It is a difficult task to review the writings of a man who does not write. Or at least, we do not know him to have written much and know him to have published close to nothing. The rare article one may find in an obscure journal from his younger days seems like a sudden thought published without his consent; perhaps a well-meaning elder. After that, there is nothing. We do know that for many years he taught at the University. His classes had very few students and the few who did attend don’t remember much. One may find his name in the acknowledgements or the rare footnote of an iconoclastic thinker whose teacher he was. It is possible that some of his thought was too unconventional to have even been considered as such. Or perhaps, having thought and felt a lot, he decided to ponder over mundane matters. Given the impossibility of recovering the quality of his silence, one can’t even comment on the sense of wisdom an occasional student might have perceived. There is no point asking the other teachers about his work or his views. They wouldn’t have a clue.
The University itself is in ruins. The rocks by the sloping road are livelier than the brick red buildings covered by trees. The wall has been lost to layers of posters about non-issues. I walk down a slender path between grass and drooping branches towards a little office he occupied for a few decades. Since the end of the era of learning, Universities have generally declined. This one shrunk long back, unable to bear the humiliation of old age. One suspects he came here because he foresaw the decay and, in it, sought refuge.
Among the few lines of poetry that he did write, in a blog we aren’t sure is his, some of the forest in the University compound is described. I have to walk in the deeper parts at dusk to find similarity between the reclining mist and his ideas. There is this part where he describes the wet leaves after rain, beneath his feet. Publishers found his work too scanty to be published.
The forest is uneven. Trees have been marked for execution. Too many of them. A review of his work, as I said, is difficult. What it will become, I fear, is an exercise of my imagination. But I must do with what I have. A few lines of poetry and half written essays I suspect he wrote. Attempts at an aphoristic style are evident; the desire to summarize in a few words the essence of an ambivalence. It is unclear whether he was happy with the summary. If he was, he didn’t seem to care. If he wasn’t, he never corrected it. As if he wrote to see his thoughts in alphabet, abandoning the exercise at the slightest hint of boredom. His mind was a labyrinth of inadequacy. Like the deeper parts of the forest, impinged here and there by an uncouth city.
He enjoyed the squalor of the city. His one short poem on laughter seems to suggest that. There is something special about large city laughter. It is an absurdly cynical laughter, defeated, amputated. It isn’t artificial. That would be a mistake. It is genuine, as genuine as the sense of solidity that drives us towards our deaths. Death is the one thing he seems to talk about a lot, in the little that he does speak, albeit with a suggestion of glee.
The other theme is love. Not the love which comes again and again in fiction. Since the end of the age of love (when did it ever begin), he seems to have decided to ponder its neglected absurdities. Like the few lines about a silent romance in a little garden. Love, it seems, lies in the everyday repetition of a couple uniting in a silent garden. It is their garden, we learn by the end of the rather brief poem, and they know every bit of it without really being aware of knowing.
Of his own life, we know too little to say anything with certainty. But we do know that there was no event so drastic as to produce this kind of morbidity. We suspect the morbidity is a bit of an aesthetic exercise, an experiment in reconciling with time and emptiness. Thus one may find an odd ebullience every now and then, which seems to signify a break from the experimentation. The essays on the falling of dusk are examples. It is surprising that he finds in the colors of the evening sky and the texture of the wild flowers a sense of beauty. One has been, until now, under the impression that he eschews sentimentality. He does. There are rivers underneath the thin ground, he cries. A cry not of fear or horror, but of wonder. The sense of glee again, as if death is the ringing call of the boatman, the vulgar humor of the rains.
I have spent the past few years thinking about his work and trying to find out more about him, to the point that what little I knew seems to be in question now. I wonder sometimes whether he existed at all and whether I could have imagined a pattern between disparate writings. But the persona is too powerful. They are, indeed, I have come to the conclusion, the work of one man. He is alive and does exist. He just does not wish to write too much or bother about distractions like publishing or socializing. It would, I have also arrived at the conclusion, be a mistake to consider him of the solitary scholar caste. He is, in all probability, not a scholar, and does occasionally seek out the company of the subaltern. He might have wished to become a solitary scholar but gave up, for the pleasure of crass company was too dear.
Near the old dargah on the other side of the city he used to visit a small eatery. In the evening smoke, the obese cook grills beef kababs and claims to remember him. I venture to go deeper. I sit there and talk to him, eat some of the food he makes. Hawkers scream by the night lights.
There was a woman, he tells me later, lightened by a hashish joint, somewhere in the older part of the city. We sit on a broken terrace, the sound of trucks and households in the distance. I walk for many hours through narrow lanes with restless goats asking for her.
She lives on the first floor and stares uncomprehendingly while I try to explain. The man is an ignored writer, I tell her, and I am writing about him. I don’t know any writers, she says. Why don’t you ask him? I confess I do not know where to find him. I don’t know where he lives or anyone in his family. And as I speak about him, or about the darkness that I have come to know as him, her expression shifts. She asks me if I would like tea. She didn’t know him as a writer, she says. They hardly exchanged information. She knew him as a teacher and was proud to serve him. Does she know where he is? Of course not, she smiles. It was a few years back. Is he a great writer, she asks later. He might be recognized as one someday, I reply. I know he won’t. He has written too little. He has insulted them.
I walk in the night on the city’s wide streets roughly towards the University. There is, in his writing, if one reads carefully, an urgent roughness beneath the polished surface. It is as if, born in the wrong era and wrong home, he acquired the surface as a duty, and retained a mutated core. But such a reading is inaccurate. For a man not particularly bothered about the idea of understanding, it forms a rather neat explanation. I keep returning to the soft lines of her face while reading his few poems on tenderness. How far apart we are.
Behind the University is a slum, where some faculty members inform me, he often went. They assume he was into acts of charity. I take the narrow path among the dry bushes towards the makeshift collection of tin shacks. No one knows him. Small boys in a corner get high and sick. I walk deeper into the slum, regenerated by construction laborers, as if walking the many pathways of his mind. I find nothing after hours. If he did walk here, his presence has been erased. This is no doubt what he would have approved of, a fast and ruthless mortality.
I visit the two or three blogs that still have scraps of his writing. I am unable to decide whether it is indeed incomplete. Sometimes, in my dreams, his few lines of writing form a wonderful completeness. At other times, they exhibit a painful inadequacy. The desolate wanderings of a playful nihilist. Where in those dense forests did he withdraw?
We are not in the position to provide references towards his work, there not being any. The few blogs mentioned we are as yet unsure of. His name could be any one of them. It is our belief, largely ignored by both the readers and the academia, that his work must be preserved and published. Criticisms of his work must be undertaken. Various disciplines may benefit from his insights. Where that might lead us, we are as yet unaware. But I suspect that it is the only way of finding him. It is the only way of rescuing him.
Of course, he wouldn't want that at all.
The University itself is in ruins. The rocks by the sloping road are livelier than the brick red buildings covered by trees. The wall has been lost to layers of posters about non-issues. I walk down a slender path between grass and drooping branches towards a little office he occupied for a few decades. Since the end of the era of learning, Universities have generally declined. This one shrunk long back, unable to bear the humiliation of old age. One suspects he came here because he foresaw the decay and, in it, sought refuge.
Among the few lines of poetry that he did write, in a blog we aren’t sure is his, some of the forest in the University compound is described. I have to walk in the deeper parts at dusk to find similarity between the reclining mist and his ideas. There is this part where he describes the wet leaves after rain, beneath his feet. Publishers found his work too scanty to be published.
The forest is uneven. Trees have been marked for execution. Too many of them. A review of his work, as I said, is difficult. What it will become, I fear, is an exercise of my imagination. But I must do with what I have. A few lines of poetry and half written essays I suspect he wrote. Attempts at an aphoristic style are evident; the desire to summarize in a few words the essence of an ambivalence. It is unclear whether he was happy with the summary. If he was, he didn’t seem to care. If he wasn’t, he never corrected it. As if he wrote to see his thoughts in alphabet, abandoning the exercise at the slightest hint of boredom. His mind was a labyrinth of inadequacy. Like the deeper parts of the forest, impinged here and there by an uncouth city.
He enjoyed the squalor of the city. His one short poem on laughter seems to suggest that. There is something special about large city laughter. It is an absurdly cynical laughter, defeated, amputated. It isn’t artificial. That would be a mistake. It is genuine, as genuine as the sense of solidity that drives us towards our deaths. Death is the one thing he seems to talk about a lot, in the little that he does speak, albeit with a suggestion of glee.
The other theme is love. Not the love which comes again and again in fiction. Since the end of the age of love (when did it ever begin), he seems to have decided to ponder its neglected absurdities. Like the few lines about a silent romance in a little garden. Love, it seems, lies in the everyday repetition of a couple uniting in a silent garden. It is their garden, we learn by the end of the rather brief poem, and they know every bit of it without really being aware of knowing.
Of his own life, we know too little to say anything with certainty. But we do know that there was no event so drastic as to produce this kind of morbidity. We suspect the morbidity is a bit of an aesthetic exercise, an experiment in reconciling with time and emptiness. Thus one may find an odd ebullience every now and then, which seems to signify a break from the experimentation. The essays on the falling of dusk are examples. It is surprising that he finds in the colors of the evening sky and the texture of the wild flowers a sense of beauty. One has been, until now, under the impression that he eschews sentimentality. He does. There are rivers underneath the thin ground, he cries. A cry not of fear or horror, but of wonder. The sense of glee again, as if death is the ringing call of the boatman, the vulgar humor of the rains.
I have spent the past few years thinking about his work and trying to find out more about him, to the point that what little I knew seems to be in question now. I wonder sometimes whether he existed at all and whether I could have imagined a pattern between disparate writings. But the persona is too powerful. They are, indeed, I have come to the conclusion, the work of one man. He is alive and does exist. He just does not wish to write too much or bother about distractions like publishing or socializing. It would, I have also arrived at the conclusion, be a mistake to consider him of the solitary scholar caste. He is, in all probability, not a scholar, and does occasionally seek out the company of the subaltern. He might have wished to become a solitary scholar but gave up, for the pleasure of crass company was too dear.
Near the old dargah on the other side of the city he used to visit a small eatery. In the evening smoke, the obese cook grills beef kababs and claims to remember him. I venture to go deeper. I sit there and talk to him, eat some of the food he makes. Hawkers scream by the night lights.
There was a woman, he tells me later, lightened by a hashish joint, somewhere in the older part of the city. We sit on a broken terrace, the sound of trucks and households in the distance. I walk for many hours through narrow lanes with restless goats asking for her.
She lives on the first floor and stares uncomprehendingly while I try to explain. The man is an ignored writer, I tell her, and I am writing about him. I don’t know any writers, she says. Why don’t you ask him? I confess I do not know where to find him. I don’t know where he lives or anyone in his family. And as I speak about him, or about the darkness that I have come to know as him, her expression shifts. She asks me if I would like tea. She didn’t know him as a writer, she says. They hardly exchanged information. She knew him as a teacher and was proud to serve him. Does she know where he is? Of course not, she smiles. It was a few years back. Is he a great writer, she asks later. He might be recognized as one someday, I reply. I know he won’t. He has written too little. He has insulted them.
I walk in the night on the city’s wide streets roughly towards the University. There is, in his writing, if one reads carefully, an urgent roughness beneath the polished surface. It is as if, born in the wrong era and wrong home, he acquired the surface as a duty, and retained a mutated core. But such a reading is inaccurate. For a man not particularly bothered about the idea of understanding, it forms a rather neat explanation. I keep returning to the soft lines of her face while reading his few poems on tenderness. How far apart we are.
Behind the University is a slum, where some faculty members inform me, he often went. They assume he was into acts of charity. I take the narrow path among the dry bushes towards the makeshift collection of tin shacks. No one knows him. Small boys in a corner get high and sick. I walk deeper into the slum, regenerated by construction laborers, as if walking the many pathways of his mind. I find nothing after hours. If he did walk here, his presence has been erased. This is no doubt what he would have approved of, a fast and ruthless mortality.
I visit the two or three blogs that still have scraps of his writing. I am unable to decide whether it is indeed incomplete. Sometimes, in my dreams, his few lines of writing form a wonderful completeness. At other times, they exhibit a painful inadequacy. The desolate wanderings of a playful nihilist. Where in those dense forests did he withdraw?
We are not in the position to provide references towards his work, there not being any. The few blogs mentioned we are as yet unsure of. His name could be any one of them. It is our belief, largely ignored by both the readers and the academia, that his work must be preserved and published. Criticisms of his work must be undertaken. Various disciplines may benefit from his insights. Where that might lead us, we are as yet unaware. But I suspect that it is the only way of finding him. It is the only way of rescuing him.
Of course, he wouldn't want that at all.
