White ink on a white page

Posted on by Moni Basu

“Happiness writes in white ink on a white page.”

The French writer Henry de Montherlant said it; these days, the words have been spilling from Salman Rushdie’s lips as he makes the rounds talking about his new memoir, “Knife: Mediations After an Attempted Murder.”

I just started reading the book in which, as the title suggests, Rushdie reflects on matters of life and death after a near-fatal stabbing in August 2022. He was getting ready to deliver a public lecture — ironically about the United States as a safe haven for exiled writers — at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York when his assailant attacked him with a knife. Rushdie’s injuries were grave and he spent the first 24 hours in hospital laboring on a ventilator. He lost his right eye and part of his small intestine but he recovered well enough to write another brilliant book.

Itopens with the attack, which, as tragic as it was, has all the ingredients of what Rushdie says a writer needs to tell a compelling story. I first heard him mention the de Montherlant quote in a Master Class on writing, recorded the year before the attempted murder. What Montherlant meant, of course, is that happiness and joy are hard to write about. It’s like writing in white ink on white paper. It simply doesn’t show up.

“Without conflict, it’s hard to have drama,” Rushdie says in his Master Class. “If people are happy, there’s no story.”

Rushdie is known for his fiction but I can see my journalist friends nodding their heads in agreement. At the crux of every powerful nonfiction narrative is conflict, tension, a problem or a central question begging to be answered. Otherwise, the story falls flat. Otherwise, what is the driver of the story? Its engine? Why would readers keep reading paragraph after paragraph if the main character is happy or worry-free all the time?

So now, in this memoir, R

ushdie has found in himself an ideal character, a man who had indeed found contentment and utter joy after meeting his fifth wife, the poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths. And that his life in New York City had been happy to the point that he felt guilty about it, especially during the pandemic.

In that sense, he had been white ink on white paper until that fateful August day when his Ralph Lauren suit turned crimson and the ink suddenly turned black.

I met Rushdie once, on one of his early visits to Emory University, which houses his archives. My friend Teresa Weaver was then book editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and she graciously invited me to tag along for a private reception.

I couldn’t tell you exactly why but I had always thought of Rushdie as somewhat of a haughty human. Perhaps it was the language of his books or perhaps it was how I perceived Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa condemning Rushdie to death for “The Satanic Verses” had affected him.

But he was a kind and gentle soul.

We shared wine and laughs and he was genuinely interested in my work. He enquired after my Indian origins and we both shared a story or two about the India that once was.

I thought of that evening as I began reading “Knife.” It is Rushdie’s second memoir — He penned Joseph Anton (the name he chose to go by after the 1989 fatwa) about his time in hiding and the numerous threats to his life.

I have many chapters of “Knife” left to read but so far, Rushdie’s words are in line with the man I met. I hope, after all that he has endured, he has found happiness again and that the story of his own life is once again written in ink white enough to not show up on a page.

20 years of tears

Posted on by Moni Basu

I flew home from a Boston writing conference this afternoon. The skies were cloudless and blue. Earth looked so serene from 33,000 feet up.

In the world’s busiest airport, there was not a trace of the wars that are now history for the United States. No more soldiers returning home from bloody tours of duty; no more family reunions that would make the hardest and most cynical of us cry. None of those scenes that had at one time become unsettlingly familiar.

Exactly 20 years ago today, George Bush declared war on Iraq. America was intent on driving out Saddam Hussein, intent on ending tyrannical rule under which countless Iraqis had suffered. Yet what followed was chaos and utter ruination of a nation that was once considered one of the Middle East’s finest. No lessons learned from the past, the United States showed the same bluster and folly in the dusty dunes of Iraq as it had in the Vietnamese jungles and rice paddies of the Mekong.

For a moment, when I arrived in Baghdad a few weeks after the invasion, Iraq was buoyed by elation – and hope that maybe, finally, people would prosper peacefully. But those precious moments between the fall of Saddam and the subsequent American occupation were short-lived. Iraq would descend into hell.

Few Americans stopped to remember Iraq today, the 20th anniversary of the invasion. What does it matter anyway? A milestone day? An anniversary? Such dates are not necessary for Iraqis whose lives were forever changed by American miscalculations. So many dead. So many, maimed. So many families torn apart. And a nation still struggling to establish democracy and peace for all.

Here is a story I wrote for CNN on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War: Iraq’s Baby Noor: an unfinished miracle

New year, new beginnings

Posted on by Moni Basu

 

Today, on the first day of 2023, I begin a new adventure.

My full-time hire date at the University of Georgia was listed as January 1. I found that curious for all the obvious reasons. Few people actually work on New Year’s Day; even fewer when it falls on a Sunday. And most certainly, no one in the hallowed halls of academia. Still, I thought this date to be a grand one.

The tasks ahead this year are challenging, to say the least. I will be directing a MFA program, which by definition includes duties that extend far beyond the classroom and are new to me. But this is not just another MFA program; it is one built with the care and love of Valerie Boyd. And that brings with it added responsibilities. I know I must nurture and grow this program to ensure its success, ensure Val’s light shines bright.

I woke up early this morning thinking about what Val might say to me as I leave behind a difficult year — losing her, a move back to Atlanta, selling three homes and buying a new one and starting all over again at a new university. Val would be smiling for sure. But it would be that cautious smile; one that all at once exuded joy and a measured amount of trepidation. She told me once that fear was a good thing. “Keeps you on top of your game,” she said. “When you have none left, it’s time to move on.”

I woke up this morning thinking not about a new set of resolutions. I am not disciplined enough to keep any that I make. They stress me out by adding to my already stretched-to-the-max daily routine. No, I woke up this morning pondering all the ways I can do my best. What would make my parents proud were they here with me now? And what will make Val proud?

So here I go.

Bring it on, 2023.

Of anniversaries and the stories that really matter

Posted on by Moni Basu

A screenshot of Jennifer Senior's story.

On the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, I called a man who lost his son in Baghdad for a story I was writing for CNN. Anniversaries of tragedies, he told me, were for people who did not suffer.

What he meant is that every day is an anniversary for those who have lost loved ones. Not a day went by, he told me, that he didn’t think of his son.

So as the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approached, I consumed the news with fear. I dreaded stories about a day on which nearly 3,000 people were killed in New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, a day that started two forever wars, a day that altered the history of the world. I dreaded them because so many have been cliché. So many were produced because every news outlet in America felt it simply had to say something on a landmark anniversary. My deepest condolences extend to all who suffered on 9/11. But I am yearning  to read something that goes beyond: “He was my hero.”

That September 11 comes just weeks after the United States retreated from Afghanistan in rather humiliating fashion makes it all the more difficult. If some of the news about the anniversary is bordering on trite, then the stories coming from South Asia are even more so. It’s almost as though the American media has decided to recycle all that it had published two decades ago. About the Taliban’s medieval ways; women and burkas; and how Afghanistan remains the graveyard of empires. I even heard a NPR story about Deobandi Islam and its influence on the Taliban.

In 2001, I wrote many such stories for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I don’t think I could stand to read them now. They are shallow, misguided and often, not nuanced. They reflect American ignorance of a complex country and centuries of history. They perhaps are one reason for the U.S. failure in Afghanistan. If America had understood that nation better, maybe things might have been different.

I’ve been particularly choosey about the stories I listen to or watch and especially the ones I read. I am posting links to two that I found riveting by Jennifer Senior and Anand Gopal. They tell the stories of the 9/11 anniversary as well as the Afghan war through compelling characters and are reported and written really well. They also made me stop and think about all that has happened in the last 20 years. On this, the 20th anniversary of 9/11, and every day.

What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind

The Other Afghan Women

In the middle of the day…

Posted on by Moni Basu
A mother hugs her young daughter.
My mother and I in Beirut. 1964.

I edited a story this week about a woman who found rebirth through a pregnancy during the pandemic. I tried hard to understand how she felt and yet, the concepts of motherhood were so alien to me.

I have never been a mother. I will never be one.

I had a mother once. I will never have one again.

My mother died 20 years ago today, exactly two months after the death of my father. Sometimes, that day, still fresh in my mind, seems distant and long ago. I suppose it depends on how I look at 20 years. It’s almost 35 percent of the time I have been alive. It’s how old I was the day my mother suffered a massive stroke that left her paralyzed on her left side and robbed her of her cognitive abilities.

May 19 was oppressively hot in Kolkata in 2001. The monsoons had not yet arrived and the temperatures had climbed well into the 90s, perhaps more. In the middle of the day, when cars, buses, trucks, tuk-tuks, carts, bicycles jostled for space with one another and with the millions of people on the streets, it seemed hotter. A raging heat that would not subside. In the middle of the day, when we had just finished a simple lunch of rice, lentils and fish, the phone rang. It was an old landline phone; its ring as familiar to me as a friend’s voice.

But it was not a friend who was calling. I knew who it was. My brother, Shantanu, answered. And I knew what he was hearing. But he did not say much. In silence, we abandoned our lunch, put on our shoes and whooshed down a flight of stairs and out the entrance to our building, Balaka. We ran through the old petrol pump where many a time I had waited to fill up the tank to my father’s Fiat that resembled a Soviet Lada. We dodged the maniacal traffic. We held up the palms of our hands to stop cars so that we could cross AJC Bose Road. Otherwise, we might have stood at the intersection of Loudon Street for eternal minutes. We rushed through the gates of Belle Vue Nursing Home and up seven flights of stairs to the intensive care ward. I felt the sweat streaming down my back, my cotton kameez so wet that it looked like I had come through rain. The sweat stung my eyes and I tasted the salt in my mouth. I could hardly see. I could hardly breathe. I saw my mother lying in her bed, her chest heaving up and down and I thought: Thank God. She was still alive. I glanced at the monitor beside her bed. Flatlined. Was she dead? No, no. She was alive. Wasn’t she?

I remember my mind going to blank. And when I could think again, I knew it was the ventilator that was doing all the work. The nurses were not authorized to stop it until the doctor had arrived.

My brother and I speaking at our mother’s memorial service.

So it was that my mother died. On that oppressively hot May 19 in 2001.

We held a small memorial service for my mother on the last weekend of May. By then, we had emptied out the flat she and my father had shared for so many years, stripped it of any evidence that they had done so. I stared at the outlines of paintings that once graced their home, the paint a lighter shade where the wall had been covered up. The only thing that even hinted at the life my parents had were the few remaining plants on the balcony. My father had once filled it with dahlias, marigolds and hibiscus. But one by one, they wilted after Alzheimer’s pulled him down and rendered him useless.

We threw down sheets and blankets on the empty terrazzo floors for the guests. They sat on them and listened to memories shared by friends and family. We sang the songs of Rabindranath Tagore,  my mother’s God. I held my brother’s hand, wanting to never let go.

It was the middle of the day when the ceremony began, when it seemed hotter than it really was. And when it ended, I felt a comforting breeze on my cheeks, as though my mother were kissing them. The clouds hid the sun and I could smell the coming rain in the air. I knew the worst was over. The heat would subside soon as the monsoons drenched the city, cleansing it of its dust and sins. I looked up at the hibiscus swaying in its terracotta pot, the soil cracked like a parched riverbed. The plant had dropped leaves and grown somewhat woody. Clearly, it had been stressed.

But even out of that stress came love. In the middle of the day, when we gathered to remember my mother, that hibiscus plant bore a single bloom bursting in vermillion.

Enemy of the people

Posted on by Moni Basu

You told me I was less than you.

Enemy of the people.

You robbed my sun, dimmed my stars, took away my moon.

Left me adrift; I knew not how to sail to the future.

You told me I was less than you.

Brown skin shimmering in the light, dark eyes searching.

I read a poem: Try to praise the mutilated world.

I stood on a bridge between what was and what is.

Between then and now

and what will be…

You told me I was less than you.

I watched a helicopter carry you away; a big man with a little heart.

There are no clouds in the sky today.

Only a distant orb glowing. Bright. Brighter.

You told me I was less than you.

You can come back now, I said to truth.

Losing my pillars of love

Posted on by Moni Basu
Gonuda loved his granddaughter Jia. This photo was taken at his home in Keyatala in 2016.

I have always been called the oldest among my cousins because the truly eldest of my generation were so much older than the rest of us, the sons of my eldest aunt, that they were not a part of our childhood gang. It was almost as though Gonuda and Manuda should have been our kakas and mamas, not dadas. Especially, Gonuda, who was only two years younger than my youngest uncle, Shonakaka.

Perhaps that was one reason I was so attached to Gonuda. He spoiled me as an uncle would. He played the role of elder brother with perfection, And I relished being the kid sister.

This is one of the few photos I have of Gonuda when he was a boy. 

I remember lavish lunches of loochi (back in the day when I could eat them endlessly) and begun bhaja. Or jaunts to the Kolkata Port Trust Club to munch on fish fingers and down bottles of ice-cold Black Labels.

Gonuda loved to eat and though he was not a chef, he could speak like one about Bengali cuisine. He could tell you if a certain fish came from a pond or a river just by tasting it. He would argue with Shonakaka for hours on end about the merits of one way of preparing a dish over another. It was no surprise that when there was a wedding or any sort of celebration in the family, it was Gonuda who was called upon to set the menu, to supervise the caterers.

A day came when we learned Gonuda had developed kidney problems that would severely restrict his diet; that he would no longer be able to enjoy food. He was forced to curtail his protein intake, among other things, and was relegated to eating 50 grams of fish a day, probably one-tenth or so, I am guessing, of what he used to eat before.

Gonuda loved to eat and was a connoisseur of Bengali food.

For anyone, such a diet would be difficult. But that such a fate should befall a man who so loved to partake in the entire process of making a meal seemed like a cruel irony. My heart broke.

Food was one of the few things that Gonuda had in everyday life that brought him joy. He had suffered enough loss for a lifetime. His father and mother died young — I was not even 3 when my uncle passed away and I don’t even have any recollections of him. Then came the grossly premature passing of Gonuda’s wife, Monika, and their youngest son Shubho, who died suddenly in America after finishing college. Gonuda was never the same after Shubho’s death. I don’t know anyone who has ever recovered from the death of a child and a part of Gonuda was laid to rest along with his son.

Last year, we lost Gonuda’s younger brother and Manuda’s passing posed another big shock. It was too much for one man to bear, I thought.

Gonuda went on traversing life with a smile on his face and with an outpouring of affection in his heart. At a family remembrance on Zoom earlier today, many mentioned how Gonduda made them feel so loved.

Gonuda and Manuda with Manuda’s grandson.

But the sadness remained and occasionally, he could not but help let it surface. Occasionally, the tears flowed as though a dam had burst on a river kept in check. I never knew what to say in those moments. What can you say?

Gonuda lived simply by the principles he had adhered to all his life. Later, he also lived by routine. The older I get, the more I understand the comfort that a sameness can bring. And so it was that he would admonish me for knocking on his door too early, before he’d had a chance to fulfill his afternoon slumber.

We sipped tea together, with Bournvita biscuits, before heading out of Keyatala Lane to Southern Avenue and onto the paths that wind around the trees and gardens at Robindro Sarovar. In my youth, the lake waters were cleaner and Gonuda brought pieces of bread so that I could feed the ever-hungry carp.

We stopped for bhel-puri or phuchka, treats forbidden by my father, before racing the sunset on our way back home.

My brother, Shantanu, and I with Gonuda and his daughter-in-law Paromita at her wedding in Kolkata.

When I was even younger, we often visited Keyatala on weekends. Mostly on Sundays when Gonuda and Manuda would be at home. Or they’d visit my grandfather’s house in New Alipur, where there were so many of us for Sunday lunch that we would eat in batches and then plop down with satiated bellies on hard beds. Sometimes, Gonuda, took me to see a Bangla matinee at Priya cinema. Like Satyajit Ray’s “Goopy Gyne, Bagha Byne.” It wasn’t that hard back then to navigate Rash Behari Avenue when all of Gariahat shuttered for siesta and a hush fell on the streets amid the afternoon heat.

I traveled to India for the first time by myself in 1978, the year that Manuda was married. I stayed at New Alipur but spent many hours at Keyatala with Gonuda and Monikaboudi. I had told Gonuda how my friends in Florida coveted hand-embroidered clothes. This was, of course, long before the explosion of global trade that made it possible to buy everything Indian in America.

At a family memorial Sunday, we remembered with great fondness the lunch and dinner gatherings at my uncle’s house in Kolkata. Almost everyone in my parents’ generation is gone.

A few days before I was to return to Tallahassee, Gonuda arrived at New Alipur with a jute shopping bag full of presents for me. Among them were two cotton blouses, hand-embroidered in colorful thread. He had searched high and low in Gariahat shops and street stalls brimming with saris and salwars to find tops I could wear with my jeans – hardly an easy task back then.

One blouse was white and grew dingy enough to get tossed years ago but I still have the red one. I can’t wear it anymore but I can’t give it away, either. It hangs in my closet as memorial,  a reminder of a happier time.

The Kolkata of my youth vanishes a bit more by the day. By that, I don’t mean the myriad changes that have come at dizzying speed. Cars, malls, satellite television and all the things that helped make India what is today.
For me, the pillars on which home stood are fast disintegrating. The people I loved most are gone. Pishi left us earlier this year. And now, Gonuda.

I don’t even know how to imagine my next trip back to the place that I love. I don’t think I want to.

Gonuda with his son, Tirthankar, daughter-in-law, Paromita, granddaughter, Jia, and Paromita’s mother.

 

 

 

The word ‘hero’ is overused but it’s truly fitting for John Lewis

Posted on by Moni Basu
I love driving by this mural that is not too far from my home in Atlanta.

When is the last time I cried over the death of a public figure or a politician? I can’t remember, really. Perhaps it was when Indira Gandhi was assassinated. I was young then and mourned the woman I had idolized in childhood. Beyond politics, she served as a role model for Indian girls of my generation.

Last night, I cried when I heard the news that John Lewis had lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. I grieved the death of a tireless fighter for freedom and justice. Continue readingThe word ‘hero’ is overused but it’s truly fitting for John Lewis

It’s about time we retire the ‘R word’

Posted on by Moni Basu

In 2013, when I was a CNN Digital reporter, I spoke by phone with Suzan Harjo, a Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee writer and activist whose lifelong mission has been to fight for Native American rights. Part of her work was to remove the use of native people as mascots for sporting teams. The Washington Redskins, she told me, was the worst offender of them all.

She couldn’t even bring herself to saying the name. The R-word, she said, was the same as the N-word.

Read the CNN story

Fans of the Washington football team have defended its name as an honorific; that somehow, the word, redskins, pays tribute to the native people of America. But the Native Americans I know say the term is offensive and the Merriam-Webster dictionary advises the word “should be avoided.” Harjo told me nothing could be more derogatory than the R word.

“The Washington team —  it’s the king of the mountain,” she said. “When this one goes, others will.” Continue readingIt’s about time we retire the ‘R word’

The stories I will live by

Posted on by Moni Basu

My pandemic isolation began on March 12. At first, I welcomed the days spent alone at home. And though I felt stressed about having to suddenly pivot and shift my classes online, I relished not having to rush out of the house every morning. But as the days turned to weeks and then months, a strange sort of loneliness set in and I found it dangerously easy to slip into a morose mood.

Determined not to spiral downward, I began posting about the things that made me smile in this strange and trying time when the news seemed to get worse by the day. COVID-19 had killed more than 100,000 Americans. Millions were unemployed. Countless businesses shuttered, maybe forever. And then America exploded over police brutality against people of color. The Black Lives Matter movement that had been born years ago was again at the forefront of our collective consciousness. Continue readingThe stories I will live by

Skip to content