Chronicle of a Week and a Half

Reading, Writing and Teaching

Last week in my postcolonial lit. class, I once again taught Noor Naga’s novel If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English. This was my second time teaching it. When I taught it last, I had also chosen it among my favorite books of 2022. (Each writer had been asked to recommend only one book but I recommended two—because my friend and colleague Hua Hsu had just published his wonderful memoir Stay True, not that it needed any spotting because Hua went on to snatch the Pulitzer in one quick fluid movement.) I enjoyed discussing the book with my students last week. But I need to tell you that after my recommendation came out in Bookforum, a friend in New York literary world told me that a few foreign publishers had passed on Naga’s novel because the conceit in the book’s concluding section (see my note in Bookforum above) had been a turn-off, interfering with their sense of realistic or authentic fiction. Shame on them! The novel needs to be read in its entirety, including the final workshop section, because Naga’s structural innovation raises the level of her fiction and makes us examine the prejudices through which any book about the East is read in the West.

Outside the classroom, just this past weekend, I led a virtual workshop for A Public Space on the role of structure in our narratives. This coming week is Rachel Aviv week in my journalism class, and in my postcolonial lit. class we are reading Zadie Smith’s fiction and an essay. And starting tomorrow, so help me God and Modiji, I’ll begin work on writing a short piece that I will read at an event at Performance Space New York on March 3. See below and write here to reserve a free ticket.

About ten days ago, I had the pleasure of having a chat with Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari from his home in Areekode in Kerala. Saharu’s debut novel Chronicle of an Hour and a Half has garnered prizes and a lot of praise; I had met Saharu during my time at Wayanad but I hadn’t read his book yet. Recently I got the chance to read the book on a Metro North train-ride—I found the slim novel fast-paced and riveting—and decided to call Saharu. I had long wondered what it would be like to use Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold as a model for a story set in India—and I told Saharu that he had succeeded very well in providing me an answer. But here was the first suprise of our conversation. Saharu told me that he hasn’t read Marquez’s novel. His inspiration had come from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. As soon as I heard that, I saw Saharu’s point immediately (even though I could see how, in an odd and interesting way, my own interpretation also remained valid). With an autodidact’s voracious interest, Saharu has devoured a lot of literature and in his search for relevance found his lodestars. One of them is Don DeLillo. Chronicle of a Hour and a Half is an account of a lynching that takes place in a small village in Kerala after messages that are spread on WhatsApp incite a murderous mob. This narrative arc takes its inspiration from DeLillo’s insight that with the advances in technology our fear becomes more primitive—and also the line from Mao II that Saharu has chosen as one of the epigraphs for his novel: “The future belongs to crowds.”

Saharu’s hometown, Areekode, where he has lived most his life, is located in the Mallapuram district of Kerala. He told me that across the paddy fields near his home, where now areca-nut palms have been planted, is the school where he studied as a boy. His mother, when she was nineteen, found a job as an aanganwadi worker and that has remained her lifelong profession. Saharu’s father, who died in 2022, worked a variety of jobs after dropping out of school, including working as a stevedore and then dabbling in local politics. For young Saharu, school meant sports; by his own admission, he was a poor student. Did he know then that he might one day become a writer? “No,” Saharu said, and added, “When you are from the lower class, you don’t have the aspirations of the middle class.” There was no sense of a future, or of a career. He said, “I didn’t understand the world; it came to me much later.”

Although his academic record was lacking, Saharu got admission at Aligarh Muslim University and, after another undistinguished run as a student there, he got admitted to JNU in Delhi. At both institutions he got help in finding admission (and even in acquiring a scholarship, however erratic) because he belongs to a backward caste. Did he learn much at Aligarh? Saharu answered that he hadn’t but that the place helped him shed religion. Even earlier, he was suspicious of people because back in his village he had seen that pedophilia had been common and the perpetrators of such crimes included those personages who spouted religious niceties. In such statements, I felt Saharu was being direct and honest. If you have followed the news in India in recent years, you know that in all the lynchings that have taken place, the victims are primarily Muslims and the perpetrators are Hindus. But in Saharu’s novel, both the victim and the murderers are Muslims. This is partly because he is not looking at the world so much through an ideological lens. He was simply responding imaginatively to an incident in a town about fifteen kilometers away from his home where a man was lynched by fellow Muslims—the mob acting as the morality police—over allegations about having an affair with a married man.

And JNU? Saharu blew smoke from his cigarette, and laughing, said that he had had sex. He explained that until he arrived on the campus in Delhi, he hadn’t even shaken a girl’s hand. But soon, he met a young woman who was a fellow student. The two of them entered into a relationship. Saharu’s girlfriend would send him a list of thirty or forty words that she then expected him to employ in the letters that he wrote to her. As a result of this new friendship, Saharu also acquired English. This period was one of massive transformation. At first, Saharu said, he hadn’t even known what words like “I miss you” meant (or what his girlfriend was asking when she wanted to know if he found her “irresistible”) but soon began reading the books she gave him. One of these was Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Saharu told me, “I by-hearted certain quotations.”

I had earlier joked that I had learned the word “incruent” from Saharu’s book. (See p. 192.) Saharu uses unusual words like these; these are not words in common usage and perhaps reflect his self-taught interest in language. The reason I’m mentioning this is because as I talked to Saharu I got a lively sense of what has always appeared attractive to me about provincial Indian identities: you can be growing up in the hinterland, and you have might even be burdered with an upbringing in straitened circumstances, but due to a mix of strange and surprising possibilities, you end up reading Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and William Faulkner. You become a prize-winning writer.

Don DeLillo is Saharu’s hero. Saharu also likes poets, especially Wallace Stevens. He brandished a stolen library copy of Stevens’ Collected Poems. While we were discussing poetry, he began to recite from memory a poem titled “Corsons Inlet” by A.R. Ammons. Again the use of that lovely verb, “by-hearting.” Saharu said, “By-hearting was a major pre-occupation.” Sitting in his home in Mallapuram, Saharu was speaking without exaggerated drama of his annual reading of Shakespeare’s plays. And his reading of Borges and also the Bible. Next to his head on the bookshelf was a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. He re-reads the books he likes; he cited a number, an unbelievable figure, about the number of times he has re-read DeLillo’s Underworld. I told Saharu that I was full of admiration for all the knowledge he has accumulated. Saharu had told me that his time at JNU had been a rare time of “exposure to the world.” He also said, “I haven’t experienced the world outside of my home village.” When he mentioned the writers he has read over the years, Saharu said, “I live in literature.”