internet. Often, the story is too self-aware, balancing overt references to present-day dystopias and the author’s life, with crafty language gymnastics. Some sentences might even work well as triggers to long and interesting and weird tales. I was reminded of Neil Gaiman more than once (and then briefly leafed through Neverwhere again). Ashamed I never read Rushdie before. Worried this is going to be another spiral down Murakami lane.

Rushdie calls one of the characters Dunia, the world. One may think that is a slow descent to corniness but, so beautifully, it isn’t. (The rest of you can have your refunds at the Peristan gates.)

In other news, this guy has two book reviews up in The Hindu. He has the best nice words and too many ‘entire’-s that jumped the editors’ desks.


Happiness in Crowded State-Transport Buses

→ July 17, 2017 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink

The commute to KL11 is spent in a Tarzeny haze on dull days, hanging onto the stainless steel rods crisscrossing the bus that takes in everything, from seat-expecting mothers and that uncannily well-dressed elderly gentleman on his early morning booze run to the state-owned-and-operated IMFL store halfway to town and the backpacker who refuses to part with his violently swinging bundle of pain and entanglement and the disgruntled ticket checker (conductor of the symphony). The elderly drunkards drown the rainy days in quarters as if all that water hasn’t enough mojo. On busy days, suspended in a sea of bodies—warm except for the half-shut umbrellas fresh off a surprise shower—the kindle becomes extra padding to my sketchbook, warmed by the packed lunch and water-bottle, leaving me listening to interviews pilfered off the internets or to Kodaline on loop. Today, half way into the yatra, Pamuk’s long and often unexciting bit on “Strangeness in My Mind” gave way to Arundhati Roy reading from the “Ministry,” and it was three different kinds of odd and beautiful. The burqa-clad girl seated next door sent strange glances my way as I giggled inappropriately and looked at the Hindi numerals on the HMT when I noticed she noticed I noticed. Ms. Roy broke into ‘Kozhikkattam Chammandi’ and went on to spice up the translation with guts. I have had the hardcover on the table for almost three weeks now, and haven’t gotten past the first few pages.


Dangerously, Reading on the Edge

→ March 16, 2017 | Reading time: 2 minutes | Permalink

It is still early in the afternoon; the sunlight warm, shards of it leaving one corner of the bed in relative comfort. I am reading Banana Yoshimoto on the e-Reader and it shows 26% on the bottom left. I tap-tap-tap to hide it. I mean to read up to a 50 and then leave for the studio. The lunch was pleasant and unsurprising (and therefore, pleasant) and the paper didn't seem to mind being left alone for another hour. Its appropriately academic-sounding prose has already started to show signs of promise despite a general lack of confidence and what any reviewer worth her salt would see is a typical case of inexperience. It simply didn't belong, yet.

The afternoon, balmy, is like a day-old factory siren, only that it binds one to the bed tighter. It is melting caramel, lulling one into a slow, sweet suspension of time and worries. Once inside, everything is distorted and one starts to believe in insignificant miracles again. It is ironic, almost tee-shirt worthily so, how sirens make one feel after teenage years spent waking up to a sorry excuse for one of those on winter mornings.

The screen catches light at a diagonal over the screen, as if in a freshly rendered advertisement while the dust, illuminated, does its dance as one moves into the comfier, corner-of-the-bed existence among the stuff that wouldn't belong there, had the bed itself belonged to someone else with some sense of shame.

It is three thirty and the book is, suddenly, over. I scroll ahead to see if the blank pages are some anomaly, and then backwards to make sure I haven't glossed over entire chapters. I read passages again as they resonate the right amount of déjà vu. The book doesn't feel real enough. It is as if I am being shortchanged. It isn't the story. I hadn't gone into it expecting a fairy-tale ending either. It is how the 100% mark creeps up unannounced. Maybe what it loses in translation from ink on paper to pixels off it is this sense of time. A sense that somehow cooks you up at a simmer for that last paragraph. e-Reading in that sense is no different from fast food. Or an electric shock.