Written by Destiny and Etched in Blood: A FF (Ch 54: Pg 100 NEW) - Page 42

You are not my enemy, nor are you my friend and companion, nor are you my queen and wife. You are what my soul thirsts and hungers for, a hunger, a thirst, a hankering which may never be destined to be satiated.

Originally posted by: sashashyam

My dear Shailaja,

I do not know when I will be up to normal typing, maybe by the weekend. Then I hope to do my next post. But I did not want to wait after that to comment on this chapter, for by then you might have put up two more! So I will do this now, but will keep it brief.

I do not understand why you are uncertain about the oddest things, when there is not the least need for it. This is clearly a stream of consciousness piece. It is beautifully written, both the parts, which are quite distinct one from the other.

The first part brings out, with raw immediacy, the accumulated bitterness that festers in Chandragupt's innermost being because of all that he has suffered at the hands of fate.

The ravages of poverty in his childhood (it is interesting that he does not seem to remember the physical abuse inflicted on him by his foster father). It reminded me of the Tamil saying:

Koditu, koditu varumai koditu,

Athilum koditu elamayil varumai.

Paverty is cruel, but the most cruel of all is poverty in childhood.

The persistent and vicious discrimination he is subjected to at the gurukul. The prickliness this engenders in him, and makes him reject even a gift of friendship from his childhood playmate Durdhara.

The curious thing is that not even his having, by now, proved himself on all these 5 counts seems to have washed away Chandragupt's inner loneliness, the unfulfilled longings, the feeling of being incomplete. He is still looking for an answer to all his unanswered questions, and now he thinks he has found them in Nandini, I have no idea how or why. It is just one of those things.

The second part is if anything even more moving and revealing of the troubled landscape of Chandragupt's inner being. It is entirely consistent and coherent in itself. I loved the passage below:

You are not my enemy, nor are you my friend and companion, nor are you my queen and wife. You are what my soul thirsts and hungers for, a hunger, a thirst, a hankering which may never be destined to be satiated.

But the two parts do not hold together to form a coherent whole. When Chandragupt says:

"You see this clenched hand of mine over yours. This is my life and love for you in a capsule. You are both my strength and weakness, Nandini. With you by my side I can fight the whole world. But I cannot fight against myself for you. ...

You are the answer of all my questions. You are the kind of companion with whom I always wanted to place shoulder on shoulder and spend the rest of my life together,

There is no link between the first part and the second part that is readily visible. Each stands alone, and each is excellent in itself. But the second does not flow from the first, and the two do not merge into a seamless whole, for me at least.

The only explanation I can find is that Chandragupt has fallen in love with Nandini, truly, deeply, wholly. And there has to be no reason for love. So he imagines all sorts of powers that she will have over his life and his heart and his mind that will wipe out all the accumulated hurts of decades and will make him whole again. Powers that seem to have no basis in anything but that love of his.

Maybe this was the way the piece was meant to be.

OK, my dear, this is already way too much for me. But then I never know when to stop!

Shyamala Aunty

Dear Aunty,

The very reason why I am unsure or not confident about my chapters is because a majority would never have come across Stream of Consciousness technique, and would find it very difficult to understand what I am trying to convey. It is very difficult and complex in understanding such perspectives and making sense of them if they have never come across such stuff earlier.

Being a student of literature, I have read Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, etc. Though I love such stuff, I try to put it across very simply and tone down to the barest minimum possible. But all the same, when doing something experimental, it looks like flip-flops, or confusion to an ordinary reader.

This was a chapter where I wanted to lay bare the very soul of my male protagonist, his very essence, his struggle, his troubled mental landscape. The interior landscape of the mind is often very complex, confusing, and contradictory. There are often times no reason why things are so, why you feel some things at a personal level and why some things do not matter. I know that you can understand this perfectly but not everyone does.

This is just an experiment I want my readers who do not understand this chapter to try out. Just close your eyes and allow your own thoughts to flit by without trying to condition them or arrange or organize them into a definite pattern or logic. Just write down the stuff you see there. What you see in your mind's eye will really surprise you. It will be brilliant (even this is a matter of opinion), illogical, incoherent, contradictory and complex stuff like what you have read here.

And when that inner landscape is that of a complex character like Chandragupt who has been through so much, it will be similar to this. It is a really difficult thing to put ourselves in the shoes of a character and think like them, for them. We never know how deep the depths of the Pacific Ocean are by looking at its surface, or the full extent of an iceberg by looking at its tip. Story and characters grow along with each passing chapter.

The Chandragupt whom we saw initially was just what we saw at the beginning of the story. His interactions with Nandini were charming, beautiful and pleasant. I grant all that. But Chandragupt cannot go back to being that Chandragupt or even better, the Chandragupt before his loss of innocence in childhood unless he heals properly. He can heal only with love and that love is Nandini's. She is the answer to all his questions not because she has special powers. It is purely illogical but that love has the power to heal his soul and that is the perfect answer to all his questions in life.

Why he does not remember his physical hurt caused by his foster father but remembers all these people and the emotional hurts they have caused him is because these physical wounds have healed now. They are only corporeal, cosmetic and skin-deep. The scars of those physical wounds remain but the wounds themselves have healed. But these emotional wounds, this loneliness, this deprivation, all these have still been festering till the present. That is why he was not able to get over them even though he had actually achieved everything he set out to do. His achievements haven't brought him any peace of mind or balm to his soul. Only his love for Nandini can do that for him. He knows that too.

These are some of the things I never did in my earlier FFs where I just narrated a simple love story, interaction between the leads, the different stages of love, a few cute and romantic scenes, a few misunderstandings, a few conflicts, and true love finally conquering everything. My earlier FFs began and ended at the level in which some of my initial chapters were.

This time round, I wanted to go beyond the set pattern and test myself and see if I could actually pull off the things I always wanted to experiment with in my writing. Though some chapters are experimental, I try to intersperse them with ordinary chapters everyone understands and appreciates. The previous chapter, The Night Vigil was exactly one such chapter where I tried to appease everyone without compromising on the story or the characterization.

I do not blame the readers who do not understand. I would be happy with even one or two like you who can actually grasp it. These are some of the things I actually wanted to do in my CAS FF but never got round to doing because it still remains suspended in mid-air in a Trishanku Swarg.

It is logically impossible for the story or characters of this FF to go back to where they initially were in the beginning chapters. That is the beauty and also downside of attempting to write 3D characters. They were bound to grow. Once a baby has grown up, the baby has grown up. We cannot ask a ten year old child to go back to his ten month old age because he looked more beautiful, cute, chubby, charming and appealing at that age, while he looks tall, lean, gawky, freckled, tanned and unappealing now. I looked much better when I was a baby, but I cannot become one now. It is the same with a story or characters.

Aunty, I know I am convincing and converting the converted. You and I are thinking on similar lines and directions. These were a few of my general views on my story and not any specific responses to comments. Thank you for that detailed and very beautiful review. I appreciate the fact that you typed such a long response even when your fingers were paining so much. The Tamil saying which you cited in your post was very thought provoking. I haven't heard it before but I found it very poignant. I will treasure it in my memory.

Edit: While reading that Tamil Saying again, I was reminded of a very old and wise acquaintance of ours. The name of this wise old gentleman was Thayumanavar. He used to often remark, "Daridram ponaalum, Bhudhi ilurndhu Daridram pogaathu!" meaning "Even after poverty and impoverishment have left, often our impoverishment never leaves the mind!"

Regarding my next update, Aunty keeping up two or three updates a week is becoming a bit taxing these days. I have been thinking since some time if I should not limit myself to one update per week. Perhaps that is what I am going to do from now onwards. One update every Thurday or Friday. I think it is better I don't assault my readers more than once a week.

Aunty, I hope you now understand why I am very diffident about my experimental chapters. I should have reserved all this kind of stuff for a novel. It is certainly not what FF readers expect from their author. But then, I too got bored writing the same kind of love stories again and again, repackaging and recycling them with different names, incidents, or characters. This time I wanted to write to please myself.

Shailaja.

Edited by shailusri1983 - 8 years ago