Spaced Out and Threaded In: Anjum Hasan’s Difficult Pleasures

Bibhash Choudhury

Difficult Pleasures,
Viking/ Penguin
April 2012

Anjum Hasan’s Difficult Pleasures (Viking 2012) is a riveting read. A collection of short stories that draws on the tropes of memory, desire and departure, many of the protagonists here enhance our understanding through unexpected and surprising moves, yet these are occasions that remind us of their potential to hold life’s moments of rapture, some of which are couched and clothed in the fabric of quietitude. Small, seemingly insignificant details jostle moments of profound realization rooted in the contours of everyday existence and as the intersections of desire and memory meet the surprise that unfolds, we have narratives that linger long after the reading is done.

“The Big Picture,” an account of a reluctant, unambitious artist whose foray into the world of European art, relocates the priorities of immediate existence and cuts through the veneer of display and sophistication that circumscribes the fraternity she is sucked into. Mrs Ali is an artist whose lonely life as a widow and a mother of children located elsewhere is interspersed by the stacks of paintings she makes by observing the world around her. She prefers to remain in her familiar space, and even as her art receives the attention of an expert scout, she feels comfortable in her self-enclosed world. The fact that she dispenses her artworks by distributing them to people, which includes her children, whose interest cannot be ascertained shows a disconnect between the objects and the one who brought them to life.

The need for performance, called upon by the European scout Frieda and its complete lack in Mrs Ali is the ironic counterpoint that Hasan invests in so much, and it is this mapping of the world and the individual at odds that stands out, making the story so fresh and invigorating. In a way, “The Big Picture” looks at one of the accretions that come with loneliness: the yawning space that covers one’s life and one that modes of travel across the memory plain isn’t enough to overcome. For Mrs Ali, unlike the fellow women artists assembled in a European capital whose fascination for performance overrides other priorities of life, the journey to another land is an event that comes to her, one she submits to now that she has committed herself to it. This isn’t a task of the everyday that she could negotiate with the assurance she does in her home. Facing disdain and even unpleasant companions on her flight, learning that etiquette demands alternative responses as locations change the hard way, Mrs Ali has a far more arduous moment awaiting her. It is on the flight itself that she experiences menopause, and unprepared for such a shift-change in an unfamiliar environment, the act addressing her immediate bodily need surfaces in the story’s end in a counterblast that deconstructs the layer of social performance she stood against. Not a deliberate purposeful act, but one we are told orchestrated in a moment of “madness,” the stigmatizing of the Max Ernst masterpiece Imaginary Summer by Night by her bloodstained wad in the form of the slight brown smudge that recoloured the moon, this is where Mrs Ali brings her creative impulse home. The picturing of life’s ironies takes for its subject the artist and the question of art-making, undercutting the familiar structures through an indulgence that refuses to adhere to form. The narrative does not present the artistic process through the register of the programmes that accompany the culture of display in high-end art installations, but takes the route of a privately ordained journey which is unlike any other.

Almost all the stories in the collection look at this issue of the private space in terms that emerge in each case in a different set of circumstances. The other story that deals with the theme of art, “Revolutions” pursues the fragility of commitment through an altogether different narrative orientation. With a protagonist curiously named Science, the story’s focus on the artifice governing the the hierarchies of social elitism draws on coincidence to thread the circular vision of another kind.

An amateur photographer, named Science because of his grandfather’s mocking attitude towards technology, finds his portfolio praised by a celebrity in the field, Darshini. Buoyed by her encouraging words, Science comes to believe that he needs to meet her, and soon he flies down to Bombay from Bangalore in search of his celebrated mentor. Or so he presumed her to be. When reality strikes him hard in that she is not merely unresponsive, she plays hard-to-get, Science gives up hope. He is taken in by the expanding city horizon of which he gets just a vignette, even though it had figured in his imagination much before he really came to it: “The city had always been there in the way that, when we are twenty, cities loom on our horizons and we imagine comfortably distant futures in which we might live in one of them. But this was the first time he was here and everything he experienced symbolized Bombay, every human gesture seemed to be a larger one made by the city.” (3) The magnification that draws him into the city coincidentally is tunnelled into the vision of the broken binoculars he purchases to while his time, and it is through its lens that he zeroes in on an apartment seen from the room he occupies, and as the story moves towards its impending climax we see Science face Darshini—but she misses him altogether, he goes unrecognised—and soon he volunteers to signal the arriving ambulance called by her partner to attend to her fall. Irony is one of Hasan’s most striking strategies, and in “Revolutions,” the purpose of his visit to meet Darshini is realized, but it is in the reality rap that the hard lesson is ironically driven in.

Anjum Hasan
Source: http://www.anjumhasan.com

As a story, “Revolutions” operates through the multiple layers that encompass the tropes of travel and desire, which recur throughout the book. Science had come to Bombay to pursue a hunch, a whim, a desire, something he did not have a name for, but it was an “eccentric scheme,” (11) one that cannot quite be accommodated within the recognised frames that circumscribe everyday human relationships. The presence of this unnameable condition emerges in “Wild Things,” a story of a rebel act where its protagonist Prasad and his cousin plunge into the vortex of surfaces and take both the angst and the experience home. There is a bitter-sweet feel in this story of childhood where fantasy and reality come to be bound in ways that neither Prasad and Natesha had prepared themselves for.

Hasan’s brilliant control over her creative resources is evident in the charting of the history behind Prasad’s flight from school, that miniscule narrative segment where his throwing of the school-distributed lunch in a show of pride constitutes its own cultural undercurrent, his caning by the wonderfully caricatured Principal, Mr Hosaralli. The drama of the flight to his cousin for the pursuit of more inviting pleasures is, however, superceded by the climactic purchase of a deodorant from an elite shop where both Prasad and Natesha come undone—the errant boy losing all the stolen money from his mother’s Glaxo tin that he carried as he embarked on the bus and his cousin dispensing with almost an entire month’s savings.

Why do they do it? By the time they both wolf down the bhajji from the street-side woman with the coins that survived the impromptu purchase they are back to their own selves, impish and eager, though the actuality of the step they had undertaken was yet to adequately sink in. The boys do not seem to have much room for memory, or at least they can afford to keep the thought of what their actions entail at bay, but that is not the case with the narrator-protagonist of “Immanuel Kant in Shillong” who not only makes capital of his memories, but also traverses the spaces that enable him to relive his moments with the woman that mattered the most to him while she lived, his wife Maia. Calcutta, Shillong, London—spaces with associations come to have meaning for him only because they remind him of all that he had been through with her.

The story’s appeal, however, centres on his experience of teaching philosophy at the university, and more specifically on the association of Immanuel Kant with John, a student who once accosted him on the way for a friend’s failure—and as these threads come together, we see how the memory train draws out the most mundane of experiences in ways that compel him to revise his way of looking at life and the world he knew and occupied. Although the role of memory, along with that of travel, serves the narratives in specifically designed ways, each episode or event is fraught with its own register, its unique mark, the meaning of which only the subject is able to understand and respond to.

This seems to me to be the most striking feature of Difficult Pleasures. There are pleasures to be had, goals to be pursued and sought, but each movement carries its distinctive signature, and located even as they are within the frames of everyday existence, none defined by predictability. In effect, what we have is the chronicling of private spaces that negotiate with the worlds that the protagonists confront, sometimes this process is one of dialogue, and in others, it becomes a process of discovery and self understanding. Constant throughout the book is the travel motif, but as in the short fabular exercise “Fairytale in 12th Main,” the interplay between desire and knowledge surfaces in a paradox that is beyond settlement. How can one hold on to the flux of life, how can one not let go of that whose passage is inevitable? Questions which operate as controlling matrices in this story, however, also serve as entry points into issues that verge on the existential, for, in addressing time, Inayat’s wish for his beloved’s perennial stay beside him carries its inevitable reverse-edged corollary, time standing still cannot mean bliss, it can only give fixity, its most recongizable form being stasis. This is a dangerous choice to make, and as Inayat allows the narrative of life to propel Hina forward, he realises that any control, however fabular in dimension, over conditions beyond our making invite risks that can hardly be foreseen. All risks, however trivial in the way they originate, bear out the subjects’ decisions in the different stories of the book.

“Eye in the Sky” has for its subject a girl, Dawn, whose risky solo venture from the safe space of domesticity soon turns out to be an adventure she had no inkling of surfacing in the manner it does. A sudden, impulsive move to leave her husband’s side for what originated in an act of gamesmanship soon transforms into a journey to Goa where a new world, and its incumbent dangers, open her eyes to experiences she had no way of envisaging earlier. The story takes on the various ramifications of the culture industry that drives the Goan world, one where everything seems permissible, but Hasan’s satirical thrusts are so nuanced that the intricacies of the space explored are also those that form the sources that invite and lure its visitors. The faultlines are not quite societally programmed, but they emerge as conditions framing the space that hold its realities on offer for whoever seeks them. The personal desire and search for her husband’s submission to her is a journey that follows its own track, yet in conjunction with the world she discovers, she comes to terms with both, her expanding self-awareness, and her situation as wife and companion. The process of discovery in “Banerjee and Banerjee,” perhaps the most philosophical of all the narratives in Difficult Pleasures, is one where we are treated to a very different vocabulary. The issue at hand is not about language, but rather on the role of the unsaid in relations between people who appear to have closed off all possibilities of re-engagement. An economist with an extremely busy itineray, Banerjee has no time to spare.

At the beginning of the story, he is contemplating settling down in Paris after a life of hectic touring in the coveted cities of the world, and it is at this juncture that his ordered lifestyle meets an unexpected roadblock: he is informed that his elder brother Dipen has passed away in Sweden. Completely at the other extreme in terms of profession, priority, and ideology, Dipen did not have much of a relation with his brother. The occasional meetings, the last of which was quite a few years back, did not cut much ice, with Banerjee remembering his brother as a man with an inexplicable worldview who urged him to read certain books. Banerjee, caught in the traffic of professional haste, hardly had time to spare for what his brother suggested, but now, confronting his absence, sees in the book left for him the unspeakable stare at him in this moment of truth.

The evocation of spaces, territorial and otherwise (Bangalore is the most referred to spatial context, but there are others too) in Difficult Pleasures shows more than subtlety and tact, the narratives are endowed with an unmistakable grip that stems from the command over the medium, and as worlds unravel it is to the reward of fulfilment and discovery that the pages of the book invite the reader to come home to.

Bibhash Choudhury teaches English in the Department of English, Gauhati University. He is the author of English Social and Cultural History: An Introductory Guide and Glossary (PHI Learning 2005), Beyond Cartography: The Contemporary South Asian Novel in English (Papyrus, 2011) and E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime(BlackSlate, 2013).