Cool Cut

[JesusA (imported)]

This morning’s edition of The Hindu has a review of a new novel that looks very interesting. So far, I haven’t been able to find a source for it in North America or England. I suspect that it will need to come from an Indian book dealer who is willing to ship it internationally.

Power of three

SUMANA ROY

A delightful first novel about the politics of language, the body and the grammar of gender.

Cool Cut, Sharad P. Paul, Picador, 2007,

Rs. 195.

Sharad P. Paul’s delightful first novel, Cool Cut, is the story of three friends, their lives as kite-flyers on the banks of the Kaveri, and their different experiences with “cutting”; Kumar’s at a hair-cutting salon, Raman’s castration by eunuchs, and Lakshmi’s at a Carmelite Convent, cut off from family and the sensations of the lower part of her body.

Three everywhere

Although the Epigraph, a Tamil saying, offers an explanation about the number 9, “the mark of the ali: the eunuch”, it is three, the square “root” of nine, which constructs its architectonics on which the novel stands . For, everything here operates in threes, story and structure, man and nature: the novel is the story of three friends; a sister ties three knots on the groom’s sacred thread, “the union of the threesome: mind, body and spirit”; water, which moves like a spirit through the pages of the book, drowning and flooding, washing and drying, is reflected in the triple mirror of the self, in the river which has “a constant flow of life and youthful energy”, in the sea which “breathes, and seems knowledgeable and protective”, and in the lake where “the water is stagnant, not mobile; yet its soul is warm and accommodating”; when the three friends are united, they think of “Proton, Neutron and Electron; inseparable — a trio of particles in an atomic flood”; the book ends with the three friends in the salon, with “three chairs” and three windows, and the narrator watching “the shadows of three kites”, and jumping “until the power of three overcomes me”.

Even Shuchi Thakur’s cover design makes use of three colours, black, white, and red, echoing the novel’s ideological thrust, the undefined inbetweenness of our lives where nothing is ever completely present (white) or absent (black), but fluid, like blood, like the red kites China Moon and China Sun, like the red sari on the cover which breaks all binaries. Cool Cut, after all, gets its name from three kinds of “cuts” which, in literal and metaphorical ways, provide the central themes of the novel: the politics of language, the changing tenses of the body and the uncertain grammar of gender.

Language and location

Cool Cut, set during the language movement in Tamil Nadu, when Tamilians felt that “many people … will live in Tamil and die in Hindi”, uses language as background and playground, brick and turf. The name of the village where the friends live is called KKP, “from the initials of a local British secretary in the final days of the Raj — K.K. Pickering. Others feel that it is just an acronym for ka ka pee, which means ‘crow shit’ in Tamil”. Through this and more, Paul creates a sense of the aleatoric relation between language and location: the various newspaper clippings with which Kumar had made the kite arrange themselves to form a line which, like the last missing clue of the detective’s story, erases the smudge between ignorance and knowledge, life and death.

Kite-flying, dreams and food play the roles of the three poles on which the baggy tent of language stands. “Dreams need to be released, to find a way out. Otherwise dreams will go mouldy inside the mind. Mouldy dreams are no good. Mouldy minds are even worse”. What the writer seems to imply is that mouldy words are the worst, for a language whose organs have fallen into disuse — or is suffocated into breathlessness by another, as Hindi, “the unapproachable, ungrateful language” is threatening to do to Tamil, the language “of sense … dreams …poetry” — will die, like desire without love. Like dreams, “a kite always wants to escape”; its sharpness-stung string, born from the manja, a mixture of dog-shit and powdered glass, is as necessary to kite-flying as slang and colloquial are to sharpen the molars of a language (“No point in holding back swear words, just as there isn’t any point in holding back a fart.”). This sense of the empowering power of the impure, the humus that gives the language its green leaves, is also conveyed through metaphors of food.

It is the same third space that Paul tries to scoop out from between the convention-crusted categories of male and female. This is done by scratching the back of history: the etymologies of the Arabic hijra and the Italian castrato are uttered in the same breath, blurring boundaries between two cultures. Myth and reality engage in play so that the cutting of Ganesha’s head is compared to the eunuch’s castration and Michael Jackson becomes a eunuch-figure who “sings like a castrato and wears make-up like a migrato”.

Resurrecting the body

Perhaps it required a plastic surgeon-writer to drag the body with such charming ferocity into the pages of the Indian English Novel. There is a zoomorphic tendency to represent the human body through tropes of nature, a plasticity which denies it a fixity of nomenclature. The penis is “kipper”, girls have “firm breasts like parrot-beak mangoes”, a drunken man “is like an octopus on the bottom of the ocean”, the eunuchs are fish, the American traveller’s “long limbs are bent like a grasshopper’s… a praying mantis”, Ramani thinks she is “like a wild animal”. What holds greatest interest are the significatory processes of denoting the body in pain.

The song that MGR hears is “in an unknown tongue” (neither Tamil nor Hindi, a eunuch language), MGR’s body is “embalmed” (an interstitial space between life and death) and the last three pages of the book vacillate between “the clouds of Madras”, the history of MGR’s legacy (“Endnote”) and a recipe of Lakshmi’s Burfi (“Author’s note”), as if claiming this thirdness as the aesthetic for the new political fable.

The Hindu

Sunday, October 7, 2007

URL: http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/lr/200 ... 190300.htm

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