The Other Colours of Monsoon

I don’t know what his name is, but a Malayalam writer has once noted how monsoons have rained good books in his life.

It has been raining white since last evening. The breaks are very short, the rains most heavy. People continue with their lives nevertheless. Everything is a bit damp, that is all. The evenings are particularly sluggish. It is indeed quite a heartening thought that one can sip coffee and sit through the monsoon nights, dreaming of songs to be sung and revolutions to be waged, but practicality often dampens the initial stages. After all, one has to find one’s way to the kitchen in the powercut house, and a single wayward drop of water on the floor sponges its way through to one’s brain.

Nevertheless, the aroma of coffee is the perfect better half of a dreamy book on a monsoon day. I had thought of many different ways to start this blogpost, but now ultimately I have come to the central portion of each, once again proving how as someone who loves the art of writing, I am quite inferior when it comes to the actual task. The intro is quite lengthy, but the point is quite simple, that how Pamuk’s Other Colours has infused so much of nostalgia for an unwritten word from my pen! So much of a nostalgia that I have been dreaming of monsoons which never rained in reality, and have been renedering colours to actual monsoons spent in quite quotidian ways starting from cursing the wet morning papers to ending it with cursing the empty water tank because the motor pump couldn’t be of any help because there was no power the entire day.

But, to stick to facts, monsoon has indeed presented good books in my life. I remember that it was in the monsoon of 2006 that I read Pamuk’s The White Castle. That was the first book by him I had ever read. I had bought it for a very strange reason – Prof. Ashok has been singing Pamuk’s praises. I was skeptical. But I wanted to know, just know what kind of writer this is. At the bookshop I found that The White Castle is the slimmest of them all, and I bought it! I fell in love with the book with each page with each situation. Right from the first paragraph, describing the movement of ships in the Bosphorus.

And, I still maintain, The White Castle is the best book by Pamuk (and I have read My Name is Red). The theme of identity swapping is not new, but is always quite exciting. Though Pamuk doesn’t mention it among his influences for writing the novel, in the essay on The White Castle, or the Afterword he has written for the novel (both published in Other Colours), one memorable example is from Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Marquez’s identity swapping is loud, colourful, dramatic, while Pamuk’s is slow, so slow that you won’t realize that you have been swept off your feet, duped. Indeed, Pamuk knows this very well, witness the final paragraph of The White Castle.

If there is anything that I like about Pamuk, then it is this softness of his strokes. They don’t leave you helpless, they don’t force your head in prostrate by its gripping genius. If anything, they inspire you, they make you attempt a few, however incapable, strokes of your own. If Marquez is the pained and agonized Michaelangelo letting out the whims of his genius (genius – djinn- spirit- residing without oneself), Pamuk is the village school teacher – you stop your game as he passes by, but you know he can take some of it.