Stories

Post Number 87: My Week In Not Paris with Deborah Levy

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I have grasped the precursor to enjoying Deborah Levy’s fiction. Problems in her characters’ lives are not to be solved but lived through. With that, I settled into her latest fiction, ‘My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein’, which follows an unnamed narrator who is temporarily in Paris, and a divorced English woman tasked with writing an essay on Gertrude Stein.

Set in November 2024 against the aftermath of the US elections, it follows our struggling narrator as she juggles a new city, new friends, no lover, a missing cat, mice in her apartment, and an essay that is yet to transfer onto paper.

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Post Number 79: A Room With A View

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[Waking up in Florence]

“It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, the Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.”

Thus wake up Lucy Honeychurch and Charlotte Bartlett, the characters from E.M Forster’s ‘A room with a view’, in an Italian pension but not without causing a scene at the dinner table that leads them to this serene view. The story, more focused on Lucy, makes the reader see how this excursion to Italy was to forever alter her outlook on life. A couple of weeks away from England, and Lucy returns to find the mores of her social circles stifling. Florence, and by extension Italy now flutters across her mind like a representation of everything that signified independence and romance. Though the story takes a different, a more conventional angle of a romance eventually, this initial section of the novel, ‘Lucy as a tourist’, made me think of the rooms with a view that I had inhabited during my travels.

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Post Number 50 : Around Europe in 100 Days – Nous Voyageons en Belgique

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A travelogue capturing the experience of Belgium – Brussels, Bruges, Beer, and Fries

Still buzzing from the trip to Paris, we rested for a solid 12 hours and decided to leave for Belgium. We had a week off and there was no chance we were going to spend it in Lille. Deepesh had officially joined us and the six of us booked the Airbnb in a rush and boarded the train to Brussels. The bogey we sat in had an overexcited annoying group of men drunk on beer who spent their time (loudly) shouting at each other until they got off and decided to pee on the train tracks in a queue. So much for Swachh Belgium Abhiyaan. I was weaning off my ‘Look! European grasslands!’ phase but I still see pictures of landscapes in my Camera-Roll so we’ll treat that as Work-In-Progress. Read More

Post Number 49: Around Europe in 100 Days – Nous Voyageons à Paris

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A travelogue on exploring Paris – tourist spots, commotion, eccentric crowds, and Seine

Still reeling from the adventure of the first day, we took things slowly in the subsequent days. We attended the orientation program of our exchange university, realized there were too many Indians there, got ourselves French SIM cards, explored Lille, realized McDonald’s served beer and that avocado sandwiches were atrocious, visited an art museum that was so painfully dull that we resorted to making memes, went to the local casino, and settled on Maggi as our staple dinner. Over the weekend, Sumit’s friends were going to be in Paris so we decided to join them. Read More

Post Number 48 : Around Europe in 100 Days – L’arrivée en France

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A travelogue exploring the journey to Europe, full of misadventures and bad luck.

Once upon a time (in 2019), when Corona was but a beer and the word pandemic made one harken back to the days of the Bubonic Plague, I was fortunate to get a chance to travel through Europe in the name of ‘Student Exchange’- the global tourism scheme sustaining many a hostels, dingy pubs, (misguided) 2004 movie enthusiasts, and petty thieves relying on the naivete of unsuspecting kids travelling through post-colonial colonial countries.

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Post Number 47 : The Fault In Our Stars

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An essay exploring the modern culture of celebrity worship.

*Slight Spoilers for Watchmen, HBO Series*

Last week, I wrapped up my binge of the HBO series, Watchmen. The show (which is excellent, if a little convoluted) had many complex characters. My favourite was FBI agent Laurie Blake, member of the Anti-Vigilante Task Force. Laurie was someone who had lived her life as, with, and around heroes. She embodied layers of paradoxes – she was the younger Silk Spectre, daughter of two superheroes, ex-girlfriend to Dr. Manhattan but she had abandoned her vigilante days to work with the FBI to catch them instead. Despite her disillusionment, she went to those blue phonebooths to leave resentful but hope-filled messages to Dr. Manhattan. The country was full of phonebooths where people voiced their deepest prayers to an omnipotent blue being who’d left for Mars. Holding out for a hero.screen-shot-2019-11-01-at-4-58-41-pm-1572642227

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Post Number 43: A Semi-Nomadic Take On The Idea Of Home

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An essay exploring the meaning of home, after a life lived on traveling for a while

Some weeks ago in Lisbon, I was asked to fill out a form where I had to write my address. In between countries, as I was then, I asked the receptionist if I had to write my Indian address, my campus address (because of which I was travelling), or the French place where I was living for the past few months. She shrugged nonchalantly and went back to chewing her gum. I scribbled something and returned the form but in that moment I was already thinking about this – about home.

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Post Number 42 : The Importance of Telling Different Stories

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An essay exploring the need to read and write diverse narratives

I read ‘Beloved’ recently. Beloved is the Pulitzer winning novel by the African-American author, Toni Morrison. Toni’s novels have all focussed on life as an African American. Her characters have always been unapologetically ‘ethnic’ in their thoughts, actions, and beliefs. She was once asked in an interview if she’d consider writing about white people substantially, to which she had responded –

I have had reviews in the past that have accused me of not writing about White people…as though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the White gaze. And I’ve spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the White gaze was not the dominant one in any of my White books.

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