The Other World...

Get up from bed…finishing the morning routines takes about 30 minutes…grab a quick bite…collect ur car keys…off I go melting into the morning traffic to my place of work some 16 kms away…so what’s new? Nothing, except that I don’t have to worry about where my next meal will come from or whether a stray rocket is going to vaporise my house along with it’s occupants by the time I return home…or wonder why the trash has been collecting on the streets for years on end, so much so that my landmarks are one putrid mound to the next cause all the familiar landmarks have been shelled and bombed to oblivion or shall I be happy that I no longer see rotting and animal feasted bodies on the streets and that the dead need only wait a day to be picked up.

Those of us who live on the other side of the world can’t for a minute imagine the life an ordinary Iraqi lives or what the Afghans had to go through during the vacuum created by the withdrawing Soviet army, the different warlords reducing the Afghan nation to shambles or the misrule of the Talibans…Today’s Iraq is no different nor are the other countless war-torn territories that we don’t have a clue about.

We can only glean the outer visages of this world from the literature that comes our way and can’t help but feel a sweltering mix of emotions…..blessed that our morning routines have remained unchanged in years…horrified that nations and people can wrought such havoc on humanity….helpless…

“After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!”

The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock (T. S. Elliot)

For those of you who would like to visit the fringes of this 'other world' read “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini and dispatches by Anna Badkhen from Iraq on Salon.

First African Author...

Every time I read a particularly captivating book by an author who I haven’t read before, I feel like kicking myself for discovering him or her, as the case may be, so late in my reading cycle. It has been an unfailing ritual with me! My latest discovery has been Doris Lessing and what a revelation she has been! Some of you guys out there may be thinking “Ain’t seen a bigger dud”, but what the heck – never late than never!

It was pure serendipity that the book that my paw rested on was ‘the grass is singing’, Doris’s first novel, set in Southern Rhodesia, today’s Zimbabwe. An intense and captivating book, Doris brings to the fore her powerful experience of life in Southern Rhodesia, the country that her father chose to travel to make his pot of gold by going the farming route. The reader is pitch forked right into the middle of the action from the word go as Doris throws open a window through which we see and intimately experience the life of the main protagonist Mary Turner.

Mary shows us how deep the racial divide ran between the white settlers and coloured natives. Her life exposes the subtle but unmistakeable class system within the whites themselves and their unrecorded and unspoken rules of camaraderie. More importantly it is through Mary that we learn the rules of engagement with the coloured – so biased, so inhuman, that at times it fills you with a sense of loathing for the people who could have behave thus.

As we journey along with Mary in the rural hinterland of Southern Rhodesia, we experience the natural vividness of Africa, feel the searing heat of the midday sun thru Mary’s tin roofed house that misses a ceiling, and get swallowed by the nights filled with strange sounds.

As Mary gradually disintegrates and the racial lines, that were drawn so taut in her life, dissolves we experience the utter destitution that human’s are capable of bringing onto themselves, by their actions and inactions. Mary also brings to the fore, how our life’s journey is decided by our childhood experiences and how utterly incapable we are to escape its death like vice.