‘Philip Roth of India’: Excerpt from Inderjit Badhwar’s prize-winning novel, ‘The Chamber of Perfumes’
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Chapter One of Chamber
But electric power in Raipur, Uttar Pradesh, was a blessing. It was doled out to us at the whims of State Electricity Boards—those state monopolies—and their sadistic, whimsical officials who would switch the power supply off when they ate lunch, slept, played cards, made love or went on wildcat strikes. Our rooms would hum with heat. The smell of dust—the sky was made of dust, the leaves on our mango trees, caked with it, looked like clods of earth on their branches, the tree trunks and their bark took on shapes of dinosaur scales molded by clay—was everywhere. In our home—a disorganized four-bedroom rambler with ceilings so high that they could accommodate a studio crane-shoot, a banquet-sized dining room with chandeliers that hung 20 feet above eye level—we had a haven. Papa’s room. It was recessed in a corner of the house and played host to almirahs with glass doors, a dressing table with a square mirrors with swivels at both ends enabling the mirror to change angles. Papa’s inventions. But his greatest invention, which he regarded with special pride, was his false ceiling. It was made of quilts stitched end to end and hammered to the roof on all four corners. That it sagged in the middle and might, one day, like Chicken Licken’s sky, smother its inventor within its generous folds as he slept on his wooden bed with planks at dead center of the room, mattered not a whit to Papa. (Continued) |
About the book and the author—once a U.S. reporter
Chamber is an identify novel about the wars between the hero’s Eastern and Western sides, between family values and the sexual wildness of the sixties; and Inderjit Badhwar is hardly the first to plum such themes. Setting his work apart, however, are the idiosyncrasies and sprightly descriptions of his characters. Certain critics have called my friend “the Philip Roth of India.” I myself think Indy stands up well on his own: no comparison needed. Both writers shine, in their own ways. Roth was born in northern New Jersey; Badhwar, in northern India. He is the son of an Indian princess, not the Jewish-American variety satirized in some novels of Roth. Like Roth, Badhwar can write sarcastic dialogue well, the boy-girl kind included. See biographical information at the end of the book excerpt. I met Indy while he was reporting for a paper that covered the doings and misdoings of the Washington bureaucracy. He earlier had graduated from Columbia Journalism School, and he went on to work for the legendary muckraker Jack Anderson. Seeing my friend so successful as an “uppity Hindu Yankee”—that’s more or less the phrase I remember from either the novel or publicity about it—who’d have guessed he would return to India? When I caught up with Indy by email recently, curious if my own novel might find readers in India, I learned that Chamber had appeared elsewhere in French, German, Portugese, Dutch and Spanish. But no American and U.K. editions have come out even though versions from India Research Press are buyable at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s and elsewhere (in some cases the title is Sniffing Papa). Is there an e-book angle here? Actually yes. Indy’s literary writing is reflective, philosophical and outside the usual bestseller criteria for the U.S. But at the very least he is an excellent possibility for a good literary publisher for E and POD. And who knows? Sometime “niche” can become much more. Meanwhile enjoy Indy’s first chapter. |
Papa’s family rarely questioned this autocrat or his wisdom. But nobody, nobody criticized Papa’s inventions—the swimming “tank” which he designed by cutting the earth in the middle of a mango and neem grove into progressively deepening steps, cementing it, and constructing four holding walls around it; the leather and canvas shoes of which he lopped off the front ends to give his knotty toes additional wiggling room; the Grundig radio and radio player console—“radiogram” we called that contraption in the 1950s—that rose majestically to a height of three feet, a strange round box with lids that opened side by side to display a turntable and a radio dial with wooden knobs, which he later converted into a bar; the old pieces of elastic with which he used to encircle the waistbands of his pajamas to avoid the bother of undoing tangled drawstrings. The tank stood out as a model of ingenuity on our five-acre spread festooned with rose gardens and fruit orchards irrigated by a network of aqueducts in which we raced paper boats.
Papa the inventor belonged in that crazy room of his. It was our home’s sanctum sanctorum. We entered in his absence at our own peril. We outfoxed Papa in our desire to do so. Large double doors opened into his room from the commodious, oval-shaped drawing room that was home to the radiogram-turned-bar. This was another crazy room with a green and buff nine by twelve Aubusson rug, high-backed Edwardian chairs, rosewood tables, family photographs of ancestors wearing white gloves and spats. Everything distant from the other. The paintings – two Sudhir Khastagir originals, a half-clad Bengali woman with her Rapunzelesque tresses caught in a westerly breeze, an army of turban-clad tribal drummers – were hung on two opposite walls so near the ceiling that you saw them at the grave risk of getting an attack of spondylitis. Alcoves with Ming vases and fake Edwardian fruitbowls.
A green Edwardian love seat stood three feet away from the double doors, which were the entrance to Papa’s false-ceilinged boudoir. The doors had four glass panes at slightly above eye level. But a seizure of privacy had driven Papa one day to paint them black to defy the eyes of prying offspring. Cleverly, though, he had scratched off a little of the black on one of them leaving a peephole about an inch in circumference. Through this, a fatherly eye—or so we imagined—surveyed his creations and inventions in the drawing room from behind a fortress of privacy.
This little peephole was our bridgehead. Since Papa could leave his room through two other doors that led into office and workshop, the peephole door remained closed unless he wished to enter the drawing room or stalk other areas of the house. The only way we could determine whether he was in or out was to use our side of the peephole on the drawing room side. If our surveillance disclosed his absence we barged in. He never kept those doors locked.
Later I was to discover that all five of his offspring and, later, a platoon of grandchildren—unbeknownst to one another—were in the habit of making this illegal pilgrimage. Especially on those hot, dusty summer afternoons. Papa’s room was a haven from dust and choked nostrils. It was more than that. If we breathed deep enough we smelled Papa. Not Papa, but what we thought wafted from some chemical, perhaps spiritual pact he had made with the cosmos. Did souls have smells? Soul to us then was nothing but timeless Sanskrit words uttered by pundits over loudspeakers or at prayer gatherings—pujas—Atman, Brahman, Triyambakam. As novitiate Hindus we imbibed our religious traditions not at any pulpit but through the fractured and hopelessly mismatched vocal chords of Mama on those ancient holy festivals when she mispronounced and with tuneless determination intoned the Om Jai Jagdish Hare (Glory to our Lord) invocation to the ONE on Diwali when India explodes with light in a frenzied celebration of the power of good over evil; on Dussehra, when 5000 years before the birth of Christ, Lord Rama slew Ravana the most powerful of all demon kings. At every puja on Janmashtami, Lord Krishna’s birthday, her reedy, compassionate voice had the power to distract Krishna during a bellicose sermon—updesh—to Arjuna, the disciple to whom he gave the infinite wisdom of the Bhagwad Gita. In Mama’s voice we sensed soul.
2.
It emanated from Papa’s presence. On Diwali evenings, before the firecrackers were lit, Mama’s jagged vocal chords vibrated and hummed in dissonance. Her family had gathered for the Diwali puja. Diwali being a thanksgiving day for material well being, Wealth Goddess Laxmi was the reigning deity for that pecuniary ritual. It would establish for the family a fiduciary pact with the devi. The supplicants, five children, an aunt, and Papa stand hands folded in prayer before the family safe, the interior of which had lost most of its valuables to jewelers whose purchase of the family valuables increased in direct proportion to Papa’s steadily declining coffers as he struggled to keep aristocratic values alive.
So we stand reverently in front of this iron safe which hides within its confines the secret of the vanished wealth of the family that once lorded over factories and laborers and peons dressed in turbans sporting fake silver emblems and khaki pants with latticed cuffs. Mama leads the chant. Seema, 18, high cheek-boned like Papa, her mother’s glistening dark eyes, Seema who did not menstruate until her late teens and did not wear a practice bra until she was 16, giggles. Tips, 16, who looks like Seema except that he an outsized Adam’s Apple and a crew cut, as he lights the wicker lamps and with sadistic impishness flicks hot wax drippings on me, whose arrival in the household, two years after him, was a source of rejoicing in Raipur because two sons had arrived in succession. Then came a third, Tally, again, two years after me, followed by Sara nine years later. Curly-haired, beak-nosed, wild-eyed, with a milky-white skin, Sara could well have fit a description of a Jewish girl right out a Singer novel. Naipaul was dead right. Midnight’s Children were given fashionable Westernized names. Horoscopes were prepared for all of them by the family pundits at birth in which their Zodiac signs determined the consonants and vowels with which their names would begin. The family name, at least in the north, remained the same for all successive generations but the first names were horoscopic. If the horoscope decreed that, say, a newborn’s first name should begin with a “cha” a boy would be named Chaman, or Chetan. “Sha” for a boy would produce names like Shyam or Shailendra, while a girl would be named Shalini or Sheena. And, so on. Most names came from ancient epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata and the Vedas – names like Savitri, Usha, Sita, Rama, Shatrughan, Sridevi, Mandakini, Arjun, Malika, Prahlad, Indra, Indrajit.
But Midnight’s Children, especially those exposed to Western education, no matter how deeply their families were steeped in traditional rituals, religious beliefs and a faith unbroken for 5000 years, sported names like Tony, Bobby, Tippy, Sammy, Dennis, Bunny, Bunty. Not all, but many of them. But when Midnight’s baby boomers spawned their own children, they reversed the trend and scanned the ancient texts and Hindu versions of the Gemara for names that would be rarer than others—Meenakshi, Vandana, Rahil, Shruti, Meghna, Prerna, Rashib. Papa’s children came in all colors – brown-skinned, wheaten, fair, depending on which Indo-European sperm won the race at the moment of conception. I am as dark as Sara is fair.
On this Diwali night, Mama sings. I step on Tally’s toe. Tally pinches Sara’s bottom. She is oblivious to the undercurrent of the irreverence of her young on this day of Diwali, all celebrating creation with lights and hymns in defiance of atheism. Mama too, bursts with light, her witchy voice celebrating celestial orgies.
Om Jai Jagdish Hare…The children pretend to get serious and lip-read their mother under the stern atheistic gaze of Papa who sports a vermilion tikka on his forehead—smudged into shape by Mama who cowers under husbandly machismo for most of the year but rises like a Phoenix from the ashes of wifely docility on Diwali, to put her own badge of courage on the wrinkled and questioning brow of her brow-beating husband.
Pa looks devilishly religious with his smeared forehead and splendidly starched white kurta pyjama suit. The last stanza of the aarti and we all sing together… “Kripa karo deva, Om Jai…( O Lord have mercy…).”
3.
If you get the idea that there was rootlessness in our family, a sense of anomie, a nagging feeling that we were hung between a world of tradition and a world of rapidly changing technologies, then I’ve given you the wrong impression. True we were Midnight’s Children. True we learned and spoke English better than the King himself. True we were the inheritors of educational, bureaucratic, cultural legacies of the Raj. We inherited snobbery, elitism. We realized we all lived in India in tribes of cultures. We were born in an India of 400 million people, one fifth of mankind, a population that was to double within 40 years. Poverty, mostly poverty of a kind, of urban ghettos, of rural privation, never witnessed in Europe or America or Tolstoy’s Russia. But there was no guilt. We did not dangle between reason and revolution. We were not agonized by existential dilemmas like the Jews of the pre-World War II diaspora—whether to migrate to the Holy Land under the Palestine Mandate and take up Hebrew, whether to join the Bolsheviks in Russia to create the permanent revolution, whether to remain cloistered in Yiddish speaking pockets in New York, or whether to assimilate with the Gentiles. No, we were not afflicted by the dilemma of the Fabians either, whether to sit in libraries and continue to make the Revolution an esoteric exercise and indulge in theories of Sovereignty from Hobbes to Bentham and Laski, or to cut the bullshit and get on the right sides of the barricades with the masses. Nor did we torment ourselves like European intellectuals about which side to join during the Spanish Civil War.
I mean, social historians may legitimately ask, weren’t you torn between two cultures, several languages, the need to emulate Gandhian renunciation and bourgeois acquisitiveness and conspicuous consumption, to become the vanguard for the workers and peasants to reorder the political structure that was a British hand-me-down of constitutional legalisms? There was no dilemma either invented or promulgated by the dictators of social conscience anywhere in the world that did not stare us in the face and threaten to drive us crazy. We were Veblen’s Leisure Class. We the Marxist-Leninist historical garbage that belongs in history’s dustbins. We were the Indian Left’s lickspittle of neocolonialism and neo-imperialism. To India’s populists and ultra nationalists we were the exponents of a corrupt Urban Culture who scoffed at their own roots.
We stood guilty as charged. At least Papa did. Frankly, he didn’t give a damned rat’s ass. He had read Spinoza when young. He had armed himself with Churchill’s volumes on the Second Great War. Travelyan’s Social History lay dog-eared on his bookshelf from the very first page on the analysis of Chaucer’s age and the influence of the French on Anglo Saxon culture.
The feast of green coriander, bitter gourds and moong dal – north India’s staple lentil that looks like a hellish yellow porridge but tastes like heaven when cooked with love – and mustard greens with dollops of white home-churned butter served at the table over which he presided in formal coat and tie would at his command the next day turn into a banquet of partridge cooked in sherry, garlic and Worcestershire sauce. Cauliflower with white gravy, fricasseed chicken served with roasted potatoes and carrots topped with parsley, French onion soup, steak and onions, baked fish, deviled eggs, Russian salad with home-made mayonnaise, caramel custard, fudge brownies. These table habits have become part of family memory, along with Papa’s letters of admonishment and advice to his family –stand straight, develop character, tolerate others, learn not to hate, be compassionate, respect precision in language, be charitable, do what is just, respect knowledge, adore books, respect eclecticism, believe in the rule of law, get married and bolster your husband’s career, learn how to wield a rifle and shotgun. Don’t shoot at a sitting duck or partridge. If you cannot allow yourself not to believe in, then at least doubt God.
Biographical information
(Reproduced and slightly adapted from Author’s Den)
Inderjit Badhwar was born in a dustbowl market town in Ujhani in northern India, the third child in a family of three brothers and two sisters. His father, an aristocrat, a patrician who inherited a cotton business that went to seed during his own lifetime was called to the bar at Inner Temple in London during the British Raj. His mother, a princess, was the daughter of Maharaja Sir Kishen Pershad Prime Minister of Hyderabad whose ancestors had helped the Nizam rule one of the largest of India’s pre-independence princely states through several generations. The Maharaja was a Sufi poet, caligrapher, Persian scholar and administrator who traced his lineage to Raja Todar Mal, one of Emperor Akbar’s "Nine Jewels" whose land revenue system still serves as the blueprint for modern India’s rural administrative structure. At the age of five, Inderjit Badhwar was sent to boarding school at Welham’s in Dehra Dun run by English schoolmarms. Until the age of 21 when Badhwar obtained his Masters from Delhi’s St Stephen’s College in History and the History of Western Political Thought from Hobbes to Laski, he remained in boarding. His pre-college years were spent at Doon School from where he passed his Senior Cambridge examination with Honors. His was an eclectic education and background—doses of feudal sentimentality mixed with massive dollops of humanism; a totally rural background infused with a cosmopolitan, internationalist world-view; a late teen-age hankering for Marxist solutions later dampened by his reading from George Orwell who still remains a major influence in his life, particularly "Homage to Catalonia." By the time Badhwar was 12 he had read Dostoievsky’s "Crime and Punishment" and Toslstoy’s "War and Peace." Even though people who taught him in school and whom he encountered as a professional did influence him, books remained his real journey. In high school he went the usual route—Shakespeare, Wodehouse, Whitman, Donne, Wordsworth, Coleridge, R.L. Stevenson, Emily Dickenson…along with compulsory courses on Indian writers and poets in Hindi. In Doon School everything was compulsory—reading, hiking, fishing, mountaineering, carpentry, debating, elocution, boxing, swimming…But as an undergrad Badhwar began to discover books on his own. From his father’s dusty shelves he retrieved Maupassant and Hugo and Thomas Mann and Spinoza. And then he discovered Joyce and the true joys of the English language.Among modern writers he was mesmerised by Sartre and Camus and even practiced writing sentences like them. But later, they paled into insignificance when he chanced upon Henry Miller. He considers "The Colossus of Maroussi" to be Henry’s greatest work. Others he considers his Great Masters who have helped his thinking evolve are Singer, Bellow, John Cowper Powys, Anais Ninn, and Erica Jong. As far as political ideas go Badhwar made a leap from Marx to Jefferson 20 years ago and nothing has happened so far in the course of world events that would make him come unglued from Jeffersonian liberal constitutionalism and the innate distrust of political determinism or a Big Brother state that disregards the citizen’s right to challenge it in defense of individual freedom. .
Journalism career
Badhwar won Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Henry Taylor Award (Class of ‘69) and was a senior investigative reporter for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson(1977-1985). Anderson was America’s leading investigative journalist whose column ran daily in more than 1000 newspapers. Badhwar was his senior associate and earned worldwide acclaim through his exclusive stories on fugitive financier Robert Vesco, Pentagon defence scandals, CIA goof-ups, the (dream automaker) John DeLorean trial, and government fraud and cover-ups during the FBI-run ABSCAM sting operation in which federal agents posing as Arab sheikhs lured unsuspecting Congressmen and Senators into taking bribes before hidden cameras. He was nominated for the Pulitzer by United Features Syndicate for ABSCAM coverage. Badhwar’s role as a top investigative journalist has been immortalized in Jack Anderson’s best selling biography “Peace War and Politics.” During this same period, Badhwar also worked as a top correspondent for ABC-TV’s programme “Jack Anderson Confidential", becoming the first person of Indian origin to appear on American nationwide television. One his most prominent stories—uncovering a sex racket run by Pentagon contractors—involved sneaking a camera undetected into the Pentagon to obtain the evidence.
In the earlier seventies, Badhwar uncovered Nixon’s politicization of the federal bureaucracy under the "Responsiveness Programme" during the Watergate era while serving as associate editor of Washington-based Federal Times (1973-1977). In 1976 he won the coveted National Civil Service League Award for his coverage of the American federal bureaucracy. Before that, he served as Director of Information of the National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting—a famous NGO associated with the legendary founder of the world’s consumer movement—Ralph Nader. Badhwar worked closely with Nader on several assignments. In this capacity, Badhwar helped organise community action groups to monitor deceptive advertising on television, fight against violence on chidren’s TV programming, and to challenge broadcasting licences.
After graduating from Columbia Journalism School, he worked two years with the Twentieth Century Fund in New York—the world’s largest non-profit publishing foundation . Among the books produced and edited were Lester Markel’s "Public Opinion" and Adam Yarmolinsky’s "Military Industrial Complex." Badhwar returned to his native India after an eventful 20 years in the US where his last professional stint was making an award-nominated documentary film on Rajiv Gandhi—“Rajiv’s India”—in 1986.
Back in India Badhwar became executive editor of India Today, India’s most prominent and powerful weekly news magazine where he served 10 years as India churned with formidable social and political convulsions–the revival of the right-wing Hindutva movement; the riots and backlashes; Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination; the bloody and savage war between Indian forces and the LTTE in Sri Lanka; the multi-million-dollar Bofors defence contract scandal in which India Today, under Badhwar’s editorship, produced the smoking gun that led the the defeat of the Rajiv Gandhi government; caste riots; terrorism; the coming apart of the peace in Kashmir. In fact, as early as in 1987, when Badhwar was covering Kashmir, he warned in several major articles that the Indian government had allowed elections to be rigged and that the consequence would be the loss of Kashmir and the rise of terrorism.
During his tenure with the India Today Group, Badhwar also served as Executive Producer of TV Today and anchored the popular weekly newsmagazine show NEWSTRACK. He was also anchor of Face The Press on Home TV, and later head of News and Current Affairs launched by Sahara-TV. In 2000 he went as Editor-in-Chief of Media Transasia which produced magazines like SWAGAT and DISCOVER INDIA. He was also founding editor of National Review, a political monthly that came out of the Media Transasia stable.
Badhwar’s one-on-one interviews in print and on TV include many of India’s Prime Ministers—Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, V.P. Singh, Chandrashekhar, Deve Gowda.
Additional Information
Badhwar’s first Novel "SNIFFING PAPA" was billed as the dark horse of Indian entries in the world of English fiction, mostly because it had been brought out by a smaller publisher–India Reserach Press–who had earlier concentrated on serious academic books such as Noam Chomsky’s "Rogue States." But since its launch it has received a blaze of publicity despite the fact that it came out almost simultaneously with David Davidar’s "House of Blue Mangos" and Khushwant Singh’s autobiography. "SNIFFING PAPA" was released by Naseeruddin Shah, star of "Monsoon Wedding" and India’s greatest Shakespearean actor, who during a public reading from the book broke down because he was so moved by a chapter. The Indian Express immediately proclaimed: "Badhwar’s debut novel has the literatti buzzing." The Hindu called it, "Joycean and delightful…the making of a best seller." The Asian Age devoted the entire front page of its book section to "SNIFFING PAPA": "Along with his wealth of experience Badhwar has drawn consciously upon his exceptionally powerful imagination and subconsciously on his breadth of reading." Tehelka featured an interview with the author on "Words and the Man." And THE WEEK said: "Those who have read the book call it moving, vivid, funny, ribald, reflective and profound." SUN MAGAZINE: "The character of Papa in Badhwar’s novel is a tremendous creation because it is the affirmation of a social reality of our times." OUTLOOK MAGAZINE: "An evocative novel…that is saying a lot in these sad times when all you want is to cover your face and call the fake-famous names." In 2005, the book’s title was changed to "La Chambre Des Parfums" when it was published in French by Le Cherche Midi in Paris and was critically acclaimed by the French Press. Le Monde called it “a grand novel.." The English version was renamed "The Chamber of Perfumes." That year, the book won France’s prestigious "Le Prix Literraire" as the best foreign debut novel.This was the same award that went to Salman Rushdie for his novel “Shame” a decade earlier In 2006 the novel was published in Dutch (by Bzztoh)and Portuguese. It is now continuing its literary journey in German. The book was published by Fischer, and the German version, entitled "Der Shikari" was featured as the main fiction attraction at the Fischer pavilion at the October 2006 Frankfurt Book Fair. Spanish publishers bought rights to the book in 2007. The book is available on Amazon as well as other major internet book sites. Non-fiction books authored and edited by Badhwar in 2005-2006 include: "Indira Gandhi–A Living Legacy",(photographs by world-renowned photographer Raghu Rai) published as a coffee table by Timeless Books; "Looking Beyond"—a collection of essays on corporate and creative management featuring India’s major thought leaders(Excel Books); "Superbrands"—featuring profiles of the leading world corporates doing business out of India; "India Chic"—a destination travelogue published by Bolding Books. Apart from working on a new novel, Badhwar continues to write occasional columns for leading newspapers and magazines, runs a strategic resource and knowledge centre for Lexicon-PR, and now edits a new monthly magazine “G-Files”, India’s only publication that focuses exclusively on governance and the civil services. He is married to Shama and has three children—Arjun, Ayesha and Samira.
Selected commets on the Badhwar book
“An amazing piece of work on many levels. The prose is shimmering, the observations unique, the cultural context is brilliantly done. It is like Naipaul but without the unbridled anger, and with love.. Badhwar has taken the expatriate experience, re-invented it, and turned a Third World novel into a whole world novel. It is very brave. It is wise….”
–Laurence Leamer, author of US best-sellers “The Kennedy Men”, and “Madness under the Royal Palms.”
“The perfumes…represent the evanescent quality of memory itself which, like mist, seep out of every second word of this novel”
–OUTLOOK Magazine (India)
“Powerful and poignant. The author shows a remarkable gift for the language. The work, a blend of the ludicrous and sublime, is in turns funny, playful, ribald on the one hand, and discursive, profound on the other. A tour de force…”
–M. Prabha, professor of English Literature, Delhi University, and author, “The Waffle of the Toffs”
“The reflections and ruminations, some quite Joycean, are delightful…”
–THE HINDU newspaper.
“Inderjit Badhwar’s novel has the (Indian) literati buzing!”
–The Indian Express.
“Along with his wealth of experience, Badwar has drawn consciously upon his exceptionally powerful imagination and subconsciously on his breadth of reading”
–The Asian Age
“Moving and vivid….”
–Ruskin Bond, novelist
July 20th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
On a new note, keeping you guys up to date. Want to know what the new BUZZ is all about? US soldier wrote a pretty good book on the meltdown. It is published by Authorhouse and is titled: THE ROAD TO AMERICA’S ECONOMIC MELTDOWN, written by RAYMOND BERESFORD HAMILTON, a soldier who nails it down pretty good in this book.