On Singapore

It rains a lot in Singapore. That is when it is not one hot still day after the other, the sun doing things to your head and making you tired. It is a different kind of sun to Australia and India, probably due to the equator. But when it rains it is a little cooler, the roads are wet, the trees drip, the three or four species that line roads leave fallen, bedraggled flowers and for a moment it can seem a magical island. But Singapore is not a place of romance. It is a pragmatic city and this feature asserts itself always.

I have been in an out of Singapore the past few months so my impressions of the city are fleeting. I know few people and none are local, merely old friends.  But I have time on my hands, time to flaneur. The city is compact, obviously well run and in a constant process of change as most cities are. The new is everywhere and the old lurks in corners.  There is no moral position about this, all history is the new and shiny getting old.  And people come here to gawk precisely at this. The new, the convenient, the malls at every corner. The promise of affluence and comfort. But if you respond to the dusty and the worn as I do - and there is no moral position about this, it after all is its own aesthetic - then you have to search fairly hard for it in this city-state.

The old culture, if there is an old culture for a city largely made of immigrants, has its own aesthetic. It remains as a tourist attraction and is perhaps part of a domestic life not visible to the ordinary traveller.  This of course is not restricted to Singapore and if labelled is Straits culture. It is most visible in the few remaining old houses in candy colours with creamy white moulding of flowers and animals influenced by the Victorians but without the heavy, florid features of the era. The colours are echoed elsewhere in old costumes (rarely worn) and the little sweets in packets that are ubiquitous. It is a pity that it hasn't flowed into the city's modern life as visibly as say in India.

Of course the predominant culture of the city is Chinese and there are signs of this everywhere, albeit in a muted way, from shops with names harking back to a different era (Beach Road, Steamboat) to tiny shrines to local festivals.  There are Chinese bookshops, advertisements for Chinese dramas. Food courts that offer specific meals like Hainanese chicken. The rush for all things Hong Kong. And some old parts, the laneways are neat even where narrow and pleasantly stacked with pot plants and the odd small red shrine.

But it isn't for this local culture or the tiny places that nurture a indie culture that people come here. And to be fair this is a small city and all this may be found elsewhere in the region. Rather it is the urban marvel that is Singapore. And so the normal tourist pit stops, Sentosa, Gardens by the Bay, Orchard Road, the River Safari, the Night Safari.  And despite the city's wealth this is not always about the loud and flashy.  Rather there are things here that are surprisingly modest, the genius and pleasure seems to lie in its planning. With all this, there is something lacking, something a little airless about the city.  Once in awhile you feel a stir. As when you encounter a place that is not the man-made green of the city and is all damp green and steam and insects of the genuinely tropical. But this is rare. 

 
As a friend put it, everything is consumed, little made. He was talking about art and this is true.  There are bookshops and neatly curated and maintained museums around. There is a small community of writers and artists perhaps for those interested.  But there is no great Singapore novel or film or art.  Like everything else, it is pleasant but not the kind that grabs your imagination and you want to devour instantly. And surprisingly here it is not entirely modern. The second hand bookshops stock old classics and Archie comics and everywhere middlebrow 80s music follows you around (not dissimilar to Goa but more on that later). Still language and proximity makes a difference and it is not uncommon to see translated works, especially from Japan, in the bookstores.

Now and then in some far flung suburb still coming into being and filled with the not so well-to-do or newly arrived immigrants, you can sense how cities are made.  And those reliable barometers of a city's life - its taxi drivers - provide glimpses into marginal lives. The commutes, the search for cheap produce, the muted lament for a disappearing age if your driver is old. On a holiday, the stations swarm with the underclass, often immigrant, that keeps the city going.  Yet the sense of a sprawling city is absent even though in some ways Singapore is like a model city of a urbanised future.

Food is everywhere in Singapore.  For all purposes it is the city's main source of pleasure. And it rarely disappoints. When I start dissecting this preoccupation (my go to for this is Pria Viswalingam's documentary Decadence though in keeping with our times he too ate his way through a few countries:)) I hear my cousin's voice saying oh so Didion and I stop.

What now and where.  I shall wait for 2014 and decide.

In Singapore

A large part of my time has been spent in India and Singapore.  More on that later.  Above a small sample of my instagramming of  Singapore (click for a larger view) - the two most ubiquitous symbols of the city are the mobile phone and food after all:)

I just realised it's been ages since I was on blogger and I am fumbling with layouts and templates. Tumblr seems like a natural home these days though I haven't been able to get the time to do a concentrated amount of work on it.  It was lucky I had a backlog that could be readily queued allowing me to coast along a bit on the vintage Indian clothing posts. It remains my joy and I feel the odd bit of pride when a particularly nice compliment comes my way.  And anyone reading this blog who is an illustrator I am badly in need of a like minded collaborator!

Leaving Sydney

It's been more than 5 months since I left Sydney though I went back for a few weeks to wind up and clear out my flat.  The years since I came back from a brief stint in Brisbane and resumed my old life seem to have coalesced into one. In between there was an incapacitating illness, deaths in the family, a very blue year, travel back and forth.  The mid point of this marked a transition, a new phase in life where everything is quietly hopeful, quietly hopeless. Yet I could not say I was unhappy.  Rather if I felt afresh the shock of grief, I felt happiness. And too keenly at times.  At the point when I was ill and had days to myself and the year was blue, blue, blue I would often walk around slowly in the afternoon. The day as often in Sydney would be mildly sunny, small pink eucalypt flowers would litter the ground, my niece would come rushing to the door of her house if I was in the neighbourhood and dropped by and life would feel absolutely simple for a moment.  I never feel this way elsewhere.

When I was a child, my brother and I lingered at a house with a TV, a rarity those days.  A documentary on the Nullarbor plain was screening and something in it held us rapt. My aunt had moved early on to Australia, to us inured to American tales it felt suitably distant and different. My Brilliant Career spoke to me as a teen. Years later in my first serious relationship which happened to be long distance, my then boyfriend was briefly working in Perth. It was the only time I considered dropping everything to move.  In a way the country held a place in my imagination.  It lay in wait for me as I for it.  I am not Australian, rather there are parts to the country that suit me. And there is no other place outside of India that feels this way. For the moment it is goodbye and there has been much to feel happy about by way of family and being home. Which is the reason for moving. But for all its distance Sydney remains a second home and I think about my years there often.

Things I Like

Right now I am reading The Maias. Its a door stopper of a book and I want to bunk a day's work and curl up and devour it all in one gulp. Sadly I snatch reading time here and there to take it in. Thus far it is a classy soap that loves exclamation marks but that is just the plot, there is so much going on and Eca de Q is having so much fun and at the same time it is a sprawling, leisurely commentary on 19th century Portugal and I am entirely captivated and can't wait to finish it and restart all over again. Also I think I really really need to visit Portugal because whatever little I have seen and read (Mysteries of Lisbon, you are perfect) has been so absorbing and interesting that you have to remind yourself that these people are writing about themselves as the backwater of Europe.

I spend way too much time on tumblr, its like a rabbit hole you fall into and then you reappear and you want to write #IDK #holy fuck #excuse his beauty #obsessive replaying #cuz why not - because those are the tags you see along with other even more incoherent fangirling tags and then you realise that unlike most of tumblr which is VERY YOUNG you are on the wrong side of 40 and well perhaps a lyricist like Johnny Flynn doesn't quite deserve that and on that note here is his song, I am Light.  Only Nick Drake is rotated more often in Chez Anu. Pic Source here. And IDK is I don't know:)

And lastly, three cheers for Caravan which gets top marks not for being a great mag but for actually posting my favourite short story, Ras, in a new translation.  Even Indian cinema couldn't ruin it, not that it didn't try (to be fair it wasn't bad).

Jane & Edward

In India, back in the day DD2 - bless them - would erratically screen UK TV programs and at the time they were the highlight of our TV viewing (yes cousins we have still not forgiven you for ruining the taping of a Jeeves and Wooster episode!).   Now that I have moved away, with UK shows being terribly commonplace here they no longer hold the same appeal. As an e.g. if Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry appeared together in an episode of QI I would forgo it for an hour of…anything really.  Then one might even watch The Far Pavilions on the basis that the “British do period drama so well” but of course like Downton Abbey (a show I haven't bothered with) it was just an overblown soap with pretty looking people in historical costumes.   Recent sporadic viewings of respectively the very hokey The Paradise which never felt like anything Zola wrote and the more ambitious Parade’s End which took itself far too seriously and was deadly dull decided me that my rule of strictly rationed British TV period fare was warranted.  And then I saw Jane Eyre 2006.

Bronte’s novel of course heads must read lists. Mr Rochester is apparently everyone’s idea of a romantic hero and every now and then a film/TV version comes out which is duly whetted and slobbered over by the fan girls and further distances male viewers (with exceptions).  So though I did read positive reviews of the 2006 version I stayed away, more so since I didn't like the 2011 version – I went with my cousin for a girls night out and half way through we began regretting the unfinished wine bottle that we couldn't smuggle into the theatre.  The only version I did like was Welles'  version but that was not due to the movie itself or the performances in themselves. Rather I am a sucker for beautiful speaking voices and Welles' is top-shelf.  And then when I did get around to seeing the 2006 version, I was more than pleasantly surprised.  The production has its faults – the two segments that bookend the novel and do not feature Mr Rochester - Jane’s childhood and her time with St John and his sisters is fairly weak.  But it makes up for that with its central story which is so very charged that you finally see why Jane Eyre is an enduring romance.  All of this has to do with the leads. For the purists they do not exactly resemble their novel counterparts, nevertheless they do create the passion and feeling at the heart of what is an uncommon romance.  Ms Wilson’s performance is effectively restrained and filmic but Mr Stephens performance has dual qualities - old fashioned theatricality mixed with the toned down approach of film.  Normally I prefer the latter but some parts call for an actor who can manipulate language and knows how to deliver dialogue (and I have to admit that I miss this in modern film, both in India and elsewhere few actors know how to clearly enunciate and speak their lines) and Mr Stephens is adept at this.  On the other hand the performance is not all thespy either i.e. the kind of "look I am acting and I have cut glass vowels" performance which undermines so much British period drama or even the Orson Welles version. The proposal scene in Jane Eyre lies at the heart of the novel for it is not a simple proposal but also hints at Mr Rochester’s past and what is to come.  It requires not just a mellifluous reading of the lines but the line reading also has to convey Mr Rochester’s inner conflict. In this version it is particularly well done by Mr Stephens.  Unusually for a novel perceived as a romance for ladies, it has a very complex male character at the centre (he is also umm rather verbose!) and Mr Stephens digs into the role with relish and delivers and more (Indian audiences may know the actor from Mangal Pandey-and the actor really should have played Flashman, Update - well he has read the part!).   

All in all I felt myself ready to watch a bit more British drama:) And for once the interviews on the DVD extras were thoughtful and interesting.

Bronte’s novel isn't popular with everyone.  There have been postcolonial interpretations – and I am surprised the French haven’t complained yet (there is a good degree of this kind of insularity and protestant christianity in Bronte's novels, they are very much of their time).  For the new feminists Mr Rochester is the worst kind of male ideal, a forerunner of the bad boy and just the kind of man any sensible woman should avoid.  Comparisons with Austen come up though Bronte wasn't a fan (and the funniest comparisons of Rochester and Darcy apparently have no comments).  All this of course misses the point because Austen and Bronte are very different writers loosely united by that hateful phrase of our time, chick-lit.  Jane Eyre remains on reading lists because it is a beautifully constructed, powerfully written novel. Second Jane Eyre is not just a romantic novel.  It is not solely about finding the right husband in a society where cads and bores abound a la Austen.  Rather it’s about passion and feeling,  injustice and goodness, hypocrisy and cruelty and about being female and in the world.  Bronte feels all this very keenly - in Jane Eyre and in much of her other work.  Unlike Austen, Bronte’s  novels are not exactly romantic templates and unlike Austen her men are flawed and real.  Jane and Rochester are singular people and their romance equally singular, despite the lists it is not an "archetype" romance like Pride and Prejudice.  And most important of all though Jane Eyre gets a “happy ending”, you can imagine her life without it too.  Unlike Austen's novels where marriage is the logical end point, Bronte’s girl is her own person – you feel that with or without Mr Rochester she would have made her way through life on her own terms.  

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My favourite period drama pieces however still remain non-British and rather French.  I loved The Mysteries of Lisbon (and Time Regained), the former I could watch endlessly.  I loved Breillat’s An Old Mistress.  And Untold Scandal was probably the best version of Dangerous Liaisons. 

The Girl - Robert Walser

From here.

Click to enlarge and read. 

On my mother

The before and after of my life lies on the day my mother died.  This is always hard to explain, the sentimental misunderstand the nature of this feeling, the more pragmatic dismiss you as having a taste for melodrama. But anyone who has lost someone very close when young will immediately empathise, indeed a silent kinship runs amongst us.  Suddenly you are in new and uncharted territory, banished from the world you knew except as memory. In this territory hours and days will go by and each will mark the slow receding of that singular event from the world you inhabit.

It is twenty years since my mother died.  Just the other day I was astonished that she would have been 69 this year, by no means young but by no means an age in which death is inevitable.  In most ways my mother has faded from the life that surrounds me. There is hardly anything left of her in the places she inhabited, indeed it can be hard to say if anyone now remembers her very often apart from her children.  This is a natural outcome of the passing of time, every philosophy is at pains to tell you that oblivion stalks us from the moment we live. Still we hope for a little more and the now and then mention of my mother by people who knew her makes me happy, makes me feel she is still a little alive in this world.

Which is why I write this every year. To keep her a little alive. As the tiniest of flames but still there.

The photograph is of my mother in 1969, unusually in the fashions of the day.