197. O, Oh, and the Wonderful O

Illustration by Ronald Searle (1962 Puffin Books edition)

Years ago, while I was just starting my graduate studies, I attended a talk by the eminent scholar Christopher Ricks. I freely confess that I was able to take away very little from the lecture, but for one thing: the difference between O and Oh. He illustrated this difference with instances of each of their use in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra.

According to the Grammarist, O is used as a poetic form of address (poetic apostrophe) and always precedes the name of the person being invoked (or the pronoun referring to that person). “O Beloved Guru,” one’s ideal student might say, “O Wise and Wonderful One, vouchsafe to us thy blessing as we go forth into the wide world.”

“Oh” is used much more commonly today. It is an “interjection used to express a range of emotions, including pain, sorrow, hesitation, and recognition. . .usually set off from its surrounding sentence by commas.” Take, for example, the opening lines from Browning’s Home Thoughts from Abroad:

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there. . .

Or—to descend from the sublime to the ridiculous—Sybil’s “Oh, I know” in Fawlty Towers.

But what O and Oh have in common is O itself, without which neither of them could even be uttered. James Thurber’s 1958 story, The Wonderful O imagines, brilliantly, what it would be like to have to live without that most fulsome of vowels. I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t yet come across this little gem, but suffice it to say that the benighted Island of Ooroo was reduced to a shadow of its former self, lovers could no longer spoon under the moon, and the unfortunate Otto Ott was reduced to a stutter. O was worth fighting for, and when it was recovered, the islanders learned to value their most precious treasure, previously taken for granted.

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185. Common Sense

They got mesmerized
By lullabies
And limbo danced
In pairs
Please lock that door
It don’t make much sense
That common sense
Don’t make no sense
No more
—John Prine. Common Sense

We were raised on the common-sense meaning of common sense; that is, “the knowledge and experience which most people already have.” But the definition continues  “. . . or which the person using the term believes that they do or should have.” In fact, common sense is not common at all (in the sense of being universally shared), since it varies over time and from culture to culture. And it was only in graduate school (where you tend to learn that everything you thought you knew is wrong) that I learned that according to the brilliant political thinker Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937—he had a lot of time to think while imprisoned by Mussolini) common sense is often conformist thinking that upholds the status quo. Gramsci credited ordinary people with being intelligent, even philosophers, but he saw “good sense” as making up only part of their thinking. He saw a large part of it, however, as having been “established by a process of consent to ruling class attitudes and interests which are thereby accepted by society at large as being in its own general interests” (Behler). This helps explain, for example, why people so often seem to vote against their own interests.

Common Sense is also one of my favorite songs by John Prine, who understands very well, through his own native common sense, the Gramscian meaning of the term. Although I adore just about everything John Prine writes, this song is particularly dear to my heart, because it talks about the disillusionment that comes along with the American immigrant experience and doesn’t just parrot the common-sensical idea of the American Dream.

They came here by boat
And they came here by plane
They blistered their hands
And they burned out their brain
All dreaming a dream
That’ll never come true
Hey, don’t give me no trouble
Or I’ll call up my double
We’ll play piggy-in-the-middle
With you.

And if I have any common sense at all I’ll bring this to an end now, before I get late for work.

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184. Brevity

Even as I was in the act of signing up for the A-to-Z April Challenge, I realized that I was making a big mistake. I had no time to spare in April, and my only hope of completing the challenge lay in being brief.

Brevity is not a quality that has been served well by the electronic media. As writers accustomed to drafting by hand or on manual typewriters begin composing on the computer, their work tends to balloon—but not necessarily to take flight.

In English class as children we had to engage in a now-nearly-extinct exercise known as précis, in which we would have to read an essay and then summarize it with elegance and economy in a few short sentences. But as I grew older, I was rewarded for writing more rather than for writing better, to the point where, as a feature writer for a small-town weekly, I was actually paid by the inch. Naturally there was no incentive to prune rather than to pad.

The trouble is, as I grew older I also found myself with less time, and brevity requires focus, attention, and, for me at least, a lot more time. As the French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote back in the 17^th-century, excusing himself for having written too long a letter: “I have made this longer than usual, only because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.” (Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.)

But this is a too-long, typically-rambling preamble to my entry for today, which I find myself circling around because I’m not accustomed to being brief.

Last night found me rolling B-words around on my tongue as, bleary-eyed, counting sheep, I contemplated my entry for today. It went something like this:

Baa-baa-baa
(bleat bleat)
Blah-blah-blah
(bloat bloat)
Babbling, blithering blather
(bubble-headed booby)
Blistering bombast
(Billions of Bilious Blue Blistering Barnacles)
Blustering braggadochio
(Bashi-bazouk)
Brisk broadside
(Bang bang)
Brevity.

The soul of wit? So they say. I still prefer the long form.

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179. And he laughing said to me

William Blake, Frontispiece, Songs of Innocence

There has been only one occasion when I have found myself composing a tune, and it was one that seemed to descend all of a piece, perfect in every way.

It happened one afternoon in my second year at university, when, alone and at a loose end, I shut myself into one of the music practice rooms in Currier House, just me and a piano in a sterile, sound-proof cell.

I wasn’t studying the piano anymore, having abandoned it after fhree years of lessons in India and a fourth in England, ending with a fizzle after an intermediate-level Royal Schools of Music examination. The fact was, I had never taken flight as a pianist, just plodded along, heavy and uninspired, “doing”  scales and the endlessly replayed pieces one had to prepare and perform for the exam. After all those lessons I wasn’t even competent enough to be entrusted with accompanying the hymn-singing in morning chapel at Mount Hermon. But although I would never be a pianist, I was musical. I loved singing, and thanks to Mrs. Murray, the Principal’s wife, so did the whole school. Every morning, schoolchildren from Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, as well as Christian families opened their lungs to the mountain air and raised their collective voices in song, making a joyful noise that echoes in my ears even today, nearly fifty years later. And we didn’t just sing: we harmonized, reedy descants soaring over smooth altoes, sturdy tenors, and youthful baritones; adjusted the dynamics, now full-throated, now hushed; and alternated lines, first the girls, then the boys in reply.

I may have betaken myself to the practice room that day in search of the youthful spirit I feared I was losing at university (see send my roots rain). At Mount Hermon, a precious side-benefit of learning an instrument was that one got to miss a half-hour of morning or afternoon study to practice, completely alone;  perhaps I just wanted to get away and commune with myself. In any case, I sat desultorily picking out little tunes with one hand, no particular place to go.

I had been reading the Romantic poets, and was taken with William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and his idea of organized innocence. My conception of organized innocence is probably highly idiosyncratic, but I remember it as a state one can consciously choose as an adult, having tasted the bitterness of experience.  The innocence of youth is also a state of ignorance, but if one can come through experience without being poisoned, one may return to a new innocence.

Then it came to me, a tune composed expressly for Blake’s Introduction to Songs of Innocence. It came as the child had come to the poet, as the song had sprung to his lips in the poem, and I found myself singing it out loud, utterly unselfconscious in the sound-proof room, then writing it down without any effort whatsoever. It wasn’t even written for me: it had  a portamento in the second repetition of the last line which I did not have the delicacy of touch to execute; and it was always a little high for for my range, as if designed for a boy with an as-yet-unbroken voice. Someday, I tell myself, I will ask such a boy to sing it for me, and make a recording.

A cherub of song visited me that day, as angels had the young Blake; and at a desolate time when I sorely needed it. I had never composed a tune like this before (or rather, one had never offered itself to me in this way) and have never done so since; but now I know that it is possible.

Piping down the valleys wild,

Piping songs of pleasant glee,

On a cloud I saw a child,

And he laughing said to me:



‘Pipe a song about a lamb!’

So I piped with merry cheer.

‘Piper, pipe that song again.’

So I piped: he wept to hear.



‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;

Sing thy songs of happy cheer.’

So I sung the same again,

While he wept with joy to hear.



‘Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book, that all may read.’

So he vanished from my sight,

And I plucked a hollow reed,



And I made a rural pen,

And I stained the water clear,

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear (x3).

—William Blake
Introduction, Songs of Innocence

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176. The Haircut

Medusa at the hairdresser’s (Chris Sharrock, sharrock.wordpress.com)

For years, hair-cutting in our household was such a rare event that whenever I told Andrew—who shares Samson’s horror of being shorn—that I was thinking of cutting my hair, he would ask, with his characteristic brand of humor, “Which one?” Recently, an old friend reminded me that I had once encouraged her to grow her hair long, and suggested that I might enjoy trying out a new look, putting me in mind of the last time I experimented with a hairstyle, way back in the old millennium.

When my cousin Sue’s daughter Oleen took me to a hair salon on one of my visits to London back in 1990, she told the stylist on my behalf that it was my first-ever professional haircut, and only my second visit to a hairdresser’s (the first, at age ten, having been to a barber’s in Calcutta for a hairwash). Since I was in my mid-thirties by this time, her announcement was met with incredulity and (I feel sure) stifled giggles. I was introduced as “our (weird) cousin from America” and the hairdresser exercised a great deal of forbearance, keeping a straight face and a sympathetic expression while I proceeded to tell her, anxiously and at great length, that I wasn’t used to this kind of thing and to explain that I wanted a different, but not too different, look, a significant amount cut off, but not so much that I would no longer be able to put my hair up into a bun, and bangs (a fringe), but not those schoolgirl bangs that would make me—to use one of my mother’s phrases—look like mutton dressed as lamb. She reassured me that she wouldn’t do anything drastic, and Oleen offered lots of moral support once I finally shut up and submitted to the shears.

A few words of explanation may be required to account for my odd behavior. I had been growing my hair since I was seven years old (see Untangling) when Mum, who had peremptorily chopped off my long hair at age four, finally gave me qualified permission to grow it back. Long hair was in fashion in the States in the 70’s, when we first immigrated, but even as I persisted in clinging sentimentally to my long hair as a marker of “Indianness,” many stylish young women in India were cutting theirs short. By the time I was a mother and in my thirties, long hair was an aberration in my age group, and, probably made me look older than I was, since I usually wore it twisted into a tight bun. My father had told me once, when admiring the 24-year-old me dressed in a sari for a classical Indian music concert, that a hairstyle like that was either considered extremely plain or extremely sophisticated. Flattered, I assumed he meant that on me, it looked ultra-sophisticated. Perhaps it did, back then; but a decade later, not so much.

On that visit to London in 1990, when I had finally screwed up my courage to make a change, my son was at the age where any change terrified him, especially in his mother. Having done the deed, I returned from the hair stylist’s that afternoon wondering if I’d made a mistake. As soon as I walked in my cousin’s front door with my up-to-the-minute scrunched-and-blow-dried shoulder-length cut complete with wispy bangs, my worst fears were confirmed by Nikhil’s immediate reaction, as he screamed—no, wailed, as only a five-year-old boy can wail: “Mom, what have you done? Go right back and make it the way it was before!” That did it: I was now officially a basketcase. It took many soothing words from Cousin Sue and the lure of a double batch of take-away Fish-’n-Chips before Nikhil became somewhat reconciled to having a different mom and Nikhil’s mom could be talked into venturing out of doors again.

Returning to the States and the Spring semester at university, I wondered whether my peers would notice my new look and what they would think of it. One or two of my female friends probably said something nice, though I can’t really remember. But I do remember one of my few male colleagues (in the English Ph.D. program men were at a premium, making it necessary for the single women among us to organize parties with the mostly-male Polymer Science department) coming over to me and saying, in all innocence: “When I looked across the room at Orientation this morning, I thought, for a moment, ‘Who’s that pretty girl?’ Then I realized, it was just you!” As soon as he realized what a back-handed compliment he’d paid me, his fresh, open face turned bright red with embarrassment as he stammered, “That c-c-c-ame out all wrong. I didn’t mean it like that, honest I didn’t!” I wanted to believe him, but I’m still not sure.

That hairstyle didn’t last long, and when the bangs grew out I simply reverted to my old one. Twenty-three years later, I’m seriously considering another visit to the hairdressers, though at the pace I move in these matters, no one ought to hold their breath.

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167. Diary-keeping

Do you remember those diaries that banks and various companies used to send out to their customers as New Year’s gifts (along with calendars, of course)? These were not the anorexic little datebooks that pass as diaries today—at least, for those who still use books at all rather than Blackberries or iPhones. No, these were substantial, well-padded, sometimes even leather-bound tomes with a full page allotted for each day, along with built-in calendars, address books, conversion formulas for weights and measures, and sections for memoranda and accounts.

Soon after our return to India at the end of 1963 one of these beauties fell into my hands, one of my prize Christmas presents that year. I carried it around with me for years afterwards through a succession of moves, until it finally slipped away not so very long ago. Imagine my surprise when, fully 43 years later, I found a very similar, almost pristine diary in the book shed at our town dump (er, sanitary landfill, no—transfer station) for the very same year!

I often think back to that original 1964 diary, the gold standard of all diaries to follow. It happened to be a leap year and ever since, I have been able to keep track of leap years using 1964 as a starting point. As I had all those years before, I began writing in its newfound successor with the best of intentions, only to have those first, well-developed entries peter out after a few short days, with long gaps punctuated by sporadic entries, and periodic absurd attempts to catch up by reconstructing the events of the missed days.

Everyone’s diary-writing style reflects their personality, and mine is no exception. My entries have been erratic, with occasional gems, a lot of lists, and many, many blank pages. I remember once in high school in the U.S., when I had recently begun to learn Calculus, using the differentiation formula (was that it?) to calculate how many pages I would have to write per day in order to catch up on all the missing entries by a certain date. I remember being very pleased with myself for actually having used Calculus for a practical purpose, if you can call that practical. Sad to say, it was the last time I ever used it for anything at all. So much of our time, so much of our education wasted.

I know better than to make any New Year’s resolutions in the realm of diary-keeping. The only diary-keeping I do these days—besides more-or-less keeping track of doctors’ appointments and committee meetings—is continuing to hold on to the motley collection of notebooks I have used as journals over the years. My friend Sejal started a decluttering group on Facebook last year, and I know that she employed a professional organizer to help her tackle boxes of journals that dated all the way back to middle school. As a writer, these hold precious raw material for her, worth holding on to even as most other stuff can be jettisoned without a second thought.

Occasionally I delve into some of those old diaries, the oldest dating back to high school in England, circa 1969, and, to be honest, what I unearth there are the very same themes and preoccupations that can be found in my private writing to this day. Please tell me there’s at least some forward movement in life!

Best wishes for the New Year.

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151. Correspondences and Convergence (“Chicks Can’t Dig!”)

In the fall of 1974 I enrolled in a course  on Vedanta Philosophy taught by J.L. Mehta, a distinguished visiting professor from Benares Hindu University. In the same semester I also took a course in which we read from the Upanishads in Sanskrit, taught by the eminent Orientialist Daniel H. H. Ingalls. Fortunate students have experienced that thrilling feeling of discovery when the subjects of two different courses converge, and, freshly returned from a year’s study abroad, I plunged into both with near-religious zeal, delighting in the overlap. I confess that I was never a very assiduous student of Sanskrit, so no doubt I made more use of Robert Ernest Hume’s 1921 English translation of The Thirteen Principal Upanishads than I did Motilal Banarsidass’ Sanskrit edition of ten Upanishads with Shankaracharya’s 9^th-century commentaries. Nevertheless, at a time when few books from India were available in the States, I treasured just the look and feel of the latter. In retrospect, I see that as a new immigrant I must have welcomed this coming-together of the disparate parts of my life: the opportunity to read Indian philosophy in the original; to imbibe it from an Indian teacher, Indian-style; to immerse myself in an Indian tradition while living on the other side of the world; and to unite the many worldviews and belief-systems to which I had been exposed in a philosophy that granted them all relative reality but trained its eye on one that transcended them all.

The Upanishads were written in a nonconformist era around 600 BCE, in which independent scholar-sages challenged caste, organized religion and priestly privilege; ensconsed in their forest hermitages, they passionately debated the great philosophical questions. Buddhism arose in this era, as did Jainism and a number of branches of Hindu philosophy, including dualist, nondualist (or monist), and entirely materialist schools. Intriguingly, Shankaracharya, though he debated the Buddhists fiercely, was very close to Buddhism in his philosophy, and Gaudapada, his guru, was even closer.  According to Professor Mehta, the difference between Advaita Vedanta’s position and that of Buddhism was that Advaita started with the assumption of a single consciousness or Being pervading the universe and transcending Name and Form, while Buddhism did away with even that assumption, choosing to cling to nothing, not even the idea of Being. Professor Mehta called that latter philosophy Nihilism, but I can see from my class notes (yes, I still have them) that I was skeptical about his bias. Nevertheless, desperately seeking coherence in my own fragmented life, I too was attracted to the idea of a transcendent consciousness from whose standpoint even seemingly polar opposites could be reconciled.

A concept in the course that strongly interested me was that of correspondence between inner and outer worlds, and between subtle and gross manifestations in nature. Consideration of these correspondences was meant to train the intellect toward a state of enlightenment in which all material distinctions were seen to be illusory. The individual mind created the distinctions through the play of illusion and the whole goal of seeking knowledge was to remove ignorance and thereby become dis-illusioned. Thus if one could see one’s breath as corresponding with the wind, or one’s internal emotions as creating external obstacles (as in the famous analogy of the rope snake, in which one is afraid of a rope, thinking it is a snake), one could come to understand how the many names and forms in the world that one perceives as real and different are only creations and projections of the mind; and ultimately, all manifestations of the One.

One of my sources of internal division had nothing to do with either metaphysics or my migrant condition, but rather, with gender. I was raised to disregard gender as a limiting factor in anything I set out to do, but as I came into my teens and encountered the Women’s Movement of the 1970s, I  became increasingly aware that the outside world was not as permissive as my upbringing had been.  Still, my own belief that I could do anything persisted. When I first came to the States, I got myself a job at the newly-formed David R. Godine Publishing (where my boyfriend worked as a printer) by simply showing up every day and throwing myself into whatever work needed doing; which, at the time, involved digging in a basement under the barn to lay the foundation for a floor that would be able to support their biggest and heaviest presses. Eventually my sheer persistence shamed Godine into putting me on the payroll. The following summer, in the Summer of 1971, Andrew and I took a trip to England and Wales, to visit my family and friends. I remember visiting a house full of hippies in Wales who were engaged in a project that involved major earthworks. Imagine my outrage when, in response to my offer of help, one of the men, a self-appointed leader, sneered, “Chicks can’t dig.”

photograph by Steve McCurry

The year after I had taken the Vedanta course, I was living in Andrew’s family cottage in Concord, Massachusetts, trying to lead a simple, self-reliant life. Andrew was working outdoors, building a foundation for a printing press from David Godine on one side of the cottage, and a retaining wall to shore up the hillside on the other. Inside the house, continuing the project of recovering my lost physical links to India, I was teaching myself to cook Indian food from scratch. Of course, given my feminist consciousness, I did not restrict myself to the kitchen; donning workclothes (who said chicks can’t dig?), I participated in digging the hole for the foundation, wheelbarrowing away the earth and sifting it through a wire screen to separate out the larger rocks. Back inside, having bathed and changed into clean clothes, I shifted gears and set about the elaborate process of making paneer, a soft Indian cheese, by boiling milk, curdling it, draining it in a colander, and straining it through a piece of muslin. From the paneer one could then go on to make a variety of Indian sweets. (Believe me, the end result is so delicious that it is well worth all the time and concentration, although it has been years since I have undertaken it. Nowadays I cheat by starting with store-bought ricotta.)

Making chhana (paneer) from Chitra Ammas’s Kitchen

As I stood straining the curd in the kitchen, the gross and subtle correspondences of nature struck me with the force of an epiphany. Here I was, transcending the limitations of male and female by working both outside and inside; the sifting of the rocks from the earth and the straining of the whey from the milk solids were clearly manifestations of the same work, work with one’s hands, neither solely man’s or woman’s but—transcending man-made societal distinctions—both. A profound sense of of well-being washed over me. I had not attained Liberation but I had been given an intimation of Enlightenment.

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138. Learning How (Not) to See

As children, small pleasures gave us endless delight. One of these was solving picture puzzles, identifying objects depicted in a drawing or photograph. A regular puzzle in our children’s magazines required us to recognize an everyday object from a close-up of it. For example, this close-up:

and the object:

from theimage.com

Children see things differently. Remember the opening of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince in which the narrator discussed his Drawing Number One and Drawing Number Two (below)? In Drawing Number One, what was obvious to him as a child was opaque to the grownups, so he created Drawing Number Two, in which the meaning was transparent. Still the grownups were not satisfied and advised the boy to stop wasting his time with such nonsense. But when, as a grownup himself, he met the little prince and showed him Drawing Number One, the boy recognized it at once.

Drawing Number One: a hat?

Drawing Number Two: not a hat, a boa constrictor digesting an elephant

When I was about eight one of my school friends showed me the drawing below and asked me what it was.

Like the little prince, I gave the correct answer without hesitation:

“A pen nib in a box.”

“Yes, it is,”  replied my friend, seemingly unsurprised by my penetrating eye. Perhaps she, too, felt that it was the obvious answer.

Do children play such simple games anymore, games that require no money, employ no electronic devices or equipment of any kind, and have no special effects? Even if they did, would they even recognize some of those objects, little more than a generation later? What’s a bath plug? What’s a pen nib? I pray that a generation from now, children will not have to ask, “What’s an elephant?”

Those games taught us not only how to see but different ways of seeing. Close up, or seen from an unfamiliar angle, the most ordinary household objects could be unrecognizable. We found that we needed to re-focus, to change our perspective, in order to see them anew. The drawing my friend showed me counted on most of its viewers seeing the cozy picture of a light in a curtained window. They wouldn’t generally expect to see into a dark box, revealing the pen nib lying within. Somehow, I did, although I’ve always been more of a verbal than a visual person (perhaps I had just filled my pen: see My Ink-Smudged Youth); but asked the same question today, I might not trust my first thoughts; instead, I might be more inclined to say what I knew most people would expect me to see.

We learn to hood our eyes, to blinker our vision, so that the world becomes opaque to us. The little prince, in his clear-eyed innocence, reminds his young readers how precious their fresh perspectives are, and—unless they remain very attentive—how short-lived.

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137. A Victorian Frame of Mind

Sever Hall (photo © AntyDiluvian)

Student engagement? Active learning? Office hours? Pshaw!

In the Spring semester of my freshman year of college I took a course on British intellectual history of the Victorian period. I knew nothing at all about the subject but it looked interesting, so despite the Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday (you heard right—Saturday) schedule I signed up for it. A couple of the books I bought for that course still gather dust on my shelves—The Victorian Frame of Mind (which I have consulted since) and The Utilitarians (which I have not). No selling back textbooks at the end of the semester in those days, let alone renting them.

Our professor was impossibly old—or so he seemed to me—and utterly inaccessible. I’m quite sure that I never exchanged a single word with him in the entire semester. Neither did anyone else; there was no class discussion, even though the enrollment couldn’t have been more than thirty.

This was his modus operandi: he swept into the classroom just  before the period was to begin, raised his head so that it angled up at some invisible point just over our heads, clasped his hands behind his back, took off his spectacles (without which he was almost completely blind), closed his eyes, and began to speak in an uninterrupted sonorous drone. He lectured nonstop for the entire class period, at which point he gathered up his things, restored his specs to his nose, and hurried out of the room without looking to left or right. I’m certain he never even made eye contact with me.

For my part, I never sat in the front of the class or ventured to raise my hand during any of the split seconds when he must have had to pause to catch his breath. Did his syllabus list office hours? He was probably required to keep them, but I wouldn’t have known. Not in my wildest dreams would it have occurred to me to make an appointment to meet with him outside of class.

I had only the haziest idea of the content of the course, most of it going right over my head. To be fair to him, the professor was probably brilliant, and no doubt I was a callow youth with only a fraction of my attention on the work at hand. Still, looking back at the experience through the lens of contemporary pedagogy, I’m appalled at what passed for teaching forty years ago. I don’t remember having to write a paper for the course, and so didn’t get any written feedback beside the marginal notes on the mid-term and final exams that served to evaluate the sum total of what we had absorbed; which, in my case, was precious little.

Harvard Student Strike. Apr 9, 1969 (dipity.com)

In my freshman Spring of 1972 my friend (and now my sister-in-law) Eve, a graduating senior, complained about having to sit for the final exams. Each of the previous three springs, starting with the student strike of 1969, had been so turbulent that finals had been cancelled. I bemoaned my belatedness. Having immigrated to the States in February, 1970, I had missed the Summer of Woodstock. Just a few months after we arrived, both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died. On those somnolent Saturday mornings it seemed as if the Sixties had never taken place. We might as well have been in the Victorian era.

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136. The Shame of Self-Censorship

from Annie Mole’s london-underground.blogspot.com

On my periodic visits to England, I’m always impressed by the highbrow stuff Londoners read on the Underground—besides the ubiquitous newspapers, more often than not open at the crosswords, they can regularly be seen deeply absorbed in literary classics, fiction by Nobel Prize-winning writers from around the world, and dense works of politics and philosophy. I enjoy looking over people’s shoulders to see what they’re reading—surreptitiously, since the British seem to find it intrusive. If they’re reading a newspaper and sense that someone is reading over their shoulder they will bury their faces in the centerfold and draw the pages tightly on either side, like curtains.

Visiting England on the way home from a trip to India in the summer of 1998, I was intrigued to see adults on the Tube hunched over hefty hardcovers in discreet brown-paper wrappers similar to those we used to cover our school textbooks with in India. Of course I jumped to the conclusion that they must be concealing pornography, but I was quite wrong. In fact the contraband reading was Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the second in the new series that was taking the country by storm. (I suppose their guilty pleasure may have been akin to ours as children when, made aware by the school authorities that Enid Blyton, that earlier author of super-seductive, wildly unrealistic boarding-school fantasies, was not considered “good literature”, we were ashamed to admit openly that we enjoyed them nonetheless.) It turned out that in the early days of Harry Potter, the publisher issued an edition for adults who would have been embarrassed to be seen reading a children’s book. This was before the series went viral and became a global ambassador of Tony Blair’s New Britain.

The last time I had encountered the brown-paper wrapper was not in primary school but in graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It was the Spring semester of 1989 and I was taking a course on modern fiction with Gauri Viswanathan, whose reading list included Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Rushdie’s latest novel, The Satanic Verses, which, since its UK publication in September 1988 had been banned in India and burned in Britain, was about to be published in the United States. We were all awaiting eagerly the brilliant writer’s campus visit on his American tour, when we heard the news—on Valentine’s Day, as it happened—that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for Rushdie’s execution as the blasphemous novel’s author and for the execution of anyone associated with the novel’s publication. As a person who has always revered books, a student of postcolonial literature, and a lover of Rushdie’s work, I was shocked and bitterly disappointed, and my fellow-students and I followed the rapidly-unfolding events closely in fascinated disbelief as Rushdie was forced into hiding (his campus visit cancelled, of course), American bookstore chains removed the novel from their shelves, and bookstores and publishers’ offices were firebombed.

I determined to read the novel as soon as I could and to write on it for my term paper in Modern Fiction. Since the hardcover edition was rather too expensive for me as an impoverished graduate student, I borrowed it from my parents, who bought every new novel by Rushdie as a matter of course, and read it from cover to cover, looking for the controversial passages more avidly than I had looked for the racy bits in Robert Graves’ I, Claudius on my parents’ bookshelves as a girl. Speaking for myself, I did not find the blasphemy that the violent reaction to the novel had led me to expect; instead, I found a profound exploration of how the experience of migration changes a person, and in particular, the experiences of South Asian immigrants and their children in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. I did write my paper, “Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses: Reality Flies in the Face of Belief,” but reading it turned out to be another matter.

Diane Schmitz, Brown paper wrappings, whitematters.wordpress.com

Alarmed at the almost-daily evidence that the threats against the novel’s dissemination were in deadly earnest, my father warned me not to present papers on the novel at any academic conferences. When I protested in utter disbelief at such words coming from my liberal father, he reminded me that I was no longer just an individual, but had a family to consider, especially my small child.  He further insisted that I allow him to wrap the offending novel in a brown-paper wrapper. I was outraged, but it was his book, and I acquiesced. Although I did present a paper on the novel at a conference some time later, I believe that our family copy still wears that badge of my shame.

I retell this shameful story now because, after having had to live ten years of his life in hiding, Salman Rushdie is again facing threats of violence for having written The Satanic Verses, and so are writers at the recent Jaipur Literary Festival who read from that novel, which is still banned in India after all these years. I have signed a petition calling upon the Prime Minister of India to reconsider the ban, and would encourage anyone who believes in democratic freedom of expression to do the same. I would also urge you to join and support organizations like English PEN, who are working to uphold the precious freedom to write and read. If those of us who do not face censorship directly do not speak up for those who do, and if we go a step further and pre-emptively censor ourselves, we become complicit in the censorship of others.

At convent school in India the nuns would wag their fingers at us and say, “Shame, shame! Have you no shame?” I have indeed, but in this case it comes not from having flouted the rules, from having enjoyed a banned book, but from having clothed that enjoyment furtively in a brown-paper wrapper.

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