A Raking Glance
"When asked to, I could pull off an act of reading without knowing how to read, with my finger moving over the right line and my mouth voicing it out clearly."
One evening in January 2019, while reading John le Carré’s The Night Manager, a phrase in a sentence caught my eye. From the vantage of a balcony, the hero takes “a raking glance” at the bar below. I paused. I didn’t recall ever reading this phrase before, and though I grasped what it intended to convey—a quick scan—I was still a bit unsure, knowing the word ‘raking’ only as a gardening activity and not as an adjective applicable to glances.
I looked the phrase up, not in a general Google search but on Google Books. It certainly wasn’t something le Carré had invented. It was quite common, in fact, particularly in erotic literature, which wasn’t hard to comprehend: “He gave her/him a raking glance.” It upset me, this proven commonness of a thing that I’d been struck by the novelty of, for it brought back that old insecurity: am I really qualified to be a writer in English?
For those who don’t know, this is a sort of fundamental insecurity that mere wisdom cannot suppress; it must be explicitly answered each time it pops up. At that time, I was writing my novel The Machine is Learning, and I fit “a raking glance” in the draft somewhere. Months later, when the memory of the perturbation caused by the phrase had waned, I edited it out.1
What happened with “a raking glance” is less a story and more the demonstration of a method—a method of responding to what I find striking in others’ fictions, and one that necessitates a stage of feeling inadequate. It has everything to do with my context and background.
I was most definitely a Hindi reader before I was an English reader. In fact, I was a Hindi reader even before I knew how to read. Quite early in my childhood, my mother started reading Chacha Chowdhary comics to me. Over long summer afternoons, her hand gently dragged my tiny index finger over the exact words she was reading. The story emerged line by line, panel by panel, page by page, even when alphabets and words were alien. I memorized everything. When asked to, I could pull off an act of reading without knowing how to read, with my finger moving over the right line and my mouth voicing it out clearly.
Consequently, a voracious appetite for Hindi comics set in, which over the next few years became a problem for my parents. It cost two rupees to borrow a comic for a day from the nearby rental shop, and I could read twenty rupees of comics in a few hours, enough to make it stressful for my father’s meagre salary. Also, perhaps more importantly, a different question had started emerging for them: what was to be gained by reading Hindi comics? After all, English was the language of aspiration. My parents had stopped subscribing to their Hindi newspaper and moved to an English one, despite being unable to read it. The paper was there only for me—for my formation, on which, as my parents believed, everything hinged. Amid such accreting obligations, requesting money for renting a Hindi comic became difficult. Once, cliffhung in a Super Commando Dhruv series and ashamed to ask for money, I stole a five-rupee note from my father’s wallet and sated myself hurriedly outside the rental shop. The next day my father asked if I had taken something from his wallet. I shook my head in the negative, but shame burned me with many flames. One of those flames lashed with the knowledge that I had a father who missed a five-rupee note in his wallet.
Around the same time, my mother bought me an abridged version of Oliver Twist, a Moby Books version with pictures on alternate pages. I took a liking to it, and soon Oliver Twist was followed by The Hound of the Baskervilles. There was something quite different about reading those English books. I was always grasped by a desire to imitate or to re-create what I had just read. If I may use Orhan Pamuk’s schema (which is, in fact, the German poet Friedrich Schiller’s schema) of naivete and sentimentality: whereas with Hindi comics I was the naive reader, at once transported inside the fantastical world of the superhero story, with abridged English novels I was the sentimental reader who observed each point of difference, each mannerism, each plot point. If I have to theorize now, I would say that an alert distance from the story-in-English merged with a general necessity to excel in the language, birthing an impulse of re-creation through granular imitation.
But anything above the granule was difficult. My English imagination was curiously constrained. When I tried to think of a story after reading Oliver Twist, all I could come up with were tales of dispossessed children. When I tried to think of a story after reading The Hound, all I could conjure was mysterious beasts prowling all over the moor. I couldn’t understand it then, of course, but English was a foreign country where I had no options but to stick close to the areas I had recently familiarized myself with.
Soon, however, both my repressed love for Hindi comics and my fledgling interest in English fiction hit a long moratorium. Teenage started, and Physics, Chemistry, and Maths arrived as an all-governing trinity. For five years I read nothing for pleasure. At the age of seventeen, I left Muzaffarnagar, my hometown. I wouldn’t pick up fiction for another five years.
In the second year of my MBA, I had considerable free time. It was the last year of my education; beyond it, real life loomed. Everyone around me was pursuing their interests, and I found that I didn’t have many options. Sports, dance, music, acting, quizzing, and even competitive video gaming were alien to me. And so, at the age of twenty-two, seeking to do something likeable with my time, I decided to read again. The first novel I read was Albert Camus’ The Stranger. That a translated book became my first proper read in English could have turned out to be more definitive if only I had liked it more. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was next, which I had to pretend to like before a couple of my male friends, who regarded Dean Moriarty as a god of some kind. Then came Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I remember finding both ominous and boring. None of these books made me want to write fiction. I’d lost my alertness and my need to grasp the language any better. And so there wasn’t any impulse for re-creation.
The turn towards writing fiction finally came around a year later. By then I was jobless in Gurgaon and had a French girlfriend who had gotten into the habit of reading The New Yorker online (something that was free in those days) to improve her English. I started reading it, too. One day, I read a short story in the magazine and, finding it quite plain, boasted: “I can write stuff like this easily.”2 My girlfriend encouraged me and I took it up as a challenge.
It was a harrowing experience. I absolutely didn’t know how to write.
More than ten years have passed since. Somewhere during this time, the French girlfriend vanished, I fell in love again, I got married, I read hundreds of books, and I wrote three of my own.3 Pride—the pride of a new learner, and of a new lover—had brought me to writing fiction in English, and its instant shattering had sent me on a quest to improve. I read nothing for pleasure in all these years. I only read to become better at writing—to learn the cadence of sentences, to note turns of phrases, to discern mistakes, to observe what characters do (in text) while talking to each other, to build private theories of flashback and flashforward transitions, to obsess about varieties of chapter breaks, and so on. It was a disease. It is a disease. In a Lawrence Block crime novel I read last week, I got stuck at the following simile: “as casually as all hell.”4 I couldn’t just appreciate its simplicity and aptness and let it go; I had to torture myself with the truth that I could never have come up with it myself.
Last year, though, I found hope—the hope of escaping a method that was becoming more powerful than its master. Around the same time when I was writing The Machine is Learning, the idea that I must write a book in Hindi gained a hold over me. Naturally, I started including Hindi fiction in my reading lists. But things didn’t turn out as I expected. My English reading habits didn’t carry over to Hindi automatically. More often than not, the story-in-Hindi sucked me in, leaving no time to pay attention to specific phrases and sentences. I read things whole. And, slowly, book after book, the searching gaze—or the raking glance, if I may—vanished completely. One evening, while reading the concluding sections of Rahi Masoom Raza’s Katra B Arzoo, I cried. It was the first time I had ever cried while reading. It went on, and there came a point when I was no longer crying for the characters in the book but for myself.
It was a homecoming.
I’ve read dozens of Hindi books since and they’ve changed me in ways I’m yet to process. I don’t know what happens next. Will I drop the idea of writing in Hindi, so as to not rake through the language like I compulsively do with English? Or will I stop writing in English to enjoy it more? Or will I find a way to do neither, as revel in the fluidity of my locations along the axes of naivete and sentimentality?
This essay was first published in Huffington Post India in 2020. The website shut down soon after, for reasons unrelated, as far as I am aware. I have made some very minor edits here.
I did, however, use the phrase in my novel Manjhi’s Mayhem, which was written after this essay. As:
I pulled down he shutter, shot a raking glance across the road, found my dream-girl super busy, and then walked on with a sigh.
It was an Alice Munro story. Yes, I’m still ashamed of thinking so.
Four now. This essay was written in 2020.
This happened again recently. I read an endorsement for a John Macdonald novel that called it “as fascinating as staring at a cobra” and I was like ‘Dayum.’
Great piece, Tanuj. I was struck by your comments about not being able to read for pleasure for a long time. Our trajectories are very different-- I only had access to English books. It took me a long time to realise the brown guy staring at me in the mirror was me.