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Civil Lines/5

© Mrinal Bose

In India, there are few literary magazines in English, and these have a way of getting published irregularly. Often a labor of love, with scarcely any commercial potential, these owe their existence to efforts by some individual or group bitten by the literary bug. Civil Lines edited by Kai Friese and Mukul Kesavan is one such magazine which appears once or twice in a year with new and refreshing pieces of fiction and non-fiction by desi and diasporic writers writing in English.

Civil Lines/5 is now in my hand, and though it was published sometime in 2001, it is the latest and possibly the current issue. But forget about its periodicity, it has a slew of contents that you would not find elsewhere.

I started with Anita Roy’s “Harold and Me”, a reader’s remembrance and appraisal of Harold Brodkey, the great American novelist who died of AIDS. But of this later. In keeping with the topic of this page, I would like to talk about fiction first.

Amitava Kumar has a story by the name of “Indian Restaurant”. It has all desi characters, but the setting is New York. It is about one Bihari Indian who went all the way to do his Ph.D. in a foreign university, but failed due to his sloppy habits and attitude towards his studies. He took along his wife and children with him, and our writer got involved with them since he also hailed from the same state. The story depicts well some of the writer’s intimate moments with the family, especially with the lady of the family, but ultimately it is a damp squib, leading the reader nowhere.

“Prelude to an Autography” by Amit Chaudhury is enjoyable not so much for its literary merit as for its comic take on Shobha De, a hack who has made a name for herself by writing bullshit. Ms. De recently changed the spelling of her first name from Shobha to Shobhaa on the advice of an astrologer, and I mention this just to give an idea of her. I was greatly amused by the beginning lines. “I felt the urge to write this after I began to read Shobha De’s memoirs. If she can write her memoir, I thought, so I can.” I have always considered Chaudhury too sober and sophisticated for a novelist. For me it is a pleasure to discover that he is also a daring fellow because along the way he also floored our David Davidar, the high-flying publisher who publishes Shobha De’s book regularly. However, I’m not sure if it is right to use true-life names in the fiction, and whether it has got any legal consequences. Anyway, hats off to Chaudhuri for speaking out.