Precisely, Shama

The events of the next couple of hours—and every few pages our attention is drawn to the clock, ticking away like a bomb—are explored at three levels. Firstly, the immediate responses of the audience to what they’re seeing—or not seeing—on the screen. Then the burden of anxieties, aspirations and frustrations these people have left behind at home for the space of a couple of hours. Thirdly, the network of sleaze, indifference and irresponsibility that has been inexorably heading towards catastrophe over weeks. The story begins with the explosion of filmy violence on the screen and ends with a real-life tongue of fire leaping up to swallow the audience.

To place a complex story like this next to a perfect miniature like The Climb—in which an ayah climbs a steep flight of steps carrying her employer’s child and every bounce of the hip or shoulder has an unobtrusive economic or social implication—is to realise the sweep of Futehally’s emotional and technical range.

The Right Word is a collection of Futehally’s articles and reveals again her astonishing ability to make connections between movements widely separated across our cultural landscape. She brings the theories of A.K. Ramanujan, one of our greatest translators but from ancient Kannada and Tamil, to bear upon the problems of translating Meera or Ghalib, unravels the intricacies that animate the stories of N.A. Muthuswamy and describes the joy of ghazals with an intensity that makes you wish you could read them in Urdu. Here’s a person with passionate intelligence, erudite and sensitive, for whom writing stories and translating songs were ways of engaging with the intricacies of the world.