Books

In Which Saeed Mirza Gives It Those Ones

These halloas from an itinerant seeker call us to paths leading nowhere

Advertisement
In Which Saeed Mirza Gives It Those Ones
info_icon
Chicken Soup for the Soul

But that’s only part of the reason. The other part is that this can’t be your average feelgood book, because the author isn’t your average feelgood author. As the back-flap tells us, he’s a "pioneer of the New Wave, progressive cinema in India". His films "have all won major awards including the National Awards for film excellence in India". Everything about him is unique and rarefied—that’s why his cinema was interesting: he believed in the world beyond the box-office. He knows about cynicism and greed. He has worshipped at the feet of the Communist god, then realised the incongruity of such faith. He believes in history and weeps for all the horror that’s been sponsored in the name of religion, politics and good intentions. He may be on his way to becoming a Sufi, channelling Mulla Nasruddin as he rides towards the sunset on a donkey-shaped magic carpet. In short, he knows too much and he feels too passionately to write a squishy-mushy page-turner—so why has he tried?

Advertisement

In his preface the author shares his doubts about what he has achieved. "Will it make sense to my readers? I do not know. Is it a novel or an anti-novel? I do not know. What I do know is that I struggled and groped and, very often, floundered to contain all that was going through my mind." If I’d been one of the friends he consulted while writing this book, which is named for his late mother and takes the form of an open-ended letter to her, I would have suggested calling it a personal documentary in book-form.

Advertisement

It opens with a description of how his parents met, married and fell in love— in that order—though I am making a wild assumption here: Mirza writes about his parents as if they were characters in a fable. His account is charming, lyrical, filled with the fragrances of a vanished way of life but, alas, not quite convincing. Perhaps it really is difficult to write about one’s dearly beloved parents without eulogising them? My own view of families is too cold and unforgiving for me to sink into this tangle of warm-puppy memories without wanting to give all the characters a good shake and say, "Enough soft focus, already! Where’s the dirt?"

As we move into a more familiar time-frame, Mirza’s voice loses some of its quaintness. There’s the years spent earning a living in the advertising industry—so he is a messianic copywriter, after all!—and the after-shocks of the Vietnam War, interwoven with recollections of his mother’s sacrifices for a family of five as they struggled to make do on the salary of a school-teacher father who later turned to writing film scripts. There’s the turning towards the Left, marriage to a "Jennifer" who remains curiously undescribed and eventually the films: Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastaan, Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai, Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho—which I can remember seeing and being moved by. Then the disillusionment with the Left and the end of Mirza’s film-making in 1992, followed by his search for larger truths, carried out across India and the world. There’s Turkey and Spain, Bhopal and Babri Masjid, cats, Caliphs, conspiracies and Confucianism.

Advertisement

And, at the end, there’s a film script.

I liked it better than the rest of the book. It’s the same voice we’ve been listening to all along but more mature, less sentimental. The declarative statements have mutated into scenes, characters and sound-track and the narrative is presented with that particular economy of word and gesture that defines good cinema. The story concerns a middle-aged Afghan refugee who takes asylum in the US with his married sister. He works as an illegal alien in his hostile brother-in-law’s convenience store and befriends a lady of easy virtue. Then 9/11 happens, the fbi comes a-calling and it’s time for that chicken-soup ending. And who knows? If you believe in souls, you might even be healed by it.

Advertisement
Tags
    Advertisement
    Advertisement
    Advertisement
    Advertisement
    Advertisement
    Advertisement