In Which My Heart Fluttered For Brilliance

     As I have mentioned in a previous post, I have taking to reading at a faster pace than is usual for me. Soon after Manto's collected short stories (You can find a review here) I picked up Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. I was acquainted with his work through a few short stories, American Gods and mostly, his blog and tweets and facebook posts. With Anansi Boys, I have truly, madly and fallen in much deep love with him and his work.
     Anansi Boys is the story of what happens when God dies and his sons are left behind. Anansi here being the god, it is left to Fat Charlie, his clumsy, very un-godly son, to reclaim the godliness and retain it for his father. Gaiman's biggest strength is the ability to compress realities and philosophies in a paragraph or two, packaged in goofy characters and gentle, embarassing yet a breeze-of-a-read humour.
    Gaiman's worlds start at the skies of heavens and dissolves into a friendly neighbourhood with one step, in his stories magic comes alive and it all makes perfect sense. He thinks like no one else, and that is a rarity with so many people and so many writers doing the rounds.
     So, excuse my fangirl gushing - Anansi dies and Fat Charlie, who has never had the best relationship with his colorful, swag of a father, finds out he is a god himself but the god-like part of him went to his brother, who was at some point a part of him. It all begins at his father's funeral where he meets his childhood neighbour Mrs. Higgler and she tells him to contact his brother, which he does.
     This brother turns out to have every bit of a magical persona that he lacks - he can get people to believe anything, trick his way in and out of life with equal parts luck and genetics. Spider, as he is called, makes life a living hell for our Charlie and Charlie asks Mrs. Higgler to make him go away, who in turn asks Mrs. Dunwiddy (think Old Nan from ASOIAF), who sends Charlie to the beginning of the world where he meets half-humans and half-gods and all of them complete animals. What ensues is an epic chase, where Tiger (who was god before Anansi) sets to reclaim his title. Don't think too much, just go read the book. Meanwhile, here is something else that happens -
     Parallel to these events, runs the very evil trickery of Grahame Coats, Charlies employer who frames Charlie in an embezzlement scheme which has just been discovered and then does everything to escape to an island.  Like it happens in stories with Gods, everything must end well. Fat Charlie shrugs off his nickname and reclaims his God-genes, finds love and makes peace with his father.
     Ghosts and Gods, Earth and Above, Evil and Good, Mischief and Anger - Gaiman leaves no emotion unfelt as you move along. It is a fast, fast read. Things happens quickly and you want to read them faster than they happen. In the process, you will think about family and love, about inheritance and about fear of control and factors of influence. His books make you think, but unlike most scholarly works, they make you smile as you think. It is a rare combination, a must-have for every child. If nothing, it is a good story. A warm, fuzzy, bed-time story. The story that a god wrote. 

On reading Manto

     It is safe to say that as readers and the reading community goes, I am perhaps on the less- read side of the spectrum, having discovered the joy of books and words, of stories and lore, a little late in life.
     This results in one of these two things - I either shut up when others speak of books or (as I have been going through) am enveloped with such an overwhelming need and urgency to devour every word and story, every written sentence and every thought that was ever put on paper as a letter or book, as a poem or a newspaper scoop.
     As the only thing that seems to be happening with any sort of direction in life, I have been reading some varied and brilliant books.
      Up first was Saadat Hasan Manto's collected short stories, translated by Aatish Taseer including such beautiful, crisp and fused-with-soul stories as 'Blouse', 'Ten Rupees' and my personal favourite, 'For Freedom'.
     As an utopian believer of maintaining the originality of any work of art, I am skeptical as translations go. As a (ironically) not-a-fan-of-English-language, anything that's converted from such languages like Urdu, which have an innate quality of romanticism in every sound, I didn't believe English would do any justice to the senses that Manto's writing would have originally invoked in the readers. While I still cannot compare for myself, it is safe to say that reading the English version did transport me to rainy evenings, protesting crowds, chawls of Bombay as and when the author wished me to. As Aatish explains in his foreword, the crispness and pace of the original stories has not been compromised, neither has he tried to improve on the authors work. And the result is as good as it gets.
      What makes Manto's stories a joy are the raw emotions and sensation-inducing scenarios he sets up and their real-to-death characters. In 'Blouse', a boy discovers puberty and the confused joy he feels without really knowing whats happening, is wonderful. In 'Ten Rupees', a child prostitute, obsessed about driving around in cars and not knowing what is it that she does, and not caring either -  is depicted with a delicate lightness.
     The important thing is that each story has underlying themes like lost love or prostitution, yet at no point do they taken away the quality of 'life' that his characters and his stories possess. Yes, little girls as prostitutes are not probably terribly lucky, yet you cannot help but forget that and participate with Sarita as she feels the sea breeze caress her (like most of her customers might never), anticipate with her the next time she would sit in a car, and feel playful with her as she sings Hindi songs with the boundless energy of children.
   My personal favourite remains 'For Freedom', capturing the momentary passions of the freedom movement that fleeted in and out of action and consciousness and the eventual 'murder' of the human body and spirit. Laced with the theme of gurus and abstinence, it is a compelling read.
    In 'Khaled Mian' he writes about the desperation of a father who forsees his toddler's death, in 'My Name is Radha', we get a peek into the Film Industry of those times.
     All stories share an ability to make you smile and to teleport you into a world filled with poetry, romance, turmoil, anger, frustration, death and the range that makes human life, what it is.