I’ m spent
what would it be
to drop everything and walk out
I’ll have to convince myself  first
no books, no laptop,
no paints and brushes
what do I intend to do under the blue skies all day
to walk out you mustn’t be heavy
just the clothes on your back
mind emptied inside out
heart that sings
feet that go nowhere and everywhere
I will have to leave my car behind
forget the moments spent sipping tea
sitting on the rosewood chair looking at the racing clouds
leave the spectacles  my mother gave me before wheeled into ICU
and my father’s  gold plated watch he got when he retired from  work
I shall fold away in a bag the radiance of a smile  
I saw on my little boy’s face
when I went to pick him
on his first day at school
searching in the sea of faces for mine
the smile that travelled from his lips to light his eyes
… that I’ll carry with me

Hope is the thing with feathers 
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm 
That could abash the little bird 
That kept so many warm. 
  
I’ve heard it in the chillest land, 
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

            Emily Dickinson

The boy skips
several times to the window
peeps impatiently
holding the rusted bars 
looking for his mother.

Will she wear a sari today
he fears the ridges of frown on Dikshitar’s face
seeing his mother dressed inappropriately for the visit
a strand of jasmines falling over her dark neck
a stole thrown hurriedly over her shoulder.

He has packed his cloth bag
there is nothing much in it
nothing that he wants to carry
from the dingy corner of the room
that he shares with ten others in Patashalai.

He is allowed to wear a shirt today
buttoned all wrong he runs
hearing his mother’s loud voice
her laughter rings through the dark passage
as she greets the Dikshitar.

She is wearing a denim pant, long kurta
and a fuzzy thing for a stole
her hair black, ripples of curls
is bunched with a yellow band
she has painted her fingers red. 

She fusses, she buzzes
as she buttons his shirt, wipes his face,
combs his hair
holding his jaws forcefully
till he screams loudly with pain.

She smiles, bends down and whispers
- for five days no veshti
 only  pants, jeans and shorts
looks conspiratorially at the old Dikshitar
in whose face runs streams of disapproval. 

The boy of eleven, in his mind
screams for tact from his mother
-I have to come back here
my friends are watching
he pleads with his eyes to his unseeing mother.

She takes him to her one room tenement
stowed away on an old building
the heat pours through asbestos roof
the walls a garish blue floats like clear afternoon sky
as he lies on the floor swept clean by his mother.

The small place is stacked with things
a fridge murmurs softly
a TV stands on a rickety stool
heap of clothes on a steel chair
rotten bananas in a plastic bowl.

She has been collecting things
buying on credit, acquiring  by charity
appliances discarded by people she knows
a little wire fitted here, a tinkering there
things for her son to use when he grows up.

For now
he is a boy of eleven
learning vedam in Patashalai
his mother is single
a cook from Kumbakonam.

It makes a world of difference to read Lord Jim after 20 years. The novel was a prescribed text in my Masters Program at college, I remember reading most of the novels of Conrad soon after and a tome of literary criticism on Conrad’s works. Most often in a college program we read a work of fiction/play /poem through various lens, so there was a colonial reading of Conrad, reading Lord Jim as a romantic novel, as adventure fiction, psychological novel, as a modernistic novel, we read it for its stylized structure and much more. There was always this anxiety to see the layered meaning of the novel.

Now I have no such anxiety, I read the book for the sheer pleasure of reading. The book evoked the predictable responses it did that many years ago, though in a muted way because of what the passage of time has done to me as an individual. I, in fact, read the same book from my college days, a yellowed paperback where I have liberally marked with pencil in the margins – ‘honour’, ‘morality’, ‘guilt’, ‘imagination’, ‘isolation’, ‘romantic’ – superficially, tags that I used as pointers for preparing essays; but at a deeper level those were the frames where, with a feeling of awe, I froze the tragic hero Jim.

Jim is a slave of his imagination, illusions, romantic longings; he lives a major part of his life in his head. As a young water clerk he imagines saving sinking ships, quelling mutinies, but during his first training to be a sailor he fails to spring into action at the sight of a coaster crashing through a schooner on a wild weather day. This acts as a prelude to what is to come, the omniscient narrator wastes no words and time to imply that Jim is ear marked for a life of tests and tribulations.

The novel can be divided into two – Patna and Patusan. Patna is the ship that takes eight hundred pilgrims to Mecca, Jim joins the crew as a chief mate. The ships runs over  something and sustains a dangerous leak. The native pilgrims are sleeping and the four white crew members, one being Jim, abandon the ship and escape in a boat. Jim who had been waiting for opportunities to show his heroism has missed a lifetime chance. Jim had been paralyzed into inaction by his imagination of the impending tragedy. Before the minute of catastrophe he lives in his head to the last detail the sinking of the ship with the 800 pilgrims in the cold waters. Even in the boat he hears the cries of the pilgrims as they sink.

At one level Jim groans over his missed chance and wasted opportunities – here we see a twenty four year old romantic fed on holiday literature of adventure and heroism, not realizing that reality always falls many notches below the ideal. He sees himself as different from the other crew members, he sees their influence as a dark force that willed him to jump into the well of disgrace. At a very important level he fights the assaults from his conscience on his moral standing. This makes him seek for atonement and retribution, he searches for a mission that is unalloyed by coarseness of purpose.

This search lands him in Patusan a forested island in the Malay Archipelago, a land bloodied and ripped apart by warring factions of people – the Malay Tunku Allang, the treacherous descendant of the Sultan who wants to consolidate his power base and establish his monopoly over trade; the Bugis who are immigrants from Celebes, this race is headed by Doramin and his son Dain Waris, who are friends of Stein ( Jim is sent to Patusan by Stein to manage his trading company), and Sherif Ali an Arab sailor who with his men terrorizes the Bugis and loots the land. Jim, the white Lord descends into this Inferno to restore order and peace in the land.  This could well be read as another trip in his romantic journey.

Was it a quest to be a hero that drove him to the sequestered island?   Marlow the narrator of Jim’s tale says, “ The conquest of love, honour, men’s confidence – the pride of it, the power of it, are fit materials for a heroic tale.” Vey soon Marlow adds, “I affirm he achieved greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words I mistrust, but your minds.” Marlow fixes his glance on the readers accuses us of sacrificing our imagination to feed on a story, to fix on the ‘externals of success’ -  reprimanded we realign our understanding of heroism. Jim routs the Arab, establishes peace by reconciliation, builds bridges. He fights with an urgency of purpose and a conviction to establish stability; in the process he gets a larger than life image where ‘his word was the one truth of every passing day’. His battles are not pantomimes of his notional heroism that he read in books, Jim sees clearly that he is in no romantic situation as the jungle threatens to creep in and overwhelm him. In the end when he visits the bereaved Doramin and is prepared for any punishment that the grieving father will inflict, he goes with a complete knowledge that there are no heroes.   

Problems with Lord Jim
The novel is exclusively Jim’s. He is isolated not just by his moral predicament but he is the isolated white man working his destiny among the natives in a distant land. The people and the land are used as mere props all through the novel, this becomes very problematic.  Jim is best described in the company of other white men like Marlow and Stein, and his relationship with Malays, Bugis lacks dimension.

The lands Jim visits are a blur, the people of the land are a smudge. Most of the places he visits do not have names, not even fictitious ones - it suits Conrad to keep mentioning eastern ports, eastern seas. The place the Inquiry is held may very well be Bombay because there are references to people with caste marks on their foreheads, there is a reference to a Parsee firm, there is a sprinkle of words like punkah,  annas,  gharry-wallahs, and a tokenism through a one line mention of Hindu belief in reincarnation which sounds irreverent. He compares the pilgrims in Patna to animals packed in a pen; he writes, “800 pilgrims were driven on board”, and they gratefully “surrendered to the wisdom of the white man”.

In the section on Patusan, characters like Doramin and Dan Waris who are portrayed sympathetically, or Sherif Ali and Tunku Allang who are painted as devilish, or Jim’s half caste girlfriend Jewel whose only refrain is ‘they always leave us’ lack the intellectual and emotional breadth that Jim, Marlow or Stein are portrayed to possess. The people in Patusan are consistently single dimensional, they are not even caricatures -  caricatures of characters like Cornelius and the Captain of Patna offer a relief, the people in Patusan are not credited with even that.

Folds on Doramin’s bulk arrange and rearrange themselves every time he is mentioned, the only emotional dimension of Doramin is his love for his son and his desire to make him his successor. Dan Waris is mentioned as Jim’s fine friend, as valuable to Jim as Marlow. This rings hollow because the story does not support this. The author only states, but is not able to show the depth of their relationship.

Conrad describes the land, the physicality of the people but cannot understand the depth of their souls to write about the choices they make. Despite all the action that takes place in Patusan, the place appears unpeopled. This is because we do not hear the voices of the people, their stories, their myths, their folk lore, the language they speak, the songs they sing, the nature of their dreams.

Amitav Ghosh’s Sea Of Poppies                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
In this context, I read Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies as representing all that Conrad chose to leave out. Sea of Poppies  tells the story that  Lord Jim  left unsaid, story of the diverse people, from rascals to rajahs to impostors to outcastes to Devis who travel by Ibis, a one- time blackbirder, a ship that transported slaves. These characters inhabit the noisy underbelly of the ship; they might be packed like animals but nobody can stop their animated voices, they tell their tales, sing their songs and hold the notion of their home through their shared histories and stories.

He hates me
punches me hard in the
space in my head.
My stomach crumbles in fear as
he comes again and again
to nullify the simple world I’ve built.