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| March 13, 2000 | ||
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| War
Karma in Cool Kargil A rock 'n' roll writer goes to war. And comes back with moving stories. By Manvendra Singh DESPATCHES FROM KARGIL
The chapters are titled in a manner that could be called, well, "cool". "The Journey", "Batalik", "Sting, Counter-Sting", "Highway Karma" and so on. All very well, except that the "cool" bit gets into the text as well. And the first few chapters read like a rock 'n' roll writer's foray into a war zone. The imagery and language seems to replicate a Hollywoodian vision of war. "Then death winked at us and we almost didn't know it ... I carried with me a moment from Francis Ford Coppola's epic on the Vietnam War, Apocalypse Now ... An African-American is listening to the radio... as the Rolling Stones belt out I can't get no satisfaction." Or later still, "In May, Drass became our Sarajevo and the stretch of National Highway 1, our Sniper Alley." There are a dozen Sarajevos along the Line of Control and numerous more Sniper Alleys living like that for the past 30 years, places where you can get the same headline -- "Eight-year-old picking flowers gets her brains blown out by a Pakistani sniper". It is simply a question of being exposed to your own. But then it is difficult to blame the author, for an entire generation of India has grown up seeing war through the lens of a Hollywood movie or a CNN/BBC TV camera. So we had the bizarre spectacle of newspaper reporters writing from Delhi, during the Kargil conflict, that the country needed a white man to give the daily news briefings! The problems with the book all but end there, for one crops up throughout the book and to which we need only make a passing reference later. The main strength of the book, which will clearly differentiate this from the rest of the crop, is to hear the soldiers. Well almost, but that's about as good as it gets. It isn't simply the brave medal winners, but the equally brave combatants who don't get a thing, as also the anonymous hardworking supply and signal types who are rarely seen in even a footnote. The author makes them speak throughout the pages of the book, and they speak very well. Movingly well. What is not so moving is the castigation of only the local brigade and division commanders for the intrusion by the Pakistan Army and the confusion that prevailed. The higher military leadership escapes all responsibility for this war. That is simply untrue and unfair. But then for that we will have to wait for someone at Army Headquarters to write a book about what it was like during Kargil. NEW RELEASES Zoji La Autobiographical fairy tale in which social observation makes up for purple prose By Madhu Jain ANCIENT PROMISES It's a Cinderella deferred kind of tale. An arranged marriage and a child intervene before the heroine (Janaki) is finally whisked away by first-and-only-love Prince Charming to that happy ending that signs off most fairy tales and, yes, the usual Mills and Boon candyfloss fare. Fortunately, it's also much more. Jaishree Misra has a sharp ear -- recording the cadences and cattiness of the conversations of her deliciously delineated and often quite nasty characters who inhabit the little world she has created in Valapadu, a fictional town in the backwaters of Kerala. The women, funnily enough, call to mind Cinderella's awful sisters and stepmother, who in this novel is the cold and haughty mother-in-law. The mother-in-law of all mothers-in-law. Misra's debut novel has all the mush and melodrama of the kind of fiction that makes women's magazines thick and is the stuff of a million daydreams: the first kiss, stolen moments, adolescent awakenings, the nightmare of the nuptial bed with a stranger for a husband, a child with disabilities. And at times, the kind of purplish prose best reserved for Valentine's Day cards. Her plot is shaky and has coincidences you usually find in masala movies. However, the author, a Malayalee who has obviously spent her growing-up years in the north, paints a fascinating picture of the social landscape of Kerala, with its upwardly mobile business community and its static traditional core. The dynamics of a conservative joint family are bound to be interesting. All the more so since the point of view from which the story is told is simultaneously of an insider and an outsider: both the protagonist and the author, though Malayalee, are strangers looking in. And the north-south equation gets a different twist: Malayalee girls from Delhi are decidedly bad marriage material. There are many "southy-northy battles" as she puts it. The author has a nice turn of phrase and quite an eye for images. Consider her description of jackfruits: "How like sad fat babies the dumpy, jackfruits looked, clinging helplessly to matronly tree trunks." But what gives the novel its frisson is the fact that, as Misra adds in her note at the end, it's a case of art imitating life. Her life and a profile in courage.
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In
the initial chapters there is a great reluctance, even a difficulty, to
like this book, but by the end of it, it is difficult not to like it. This
book is different, it is even a bit strange. And there are many reasons,
cultural or political, for its oddity. They do not, however, detract from
the fact that at the end of the day Despatches from Kargil leaves the
reader satisfied. But it is the cultural baggage of the initial chapters
that it is bit of a chore, even grating sometimes.