Quilt me a Story

Our lives are a continuous thread of stories and these do not end even when we die ‘cos they continue in posterity in our children’s lives woven into the very fabric of human life on earth. We have been talking of stories for the past two exchanges and the story of stories seems to continue, its repertoire heavy and laden with more to say and share.

The picture above is a colorful design in embroidery, meticulously worked with patience, perseverance and ingenuity. It has an aesthetic appeal related to colour, touch and creativity, but more so it intrigues and enthrals us with the story which is woven unto the cloth. The sewing needle moves in and out of the fabric creating patterns with its long colorful thread tail treading a trail untold and anew. Each twist and knot is an amalgamation of explicit and symbolic meanderings of the needle and the tail replicating a story on the canvas of a wide fabric, to be deciphered and understood by humans far and wide through the ages. We arrive at the art of storytelling through ‘Quilting’.

Quilting is our artistic heritage, indulged for creativity, sharing  and community living. Quilting seems to have been around in the medieval times in Europe and the Eastern world, but it reached America in the 1800s. Initially quilts satisfied the practical purpose of warmth in the cold season, wrapping babies, folded and used as cushions or pitched on a clothes line to serve as children’s tent house. Quilting was mostly done by women at home or in larger extended groups to overcome isolation and satisfy their creative impulses. They would relay a simple joyful account of a family or episode, or be indicative of a family tree, recounting the entire history of generations of a clan. The pattern selected by the quilter can be indicative of a quilter’s lifestyle, artistic talents, political views, and even her emotions. Prior to a woman’s ability to vote, some women used their artistic talents and expressed their political views through a quilt.  Over times they morphed into story narratives, especially when women could not actively participate in active service during revolutions and wars. These stories on a cloth canvas became coded and suggestive of signals and messages to men, serving and stranded in tense zones.

An example in case would be the issue of slavery in the United States in the mid-1800s which led to quilt patterns called Slave Chain or Underground Railroad. The designs and colours indicated safe houses or routes to freedom. ‘Clara and the Freedom Quilt’  by Deborah Hopkinson is a picture book based on the true story of a young slave girl who is taken away from her mother to work on another plantation. Clara’s greatest wish is to be reunited with her mother and to become a free slave. Clara was skilled at sewing and became a seamstress at the plantation house. She was often privy to conversations between her master and other visitors to the estate. Being a sharp, clever girl she was able to piece together the information that the Ohio river was very close by. She stitched a map to the river and beyond to freedom, locating swamps, rivers and fields en route. The quilted story board was used by herself and her mother to escape and thereafter, they helped many other slaves to reach the underground railroad and thus freedom.

Harriet Powers and her two famous story quilts are now part of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She was a completely illiterate woman who was greatly influenced by the sermons and gospels in church services and her quilts carry her favorite portrayals of biblical stories and folklore tales. “The Keeping Quilt’ by Patricia Polacco is a story of a quilt that

was made to preserve the memories of an immigrant Russian family’s remembrance of their country. Over the years the quilt is used as a tablecloth for the Sabbath, as a huppa for family weddings, and as a blanket to welcome newborn babies into the family. As the quilt is passed from one generation to the next, so too are family stories.”

‘The Sujjni Kantha’ embroidered bedspreads, ‘Embroidered Rumaals’ and  ‘Embroiderd Pahari Quilts’ are a few examples of the stitch craft practiced in India for 3000 years. They are preserved in museums across the Indian territory and the Victoria Albert museum in Britain. A revival wave in the country through the initiative of foreign interventions have led to the surfacing of our age-old heritage of crafted stories on cloth by women and it is providing sustenance to rural women in pockets even today.  The themes vary from the depiction of stories from the great Indian epics, ‘Raslila’, ‘Rukmini Haran’, depiction of popular dice game of ‘chaupad’  to contemporary works portraying  stories of female foeticide, education for girls, election violence. The oldest ‘rumaal’ is from the 16^th century embroidered by Bebe Nanki, sister of Guru Nanak, the founder of sikh religion, preserved in a Sikh shrine in Punjab.

‘Kalpa Vriksha’ – the boon giving tree, a treasure of the churning of the oceans – ‘Samudra Manthan’ was taken by Lord  Indra and planted in his garden. Many an embroidered quilts  depict the ‘Haran’ theft of the tree by Krishna and the ensuing fight between Indra seated on his white elephant and Krishna riding Garuda. ‘Ashatanayika’ is a representation of ‘Nayika Bheda’ the moods of the nayika through varied expressions, gestures and surrounding motifs of doves and peacocks.

A POW wiling away the war in a German prison camp delivered a defiant message insulting Hitler through the apparently innocuous skill of embroidery.

Maj Alexis Casdagil sewed a Morse code message around his sampler, reading 'God saves the king'.  

“Major Alexis Casdagli, who was taken prisoner in 1941, had turned to embroidery as a way of protecting his sanity against the tedium of POW life but he also found it provided a means of covert resistance. An innocent looking tapestry stitched by the officer in December 1941 bears the rather bland text stating the name and location of its creator and the date. But in a border surrounding the text Major Casdagli also stitched a series of dots and dashes, which in Morse code spelt out "God Save the King" and "---- Hitler". Unaware of the hidden message but impressed with the captive officer's needlework, the Germans even put it on display."It used to give him pleasure when the Germans were doing the rounds," Tony Casdagli, the Major's 79-year-old son, told the Daily Mail."It also stopped him going mad. He would say after the war that the Red Cross saved his life but his embroidery saved his sanity."

Quilting as a theme has been interspersed in writings in literature. To name a few writers would be Rohinton Mistry in ‘A Fine Balance’, Ismat Chugtai,  the feminist Urdu Indian writer and her controversial story titled ‘Lihaaf’ meaning quilt and Alice Walker in ‘Everyday Use’ and ‘The Color Purple’.

Quilting is here to stay through revivalist endeavors, maybe not patronized popularly but a haven for those seeking creativity, expression, sharing and healing qualities in their lives. Go Quilt a Story!  

Stories Galore!

       

We celebrated short story as a literary form of art in our last exchange and the impetus it has acquired in the digital age as the more favored form of narrative literature.  Today I will be enumerating and expounding on the ones that have lingered with me over the years, culminating in a couple from contemporary writers. We read short stories to occupy ourselves for a brief period of time, given the length of a short story. It intrigues me when they stay with me for longer durations and some have been in my mind space for years together. A short story is technically written to invoke a single effect or mood and all parameters of the story are etched towards that effect, climaxing to the most apt denouement.

 In my school text, I read  Tagore’s ’Homecoming’ which left such a deep impression on my mind that I would often dream of Phatik, his homesickness and ardour to be back home with his mother. Over the years, I have mulled over the poignancy of the story and how Tagore inimitably creates an aura of loneliness, alienation and neglect that shrouds Phatik who accompanies his Uncle to the city with a willing heart, but finds himself unwanted, ignored and a burden. The liberties that he took with his mother and younger brother are suddenly and strictly curtailed and the love that he took for granted becomes paramount and an obsession, by its complete absence. His loneliness crushes him into a shadow of his former boisterous self. He falls ill and in delirium the refrain continues – ‘Have the holidays come – can I go home?’

Equally unequivocal are the writings from the 2R’s – Roald Dahl and Ruskin Bond, read and followed by children and adults throughout the literary circles. ‘The Man from the South’ written by Roald Dahl is an intriguing piece of literature. The story portrays the compulsive and so, a strange urge of a man to trick other people into getting their fingers chopped in lieu of extravagant material possessions. It is a study of the psychological depths of the human mind. The expertise of the writer skillfully laces the intricate workings of the mind, of the desire for wealth, the bait of gambling, and compulsive behavioral patterns with humor and a lightness of being.

‘The Eyes Have It’ by Ruskin Bond is a sweet story of a blind traveler rendered in first person, who meets a girl on a train to Dehra. The brief, but beautiful exchange between the two acquires a deep poignancy with the revelation in the end. The sweetness of attraction, the little pretences to keep up the lovely fantasy, and the so very tender interlude leaves the reader with a savory chocolaty feel of the whole episode.

 ‘The Gift of Magi’ by O’ Henry is an insurmountable feat in literature by itself. ‘The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men-who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here, the author  lamely relates the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days, let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.’

Now I shall take the reader into the unpalatable realms of story writing by Franz Kafka and DH Lawrence. I term it unpalatable because ‘The Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka, is a story that strips humans of every vestige of camouflage and shows us our barren naked souls. That every relationship in this world of desires and maya is based on give and take and what happens when it becomes just one sided. Of how we as human beings detest and are afraid of anything which is unlike or unfamiliar or grotesque to our senses. Kafkaesque, a repertoire of the absurd touched its zenith with the story ‘The Metamorphosis’. An extraordinary transformation of the protagonist Gregor Samsa into a giant insect is relayed in a mundane banal tone highlighting the absurd and chaotic in an everyday home with the kitsch of huge debts and themes of alienation and isolation. The evolving feelings of love and care juxtaposed with animal yearnings of food and shelter in Gregor, the insect (whose very sight and habits disconnect him from the family he so much cared for) deliver him in the end. Horrified by his appearance and transition from a bread winner to a grotesque burden and a liability, his family distances itself from him and his death releases the family to better days. In a way the story questions the consciousness of humans versus the animal world which is devoid of it.  Milan Kundera is another such writer whose writings are a journey into the cold, insensitive, basic and raw desires of the so-called highly evolved race of human beings. We shudder at their writings ’cause they are the hard, unpalatable (I use the word again) truth of our existence as a species. 

DH Lawrence wrote the ‘Rocking Horse Winner’ to mirror the ungainly image of mothers who in contrast to their nourishing avatars, drive their families to destruction with their incontrollable desires.  He brings out the irrevocable imprints that women as mothers leave on their children’s minds. The effect of a mother on her child can drive him to the realms of clouds and also to the dungeons of despair, depending on which way the energy of the bond is used by her. The story with its morbidity leaves an indelible mark on the reader’s mind.

Amongst contemporary writers, I devoured the story collection of Anjum Hasan – ‘Difficult Pleasures’ delightfully. The stories have urban settings with themes of displacement, longing and alienation imbued with a melancholic search for meaning, deeper connections, flair for creativity and sometimes an escape from a claustrophobic relationship or a flight from paranoia.

The reader is easily led into the interiority of the characters and more often than not the protagonists are solitary reapers exclusively binding and unwinding their lives, singing melancholic strains………... Characters are animated in deft strokes and their muddles, paradoxes archived using the stream of consciousness which builds crests and troughs diffusing situations and moments with a fluidity of a competent writer who has complete control on the design and structure of the narrative.

‘Revolutions’ is about a precocious child turned photographer who sees pictures in everyday things and freezes them into his frames. His endeavors are a face in a coconut husk, plastic that could be water and water that could be shadow. His quest for recognition makes him cling to a mentor and he himself becomes frozen in time. ‘Good Housekeeping’ unravels the deep emotional bond in a mother - daughter relationship. Ayana views the world through her mother’s eyes. Her mother’s mood -swings, tears, likes and dislikes are hers too. The last part of the story when she comes into her own is rendered with great mastery and subtlety. ‘The Big Picture’ walks away with all the laurels. It is a sweet story about an older woman who has cocooned herself in her house with her art works, and then suddenly she is let out in the wide world with an opportunity to travel to Europe with her selected paintings for an exhibition and the attraction of seeing master works and meeting world renowned artists. A menopausal woman stranded and lost at airports and art galleries , talking and mumbling to herself, fidgeting with tampons, with her menopausal timing gone awry.

And so the stories go on. Godspeed and stories galore to my readers too!

The Short Story’s Novel Life

Short story, a condensed literary genre, has got a lease of new life with the proliferation of the digital media, beginning with e-book revolution which hit us in 2007. There is an ongoing debate of reading having taken a backseat in today’s world of never-ending deadlines and smart phones. But the fact of the matter is that people are reading on the screen rather than on paper. With short attention spans and a fast life, the short story which as Edgar Allan Poe defined it, ‘that which can be read in one sitting’ has gained momentum.  The length of an average short story takes just a couple of screens and  suits the rampant users of the internet and latest smart handheld gadgetry. ‘Amazon, for instance, created its Kindle Singles program in 2011 for publishing short fiction and nonfiction, brief-enough to be read in less than two hours. Although the list price is usually modest, a dollar or two, authors keep up to 70 percent of the royalties: a welcome revenue for fledgling authors and a potentially big payoff for well-known writers.’ Within the space of a few pages, a great author weaves a compelling story which, with a rich narrative and vibrant characters and a dramatic denouement, acquires the depth of a Dickensian and the pace of a thriller, creating memorable literature that impacts the reader long after they have finished reading.  Virginia Wolfe, talking of photography and the art of short story writing, said, “Isn’t it odd how much more one sees in a photograph than in real life? This gives us, I think, a clue to the enduring power and appeal of the short story—they are snapshots of the human condition and of human nature, and when they work well, and work on us, we are given the rare chance to see in them more than in real life.”

The genesis of the short story began with the caveman recounting the tale of his hunting encounter for the day. Improvising, deleting, dramatizing, rephrasing, repeating, exposing and yet withholding details to carve out the frame of a great story, the narrative traversed the ages in the form of anecdotes, parables and fabricated lies( an art ) to the Canterbury tales, fairy tales, legends relayed through poetry. Short story appeared in the printed format just two centuries ago with the industrial revolution and the surging middle class which demanded literary fodder through magazines and periodicals. A plethora of writers experimented and achieved success through their writings of intense stories, which were visited and reread time and again by generations down the line.  There were no evolutionary planes, a slow build-up to a crescendo.  In 1837, a printed short story collection was born when Nathaniel Hawthorne published his short stories titled Twice Told Tales..  The fact that in the early to mid-19th century, Hawthorne and Poe and Turgenev wrote timeless short stories virtually without any falterings, is indicative that the short story is hardwired in the human imagination, and was just waiting for an outlet stream which built into an ocean through the works of Melville, Nabokov, Calvino, Rudyard Kipling, Dickens, Dylan Thomas, DH Lawrence and the like. A long story of short stories that began with Hawthorne reached its zenith with the publications of Anton Chekov.

Chekov is heralded as the greatest short story writer of all times, and rightly so because he transformed the narrative from a beginning - middling- end plot to a formless structure. He recognized the meaninglessness of life, its random dictates and answered questions that people lived and died for. He ploughed into the story format creating fluid characters, resisting judgments, and neat endings. His stories are lifelike i.e. unpredictable, arbitrary, thought provoking and disillusioned. The advent of the 20^th century in the world of short story writing thereafter is all Chekovian. The short story entered its golden age. Short story writers earned particularly good sums especially in America. ‘Magazines proliferated, readers were eager, circulations rose, fees went up and up. In the 1920s, Scott Fitzgerald was paid $4,000 by the Saturday Evening Post for a single short story.’ The Chekovian legacy lasted a long time without any new style bisecting it concretely, till the advent of the modern story.
We have spoken of the event-plot story and Chekovian story. Most short stories, even today, fall into one of these two categories. From them, other types emerged over the coming decades. The cryptic tale baffles many an untrained reader with a depth of meaning hidden under the apparent text, and the poetic story is for the connoisseurs. The biographical story is the latest modern form of short story writing blurring the line between fiction and fact to render sensational stories, maybe a take from the media which sensationalizes hard reality to appeal to the viewers’ appetite for drama in life.
‘The Gorkha’s Daughter’ is a short story collection by Prajwal Parajuly, a student of the Oxford Creative Writing MSt course. He was born in Sikkim to an Indian father and Napalese mother. He signed a record-breaking two-book deal with UK publisher Quercus. The five-figure deal makes Prajwal Parajuly, 27, Quercus’ youngest author and the youngest Indian ever to sign an international book contract. The book is out in the market and was discussed critically at the Jaipur Lit Fest, a sure shot indication of the popularity and resurgence of the short fiction genre in the contemporary world. The fever has caught on and novel writers are now switching over to the new demand of the digital era and new formats of writing. Story collections which had been put on a backburner by acclaimed writers like Tom Perrotaa ( books ‘Election’ and ‘Little Children’ have been adapted into Oscar winning films)  are seeing the light of day.

I recently read a short story collection ‘Difficult Pleasures’ by Anjum Hasan . She revels in the luxury of variety, of trying out so many different garbs or voices; but the perfection lies in its brevity and pointedness and really in the feeling of expansion into life that penetrates our consciousness by means of a style that produces a sense of truth and richness. She views each story as a specific invention, a liberating experience to move out of her own skin and slip into a character’s head and find the language and psychology to tell their story – that’s where all the difficult pleasure is!

My last article was about book apps, the latest format of books on the smart phone, and now the above topic of the new life of the short story has been an endeavor to explore the latest genres of books and reading in the contemporary world. This talk about short stories has surfaced many an unforgettable story from the recesses of my consciousness – which I shall continue in my next article. In the meantime readers can too go explore and recollect their favorite short stories and if you mail them to me I shall expound on them in my next interaction with you.

Happy short story readings on the KINDLE!

Book Apps

                                                        
I am an educationist and my experience as a curriculum developer and administrator for educational institutions led me on a path to develop book-reading worshop-modules incorporating fiction/nonfiction books as the bases of teaching-learning process instead of dry, prosaic academic readings. My book presentations entail power point presentations, maps, documentaries and music downloads along with excerpts from relevant books. Sometimes I share my insights and critical appraisals of books with book lovers on different platforms – colleges, art galleries, libraries and book reading clubs. The journey through these book reading workshops keeps me abreast of the latest in the book publishing world in India and abroad.
New book formats have become part of our reading lives, and they simultaneously create opportunities and challenges to my reading workshops. The e-book has segued into book apps since the launch of  ipad in 2009. It sent the publishers and developers into a tizzy and created app space to redesign, create and develop books in an avant-garde  fashion.  It’s a much more collaborative process and it’s hard to look at any of the apps and say ‘this person made that’… it requires an input from many a different disciplines. The cozy relationship of a writer and his book is replaced by artists, animators, designers and storytellers and their book app.

The London Olympics created a stir with their spectacular preparations and execution. The news doing the rounds in the book world was the Heuristic’s award-winning London: A City through Time which challenged our interpretation of a ‘book’. Taking as its basis Pan Macmillan's London Encyclopedia, the app packed in a simple design and a scrolling menu which navigates 6,000 articles about places, people and events from the city's history. There are panoramas of the city, rare photographs, video documentaries, a timeline and audio tours. The app is not linear like a book and one can tour places and events from links on the map. Indeed a fascinating guide to an amazing city and is well-worth investigating.

 Touch Press is one of the developers that is exploring how books can be reinvented for the iPad. Previous titles, Solar System and Gems and Jewels, have taken coffee table books and re-engineered them for tablet devices. Touch Press has moved away from non-fiction and has renewed its partnership with publishers Faber to try out some poetry. A new app compiled Shakespeare's 154 sonnets and it costs about the same as a decent printed book. But it goes far beyond what could ever be achieved in print and after a few hours of playing with it you'll feel that £9.99 is a bargain. Central to the app are the 154 video readings of the sonnets read by great actors, which is a wonderful thing and the readings here are a delight.
Touch Press experimentation with T.S Eliot’s poem ‘The Wasteland’ was very impressive. There is the poem itself and detailed, informative line-by-line notes which will help students and anyone who wants to understand the work in more depth. Beyond that, there are six readings of the poem, including two by Eliot himself and an excellent one by Sir Alec Guinness, a picture gallery and a facsimile of Eliot’s original manuscript.
One of the most interesting areas in book-apps right now is the one aimed at the children, as publishers blur the boundaries between books, games, animation and creative software. The handling of a book is difficult for a very young child. They have to know how to turn pages, and have to manipulate this thing, whereas with a tablet, you don’t need to work a mouse, or know the concept of folders.  There is a direct relationship between the child and the app or the digital book, and it is manipulateable with tremendous ease. That causes delight not just for the child but the parent, too. There’s a challenge for publishers here though. Books have been designed to be read with or by parents, so while it’s important to create book-apps that are engaging and fun, it would be a shame if that came at the expense of the emotional value of the book: of the parent and child sitting together. The answer could lie with writers and artists who also understand the fundamentals of interactive design. “Those are going to be the new children’s book rock stars!”
Me Books is the digital equivalent of an independent picture-book shop, which is trying to help parents who are struggling to filter the sheer number of book-apps available on iOS."It should be exactly like going into a little picture-book shop where you trust the guy who runs it, and know the stuff he's selling is good.The key feature of Me Books is its "draw and record" feature, where children can draw an area on-screen – a "hotspot" – and then record their own sounds or words for it.
That may sound minor, but in the Peppa Pig and Ladybird Me Books apps, it was enormously popular where they invent their own zebra calls or insist that visitors to the house record their own take on Daddy Pig. In the future, we'd really love the notion of people being able to save, swap and share versions of the stories, both with other people that have the app and the ability and to send your version of The Three Little Pigs to grandparents.
As children grow into their teens and tweens, they’re becoming much more immersed in interactive content, particularly video games, where there is a nonlinear world that they’re getting to explore. The challenge for the publishing industry, then, is to tell stories in the way that these teenagers are used to and want to receive them.
I have shared my exploration through my smart phone and the internet with my readers. In fact rereading the write-up, it is more of what a reader would find on the net. I have bunched in all the relevant detailing on the net to take you through the new world of book reading. What delighted me no end was the fact that my book reading workshops are very much on the lines of the book apps designed by Touch Press, where-in I take the audience through virtual tours of settings in the book, the historical, social, and political backdrop of the book, pictures and maps of architecture, paintings and designs in the book – besides deciphering the plot and literary study of the technique and themes in the book. My most delightful experience so far has been ‘An Equal Music’, written by Vikram Seth in which I made the audience listen to all the five pieces of European Classical Music woven in the story of the book, with an added tour of the geography and artistic musical theatres in London, Vienna and Venice.
Do come to one of my LIVE BOOK APP READINGS in the forthcoming months!