Roses

Five months into the I Fellow schedule, this is a good time to reflect a little on work done (and undone).
As it happens, I have strayed quite a bit from my topic as I originally envisaged it. These things are difficult to predict ,but I'm quite happy with the 'shape' things have taken. The central concerns of race, gender, belonging, identity and memory remain but have taken unexpected forms.The surprise element ( well for me at least) was that they didn't even stay 'stories', veering towards other forms like meditations . Though I would not strictly categorise them as either.
The building that was to be central to my stories disappeared.( The first blog piece ). And I watched in horror as the stories refused to be 'stories' and spilt out of the building into other spaces - streets, parks - and some of them are indeed homeless.Now, a few months later - I am even more surprised to see an 'unity' of sorts arise, and hopefully by August I will have what will be a 'series' of short pieces ( and extracts from a long piece) .
I waited a bit before I put up this piece - "roses' .Its a little too direct , the players all too familiar, violent, and a piece that if interpreted in a 'sentimental ' way , would be disastrous. Perhaps, it is unnecessary too...( I must restrain myself from holding forth on how it should not be read ).But a blog does give one the freedom to put up imperfect pieces ( and as imperfect pieces go , I do have a soft corner for this one!).And this way, I dont have to watch faces for a reaction or giggle nervously so here it is...

'Untitled' ( Or extract from the longer stories)

Page 9


Page 12

I've put up a two page extract from a much longer story that I finished working on. The other pieces up on the blog are the 2/3 pages long stories .
The longer stories - (15 to twenty pages or longer) work a little differently from the shorter ones. The narrative is more conventional - text and image supporting each other. I'm also a little more disciplined and rein in my arbitrariness to some degree. Working on both the forms does give me more freedom to play ...

This story is not based in Delhi unlike some of the earlier work I have up on the blog. I like to think ( or at least thats the plan ) that the story is being told in Delhi, though it is a story of another place and another time.

I'm still looking for a title .
I'm not very good with titles - or names of characters - a title somehow seems to give the piece an air of finality - and it's difficult to arrive at a title that says only so much and not more , is arbitrary enough and 'belongs' to the story ...
So until I absolutely have to 'name' them - I stick to 'stories' or 'story 1, 2...' . Which i admit is a little ridiculous. And I can imagine - it must be very dull to have to encounter stories called 'stories' , comic books called 'comic book' and so on ...

Though I actually knew someone who after much thinking - landed up calling her dog - 'dog'.

Who is this young girl in a kimono, and other things

I chanced upon two ' quotations' this week that seems interesting in the light of my project.

The first one - ' Who is this young girl in a kimono ?' was a reference to an assamese mekhla skirt worn by somebody with, err.. small eyes. ( It's a fantastic anecdote with all the elements that I'm trying to touch in my work, but I can't possibly narrate it here- I have a 'literary ' career to worry over!). I think I'm going to use this as a title to one of my stories.

The other quotation is from Yves Chaland,a comic book artist talking about style.Yves Chaland worked in the 1980s and created Freddy Lombard - a comic book in the 1950s style.Chaland died young though and one gets the sense that he would've done more important work if he didn't go so early. You get the feeling from his work ( and from his ideas on where his work was heading ) that he was only warming up. Well, here's what he wrote about style in a letter to a friend -

"I believe in treating the reader badly, in making sure he never forgets that the writer is in charge. I can make a tiny event that takes three minutes fill 43 pages, and I can tell a person's entire life story in one page if I want to. I want to really grab the reader's attention, I want him to know that if he skips one image , he could miss a bloody masacre with 583 casualties. That's also why there can be pages with no text and others with more text than the reader can stand to read. You have to do the opposite of what other people do and invent the rules of a new style, because style is the most important thing, and the author has to spend the most time on it."

Yves Chaland
September 18, 1985.

Also I've posted in another two page story 6 o'clock. It's the same style as At the Park ( my last posting)but different in many ways too ...( it perhaps doesn't strictly conform to the migrant's story theme.)

6 o'clock

At the Park ( a two page story)

I've been working mostly with longer stories - ten to twenty pages long, with text and image. But these shorter ones are easier to put up on a blog, and will give you an idea of my style and where I'm heading...
Also, it's fun to be experimenting with these pieces - just images - no text - or minimal text, a certain economy ,capturing perhaps just the fleeting movement of a thought or a mood. The kind of thing one allows poetry. But comics?

Story 1

Does one do comics to escape words?(Screams, shouts , cries ...)A wordless comic book- one where the players only scream?( forget Bacon)