The Occasional Muse

Given its unpredictable and elephantine gestations, one can hardly call Civil Lines a periodical: CL4 appears after a gap of three years, the first one appeared in 1994. So, perhaps, it may be called an 'occasional'—not merely because of its ad hoc publishing schedule but because a new volume is something of an occasion. The present volume keeps up the tradition of bringing together distinguished (and some less distinguished) writing by famous and some not-yet-famous writers.

Thus, Kai Friese's Ladakh travelogue is both sharp and witty. It starts with Nazi maidens scouring the remote valleys in quest of pure Aryan 'seed', i.e., getting laid, but in the line of racial duty, so to speak. It ends with a Kargil vignette—a flag-draped coffin passing through the X-ray machine at the airport. Tenzing Sonam's account of his visit to the still forbidden though native land—Tibet—is again carefully observed and thoughtful. It is also, alas, a trifle predictable, like picture postcards. But this might well have something to do with the kind of exposure Tibet has had in the years since he wrote this: a land simultaneously unknown and cliched.

Shiela Dhar's three pieces, compounded of music and memory, are an uproarious delight. Braj Raj Singh's poignant memoir of his father, on the other hand, had me looking around anxiously to assure myself I was unobserved. Arvind Mehrotra's Kabir translations and Ambarish Satwik's poems left me wanting more and less, respectively. Shashank Kela's two short stories have interesting themes—avuncular adultery; time and its manifold desolations. But they found me reaching for my grammarian's hat: thickness of the crowd, hugger-mugger house, raindrops plopping off the eaves... Perhaps the editors need a few more years for proof-reading?

But the best thing in the current volume is, in fact, the unsigned editorial Introduction. Good-natured but combative, and complete with wittily argumentative doggerel, this provides the necessary frame in which such writing can be liked—and disliked—for itself. None of the usual Indo-Anglian angst, the haunted narcissism that ends up reducing whole worlds to a gallery of freaks and grotesques.