dear all,
enclosed is the authors intro text on the launch of the book Trickster
City : Writings from the belly of a metropolis. (Penguin, 2010). The
authors shared their thoughts on writing and the city during the
launch of the book. Here is the english translation.
happy reading.
warmly
jeebesh
----------------------------------------------------------------
Translation of the writers' text
Launch of Trickster City
12th February 2010
Delhi.
Azra Tabassum:
They say in Delhi, there are no red lights; there are only the hands
of strangers.
We, along with all our co-writers of Trickster City, who are among the
audience, welcome you all. We would like to thank Ankur and Sarai,
along with whom we have made, through Cybermohalla, a generative
space. A space where we pose and think through our most challenging
questions. We thank all our co-travellers, who argued and debated with
us, challenged us further as we wrote and questioned.
Lakhmi Kohli:
We made Cybermohalla a space where unfinished stories may find a
narration.
We know that fearless speech requires fearless listening.
Over the years, we have realised, that people's capacity to surprise
each other is inexhaustible.
Suraj Rai:
To be continuously surprised by another can evoke fear. To us it
presented an ocean of possibilities. Stories became the oars with
which we navigated this vast ocean.
But the questions one might ask now are –
How can one know another's desire to surprise?
How can one become aware of the possibilities in someone?
Neelofar:
What is "to surprise"?
Does surprise excite? Or is it that by being surprised we re-animate
ourselves?
Is being surprised a self-absorbing game? Or does it make us tug anew
at the weave of our relationships?
Jaanu Nagar:
It must be said that these two words – "surprise" and "capacity" – are
vital for understanding any environment or context, and to find ones
own connection with it.
To surprise, to think the intangibles in life and in force of life,
and ones capacity to search new directions within them – these
indicate the quality of ones life.
Love Anand:
We live in the city. In living in it, we affirm its multifareous
forms, and yet we find ourselves incomplete within it. It is in this
incompleteness that the desire to search begins. As we search, some
people appear around us as missing persons.
Azra:
Everyone renews within them their stubbornness to live. We recognise
it as an intellectual process, as something that expands and deepens
with time.
When we say 'missing', we are not talking about a lack. The 'missing'
is that which provides the impetus, the capacity to move from a known
threshold to multiple thresholds. We keep reaching out to those
thresholds which give us the high of weaving together new creations.
And this becomes part of our desires.
To recognise something as 'missing', is to open oneself up to
imagining and discovering oneself, new directions and ones co-
travellers.
Suraj:
We set out on this long journey of writing. We'd write about that
around us which perplexed us, and these perplexities we'd share with
each other.
But merely transcribing what one sees and hears – is that writing?
Chiselling ones writing through ones own experience, memories and
perspectives, we encountered questions. To move ahead without thinking
these questions through was impossible. And so we asked ourselves:
Can every day be accounted for?
Can every moment be recalled and narrated?
Does every passing moment get absorbed in our past?
Every space is somewhat like a story. A story told over many pages.
And there are those pages too, which get folded at the edges, and so,
when they are turned, they either wrap and silence many pages, or open
out several new pages. Time is revealed, or gets concealed in this
way. And along with it, many people too.
This is the threshold at which we realised that – to write is to keep
active a sense of the force of life. This sense is for the writer, for
the one who is being written about, and also for the thoughts and
visions that unfold when one writes.
[Neelofar reads a text]
A cot on the road divider, and on the cot sat she... There is a pair
of thick glasses on her eyes, because of which one of her eyes looks
big. Her black hair are curly. Her hijaab in her hands, she is staring
unblinkingly at the bald patch of land before her. Her experienced
heart knows a fountain will powerfully sprout out from this land. The
sand on this hillock will soon be moist; the garbage will turn to
gold. This place will breathe and make space within itself for many
lives to breathe within it...
A strong gust of wind. It starts slowly, but then gathers velocty...
The sand doesn't want to stir. The wind wants to draw it towards
itself, seduce it with the promise of flight. How long can dust on the
ground refuse the promise of this intoxication? Soon it let itself be
carried away. And she? She sits, her eyes smarting... Each time she
opens her eyes, she sees things have changed. Is it her mind, or is
the world spinning? How is this place is changing the way it is?
The dust is slowly settling. One can see, the bald patch of land is
generating something. Have these bodies been carved out of its own
mud? Or have they been carried by the wind, brought to rest here? All
the bodies are in different postures. Postures that don't make it seem
as if this place were new for them. It seems as if these bodies know
this space, know the waves, the crests and troughs that constitute
this place.
[Love reads a text]
It is dark in the lane now. The bottle is empty. This roof is on the
seventh floor. Like countless nights that have passed, and all those
nights still to come, it begins from his feet. "Tha-Tha-Thaiyya..."
Till his hips gyrate to a rhythm that he alone knows. Then the tips of
his body – his head, his fingers – stir. His torso sways. Every pore
of his body secretes a music, each cell that makes him stirs. He
begins to dance.
He can’t piece together how things changed for him. But he knows
something inside him was cast away, was slowly pushed aside and locked
out by his surroundings. The climb up the forty steps to the roof on
the seventh floor was a daily passage to solitude, so he could be
alone with what was precious to him.
There was a time when the roof was not all he had.
The courtyard was open to the sky. It was past midnight, and there
was no sign of sleep in his eyes. The drum beat loudly. Voices sang.
Among these, another voice – but it didn't sound like someone was
singing; it sounded like a beast letting out a wail. It was his voice.
Jaanu:
Confronting us, a poet in our neighbourhood said to us, "Come to me
when you have a question that goes beyond my relationships and world
of work." This critique compelled us to start a new dialogue with our
own self.
We asked ourselves: How do we think about a space which is only
beginning to get formed, where relationships and the world of work are
still tenuous, and where wandering and weaving are happening together,
challenging each other? To be introduced to a person, and to be
introduced to a place – how are these different? Does a person become
what he does because of a place? Or does a place become what it does
because of the people in it? Perhaps both. Perhaps place and people
keep forming each other and clashing with each other.
[Neelofar and Love read]
Recognising the pitch of the whistle, a flock of pigeons turned
sharply in its flight, waylaying pigeons from a neighbouring flock
startled by this sudden intersection. The boy continued to whistle,
guiding his pigeons. He scattered grain on the roof on which he stood.
Their wings flapping furiously, the pigeons alighted on the roof. The
boy counted them while they pecked lustily at the grains. Each time he
spotted a pigeon from another flock amidst his own, he grabbed it and
pushed it into a cage. Then he set his own pigeons free to fly once
again in the sky.
A woman appeared at the window of her first floor. "I am roaming far
more in my dreams than I can possibly roam in Sawda-Ghevra," she said.
"Just recently, I was at the shrine of Lattu Shah Baba. There is so
much spiritual depth and quietness there. I could see myself sitting
by the shrine, offering namaz, seeking the saint's benevolence. I saw,
Babaji is asking me about the good and the bad in my life, and I am
answering him. Then I am going towards the shrine of Haji Ali—angels
are carrying me to it. I am dressed in white clothes; I am flying.
Suddenly I see, the fridge has caught fire."
The man with the drums played on his drum and walked through J-block,
his eyes scanning his surroundings. He paid no attention to the
hullabaloo around him. He looked past it, to some point far away. But
whenever he'd reach that point, it was as if by virtue of having
reached it, his relation with it would end. His eyes would always be
set ahead of him. Up ahead, some goats were nuzzling around in a sack,
trying to chew on the cauliflowers in it. Till he was far from them,
he kept looking at them; but when the man with the drums reached them,
he removed his gaze from them and walked on, as if his destination lay
further ahead. Did he even have a destination? He didn't halt
anywhere, but only kept walking. When my niece was much younger, why
did my mother scare her by saying, "Don't fuss, or the dhol wala will
take you away"? She used to say the same thing to me, and possibly
both my elder sisters too were kept in check by evoking this same
figure. A drummer beats his drums, and amid the crowd that gathers
around him because of this noise that he produces, his eyes lose their
focus. Drawn by the sound, the crowd follows him, but maintains a
distance. Weaving a web of glances around him, the drummer disappeared
into K-block.
Azra:
Stories never complete themselves. They always remain unfinished, and
that's their strength. This is what keeps alive an anticipation in
listening, and surprises the story teller.
My love for writing grew when I realised that the words that we hear
around us, or which we say ourselves in our everyday, are not only
part of language, but each word has an expansive world of its own. A
shadow accompanies every word. A word is that tool which opens out the
possibilities for creativity. These possibilities are infinite.
When I realised this, I found myself inextricably bound to the shadows
cast by different words. I actively began to seek them around me, and
explore them in my home and among all my companions.
When we find ourselves thinking, “I now understand this place”, or “I
understand this person completely”, it means we have stopped thinking,
ended our curiosity about things.
"I have not understood". When one says this, s/he opens out new ways
of listening and speaking. And that's when we begin to excavate again
that which we thought we had already found and we had.
"What is my own capacity, creativity, possibility?" This is where our
journey began, but soon our words changed. Or perhaps I should say,
the words that circulate between us may still be the same, but over
time, their edge and their velocity keep changing.
Suraj:
The question is not only – "What are we giving to a context?" But
equally important is the question – "What have we brought with us to
that context?"
Questions change. How questions are formulated, changes. The relation
of the teller and the listener to words and stories also changes.
“Capacity, creativity and possibility” make this flight and scaling
new heights possible.
But "capacity, creativity and possibility" can only breathe when they
are given flight, outside ones own self. Otherwise they remain,
merely, as ones experience or story.
Azra:
Is there anything outside experience and stories?
I was finding it difficult to write beyond experience and story. My co-
travellers realised this when they saw my pen had dried up. Self-love
allows inner desires to flower, take flight. But it also reduces ones
capacity to spread ones arms and take in other lives.
How does one discern what it is that one is weaving;
which possibilities we are nurturing;
which possibilities we want to be in dialogue with?
How will we know if we are stuck merely in repetition?
How will we know if we have turned ourselves merely into archives from
which we keep producing and presenting things before others?
After all, that's not what we want to do!
We tussled with this difficulty and searched resources so we may
emerge out of our own drying up.
[Love and Neelofar – dialogue]
Love: Lets marry tomorrow?
Neelofar: Why? What good will that do?
Love: You'll start living in my house.
Neelofar: Then?
Love: We will live together.
Neelofar: Then?
Love: Those things will happen, which happen between husband and wife.
We will have children. They'll call you 'ma' and me 'dad'.
Neelofar: Then?
Love: Don't you know?
Neelofar: What's new in this? Isn't something new possible? All this
has already happened in the world, hasn't it?
Love: By saying this you have equated my love with everyone's love.
What is it that you want?
Neelofar: Something which really is different.
Love: I can't think of my life without you!
Neelofar: Really? And what if we don't end up together?
Love: I will die then!
Neelofar: That means there never was any love between us.
Love: Why! Why do you think that? I love you a lot. You don't see this
in what I say to you?
Neelofar: I used to live even before I met you. Yes, when I met you, I
felt this special feeling, and so I found my life even more beautiful
than before. To me, these feelings that you have given me will remain
with me even after you're not there, and they will ensure I don't feel
your absence. Our love has opened new paths for me in my life. If
these paths were to close after you are not with me, then what would
your love have given me!
Love: Do you love me at all?
Neelofar: To live is to be in movement. Love which gives you
opportunities of flight in life is love that will remain with you
always. Whether that love be of friendship or of relationships.
Love: What do you want? Why don't you just be explicit about this!
Neelofar: Along with you, I want the entire world. After all, how long
will we remain lost in one another?
Love: Yes, you're right. Go on, take the entire world. Take whatever
you want... I think, maybe you want to work.
Neelofar: No.
Love: Then what do you want?
Neelofar: My desire is to fill each day with colours, and this is the
desire I want to continue to fuel and live with in the time to come.
Azra:
Resources which made us emerge from ourselves, made us reach beyond
ourselves.
So we may find again our romance with our expressivity.
A search which took us beyond our own stories and experiences, into
the city, to search again a new language.
[Love reads a text]
Many sharp images came to mind as I sat down to write a review of
Godfather. But after an sms conversation about what I was thinking
with some friends, these images became blurred. As if the canvas on
which I was painting had been spoiled. Thinking about this spoiled
canvas, I wrote:
Three men herding forty goats crossed my path. One of the men pulled
a goat by its ear; the goat bleated loudly, resisted, and was dragged
along, helplessly. The remaining thirty-nine goats followed quietly in
line. The two men walking along them hit them with sticks
occasionally. I marvelled at how dragging one goat by its ear can
control an entire army of goats. The goat right in front can sense
it's going to be killed and so it struggles, refusing to move. And the
goats behind it follow quietly, afraid that if they don't, they will
get their ears pulled!
[Neelofar reads a text]
Watching Chris Marker's La Jette, I felt:
...All of us see dreams with our eyes closed, and when we open our
eyes, we try and think about those dreams. We search frames through
which these may enter our lives. What happens if no connection remains
between what we saw and what transpired? All of us nurture an inner
life within our selves. It lives on inspite of the conditions of life.
If this inner life – this internal life – were to be subtracted out of
our lives, all that will remain, merely, is the grey, visible, social
world.
Lakhmi:
Our emphasis on performative expression was not to veer away from
either the truth or the imaginary, but was a challenge we posed to
ourselves to encounter every place, each person as shape-shifting.
Some questions arise:
What is life? What is life force? What is to crack something open to
make it reveal itself? What is a mystery? What is truth? What is a
lie? What is imagination? Who are we? And who am I?
And then we return again to search resources.
[Love reads]
Though, it must be said, one doesn't need to wait too long in order to
find happiness. Just dream new dreams in your sleep at night, laugh
away the indignity you felt at work, and pocket all the tickets that
will lead you to happiness. These are tickets that can also be bought
in black. People line up, stand in queues for these tickets! Just that
they're a little scared of asking for them. Who is to say if some
official is standing nearby, in vigil, to declare them as criminals if
they were to ask for them. And then, everyone is wary too, of how much
they will be charged for these tickets in black!
[Neelofar reads]
Outside the cinema hall, their back against the wall, stand many
young men, countless dreams in their eyes. Eyes which are staring, now
at the cinema hall, now at the actors whose photographs adorn the
posters. Eyes with which they check hurriedly what the person standing
next to them is looking at, or trying to look at. Maybe they have just
come out after watching a show? And are still playing the character
they had seen on the big screen? Maybe someone who is without a job is
imagining he has found one? And someone is convinced he has now
finally found the way through which he can plant the seed of his love
in the heart of his beloved? Outside the cinema hall, every pair of
eyes is as if dreaming many dreams.
Dreams that are dreamt with open eyes can't be called strange dreams.
These aren't dreams dreamt while one sleeps, which can be brushed
aside after waking up. These are not daydreams, that they get left
aside, tucked away in ones mind alone. Many set out to fulfil these
dreams, to make them reach some kind of conclusion. That is why some
head out from home, a small bag packed with a change of clothes, and a
few rupees in their pockets. He disappears from his known world in
search of that other world. Or someone reaches a set where a shooting
is on, doing everything within his means to get a chance to show his
skills. And that, in front of someone who must have first come here to
be an actor himself, and is still in queue.
These young men hang around the cinema hall for hours, as if stuck to
its walls, waiting for that moment which will reveal to them if it is
possible, after all, for what they have seen to become reality. They
halt there, laze around, behold the walls, the posters, the public
entering the cinema hall, the viewers emerging from the cinema hall,
their friends and, if nothing else remains, themselves.
A police constable, a stick beating the floor, comes near them and
says, "What the hell are you doing here? Why are you standing here?
Just loitering? Or are you a ticket blacker? What do you keep doing
here? You're not standing here with the intention of picking someone's
pocket, are you? I've been watching you for a while now." These young
men who dream with their eyes open (these "pickpockets", "ticket
blackers" and who knows what else they are or might be called next) –
listen quietly, or they sometimes become gutsy and talk back. They
aren't about to produce any hafta, so the constable can beat down on
them a bit harder. For now, these young men will move away. But for
sure, they will be back again tomorrow.
Suraj:
Before us today is the question – what qualities of life can we etch
out in the zone between the state and the truth? These are the two
poles towards which arguments often veer. And the state always asks us
– what examples of "being alive" can you provide which can vouch for
the truth of what you say?
What are the circumstances about which we become without words? An
image emerges before us when we think about this question:
To embellish its truth, the state declares every person a citizen, and
every space a territory. It is difficult to make an estimation of what
and how many kinds of threads weave a person or a place. Because the
state searches for the extent of a thing; it is not concerned with
depth.
The state makes rules and regulations. Those who follow them are good
citizens, and those who do not, are traitors. Through what words does
someone who is in the grey zone between being a good citizen and a
traitor express her/himself?
Azra:
The state prepares its eyes in such a way that it will approve of us
only when we dawn on certain costumes. But in the time this eye takes
to blink, so many kinds of scenes – internal and external to us – open
themselves out. Scenes in which one is free, in which one dances,
makes others dance, runs, makes others run with him, where one is
sometimes a stranger, at other times a neighbour, sometimes on a
journey, and at other times a companion in another's travels.
Jaanu:
In the time between when a place breaks and is re-made, can be found
many kinds of life, many kinds of signs of life. But the city – the
same city that is made up of strangers, where strangers hold hands –
is also expert at pretending these signs of life don't exist.
Suraj:
There is a place called Ghevra. A new place in the city, which is
still being settled. Through this place we reached those questions
which are often uttered once and forgotten, or sentenced to that realm
in which they are answered in simplistic terms of behaviour, or in
black and white – immense pain or joy.
Places give shelter to different kinds of searches. To rest in these
places is not to get planted in them, but to find in oneself a deep
urge to embark on another flight. One often thinks people go to a
place to search how they may settle down in it. But actually, it is
after someone reaches a place that his search begins, is born in him.
This search may be of many kinds – search for a habitat, for a
gathering, for meeting others. That these desires emerge in every
person who comes to a place is not a co-incidence. Then what is it?
Many ways in which one can think about this question have to be found.
The important thing is that this is a realm that can't be called or
explained as "experience" or easily narrativised.
Jaanu:
Our book, Trickster City, begins its life in one part of the city. But
this does not mean the book is based on a partition. Every word on a
page breathes with life, and when things breathe, the desire to find
their own way of living is born in them.
Words fill a book with the breath of life. They can transform lives
into a life force. No, a book is not a magical realm, but it has its
ways of giving birth to worlds that are magical.
Azra:
There are many paths ahead. Open arms call out to us.
We thank you all, once again, for being with us today. We hope you
will read this book, and will want to continue this conversation with
us.
Thankyou
Trickster City: Writings from the belly of the metropolis by Azra
Tabassum el at (translated from Hindi) has been published by Penguin
India, 2010.
Trickster City is available at any bookstore across India and can also
be purchased online from
http://www.penguinbooksindia.com/category/Anthology/Trickster_City_9780670083329.aspx
It is possible to buy Trickster City from outside India. Write to:
customer.service[at]in.penguingroup[dot]com
To buy Trickster City from the US, go to:
http://www.indiaplaza.in/trickster-city-writings-from-belly-of-metropolis-us-shippingvarious/books/Tricksterr.htm
Read a review of the book and a conversation with the writers in
TimeOut Delhi at
http://www.timeoutdelhi.net/books/book_feature_details.asp?code=86
Read about Trickster in Tehelka here
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main44.asp?filename=hub130310slum_doggerel.asp
Trickster City in Mint
http://www.livemint.com/2010/03/05203751/Listen-to-this-Delhi.html?d=1
Read more about Trickster City at
http://www.sarai.net/practices/cybermohalla/public-dialogue/books/trickster-city
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