He came home from work the other day carrying, apart from his usual laptop bag, a gift box about the size of a pop-up toaster. I didn’t actually recognise it as such at first glance because it was just a plain cardboard box with no fancy clothing that would have made it mysteriously alluring. But there was this other suspicious matter, rather, his manner.
Only a few weeks prior to that day, he had returned from the nearby liquor store, lugging back not just bottles and cans but an enormous fruit basket wrapped in transparent yellow paper as well. For a moment, I had entertained the thought that it must have been a new business strategy devised by the person who runs that store to treat loyal customers royally. The fruit basket turned out to be a memento given to participants at a meeting my husband had attended earlier in the day. Only that he had forgotten to fetch that bountiful thing home, and awaiting reclamation, it had been languishing in the car until he went out again to buy alcohol. The same kind of mischief was now written all over his face.
At his office, they occasionally have gatherings celebrating some professional event or other. Birthday celebrations typically spill over to a next-door pub or restaurant, with or without gift-giving. (Food and alcohol, the great stress-busters, also often work as harbingers of truce, whether between colleagues or couples, don’t they?) And tokens of such events that he might bring home do not generally stir up vexing considerations. But then, it wasn’t his birthday, nor was it mine.
Our canine child who had already run two rounds of ‘zoomies’ around the apartment, after following him into the bedroom, was by now equally intrigued by the box on the coffee table. He took a good sniff of it, prancing around the table, but soon lost interest. Not food then, I surmised.
Without more ado, let me right away burst the bubble of suspense. The box contained a large coffee mug neatly ensconced in bubble wrap. I pulled it out by its handle and stripped its cover, while I was most probably also considering what I might throw together for dinner. Suddenly demystified, there it was before me. And staring back were the faces of an older couple, of a former colleague at the bank my husband works at and of his wife. Now, I have no intimate knowledge of this couple. His wife, I’m yet to meet. But the one time I had run into that man at someone’s wedding a couple of years ago, he had been talking at length on how the bank should take an interest in Bangalore’s eternal traffic snarls, and emerge as a stakeholder in it to solve the issue.
Anyway, according to the words on the mug, they had just crossed a major landmark of connubial happiness. And between their faces, there was a slightly smudged glimpse of the Eiffel Tower in the background, captured from a point just far enough so that it can be seen in entirety. It rose up towards the lip of the mug, cutting into its glazed white surface like some dreadful portent of what was to come. All I would consider, no, bother myself with, at that moment was the question, ‘What the heck am I supposed to do with it?’
Substantial amounts of drivel the mind can cough out when it is thus inclined, when it chooses to turn anything, especially an odious feeling, into a joke or a puzzle, or both at once. In all fairness, the couple could not have known that my defensive strategies for getting by include muttering (to our floppy-eared epicurean) homespun dictums like, ‘Coveting a place in too many people’s lives might be injurious to the health of all humans involved in a given situation.’
It was a gift after all. I mean the mug, not the unpleasant feeling. And one is not supposed to look it in the mouth, or count its teeth. But most human things come with fangs and claws. Or, one imagines that they are thus armed. Truth be told, I had already exhausted my options by then.
Could I use it to store pens and pencils? Or maybe take it to the bathroom to use it as a holder for toothbrushes, replacing the glass already in use? That, by far, was the most foolish choice. Because the hapless couple on the mug had already begun to resemble the country’s Prime Minister, and the Chief Minister of my native state at once, given that I like to think of the two men in classic Bollywood fashion, as non-identical twins who got separated while on a train journey in childhood, and recognise each other as siblings only in adulthood because they share the same secret feature that binds them. No, not the right reminders, not in the bathroom in particular.
But what indeed were their thoughts when they got the mugs custom-made to be given away as presents to certain people in their so-called social circle? Surely, my husband could not have been the only one at ‘the receiving end’? It’s admittedly reprehensible to chase these apprehensions. But everything human, one suspects, eventually turns into something else.
I’m already looking over my shoulder, wondering how people with a certain bent of mind might find this offensive. They might even gang up and issue a clampdown on this train of thought, violently chastising me on the need for empathy, a much bandied about concept that is automatically given a clean chit. As if any reasonably sane person would, out of empathy for the Bangla-speaking people, try to pronounce the surname of West Bengal’s Chief Minister using the rotund vowel ‘o’ for the letter ‘a’ in it, even if a former head of that state had a surname which could be thus pronounced. Or again, to cite a less spurious example, as if anyone could bring up a dog and empathically want what the latter wills as it repeatedly spits out the bitter medicine while visibly suffering from a serious case of stomach flu [i].
What if empathy is not always the answer? What if we have to make use of whatever is left of reason precisely because it is in short supply, as Erasmus reminds us, tongue firmly in cheek, as he lets Folly remind us in turn that we are made of “more than a pound of passions to an ounce of reason” [ii]. She makes her presence felt, we are told, whether acknowledged or not, in most human affairs.
But right when one is trapezing between such and other thoughts, one gets a rancid whiff of how it’s possible to feel pretty rotten about something, and still immerse oneself in whatever it unpacks. The mug took on a gloomier shade soon enough. This innocent gift, I thought, might be the most tangible souvenir from Paris I have at home.
Because, having never crossed what geographical parameters would incontinently demarcate as the boundaries of my continent, Paris, my dear friend, is predominantly a fictional city to me. Fictional, but not fictitious. A city encountered largely in stories: visual and verbal, real and imagined. A city of umpteen enchantments that seem to come with a price, as inscrutable as the depths of the Seine in which Paul Celan drowned himself. The people who haunt its streets are all ghosts from works I admire— the ones created by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Jean Rhys, and Patrick Modiano right away shadow my thoughts, although some of them were humans who lived and breathed and walked its streets like Modigliani, to mention one, both the man and the myth. Occasionally, some contemporary or near-contemporary event like Rafa Nadal’s disarming, gummy smile before nibbling the ear of yet another Roland Garros trophy might chip into its surface. Unpleasant, contingent matters too sometimes. Still, its appeal is almost exclusively borrowed, second-hand, also possibly from a slightly older time. Even so, it’s, in a way, more real than the other Paris in my head.
The latter is somewhat specious. I imagine it as a city where extremely thin people clad in extremely chic clothes sashay around on stilettos or whatever in the contemporary world might be its equivalent in men’s haute couture. Or they sit under the awnings of extremely chic wayside bistros, and consume extremely small portions of food to the accompaniment of extremely expensive wine that comes in chic bottles, appropriately aged, where the evening pavements themselves are lit up by the muted, warm glow from its array of extremely chic stores patronised by the same kind of people. (Places endow us with strange gifts. Even unanticipated skills, like Bangalore teaching me the humdrum knack of unscrewing the nozzles of bathroom and kitchen faucets to clear out the inevitable salt deposits, without needing the plumber’s help every now and then; or anticipated skills like Paris sidewalks letting women learn the art of walking on six-inch-long pencil heels without stumbling.) Either way, innocence, unless when employed in the form of a transferred epithet, is not the word it calls to mind. What’s the innocence of a place anyway?
Having frittered away enough time in such considerations, and whipped up by the sole intention of loosening the association between the mug and Paris, only to hold on to my Paris, I began wracking my mind to remember what could possibly represent the city for me in all its glory. I didn’t need to think much. It is still, no matter how many times it has been given another lease of life in imagination ever since, A Moveable Feast. Over the next few days, I busied myself with my copy of the book— its restored edition— which has unpolished, unpublished fragments Hemingway had put together towards the end of his life.
One doesn’t need a map to endlessly follow him on his endless walks down the quays by the Seine, or in the Luxembourg gardens. One can silently stalk him when he strolls down the steep path from his apartment above a sawmill on Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine to one of the cafes he liked to write from, or to Sylvia Beach’s much-loved bookstore. One might third-wheel him and Hadley as well, as they climb the stairs to Gertrude Stein’s studio apartment with its Picassos and fancy liqueurs on Rue de Fleurus to exchange literary and other kinds of gossip. Better still, one might watch him study Cezanne’s works then on display at the Musée de Luxembourg, as he stares at them, and learns from them that writing the truest sentences he knows may not be enough to bring in the dimensions he wants for his stories. Or one might watch him watching others, sometimes the poor fisher folk with their tackles and lures by the river, doing the thing they know best, which fills him with joy at the idea of a meal later in the day, secured then and there. That again teaches him something. One might even spy on him as he pieces together warts-and-all portraits of fellow writers, which, for all their harshness, still spell something achingly human, though not necessarily humane. All that and much more along these lines that resist any attempt to summarise them.
But this pleasure-jaunt through the Paris of the early 1920s is, as everyone who loves the book knows, also something darker: a celebration of a place and time loved, lost, and retrieved. But retrieved, as he admits, “from the remises [sic] of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist” [iii]. So much of it is steeped in a sense of loss, but so much of it is also a memory of bright matters like love that’s reciprocated, personal joys of being young and in love in a vibrant city, and of writing his stories in ways that pleased him most: without frills and fripperies, happiness that’s shared too, and secret pleasures whether of the kind that binds people together, or of the kind that binds a person to a place.
But then, in a bunch of fragments appended to the very end of the book— which we are told were “false starts for the introduction” that he didn’t live long enough to write— he also acknowledges repeatedly that “[t]his book is all fiction, and the fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact”, that “all remembrance of things past is fiction”, and that there’s no last chapter although “this is the end for it now” [iv]. To that he adds again, “[t]here was never any end to Paris” [v]. And since there “is never any ending to Paris”, and even though “the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other”, “[w]e always returned to it” [vi].
Each one of those admissions throws the book into a different spin. Things resurface from the past, a clutch of fragments now, a suitcase with lost manuscripts then. Questions concerning genre categories loosen their grip. Along with it, the accusation that the story about the lost suitcase that had been later returned was cooked up (by Mary Hemingway?), too, probably. Even if there had been a real, retrieved suitcase containing lost manuscripts, wouldn’t the narrating voice still have exercised control? How it employs that power would, of course, vary in practice from person to person, and most probably depends on what amount of truth, as far as it’s personally measurable, that is possible in a work of art based on real people in a real place, even when accessed much later.
One wonders then what to make of declarations often found in memoirs in our times, about the discovery of the ‘true self’ entailed by a crucial life event: an extended period of study at some institution, a prolonged stay at a monastery, a sex-change surgery and such like if it’s the certainty assumed by the narrator’s voice alone that might prove the trueness of the current self, or its lack thereof, in a former one. Is one allowed to ask what such claims of arrival mean, even if all one’s asking is that?
Has the concern for proper morals and correct politics swept these away as redundant, esoteric dilemmas that writers and philosophers once troubled themselves with? As in several other matters, here again, I’m inclined to rely on a thinker whose mind seems to have been rarely at rest. He would say that far from that being the case, it’s how language, whether of remembering or speaking, itself operates. That it lets us think, because a new way of looking is assumed, “[a]s if you had invented a new way of painting; or again, a new metre, or a new kind of song” [vii]. That we are wont to ascribe self-explanatory status to what memory concedes:
“It’s as if a snapshot of a scene had been taken, but only a few scattered details of it were to be seen: here a hand, there a bit of a face, or a hat— the rest is dark. And now it’s as if I knew quite certainly what the whole picture represented. As if I could read the darkness” [viii].
Language, he would say, allows the nurturing of fancies about the ‘self’ as something that waits to be discovered [ix]. The bottle then comes with the buzzing bee in it [x]. The strangest of all gifts, perhaps.
These are probably inconvenient reminders. It needn’t stop anyone from writing memoirs, or others from celebrating those works. We all ultimately gravitate towards ideas that draw us most anyway, for whatever reasons. Wittgenstein might have probably also added to the above that we make meaning out of our fictions. Outside of pleasure, that must be one of the compulsions that makes us read (and write) where again an ‘as if’ intercedes as it keeps the true, the real, the beauty and might of form and thought, and so on in tension.
Everything real is then probably already something else?
Paris still remains far away. Except, of course, for the dazzling chunk of it I can trespass into in borrowed vision.
And having had my own rollicking joyride across it once more— enabled, it seems to me, by an unappreciated gift this time— I would acquiesce and concede some bit of that distant city. Who knows, maybe the couple on the coffee mug might be fondly telling each other in Casablanca fashion, ‘We’ll always have Paris’!
Be that as it may, I put the mug back in its box, and placed it in the topmost kitchen cabinet, where I store things I don’t need to handle all that often. I can reach the handle on its slab door only when I stand on my toes, you see?
Endnotes
[i] Paul Bloom provides better examples in his book, which is less against empathy, and more a critique of how it is perceived. Bloom, Paul. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Vintage, 2006.
[ii] Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly. Benediction Classics, 2019, p. 25.
[iii] Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition. Arrow Books. 2011, p. 225.
[iv] Ibid, p. 229, 230, 231, 235.
[v] Ibid, p. 235.
[vi] Ibid, p. 236.
[vii] Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Wiley-Blackwell, (1953) 2009. p. 128e.
[viii] Ibid, p. 172e.
[ix] Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: A Critical Guide. Edited by Arif Ahmed. Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Some of the articles in this work have been more than helpful to puzzle out Ludwig’s sometimes poetic, often cryptic pronouncements.)
[x] Edmonds, David and John Eidinow. Wittgenstein’s Poker. Faber and Faber, 2001.
