Vasudhendra
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Vasudhendra
Arul Mani , Man about town “India Today” 19/12/2016
The story of Vasudhendra's arrival as a writer may offer the curious reader a way of unpacking the familiar narrative of a changing Bangalore. Drawn to Karnataka's capital like many other engineers by the centripetal suck of the IT boom, Vasudhendra chose unusually, after professional success, to return to writing in his mother tongue, and to live the fantasy of retiring young by setting up a publishing house, Chanda Pustaka, to help aspiring writers. He has mentioned being drawn to writing while in involuntary, job-driven exile in England, as a result of evenings devoted to World Cinema. He is also known to have dedicated at least one of his books to Bangalore's infamous traffic-for the steady luxury of writing time it afforded him while he was chauffeured between home and work at variously indecent hours.
And there is the story of his coming out. In an interview at the back of this volume, the writer talks of the great trepidation with which he sent Kaggantu (the story where he introduced Mohanaswamy in 2009) to a literary magazine under an assumed name. The response emboldened him to reveal that he was the author and that Mohanaswamy's gayness was a version of his own life. He now describes himself as a creative activist, and devotes some part of his time to counselling people who write in with tentative questions drawn from the recognitions they have made while reading his stories.
I finished the book in about three hours of having received it and promptly began a rereading. The two other people who I knew were reading this volume had similar experiences to report. This is perhaps some small testimony to Vasudhendra's gift for being able to report the complications of personal life in words that are equal to the task. In putting together stories written at different times, the author has fashioned a story-cycle that has the emotional traction of a novel while sustaining multiple trajectories in terms of ideas and experiences.
Kaggantu, translated here as The Gordian Knot, opens the volume and offers us the picture of a twenty-something Mohanaswamy in silent reverie before an idol of Krishna while a forgotten handful of fresh bhindi lies strewn across the kitchen floor. He has just found out that Karthik, the man he lives with, has been quietly finalising marriage plans. We meet Mohanaswamy several times in the nine other stories, albeit at different moments of self-knowledge. In Bicycle Riding, he is a young man studying engineering driven to distraction by the disastrous conclusion to a moment of attraction. He decides that he is sick and that the cure must begin in his learning to ride a bicycle, but that leads to an unexpected discovery, in an abandoned Hampi temple. In Kashiveera, he must stand up to a blackmailer, and when he is finally able to, he finds himself banished from his favourite restaurant. We also meet an older Mohanaswamy doing things-these range from a bewildering transaction with an apartment builder and climbing Mt Kilimanjaro, to living the Grindr life, and discovering, quite ironically, that monogamy is not for him. When the author does set Mohanaswamy aside, it is to travel into pasts separate from this protagonist's life to draw our attention to the names and the consequences that desiring differently may have had.
These stories do not always end happily, and indeed, they often end in defeat. And yet these characters demonstrate that they are more than the sum of their defeats. The author often brings a sly good humour to the manner in which these defeats are devised. Many of the stories seem to approach the prescribed, acceptable, melodramatic conclusions for impossible desire-madness, death and dissolution-before veering away into small-scale restitutions of the everyday and the routine. We may sometimes miss the small triumphs that these may be.
This willingness to mess with a heteronormative template, to tip it over and see what might happen, is an act of courage. If gayness was once the love that dared not speak its name, it is perhaps twice that in India since right-wing opinion has devised a foreign origin for such love. Vasudhendra's courage is in going beyond the name to finding for it an undeniably local habitation. In his world, men may find each other while standing in line at temples.
The author brings to writing a kind of musical gift, an ability to combine and overlay completely different tones. His fiction thus extends the oppositional yet engaging register that the Kannada writer Triveni used to make visible the inner life of her women characters. The reader may also recognise in the often deadpan depiction of tortured masculine anxiety something reminiscent of R.K. Narayan. Fiction with an activist ambition can often subside into a monotone, but that is a trap Vasudhendra never falls into.
There are some quarrels that I must nevertheless pick. The author seems to commit to a kind of genetic determinism when it comes to talking of gayness. The stories resolve into neat binaries of gayness such as tops and bottoms. There are indeed characters who seem to operate in a spectrum of desire, loving both men and women, but these come across as mysterious aberrations. He goes as far as including a transgender character or two, but these inclusions come off as cursory. Nobody in this world is dyke, or simply queer. The idea of desire itself as a shifting, unstable thing seems anathema here.
I'm also curious about why the city is an absence - Cubbon Park and all the other melting pots of class and desire in Bangalore simply don't figure while Malleswaram and Vijayanagar get a mere name-check. This is odd only because of the strong sense of location that the author brings to writing of the hinterl and beyond the city.
We are told that Mohanaswamy loves his job, but all we see of this are random mentions of PowerPoint presentations, and the odd business trip. These absences result in making Mohanaswamy an oddly-disconnected man. He has no life with his friends, except for one who delights in inviting him home to ply him with home food. He flies home straighter than an arrow otherwise. His conversations with women happen exclusively within a family circle. And thus we must wonder if he has no interests beyond getting laid. Perhaps the fair thing to do is to see all this as an accurate portrait of friable, closeted upper-caste masculinity.
This edition seems to have been hurried into print, going by the dozen or so editing lapses. Rashmi Terdal's translation captures some of the things that move and work in the original, but every now and then she turns out sentences that sound like she tripped and fell into a thesaurus. Thus we have WTF gems such as "Mohanaswamy was unsure as to how to respond to abstruse story", and how he didn't want to "present himself as a lachrymose to Rajesh, a total stranger". American turns of phrase such as 'cycling is not rocket science' and somebody departing 'like a bat out of hell' turn up now and then in unexpected fashion. She also chooses to order the stories by date of publication rather than in the sequence in which the author arranged them in the original. A poem that he planted bang in the middle is now exiled to the post-script. No explanation is provided for these alterations.
Reader, if you don't have any Kannada, you should go ahead and buy this anyway. If you do, read the original.
