The Common Room by K.B. Rao, 2014

‘The Common Room’ is a novel of atmosphere and seeks to evoke the ambience of a small town college. The old Principal is retiring, and a few contenders and pretenders flex their muscles before jumping into the fray. The members of the common room look on with some curiosity, and not a little anxiety. Everyone has a big question: who is going to replace the old bandicoot? — Back of the book

The Common Room, the debut novel by K.B. Rao, a retired college teacher in Goa, India, chronicles the lives of a motley group of professors who teach at a college in the town of Akadamipur. However, as the eponymous title suggests, the story does not play out in the classroom but in the common room where the teachers discuss in not so hushed tones who among them will replace Old Man Joshi as principal of the Chairman Bhulanath Shet College, known as ‘The College’ to some and as ‘Bullshit College’ to others.

Although The Common Room has a theme, it is actually a collection of interconnected stories narrated by one of the professors who, while choosing to remain anonymous, sees his colleagues for what they are and hears what they have to say about this, that, and the other. Balding and not far from retirement, Prof., as he is known to all, has a “curious disposition with an overactive imagination and an inclination towards the gentle art of gossip.” He does not act, he only reacts, he says, and in spite of being in the thick of it, he doesn't have much of a role to play.

Prof. is an insider who prefers to know what’s going on from the outside. He is like a sounding board against which his peers bounce off their thoughts, their ideas, their theories, their dreams, their fears, their inhibitions, and their resentments. They engage him with intermittent gossip and juicy tales. Through all this Prof. is an amused witness to all that is said and left unsaid. His is a quiet and mature influence on his colleagues both within and outside the common room.

As you read about the everyday lives of a rather idiosyncratic bunch of teachers, through the eyes and ears of the narrator, you wonder why Prof., who is not even a remote contender in the scheme of things, ought not to be the next principal of the Chairman Bhulanath Shet College. After all, he is a veteran of the common room, he is popular among his colleagues who seek out his modest company, and he has a good head on his shoulders.

So who replaces the old bandicoot finally? Just as you narrow down the contenders to one or two of the teachers, K.B. Rao pulls a rabbit out of his hat and ends the story on an unexpected note, much to the chagrin of the more formidable of the contestants.

There is no plot and no intrigue in The Common Room, but there is plenty of atmosphere in this lighthearted and humourous story about a place that most of us, either as academicians or as students, are familiar with. As K.B. Rao told this writer, “The Common Room is supposed to be a novel of atmosphere, a gentle satire on academia.” Well-written and engaging, I found this 247-page debut novel a nostalgic read in many ways as it took me back to my own college days. Recommended.

The Common Room is published by Frog Books, an imprint of Leadstart Publishing Pvt. Ltd, Mumbai, and is available at Leadstart and Amazon. My review copy was sent by the author.

Carved in Sand by Erle Stanley Gardner, 1933

Bob Zane takes a leaf out of Perry Mason’s case file and solves a desert mystery in this quasi-western. For other Forgotten Books, head over to Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

Bob Zane was certain that somewhere the desert held the evidence—carved in sand—to bring a murderer to justice.

Argosy Weekly,
June 17, 1933

Carved in Sand is one of eighteen ‘Whispering Sands’ novelettes Erle Stanley Gardner wrote for Argosy, one of many pulp magazines he contributed to in the middle of the last century. Sixteen of those stories featured Bob Zane, a desert prospector, an intrepid adventurer, and an informal detective.

The novellas were never published as books. Decades later, they were compiled into two volumes—Whispering Sands: Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert, 1981, and Pay Dirt and Other Whispering Sands Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert, 1983—by writer Charles G. Waugh and anthologist Martin H. Greenberg.

Carved in Sand is the only story featuring Bob Zane I have read so far. It appeared in the June 17, 1933, issue of Argosy Weekly.

The story featuring the desert prospector, in first person, is not a conventional western. It is a semi-western that has elements of a traditional western like holstered cowboys and gunfights and cacti-studded desert and greed for gold. The other half of the story is a detective mystery with police officers and a police dog and automobiles and airplanes involved in the hunt for Sam Blake who is suspected of killing a crooked prospector named Bob Skinner in Sidewinder Canon. Sam’s pretty daughter, Margaret, is wanted as an accomplice because she helped her father escape. 

Bob Zane doesn't believe the police theory that Sam killed Bob over gold. He sets out to prove that Sam and his daughter are innocent. What really impels him to get involved is the arrest of his friend Pete Ayers, for shielding Margaret. Pete was born and bred in the desert whose shifting sands is in his blood. It is the drifting sand in the cold desert that “whispers” the truth to Sam. Armed with evidence, Sam enters the crowded courtroom where the trial is taking place and, in Perry Mason-like fashion, exposes the real killer in the nick of time.

“It was whispers,” he said. “The whispers at night.”

“You mean the sand whispers?” I asked.

He nodded. “There was something reassuring about them,” he said. “At first they frightened me. It seemed as though voices were whispering at me; and then, gradually, I began to see that this was the desert, trying to talk; that it was whispering words of reassurance.”

Erle Stanley Gardner reveals his poetic side in his description of the desert—the swirling sands and the mysterious messages they carry—the central theme of Carved in Sand. The desert is everywhere in the story. Gardner, apparently, had a passion for the American southwest where he spent many years of his writing career. This included the Perry Mason novels and articles on travel and western history. He was especially fond of the desert which seems to have given him the idea for the ‘Whispering Sands’ series.

In Bob Zane, he has created a skilled and spirited adventurer who is a combination of a small-town western hero and a city-bred lawyer, a man who likes to solve crime and bring those behind it to justice. To me, Carved in Sand is more western than Perry Mason. The comparison is mine. Either way it is a very well-written and readable story. I'm off to the desert where the whispering sands will hopefully reveal more Bob Zane stories that swirl around in the dust cloud.

Zane backs Pete's play.

Photo Essay: State Libraries

Do you wonder what state libraries would be like with their enormous, and envious, collections of rare and historical books, manuscripts, and maps accessible mainly to incumbent presidents and prime ministers, kings and queens, parliamentarians and senators, and popes? Here's a virtual look at some of them. I couldn't get a handle on any of the British royal libraries.

President of India Pranab Mukherjee in the newly renovated
Rashtrapati Bhavan Library, New Delhi. © www.presidentofindia.gov.in

US President Barack Obama during an interview
in the White House Library.
© Pete Souza/www.whitehouse.gov

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff with
Pope Francis in the Vatican Library.
© www.en.mercopress.com

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his wife Laureen visit the Parliamentary Library with Felipe Calderón, President of United Mexican States, and his wife Margarita Zavala,
in Ottawa.
© www.pm.gc.ca

Reading Habits #11: Who did you read in school?

A few days ago, I visited ‘Landmark’ in my suburb. It's a leading chain of bookstores owned by one of India’s largest business houses. I was browsing through the books, with no intention of buying any, when I saw Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw in the Classics section. I’ve had an affinity for Shaw and his writing ever since I studied an abridged essay in high school. I don’t recall the title but I remember being highly impressed by his prose.

Many years later, Autobiography of Anthony Trollope by the English author had the same effect on me. This is how Trollope opens up on his life in the first chapter…

“In writing these pages, which, for the want of a better name, I shall be fain to call the autobiography of so insignificant a person as myself, it will not be so much my intention to speak of the little details of my private life, as of what I, and perhaps others round me, have done in literature; of my failures and successes such as they have been, and their causes; and of the opening which a literary career offers to men and women for the earning of their bread. And yet the garrulity of old age, and the aptitude of a man's mind to recur to the passages of his own life, will, I know, tempt me to say something of myself...”

The only way to enjoy reading the above passage, and the rest of the book, is to read it very slowly, pausing at just the right moment and then reading again, all along feeling and absorbing the rich texture of each word and sentence. Rapid reading simply won’t do with Trollope here.

The sighting of Pygmalion, which I also had in school, brought back memories of some of the finest essays, stories, and poems I’d the privilege of studying from my English textbooks. Until the late eighties, I think, English as a school subject was influenced by English literature based on a pattern of British curriculum. The textbooks have since been Indianised, in terms of both writer and content, and while they have retained some of the English and American literary heritage, they’re not the same anymore.

Who else did I read back in school? As far as I can recollect, besides Shaw, there was Chekhov, Kipling, Buck, Dickens, Maupassant, Shelley, Blackmore, Wilde, Sewell, Melville, Hugo, Bunyan, Swift, Doyle, Shakespeare, Twain, Verne, Carroll, and Dumas.

The best I can recall from my school days are the poems—Death Be Not Proud by John Donne, O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman, Paradise Lost by John Milton, Daffodils (or ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’) by William Wordsworth, and The Lord of the Isles by Sir Walter Scott. I loved them but don’t ask me to recite from by heart.

A word about Charles Dickens and Mark Twain: for some inexplicable reason, I want to re-read Pickwick Papers and A Tale of Two Cities, and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I delight in the mere thought of being able to read these books again.

Are there books that do this to you? Who did you enjoy reading in school?

For previous Reading Habits, see under 'Labels'

Musings on a fifth Thursday

I’m trying to take my writing beyond newspaper reports and blog posts. I’m working on a collection of short stories set in my city. The stories are in the making and I’m still playing around with a few ideas one of which includes an Indian version of an American cowboy, a gunslinger or a marshal, on horseback and in full western gear. He’ll carry six-guns and he'll be fast on the draw. I don't know if I can lasso the character, the story, and the setting the way I imagine but there’s no harm in trying. I want each of the stories to be as outlandish as possible.

I'm also working on a book on self-help that has a huge market in India. Everyone seems to be writing one these days. The problem with writing self-help is that you tend to get preachy and the last thing I want to produce is another cure for insomnia. I'm rewriting the three chapters I've written so far and I’m fighting to keep my eyes open. I'm thinking of consulting other self-help books.

Four decades ago, my late father wrote nearly a dozen short stories, mostly family dramas. He was a fine journalist and a gifted writer. I envied him his language but I was also proud of it. He wrote them with a fountain pen in long hand and typed them out neatly on foolscap paper, on his dull blue Smith Corona typewriter (not the one in the picture). I'd been sitting on this little treasure of tattered and yellowed pages all this while. A couple of months ago, a dim bulb lit up over my head and I decided to transfer them onto the computer, and try and publish them as a book or an ebook. I owe it to him.

I've also been writing something else off the top of my head. I think it could turn into some kind of a story, maybe flash fiction. It begins like this…

I woke up Tuesday morning and finally cleared my bowels. What a relief it was. It’s not the best opening, pun or no pun, but it’s certainly the best way to start the day. I rejoiced in that single act of self-gratification. It beats Christmas morning. If only my ritual the previous day had been as productive, I'd have top-scored at the interview. I was squirming in my seat and my inquisitors, a grim-faced restaurant manager and a mean-looking head chef, took my discomfort for a nervous attack. They looked at each other and telepathised, “This guy is shitting in his pants.” I wish. They said they'd call me before sundown. They never did. That was yesterday.

A paragraph somewhere in the middle of the story goes like this…

I took a bus that dropped me outside the restaurant. I stood there and looked at the place. I didn’t like it. It looked shady and it smelled of vice. It was a bar and restaurant and not the other way around, which meant nice families didn’t go in; only inconsiderate men did, the kind who drank and gambled and thought they deserved a break from their wives and mistresses four times a week. The food was an inducement to drink more booze and blow up more money, and then take an advance on next month’s pay.

By the time I reached 900-odd words, I was in my element…

As we neared the door it was opened by Quasimodo’s twin. We entered the room and the door banged shut behind us. I wheeled around and saw the hunchback in front of the door, his broad twisted frame blocking my escape, a hideous grin pasted on his freaky face. I was trapped and I was very afraid. My mind pressed a dozen panic buttons. I was going to be framed for a crime and spend the rest of my life in prison. Worse, I was going to be sodomised, tortured, and murdered. 

I have no idea where this is going, if it is in fact going anywhere at all.

Abwärts, or Out of Order, 1984

A German entry for Overlooked Films, Audio & Video over at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom this Tuesday.

It took me a good ten minutes to trace this little-known film on the internet.

When I googled “Out of Order” I got a film by that name but it turned out to be a British comedy I’d never heard of. It had George Baker whom I know from Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969), but definitely not from I, Claudius, a BBC adaptation, or Ruth Rendell Mysteries (1987-2000) where he plays Inspector Rex Wexford, or a couple of James Bond films I’d seen.

My search also threw up a namesake Rod Stewart album and a 2003 television mini-series that had some fine actors like Eric Stoltz, Felicity Huffman, William H. Macy, Kim Dickens, Peter Bogdanovich, and Lane Smith. I haven't heard or seen either.

I then looked for movies about elevators and actually came up with two, called Elevator, made in 2004 and 2011. Their plot—stuck in the lift and something happens—was similar but neither of the films was what I was looking for.

There should be a universal ban on the use of the same title more than twice for books, films, television, and music. It’d narrow down one's search.

I went back to IMDb and this time scrutinised the results carefully, and there it was, Abwärts (1984) aka Out of Order. And that was when I found out that it was a German film and not a Hollywood product. Abwärts means ‘downwards’ in German. In this film it could mean anything. I don't know if it was dubbed in English. I saw it thirty years ago. 

  

Directed by Swiss-born Carl Schenkel, Out of Order is a mini thriller about four strangers—three men and a woman—who are trapped in a small high-rise elevator on a Friday evening. The lift has been under repairs, the alarm system is not working, and there is little oxygen. Will the four people come out alive on Monday? And even if they manage to survive the next seventy-two hours, can they survive each other in the interim?

The occupants include an elderly bookkeeper who has robbed his employer and is carrying the stash with him, a middle aged man and his girlfriend, and a young man. Inevitably, tempers fly, egos clash, and conflicts arise. As I remember the boyfriend and the young man quarrel from the start, right through their efforts to find a way out of the lift. The girl flirts with the young man which makes it worse for everyone inside. By the time they're rescued, a lot happens, and it’s no longer about spending a few claustrophobic hours in the elevator without food and water. The end is a bit of a cliffhanger.

An article on Wikipedia sums up the film thus: “The main theme of the movie is the sudden life threatening situation unsuspecting people find themselves in the most normal of circumstances on a most usual day. The film also explores the rivalry between men over a woman and being faced with becoming obsolete, either by being fired like Gössmann, who is too old to learn to adapt to computer bookkeeping and apparently also Jörg, being fired for unspecified reasons and losing his lover to another man.”

Out of Order is a stark depiction of human nature and its shortcomings as evident from the dishonesty, insecurity, and jealousy of the four disparate characters none of whom stand out in the movie.

Apparently, the film and its maker received both critical acclaim and several awards. Carl Schenkel (1948-2003) also made Tarzan and the Lost City (1998), Knight Moves (1992), and The Mighty Quinn (1989), and the television movies Murder on the Orient Express (2001) with Alfred Molina as Hercule Poirot, and Missing Pieces (2000) with James Coburn in the lead.

The Intruders by Evan Hunter, 1954

This week’s contribution for Friday’s Forgotten Books over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

I had almost forgotten, when they came and reopened all the old wounds—the woman who swam naked before my unseeing eyes, and the man who had already killed once…

Just over six thousand words, this short story by Evan Hunter (alias Ed McBain) is not as gritty and hardboiled as the blurb hints. Instead, what you get from the legendary crime fiction writer is only a degree of suspense and the atmosphere of a thriller. It’s enough to keep you glued to every word in this cracking story. 

Adventure, April 1954

Jeff Toland is a brave young man, a former soldier, and blind. He is angry and frustrated because he is patronised. His older brother, Tom, treats him like a simpleton and his father follows him around lest he trips and kills himself. Jeff rebels. He wants to be left alone. He decides to go up to the cabin in the woods next to a brook and live there all by himself.

"I had liked the world I made. It was a world of quiet darkness, with no people in it."

And then one day, Jeff is walking along the trail he knows too well and making his way back to the cabin guided by familiar sounds and smells of nature. He steps inside the cabin and makes his way across the room when his toe hits the leg of a chair that isn’t supposed to be there. That’s when he realises something is wrong. The next moment a .45 is rammed into his back.

Sam, the owner of the .45, is hiding from the law. He has killed a man in a fight. He is not really a bad man, only a victim of circumstances, we are told. He and the woman with him, Dot, want to spend a few days in the cabin. Sam is threatening until Dot tells him that Jeff is blind and can't do harm. When Sam mocks Jeff about his blindness, he reopens his old wounds. Jeff seethes with rage and plots his revenge.

Bestseller Mystery,
March 1959

Evan Hunter weaves the suspense nicely into the narrative. Jeff’s furtive search for his rifle in the closet and the hidden chemistry between him and Dot are the notable suspense elements in the story while Jeff’s mental picture of Dot and his exuberance upon learning that she is Sam’s sister and not his wife or lover add a touch of humour to it. None of this means anything for Hunter ends the story on a bit of an anticlimactic note. But he doesn’t leave you in a blind alley.

The Intruders, one of dozens of short stories Evan Hunter wrote in crime, mystery, and science fiction, was apparently first published in Adventure: The Man’s Magazine of Exciting Fiction and Fact, April 1954, and reproduced in Bestseller Mystery Magazine, March 1959. I read the story in the latter, online.