Teaching Carpentier's 'The Lost Steps' (Los Pasos Perdidos)

I recently did a lecture series with a group of MA-M.Phil-Ph.D students of English Literature at a university in Mumbai (Bombay) where Alejo Carpentier's 'The Lost Steps' has recently been introduced as part of contemporary World Literature. Since I was told that students know nothing about Latin America, I had to start from basics. So I did the first session as an introduction to Latin American literature and the second lecture dealt more directly with the novel. I thought I might as well share this with others who might be interested. 

Lecture I: An Invitation to Latin American Literature

<<… The eccentricity of Latin America can be defined as a European eccentricity: I mean, it is another way of being Western. A non-European way. Both inside and outside the European tradition, the Latin American can see the West as a totality and not with the fatally provincial vision of the Italian or the German or the French or the English… >> Octavio Paz, Vuelta, no. 117, 1986

• New World and the Old: Engravings of Great Voyages (Historia Americae) inspired by Columbus’ extravagant accounts of the “exotic”  lands bear testimony to European ideas about the New World (see image at the end). “Discovery” vs invention (America was never discovered, it was invented by European imagination). These images enfolded them within the mythological vision of a Europe still emerging from the Middle Ages. The fantastical images of America -- “where men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders” [i]  -- found unscrupulous acceptance in Europe over a long period spanning several centuries. The explorers and later the ‘conquistadores’ used the exhilarating fantasies of the chivalry romances to express the marvels of the New World in the attempt to come to terms with the diversity and difference of America.
• Three mechanical inventions had changed “the whole face and state of things” (as per Francis Bacon)-- printing, gunpowder and the magnet  -- which permitted literature, conquest and navigation and let the Renaissance spirit flourish.  Indeed it can be said that the discovery of the New World  released the Renaissance imagination itself.

• The New World had been, since the Renaissance, a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories, landscapes and unusual experiences. For Europe (and later on, Anglo-Saxon America) “Latin” America represented one of its deepest and recurring images of the Other.

• The term "Latin" America was coined by the French in their imperialist zeal during the 19^th century. They opposed Latin to Anglo America to claim for political gain a historical and linguistic kinship with the regions recently freed from Spanish domination. The name has stuck although clearly many of the cultures in the region have no connection with the Roman Empire.

• Columbus’ diaries: “discovery” [ii] of America in 1492 initiated a long chain of unfortunate, violent events. Columbus’ genocide in Latin America. Indian population came down in 40 years (since Columbus’ arrival) from 3 million to 60,000 (2% of population). The Chroniclers (mostly clergymen who were witnesses). Most Spanish officials argued that that the indigenous people’s work in the silver mines was the contribution they had to pay in exchange for the ‘gift’ of being evangelised (converted to Christianity). [Readings from Columbus’ diaries attached, with highlighted sections.]

• Encounter of races; Carpentier considered the “discovery” to be the most important watershed in history; Neruda’s ‘Canto General’: ..’antes de la peluca, habian los rios. Los rios arteriales.’ (Before the wig, there were the rivers. The arterial rivers.)

• Fiction writers like Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez plunder the colonial record for stories, characters and situations. Ref: Autumn of the Patriarch, p34.  Octavio Paz has written a massive literary biography of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the 17^th century Mexican poet-nun. Also explore the pre-Columbian roots of Latin America.

• Colonial rule thus represented a definitive cultural rupture. Alienating the New World Man from pre-Columbian Man. Latin America eventually became the site of a creative cultural symbiosis, immensely rich with the possibilities of cross-fertilization. Most thinkers from the nineteenth century down to our own time have located the cultural specificity of Latin America to the incongruous amalgam of the continent. (diary, pp 11, 12, 15)

• Crisis of identity and the search for forms of authenticity become abiding concerns; masks and labyrinths are recurring metaphors;  private search for meaning and authentic personal language conflated with a larger continental quest for identity. Neruda’s invocation of The Heights of Macchu Picchu or Cesar Vallejo’s lamentation in Trilce  (“...between my where and my when / this crippled coming of age of man” )[iii] are moments when personal anguish moves to a broader vision of a suffering humanity.

• Art, society and history have become profoundly interlinked. Individual artist’s private search for meaning epitomizes the society’s search for a new, amorphous self-definition. Every work of art has consequently implied a certain social ideal even if it chooses to represent a deliberately alternative reality.

• Ban on reading and publishing of the novel during the Inquisition; reading became a sinful adventure; novels like DQ reached the New World concealed in the false bottoms of wine barrels; Chronicles got fictionalised because the novel was prohibited. “Revenge of the novel” led to “novelisation of the whole of life” – a world reconstructed and subverted by fantasy (Mario Vargas Llosa) Ever since then, the European tradition of the realist novel never took hold in LA. The novel remained a misfit. First novel: The Itching Parrot (1816, Mexico).

• Civilisation vs Barbarism: The turbulent excitement of political life in nineteenth century Latin America stood in sharp contrast to the dullness of much of its literature. Major debate revolved around notions of civilization (represented by Europe) and barbarism (savagery as represented by the chaos of traditional society).

• Independence from colonial rule and the birth of new republics ushered into a new era:  no more shadowboxing between European fashion and LA reality

• Uruguyan José Enrique Rodó hoped that “the noble and winged part of the spirit” would eventually rule over gross sensuality (Ariel, 1900), others like the Cuban José Martí declared in a celebrated essay called Nuestra America (“Our America”, 1886) that the “barbarians” had an authenticity and spontaneity which would finally be more valuable to the continent than the borrowed fineries of the “civilized” European. [1]

• While the traditionalists endorsed a reworking of the clerical civilization of Catholic Spain suitably adapted to the new republics in their post-colonial era, the liberals turned to the values of the French Enlightenment with its primacy of reason and equality before the law.

• Archetypal landscape: pampas  (the Prairies) as a place of barbarism but also the crucible of national identity. The gaucho (inhabitant of the pampas) became the primary agent of this landscape. In several countries with strong indigenous traditions, the liberal Creoles laid the foundation of a neo-classical “americanismo”  disclaiming the heritage of Spain by evoking an ideal vision of the Indian past. (indigineous novel).  Thus in every country, there emerged an archetypal, authentic son-of-the-soil and by transforming that figure into an ambivalent national symbol, artists and intellectuals temporarily crystallized the problem of national identity.

• “Cold America of the North” vs “the warm America of Spanish origin”; Mexican revolution & the flowering of lit after indep (mask metaphor): p 144 of King
• Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of The West (1918) was received with great fanfare because it suggested to them that  Latin Americans may soon leave behind their sense of inferiority to Europe.[iv]
• 1920s mark the emergence of the modern novel. “Creative cannibalism” in Brazil; 20s-30s: Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias drew on pre-Columbian traditions in order to explore myths and realities of the people, Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges asserted a self-confident cosmopolitanism and emphasised form and coherence in writing, Cuban Alejo Carpentier defined and explored the ‘magical realism’ of LA. 1950s- the ‘boom’.
• Literature of the ‘boom’ (“Latin Freakshow”): a US marketing term implying vigorous promotion; describes the increased consumption of cultural production in the 1960s. A readership emerges, the author becomes a brand name, a mark of quality; writers become superstars: Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jose Donoso, Isabel Allende, Manuel Puig, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, etc. Cuban revolution of 1959 remains a key point of reference: battlelines were drawn with regard to those in favour of it and those against it.
• Use of the baroque and Faulkner’s influence in Latin America: p139, 140 (Carlos Fuentes interview): ‘the great novelist of defeat in a country premised on success, success, success, all the way, a country that never learnt anything from defeat’
• GGM: The collision between a largely matriarchal oral tradition and an aristocratic, patriarchal written tradition is one of the fascinating aspects. Most of his novels are written from a point in time when everything has already happened. Read the famous first paragraph of 100 years of Solitude (note its complex tense– a Faulknerian ‘present’-ation of time - and a sentence from Autumn of the Patriarch). This type of narrative structure relates to the central issue of memory, personal and social, written and oral. The contagion of amnesia, in 100 years, arose from the local Indians, an oral community, whereas the cure is brought by Melquiades, the writing man.

• Definitions: MAGIC REALISM
It’s a mode, not a genre. The unreal happens as a part of reality, quite logically. It possesses often an allegorical quality as well as a sense of time and space contrary to normal perceptions.
Magical realism is a term used to capture the living contradictions of societies in the active process of underdevelopment and neocolonialism  although it originated in Weimar Germany where it referred to the mystery in the mundane. Alejo Carpentier used the term as "our marvellous American reality" in the '50s. "The fiesta of metaphors, of allegory, of symbols is not a carnival of subjectivity; it is the attempt at a rational analysis of a deformed reality, deformed by European culture and suffocated by American imperialism," said the brilliant Brazilian filmmaker, Glauber Rocha.
o        Magical realism differs from pure fantasy primarily because it is set in a normal, modern world with authentic descriptions of humans and society.  According to Angel Flores, magical realism involves the fusion of the real and the fantastic, or as he claims, "an amalgamation of realism and fantasy". 
• Surrealism and Magic realism: Frederic Jameson called MR “poetic transformation of the object world but a world in which the objects are also narrated”.
      Surrealism: Surrealism: A 20th-century literary and artistic movement that        attempts to express the workings of the subconscious and is characterized by         fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter. +  An artistic           movement and an aesthetic philosophy that aims for the liberation of the mind by       emphasizing the critical and imaginative powers of the subconscious.
• Presence of the historical and the political below the surface of the narrative.
Magic realism writers express their view of a world fissured, distorted, and made incredible by cultural displacement. It marks a view from the fringes of European cultures and an interest in syncretism produced by colonialism. 

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[1] ‘Ariel’ is an allusion to Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’ where the master Prospero has two slaves: Ariel (winged part of the spirit) and Caliban who is base. Caliban is an anagram of Canibal, canib, carib, Caribbean. Tempest alludes to the ‘discovery’ of the Americas. Shakespeare created in the figure of Caliban, the other face of the nascent bourgeois world: “…I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour/ One thing or other, when thou dids’t not, savage, / Known thine own meaning, but would babble like / a thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes / With words that made them known.”  The attitude of the rebellious slave Caliban is thus: “ …You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid thee / For learning me your language.” (Act 1, Sc 2)

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[i]            “. . . travel’s history:

            Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

            Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,

            . . . And of the Cannibals that each other eat,

            The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

            Do grow beneath their shoulders.”

            (Act I, sc. iii, W. Shakespeare, Othello, 1605)

[ii]           Amerigo Vespucci’s reports (the Italian navigator from whom the continent got its name) encouraged Sir Thomas More to invent a vision of an ideal  society in his Utopia (1515). 

[iii]           “. . . entre mi donde y mi cuando

            esta mayoria inválida de hombre.”     Trilce, 1922         (Translation mine)

[iv]          “Spengler’s explanation of history in terms of cycles of cultural growth and degeneration enabled Carpentier to overcome his pessimism about the historical prospects for Latin America: if the loss of spirituality to which rationalist humanism appeared to lead was not an ineluctable destiny, then to approve the vitality of primitive cultures as the nativist writers had done, was not necessarily reactionary; for these local cultures could now be seen not as vestiges of the past but as the seeds of a new, specifically American culture in the making.”

            Edwin Williamson, ‘Coming to Terms with Modernity’ in John King. (ed.), Modern Latin             American Fiction : A Survey , London : Faber and Faber, 1987, p. 83.

Lecture II: Textual Analysis of Alejo Carpentier's 'The Lost Steps' (Los Pasos Perdidos, 1953)

• Carpentier’s voodoo experience; his protagonist is the Haitian shaman, Mackandal who has extraordinary seductive powers over his audience. Thus, he becomes the creator of identity for the black slaves. This is symptomatic of the new mood of nationalism that emerged in the 1920s. Such powerful storytellers employing techniques and material rooted in long standing popular traditions, could not fail to appeal to cultivated writers seeking to connect more fully to American realities.  Cultural nationalism thus combined with modernist experimentalism to create an autochthonous culture where tradition could be reconciled with modernity. Thus it became an occasion to reassess LA’s relation with Europe and it meant coming to terms with the modern culture of the Enlightenment. MR= Surrealist desire for psychic wholeness (rationalism of the Enlightenment had alienated Europeans from the life of the instinct, desire and imagination) + Haitian experience in 1943 (magic & religion, the repositories of authenticity and wholeness, were capable of intervening positively in history as vehicles of freedom) + reading of Spengler (explanation of history as cycles of cultural growth and degeneration helped him dispel his pessimism about LA’s future; also rise of Fascism).
• Disenchantment with surrealism (literary trick): “redeem the mind from the dead hand of rationality by unblocking once more the sources of the marvellous, the experience of which presupposes a faith.” …The marvellous in literature entailed a belief in the supernatural: those who do not believe in saints cannot heal themselves by the miracles of saints.” Carpentier thus took the novel out of the drawing rooms of Europe and thrust it in the deep wilderness of America, where it might recuperate the mythological powers of the epic and romance, those narrative forebears it had once destroyed through irony and burlesque in Europe. – source of the exuberance of modern LA fiction. By celebrating the supernatural and the miraculous, magical realism inevitably generated antinomies between faith and reason, imagination and intellect, nature and culture.
• THE LOST STEPS: AC’s “American cycle” of novels (Kingdom of this world – ‘49, The Lost Steps - 53, Explosion in a Cathedral –‘62); written in Venezuela during the dictatorship in Cuba; looked at his own life in Paris between the Wars; in 1947 travelled to the wild interior of the Gran Sabana. Realised the cultural significance of the “Forest”; next year travelled through the upper Orinoco river
• Background of AC: 1904-1980; studied architecture and music; family background in music; early childhood in a Cuban ranch, father was a cellist/architect, grandma worked with Cesar Frank; formation on European novels – Balzac, Zola, Flaubert; spoke Spanish with French accent; moved to Paris to become journalist (music critic) where he wrote elevated accounts of European salon and concert scene; popularised High Art in LA, sponsored first Picasso exhibition in LA, wrote librettos for classical composers; became a major radio personality playing classical music (1939-45); wrote “Music in Cuba” (1946) his first non-fiction masterpiece; prepared the ground for his novels; went to jail in Cuba and then moved to Paris; returned after 1959 Cuban Revolution, after which till his death, he was Cuban ambassador in Paris; personal journey symptomatic of the Latin American intellectual of the 1920s and 30s.
• The novel is a repudiation of Europe and the pretences of surrealism; Felt the need to free himself “from the grip of surrealism”; he felt that Europeans whored after a surrealism that they never understood as the Enlightenment had taken the magic out of their lives (with its emphasis on rationality) and yet this sensibility was fully formed among Afro-Cuban shamans. He hated himself for measuring LA with European yardstick; rise of Fascism made him lose the traditional LA respect for European civilization.Magic and religion – the repositories of  authenticity and wholeness -  were capable of intervening positively in history as vehicles of freedom.
• Title is an allusion to Andre Breton’s ‘Les Pas Perdus’ (the lost steps/ not lost)
• PLACE of the novel: Indeterminate, deliberately; Pan-Americanism
• NARRATOR of the novel: anonymous; relationship with Carpentier; narrator fails not tragically but inevitably; living by the metronome; doppelganger?; search for authenticity (travels to the roots of all life). Native vs authentic; novel of self-condemnation; AC avoids the narrator’s fate; King p91: Is AC lamenting the fate of the composer, or subtly mocking his folly in seeking refuge from history? No doubt, as the allusion to Don Quijote would suggest, he remained ambivalent, torn between heart and head.
• Use of capital letters: Forest, Time, Theatre, The Valley Where Time Stands Still, etc. Allegory?
• USE OF LANGUAGE: operatic, overblown, possibility of irony lurks behind every phrase; sonorous, complex prose style, ornately gilded like an altarpiece.
• MYTHS:  Book of Genesis & Fall (origins of the God’s chosen people, first book of the Hebrew Bible; Sisyphus (king condemned to roll the stone for eternity only to see it roll back the mountain), Odyssey (episodic quest structure), Don Quijote, Prometheus Unbound (217) – steals fire from Zeus and gives it to mortals and is then his liver is eaten every day by an eagle only to grow back the next day; Genevieve of Brabant 218 (the chaste wife falsely accused and repudiated), Deuteronomy: Traditionally seen as recording the words of God given to Moses; fifth book of the Hebrew Bible.
• THEMES: All stages of civilization can be witnessed in America in the present (possible to evade time) Read Paz’s passage in ‘Labyrinth of Solitude’, p11-12; p80: ‘the question of our origins is the central secret of our anxiety and anguish’. + p194 of Paz: we cannot dwell in the past but become contemporaries of all mankind. We have to live in our own epochs. He is a man seeking to recover that faith upon which the sense of the marvellous depends.
• If the Artist is bound to History, what is the place of the imagination in the unfolding of time? Once a magical consciousness came into contact with a rationalist one, the magic was condemned sooner or later to evaporate. But if the magical elements in the “marvellous real” were unsustainable, was it possible to salvage the sense of the spiritual and the transcendental?
• FOREST: Symbolism: ‘great theatre of the forest’; journey through space becomes journey through Time; celebrate Nature but rejects European hankering after ‘the natural man’. Positions men in nature against the mediocrity of pallid existentialists. In Europe this Forest can no longer be experienced – sanitised and erased several centuries ago.
• RUTH: decadence  5; wife to leading lady 8
• MOUCHE: contempt for shallow bohemianism (wild about primitive art); for them it is neither creative nor liberating but crude and reactionary. Mouche projectsthe writer’s own ANGER against his own self, his aesthetic detachment during the pre-war years. Lost Steps: AC’s own way of purging his own past.
• ROSARIO: Don Quijote reference; is this his Dulcinea of the New World? Rosario completes the opening sentence of DQ. She is the soul of Nature, the essence of womanhood, Rosario doesn’t pose any challenge to his male authority; she is lost.
• Read King: p 90

Readings from the novel:

Ruth’s decadence: 5, 7

Sterility: 6

Allusions 12, 33, 59, 80

Freedom: 16 (irony)

Backstory 21

Surrealism 24-25… 29

Wild about primitive arts 32

Seeing LA with European lenses 43

Living in different ages 51

Mouche 70

Three Wise Men of America 71

Discovery 77

Description of mountain journey 78

Rosario’s appearance 81

Bookburning 90

Father 95

9^th symphony boring 97

Bodily love 99

Recalling the chroniclers accounts 110-111

Authenticity and validity of primitivism 123

Butterfly rain: 133 + amphibious men 144

Rediscovery of the power of Christian myth: 135

Description of the dark power of the Forest: 138, 149

Example of Allegory: 141

El Dorado: 142 – 143

Rosario beats Mouche: 147, 149 (revenge of the authentic)

“We are the conquistadores” 158, 176, 177

Nature’s mimetism: 165

Rosario’s mystery: 173

Refinement of the savage: 173

Time travel: 178-179, 186, 187

Woman: 180

Sun entering the body: 197 – 198

Sisyphus: 198

Decision to stay + Ruth’s stage show: 244

Disenchantment with city life: 252

Against surrealism: 254

Close Encounters of the Bollywood Kind

I have been invited for a second time to my alma mater, this time as part of an evaluation committee that assesses the final diploma thesis projects (fiction/documentary film). This evaluation, thankfully, doesn’t entail giving grades to students (as the film school is avowedly anti-scholastic) but involves engendering a lively debate around the films. The evaluators are all ‘external’ people, not involved in the process of making any of these films so that they can maintain an unbiased view. The Committee comprises of twelve people from twelve countries and I feel utterly humbled by the people around me. More of that will come later in a separate blogpost.

One of my ‘colleagues’ in the Committee is Matthew Robbins, an American (or Gringo, as they call it here) . I am excited by what I gather about him from the accompanying brochure and wonder whether I will ever get to talk to such a Hollywood big-shot. The brochure says (in Spanish, here translated into English):

Matthew Robbins is a director, producer, scriptwriter and script consultant. He was part of the group of filmmakers who turned around American cinema from within in the 1970s along with George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Spielberg, Brian de Palma, Cohen Brothers, etc. Founder of the American Zoetrope Company along with Lucas and Coppola, he collaborated on Lucas’ first film THX 1138. He won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes in 1974 for The Sugarland Express directed by Spielberg. He later acted and wrote Close Encounters of the Third Kind, wrote and directed the fantasy film Dragonslayer in 1981. In 1997, he started his collaboration with Guillermo del Toro for whom he wrote the script for Mimic, sci-fi horror film which marked the beginning of the brilliant Mexican filmmaker’s Hollywood career.

As we come out of the hall one day, he turns to me and asks, ‘Do you understand English’?

He suspects I am Indian but isn’t sure by the way I look. Physically, Latin Americans can often be confused with Indians (of India).

You are so much a part of American film history, I tell him as we sit down at the Cine Encanto Cafetaria.

Unfortunately, that’s true, he says.

I don’t really understand initially why he is so enthused about the fact that I am Indian and live in Bombay. I soon find out the reason. He has so many stories to tell and is almost dying to do so. Over the next hour and a half, I listen to all his close encounters of the Bollywood kind.

Nearly two years ago, he spent a long time (a total of 7 weeks) in Bombay and elsewhere and lived at the Sun n Sand Hotel on the Juhu beach. It is overwhelming to be in Havana and hear a blue-eyed American in an elegant hat talk about his experiences with Vishal Bharadwaj, Gulzar, Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgun, Sanjay Dutt, Ramgopal Varma, Ronnie Screwala and so many more. As a close friend of Mira Nair, he had attended the Maisha (!?) workshop in South Africa and that is where he met Vishal Bharadwaj.

He immensely admires Vishal and appreciates him both as a human being and as an artist. He was also instrumental in putting Vishal in touch with the DOP of Guillermo del Toro (which I saw him filming in Whistling Woods) and also functioned as second unit director for Coppola who was hugely impressed with Maqbool and Omkara. If it wasn’t for Vishal, he wouldn’t have anything to do with Indian films. He has been taken to many screenings in Bombay multiplexes where he said he was subjected to Shah Rukh Khan’s Om Shanti Om which he hated with a passion as much as he disliked No Smoking. He disliked practically everything he saw and wanted nothing to do with Bollywood but got embroiled with it when Vishal told him that he always wanted to make a war film and so he wrote for him a film which was on a huge scale (possibly the most expensive ever made in India) with UTV funding it. The script unfolded nicely and since Vishal wanted good opportunities for composing music (with lyrics by Gulzar), he had the idea of a singer who comes to entertain the troops during the Japanese invasion of the Indian northeast during World War II. He called it Julia and was happy with the screenplay which he wrote at an astonishing pace, according to his own statement. For building up the story, Matthew said he used the biographical material of ‘Fearless Nadia’/ Hunterwali (Mary Evans Wadia, born in Australia with an English-Greek descent) – the swashbuckling heroine of 1930s to 1950s Indian cinema. Everything was set up at breakneck speed and the music was ready and then just a week before the shoot, the main star Sanjay Dutt - “the guy who was caught with guns” - quit the film without any rhyme or reason and any prior notification. In fact they had signed up the internationally well-known actress Franca Potente (of Run Lola Run and Che fame) on a ‘pay or play’ basis for a million dollars (which meant the producer had to pay the actress even if the film was abandoned or postponed for whatever reason). So UTV was in deep trouble and Vishal was heartbroken.

The most fascinating aspect of the preproduction was when Sanjay Dutt’s parole officer was sent by the Indian government and was acting like a private secretary, rolling out the shooting schedule on a table and indicating the dates during which Sanjay may be allowed by the court to shoot. The project was abandoned at a huge cost and meanwhile Vishal finished Kaminey with UTV where he supposedly got the rights of Julia back in exchange for the film he made for them. Matthew still believes that the project would be resuscitated very soon and he would be back in Bombay, the crazy city, but this time he would be there with his wife.

He was invited by Aamir Khan at his house in Panchgani. He had a new wife at that time and Aamir told him that a close friend of his was shooting a film but it got so messed up that he had to take it over as director. He was hugely distracted and apologized profusely for not being able to give him more time. He was shooting Taare Zameen Par, the story of a dyslexic child that would eventually become a huge commercial success and would also get considerable critical acclaim. Matthew didn’t know that and so he was very happy to know from me that Aamir pulled it off after all the distress he saw him going through.

He woke up one morning to find that Aamir Khan had left for the shoot while he was still living in his bunglow. He had his lonely breakfast in a huge dining table that reminded him of the dining table in Citizen Kane. The house was beautiful, overlooking the mountains and the furniture was all immaculate as well as the bathroom fittings, all of which dated back to mid of the 19^th century. The bathroom, he said, was particularly huge. Aamir was quite a gentleman and was genuinely distracted and in deep trouble at that moment. Matthew was puzzled by the way the cooks and butlers treated him at Aamir Khan’s house. He was the maharaja to be accorded the highest treatment. He was never allowed to even open any car door. While he was at the Sun and Sand Hotel, Vishal sent over his car every evening so that he could have dinner at his place and not eat alone in the hotel. The cook was absolutely amazing and he enjoyed every bit of the Indian food he ate.

For location searching on Julia, he had travelled far and wide within India, particularly in West Bengal, Maharashtra and Moosourie. He was impressed how comfortable Indians were with technology and how Vishal continued to work on the music while still on the move. The roads in West Bengal were … well, they couldn’t be called roads. Once while travelling through a forest in Mussourie, his car stopped when they saw a beautiful small tiger cub smashed and killed in the middle of the road. His heart bled on seeing this. He wanted to go out and take a photo but the driver wouldn’t allow him as they thought that the mother tiger is certainly around and would attack anybody who would go out. Matthew’s family got the shock of their life when they saw the photo of the dead tiger which he also showed me from his laptop a few days later.

By this time as he was meeting more and more 'filmy' people in Bombay, many prominent filmmakers wanted him to write for them including Ramu (Ramgopal Varma) and even Bachchan. It was surprising that Bachchan wanted him to write King Lear with him in mind when in reality he must have just finished making The Last Lear with Rituparno Ghosh.

Strange, isn’t it, Matthew asked. Why did he want that?

May be, I said, he had read King Lear on the occasion of making that film (which revolved around the play) and was intrigued how much the character befitted him where he could hold centrestage without getting into plots of romantic stories with young girls as in Nishabd or Cheeni Kum.

During the shoot of Aag (or Ramu’s Sholay), he found it funny how Bachchan babbled for 3 minutes in front of the camera. The extremely noisy Arriflex started. He couldn’t imagine why they are doing this when a top star is talking.

The sound is only for reference, Ramu told him. You see all the noise around. Do you think it is possible to do direct sound on location shoots in India?

Rubbish, whispered Vishal Bharadwaj into his ears. Most young filmmakers these days prefer sync sound.

He was surprised that in the middle of the retake of the 3 minute dialogue, the reel snapped and the shot had to be cancelled. If you had a camera assistant like that in Hollywood who didn’t check how much reel was inside, he would have been fired on the spot and would not get a job again in his life. He would have to move to the East Coast. (Now that was a sweet but nasty joke about what he thought about indie filmmaking in NYC.) However, in Bombay, it was normal and they just moved to the next take.

He had seen Bachchan’s pictures everywhere and one day saw him in the front page of Times of India in the clothes of a bandit. That very day, he was invited to Ramu’s set and found Bachchan sitting in exactly the same dress and same pose that he had seen in the papers that morning. He was utterly confused.

Later when he told AB that he was surprised that the 100 Rupees note didn’t carry his picture in it, Bachchan’s response was graceful.

‘He gave a very aristocratic smile’.

I know, Bachchan said.

‘This guy must be so used to adulation’.

When he saw the shoot of Ramu’s Aag, Matthew said he knew it was going to be the worst film ever. Later he was again invited to the set of Nishabd where Ramu wanted to show him about to commit suicide. The way the camera moved in that scene was utterly hideous. But Matthew had a brainwave. He called Vishal to his side and told him what if before he commits suicide, his hands travel to his pocket and there he finds a paper in which is written one of the poems that this Jiya girl wrote. Vishal said it’s a great idea and went ahead with how the whole scene could evolve. When they got very excited with it, they called Ramu and ran it past him though they knew obviously it was too late and can’t be shot anymore.

Ramu kept saying, ‘I don’t understand, I don’t understand’.

And then when Vishal explained the entire scene to him at length in Hindi, Ramu suddenly said, ‘Great’.

Matthew was amazed how Ramu instantly called his assistant on his cell and asked them to arrange a shoot immediately on a terrace and he saw the scene being shot right away. He was very impressed with the dynamism.

Since I do not recall seeing any such shot in the film, Matthew concluded that the scene must have been deleted later.

I told him about the furore over Ramu during the Mumbai Attacks and he had nothing but contempt for his sensationalism.

He had great admiration for Gulzar. He had been invited to the house of John Abraham and Bipasha Basu. He had little regard for the acting skills of either of them.

‘She is sexy and knows how to use it’.

He was amazed how they had a balcony, secluding themselves from any possible human being watching them.

While travelling by train with Vishal and Supratik Sen (a Bengali like you, he said, – how did he know that!) in a first class train, he found himself with two ‘middle class businessmen’ who didn’t recognize Vishal. With some trepidation, they asked him at some point where he was from. When he said he was from California, they asked him, are the other two men also from California? Matthew was hugely surprised by the oddity of the question and I provided him with the cultural decoding that the awe that these gentlemen evinced had perhaps less to do with race than economic status evoked by ‘California’ and further reinforced by their association with a white man.

A few days later at a beach-house party, Matthew narrated some other amusing incidents of his India experience that involved a jewellery shopping-spree at a private house guided by Vishal Bharadwaj’s wife (that made him extremely popular that Christmas) and her ‘strange’ behaviour at the dining table where she never ate with the guests but only served them. 'I want you to explain this to me', he said; 'Why did she do that'?

Some more cultural decoding followed from my end and he looked a bit demystified.

'But why did Sanjay Dutt do that to us? Why did he abandon the project at the last moment?'

Was this a matter of cultural decoding, I wondered. What do you think?

'I can only guess', he said. 'I think at some point Sanjay realised that the film was not exactly about him and that disappointed him.'

Didn't he read the script in the first place? Didn't he sign the contract?

'I don't know'.

I felt ashamed to tell Matthew that Indian stars (as against the actors) rarely read screenplays unless they have to, at the last moment. It all depends on the pitching and the narration. At the time of narration, the director narrates the story differently to get the star excited about his role and give his nod. Sanjay, who is particularly infamous for not reading screenplays, must have read it precisely a week before the shoot, under duress and with some degree of seriousness and that is when he may have felt that he was not the centre of the universe.

Will Julia ever be made?

Now that Kaminey has released today to rave reviews, let's hope that it is made now. And that would bring Matthew back to Bombay!

'This time I will definitely go with my wife', he said. 'She is particularly excited about the jewellery shopping spree'.

As Time Goes By

One of the many things that I find charming about Latin American social life is how people remember little details about you even when you have forgotten them. It never ceases to surprise me.

I often enjoy the company of kids far more than that of adults. So when this extremely sweet girl - with cheeks so red you would think they have been painted – slowed down her bicycle and started talking as I was walking from one building to another, I couldn’t help extending the casual conversation. What I didn’t know was that she would touch me in a special way!

Her name is Estafani (Latin version of the Anglican Stephanie), six years old. She told me about her mother who is in Mexico City and her dad who is in Italy and she lives with her grandma on the film school campus. She must be feeling terribly lonely here and I start feeling sad for her but she wasn’t sad at all. She strikes up conversations with students and teachers everywhere and all of them seem to love her. I was missing my own son very much and so spending time with her was a kind of emotional substitute as well as a way of refreshing myself with her beautiful innocence.

In the evening, I found her playing with her grandma close to my apartment and I realized that she is the granddaughter of someone I know for many years. The kid’s grandma, who is now in her late 70s, remembers clearly till this date that I had taken a photo of her ballerina daughter (Estafani’s mom) twenty years ago in the swimming pool and had sent it back to my family in Calcutta as a (biased) sample of how Cuban girls look like and everybody had gone gaga over it. So it was a pleasant surprise that this little girl is the daughter of someone I know. What does her mom do now?

The ballerina mother continues with her career in dance but as the trapeze dancer in a circus in Mexico. How time passes! The grandma is visibly proud of her daughter and granddaughter.
“Her mom is as beautiful as she was 20 years ago and this kid is an image of her mom, isn’t she? She is so friendly that she can strike a conversation with anyone and so intelligent that she asked me, ‘Can you imagine what it feels like when the president of a nation is thrown out of his own country?’ ”

She was referring to the incidents following the military coup in Honduras which has shaken the whole of Latin America for the sheer barbarity of the act. The Miami news channels are playing hourly updates on it. But I am more interested in the story of the mother. How does a beautiful ballerina dancing to Bizet’s Carmen become a trapeze dancer in a circus? It confuses me because in my mind, ballet belongs to high culture and circus belongs to the other extreme in the hierarchy of cultural forms of entertainment. This can only happen in Latin America!

I also suddenly remember something and that fascinates me further. I had indeed seen a circus playing while in Monterrey in Mexico two years ago and someone said that the circus is of a very high standard, specially the dancers. I wanted to visit it though it was very expensive but my friends discouraged me firstly because there was no time that I could take out of the conference to go to a circus and more importantly, they all thought I must grow out of my childhood fantasies.

Estefani’s mom had married an Italian and migrated to some Italian city and the child was born out of that marriage. She subsequently divorced the guy and married a Mexican businessman and migrated to Mexico, travelling with the circus while leaving the daughter back in Havana with the grandma. The mom calls the kid every few days just as much as the dad calls from Italy.


Catching up with people after so many years is like following the characters of a novel and seeing in a few moments of storytelling, what Time does to people. Divorces and separations are rarely seen as tragedies in this part of the world. When women tell these stories, they sound more like stories of liberation and triumph. Many years ago I had seen this septagenerian grandma getting married on the campus for the fourth time in her life at the age of 50 or so. It was a hugely memorable event with Gabo (ie, Gabriel García Marquez) playing her godfather and Fernando Birri (the ‘pope’ of Latin American cinema) as the priest substitute. I overheard her boss, a woman, saying, ‘At last she has found the great love of her life’. As I followed the atheist rituals of the event with wide-eyed wonderment, it felt like a thrilling tragi-comic idea to find the great love of your life at the age of fifty.

So now I ask her what happened to that man.
‘I got rid of him’, she said. ‘He migrated’.
No more men in your life after that?
‘No. Enough with men. Now I have my granddaughter. I live for her’.

I didn’t realise that the kid thought I was a native Indian from some part of Latin America.
‘But you don’t look like that. You dress differently.’

I explain to her about the silly mistake that Christopher Columbus made five hundred years ago, leaving all of us confused about ‘Indians’. He wanted to find us (India) but instead took the opposite direction and ended up finding you’ll (Latin America) and the guy didn’t even realise his mistake. He started calling them ‘Indians’ and that continues to this day!

‘Five hundred years ago?’, the girl murmured to herself in amazement.

Actually, more than that.

‘My friends also create so many confusions in class.’

She takes me to show something in the garden – the design of the shrubs. I am enjoying being with her but some people call me to a van which is waiting for me to get in. I have to tear myself away from her.

The next day, I go to the office of the director in search of some documents I need to sign and there was the grandma there who works as the director’s secretary even at her age. Suddenly the sweet little girl comes out of the door and hugs me intensely as if I am her father. I almost reciprocate the emotion but I have to hold myself back with a sense of adult guilt. It is not a good idea to develop emotional bonds with kids when you know you are going to leave within a few days/weeks. For me she is just a substitute for my own kid and for her, I am just a substitute for her father whom she must be missing deeply.

Adulthood has also taught me that loving anyone involves certain consequences, certain responsibilities that we must be ready to embrace, and embrace them with joy but what do we do when what we stand to lose is far more than what we gain?

On the final day of my stay in Cuba, I ask Estefani to speak to the camera while I record her standing at the landing of the staircase. She tells me, ‘Mom said yesterday she is coming to Havana in December and will stay here for the next two years. Why don’t you stay back till December? Then, you will get to see her’.