That Campus Novel from Deep Storage
Thoughts about an early, failed attempt at the novel, and the opening section of that effort for your kind look-see
In 2009, when I graduated from B-school, I was twenty-three years old and temperamentally ill-suited to the real world (I find that I still mostly am). I used to write poems, and had some confidence in my ability to write decent ones, a confidence that attenuated (1) as I started sending my work out for publication and gathering terse rejections and (2) as I read more accomplished work. As with most failed poets, I turned to fiction. Several other incidents caused this turn too, but I’ll keep them for a future post. At this point, suffice it to say that going nowhere with poetry, I started cooking up stories. There were not many initial successes to speak of, but I was working a job by then and the efforts I put into starting and finishing stories provided enough of an alternate definition for my self. I would not have had the courage to say ‘Writer’ on my social media bios yet, but it was true that I had started cooking up ideas to make a living out of writing short stories—I saw it as an idyllic activity that could take me out of the rigmarole of the job. The noughts were probably the last decade when one could still keep that fantasy for a while. Reality was, of course, already far too sour. Just like the poems, the stories proved difficult to place, but because I had spent more time with each one of them, because I had moved away from the instant gratification of finishing a poem to something that required more consideration, and because—this was different from my engagement with poetry—I was able to spot relations of technique and effect in the fiction of others, I was convinced I needed to persist. The upshot was that I not only persisted with stories, I started writing a novel too.
In 2010, then, at the age of twenty-four, I started writing my first novel. It was, inevitably, about a slice of life that had until that point been the most dramatic of my life: campus life. The writing went along without a title for months. Then I came up with Young Departures as a suitable title. I later changed it to The Poetry of Young Departures. Friends from college suffered excerpts and obligingly gave me the only thing I needed: compliments. A friend from work read excerpts too, and called the whole thing boring in a polite way. Unfinished as it stayed for about thirty months, the novel constantly weighed on me. Privately I felt that I was doing something pristine and beautiful, that it could be even more pristine and beautiful if I had untrammelled islands of time, that I had the potential for the extraordinary in me, and that any deficiencies in my efforts were the result of how other things always demanded my attention. That these self-narratives were downright pretentious and divorced from the world, that they trained me to enjoy the cloud of low-grade frustration, that they made work and life both needlessly difficult—I could not have grasped these truths then.
The novel eventually did get finished. I sent it out to an agent (my agent today). He rejected it, calling it ‘highfalutin.’ Another agent said tersely: ‘We won’t be representing this.’ With great hope, I sent it out to an editor at Hachette, who did the kindest thing one could have done for my writing life then: he wrote to me at length. In his email, he pointed out the good things, then the bad things, and then explained how far I was from publishability. He also said that my novel needed a lot of ‘‘self’-editing (pun intended)’. I did not fully appreciate his comments at that time, and wrote him a long, silly email in response. But the truth is that he saved me from wasting any more time on that manuscript.
I opened the manuscript today by accident. I was searching for a different file in my drive, and the novel file popped up. I realise now, after reading the first full chapter, that this exercise of going back to old work isn’t completely without profit. The novel was written in the third person, in the present tense, with a constant interplay between action and interiority. These are things that are still formal challenges to me as a novelist, and my early (unthinking) solutions have given me not a small amount of pleasure. There are things that I would do differently today. It is likely, in fact, that I won’t start where I did and might choose a more dramatic entry to the novel.
In this post, I present to you the opening section of that novel’s first chapter. You will note in it some elements of male campus life: fascination with pornography, formative (erotic) encounters on Orkut and Gmail chat, attraction to shallow philosophy, aimlessness and ease with time, and so on. There is most definitely an aspect of navel gazing here, a writer giving too much priority to experience that—even if not completely theirs—holds signficance for them. I have left the excerpts basic rawness untouched. I would love to see what you make of it.
Note: The monthly War and Peace post will resume end of June, with ‘Month #5 and #6 of War and Peace’.
The Last Year Before The Rest of His Life
There are only six hours of compulsory classes in a week. Today is Wednesday, and on Wednesdays the last one of the week’s classes gets over at noon.
After a solitary lunch at the mess, he walks toward his dormitory through the loggia beside at the central plaza, the heart of the campus. He counts Wednesdays. Today is the third Wednesday of the academic year. There will be many more such Wednesdays—thirty-five to forty—before this final year concludes. With a fuzzy positivity regarding so much time, he walks on.
Entering his second-floor room he goes straight to the desk and switches on the laptop. He opens a porn website. A grid of lurid thumbnails splashes on the black screen. He scrolls through these to find a quality video. Till not so long ago he used to open four or five videos simultaneously, pausing all of them to allow streaming and then alternating between the options, but now he prefers sticking to one. It saves time, and is better erotically. The woman in the video makes all the right sounds, but out of concern for his immediate neighbours he has the volume turned as close to minimum as possible. Sitting on the chair before the desk he masturbates. He is done before the couple in the video will be done. He then leaves the chair and crashes on the bed, letting the video play on, as if allowing the actors to finish.
His room is standard hostel accommodation: minuscule and cramped: bed desk chair almirah. The desk and the almirah, pushed to one wall, and the bed, pushed to the opposing wall, leave little space for movement in between. The wheeled chair serves sometimes as a vehicle for navigation. The balcony is almost like a large window to which the room opens entirely on one end through a cumbersome bifold door. Beyond it the upper half of a neem tree swerves. The small jagged leaves of the tree provide a scattered shade in the afternoon.
On the bed, he traces blankly the rotations of the ceiling fan. He is happy. This last year of student life, fourth week running now, is a novel period. It is different from a holiday, and also different from the short-lived thrill of a bunked class. It is a beatific stasis—pure, well-earned, altogether ordinary leisure. It gives him time for things—for indulging in endless intellectual discussions with Nishant; for finally watching the more elusive of the movies listed in IMDb’s top 250, even the French and Spanish ones; for reading random articles on the internet; for writing poetry late in the night; for reading Coleman Banks’ translation of Rumi and scribbling around any lines that strike him as deep (he makes the notes with a very sharp pencil, to make them look studied); for noticing, from his small balcony, the play of colours in the sky during dawn and dusk, and diligently taking notes in his poetry journal; for spending time in the library, browsing through numerous books, and sighing at the sight of so much that mankind has felt and thought and studied and documented; for jogging in the small ground just below the dormitory and tiring after just three circles, but persisting—and so on.
All can be done now, and all, with its highs and lows, with its small fulfilments or small wastes, adds to his happiness. He is too lazy to distinguish between fulfilment and waste.
*
In the chatbox he notices the name Kavita Maulik. He points his cursor to the green dot next to it, and looks at the small picture in the expansion. The dull pixels craft a girl smiling with only her face and neck visible. He moves closer to the screen, to once again ascertain the degree of her prettiness, her aptness to his desire.
Kavita: a local Ahmedabad girl who befriended him on Orkut two weeks back. They shared emails. Day before yesterday she asked to Gchat at four today. Why was it so easy? Because he looks good in his profile picture, because he studies at an elite business school, because… whatever. He too has checked out her photos at leisure. He finds Kavita attractive.
“Hi,” he types into the textbox.
“Hieeeeeeee!!!!!!!” comes the reply.
In the long conversation that follows, there is little requirement for either wit or wooing. They go straight to the erotic groundwork, which is done at a frenetic pace. First, he manages to convey how attractive he finds her, how he loves all her pictures, how in such and such picture in such and such clothes she looks stunning, astounding, what not. He talks as if he’s used to talking like this. His own glibness surprises him. At her turns she tells him how how his sharp eyebrows have ‘bowled’ her, how his nose is ‘jst prfect’ and how his broad shoulders denote a ‘gud heart’. They finalize a meeting for the next day, to watch a movie together. And they share phone numbers, agreeing, at her insistence, not to call each other till they meet for the first time.
“Jst 4 suspense. I like u vry vry much,” she says, and with a final “Muaaaaaaaah,” seals it.
He feels easy, elated. It is close to six now. and thinking of where to find Nishant at this hour he dresses quickly. He rushes out of the room and flits down the six flights of stairs in less than twenty seconds, sledging down three, even four steps at a time.
Outside, hints of dusk have started mingling with the hot afternoon. The sun, still formidable, has begun to soften, and though the brick-laid floor of the campus is radiating heat beneath his feet, the breeze against his face feels relatively cooler.
He walks toward a little window that a road-side vendor has been allowed to draw through the walled boundary of the campus. Through this little square in the high brick wall, cigarettes, chais, and other snacks pass ceaselessly to the clientele inside—professors, staff and students—till 11 in the night. The campus authorities have even provided a bench just below the window. Sitting quietly on this bench is Nishant, just as he expected. There is a cigarette in his fingers; its smoke silks through for a while before confusedly disappearing in the air.
“Hey man. What’s up?”
He buys a cigarette and lights it, thinking he will not tell Nishant about Kavita. Through the window he signals Rambhai, the vendor, for two chais.
“What time for today’s discussion?” Nishant asks.
Nishant is wearing the same black T-shirt as always. It has a large marijuana leaf on the front side. On the back side are written the words ‘Up in Smoke’ in white, with the 'e' of ‘Smoke’ whirling away.
“So there is something to be discussed today?” he asks. The chai is ready. He takes the two flimsy plastic cups of chai through the window and passes one to Nishant.
“Always,” Nishant says. “I have been reading a lot and been thinking a lot.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes,” Nishant says. “Also… I have beers.”
“Great! So you bringing everything to my room then?” he asks, a bit mischievously.
“Of course not in your room, dude!” Nishant says. “My room. No other room in the world. Thinking happens where thinking happens.”
He always feels icky in Nishant’s room. The room is a horrible version of his own room; the furniture is the same, its positioning is the same, yet it feels like a shack from the least developed of countries, where malnourished, big-bellied children can be imagined lolling hungrily in their own podgy shit. But somehow all their discussions, meetings where they, under the effects of beer or whisky or rum or marijuana, let loose their tongues and thoughts, always take place in Nishant’s slovenly room, not his clean one.
Nishant has the gift of philosophising, something that is bleak, distant and enticing enough for him not to say no to. The session will start a bit earlier today, but Nishant claims to have a large stash of beer which will take some time to be finished. He must have sourced it through an exchange student, the few Europeans scattered in different dorms who have the right to alcohol in prohibitionist Gujarat. He notices Nishant full of energy, a bit excessively for a mere session of drinking and talking. But he cannot deny feeling energetic himself. Part of him has always felt compelled to match Nishant’s jest.
*
They are on Nishant’s bed, drinking beer, their backs rested against a wall. The room is almost dark, closed to the dwindling daylight from most ends. The floor is dirty, many things scattered on it—newspaper pieces, torn-off pages of classroom study material, mothballs. The stale air of the room is laden with a syrupy smell, a smell that is the signature of Nishant’s room.
Nishant, having slipped out of his jeans, is now in the blue chequered boxers which, like the T-shirt, are a regular affair. He finds Nishant wearing these in every session, and considering that they have been having sessions every other day, it really amounts to disgust. To plug it, he tries to understand this as a sign of intensity. All this filth is sufferable, in part, due to Nishant’s ignorance of the state of his personal hygiene. Surely, one cannot be blamed for something one is not aware of.
Nishant is fiddling with his laptop, to set up a video. The video is apparently ‘trippy,’ something about a stand-up comedian getting electrocuted on stage by the microphone.
He presses the beer can in his palm, making small tinny sounds whose hollowness he finds both pleasing and pathetic.
Tired of the uncharacteristically slow connection, Nishant puts the laptop aside and reaches for his beer. He takes a swig. “Ah. Intelligence is a curse my friend,” he says. There is a note of announcement in the tone. “Not intelligence… No…Intelligence is not the right word… Awareness... Consciousness… Yes… Consciousness is a curse. What do you think of that?” This is Nishant’s style. He thinks while he speaks. He corrects himself continuously. In fact, Nishant develops his point of view along the way.
Just at that moment the video splutters a bit and the speakers emit broken sounds of applause—cheers, claps, hurrahs—that lie at the beginning of the video.
He finds it ironic somehow, and laughs.
Nishant ignores it. “One can be conscious of wearing the wrong colour at a party. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about being self-conscious…being self-aware.”
He knows that Nishant may or may not make sense, depending on the time. Also that Nishant is not good at defending his position. If Nishant can take any questions at all, it is only those that are posed in a non-argumentative way. Better to just listen to and enjoy his myriad ideas.
He is good at listening to Nishant. He likes it even. But for him the real attraction of these sessions is to be able to read his poetry. Because after all the searches-for-truths and extrapolations-of-meanings, after all the arriving-at and departing-from, Nishant becomes a really good listener, one who eagerly spots and generously appreciates the tricks and nuances of poetry. It is in this way that they become adequate and necessary for each other.
“Or should I say a… a lumbering awareness of the self,” Nishant continues. “You see, all religious philosophy is about how to deal with the awareness of yourself. Some talk about increasing this consciousness and therefore becoming the super being ... becoming able to experience things in their true truth. Others talk about annihilating it—they say that the annihilation of self-consciousness is the only way to merge it with superconsciousness… have nirvana. Anyhow, if there was a continuum, most people will be on the right side of it.”
“The right? As in the correct side?” he asks.
“Left and right. On the left I’m putting the highest self-awareness, on the right the lowest self-awareness. Lowest as in lowest possible for sane humans. Most people we meet will be in the right half.” Nishant makes animated gestures with his hands while explaining this, drawing an imaginary line on the thick air of the room and then cleaving the line into two with a swoosh of his palm.
He wonders if Nishant is a tad too abstract tonight, and if his abstractions are leading them astray. But there is chilled beer. And maybe there will be an opportunity for poetry later on.
He does feel a little guilty of the somewhat selfish purpose he meets Nishant for. Maybe Nishant has a similar feeling. It is true that in all of their meetings, both of them find it difficult to start. There is a little hesitation at the beginning – its manifestation today being the stupid video Nishant tried to play, for no reason at all. But he understands this as natural, indicative of the unease they are bound to feel due to the novelty of their situations, their finally finding the time to think through what they regard as vaguely important. But he can’t be sure; perhaps it is like a warm-up routine that is necessary for such conversation. Whatever the hesitation is made of, it does not stay long enough to spoil the party, for one of them invariably overcomes it with a flourish of words, a loud exclamation, a call to action, and directs the rendezvous to its meat. Any awkwardness in this process is always ignored by the other one. The net result is a sinuous discourse that sets off in philosophy and veers toward poetry and by the end of which philosophy and poetry mix to the point of becoming indistinguishable. He loves a scenario where he presents—or even crafts, then and there—a poem that describes the concepts that Nishant has moments earlier talked of. And Nishant, he believes, loves to pick his poems and ‘abstract them’, surprising him with deeper meanings and interpretations that make him prouder of his creations. There is no doubt that these sessions have suggested newer subjects to him. After each one of these unimpeded intellectual discussions – stretching on sometimes for the duration of an entire night – he feels a strange enlightenment and is able to pour it, at least to his satisfaction, into words.
This is how a poet improves, he thinks. By listening. Discourse is the foundation of artistic enterprise, he is sure.
As if trailing his thoughts, Nishant’s monologue, too, is slowly shifting toward the zone of art. There is something about artists from either half of that imaginary line managing to create pieces of art for the other half. Writing poetry, Nishant says, is an avowal of being in the left half. Reading poetry is experiencing the pull to the left.
The words left and right are used so much that he feels confused. After a while he abandons all attempts to follow Nishant and turns again within himself.
Their session last night had made him write many poems about the writing of poetry itself. It was all short witty stuff.
In half sleep a black pen finds white paper.
Two eyes then argue, one shut and the other mildly protesting,
The guile in burning for words.
“And then…” Nishant’s booming voice pierces the space of his thoughts. “…all you’re left with is your reasonseeking motherfucking intelligence in this reason-evading motherfucking world. The more self-conscious you become, out of sheer intelligence, the more you’re doomed behnchod... because then you question... then you argue... then you criticise… you see the senselessness but cannot accept it whole and sole. The world was made for motherfucking insects... actually.”
There is some silence after which Nishant gets up from the bed and goes out of the room. Has Nishant walked out feeling ignored? No, it is just to get more beer from the dorm pantry. He decides to listen to Nishant from now on. He pans the room in his eyes. Is it in places like these that genius germinates? Genius germinates! Alliteration!