A Passage To Neem Dreams

Introduction

A Passage to Neem Dreams is partly a memoir about writing Neem Dreams, partly a critical study of my own novel.

Neem Dreams took several years and three main drafts. I had already been working on it for years when I was persuaded (without much difficulty if I recall correctly) to undertake writing a dissertation for a Doctor of Philosophy degree at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia where I had begun to teach in the Creative Writing Program. My subject became the writing of Neem Dreams and included themes such as my research in India, representations of India by a non-Indian, issues in creating a novel, issues in fictive character and, as well, the ways yoga practice might be compared with writing practice. Writings that developed the yoga theme were collected in a separate publication, called Sun Square Moon: Writings on Yoga and Writing which was first published in India by Writers Workshop Kolkata (and now is available as a free e-book).

What follows in this book is a selection of writings that began as part of my dissertation (my PhD was awarded in 2003). Some have been previously published as journal articles or book chapters. (‘Further Reading’ gives links to pieces that have been published and are not all included here.)

What is Neem Dreams ‘about’? Let me quote from the following pages:

About India. About globalisation. About 300 pages. About mainly these four characters ... Neem Dreams is about Westerners in India, it’s about cultural exchange, it’s about how politics and myths, as well as personal products, are made, it’s about how globalisation works to perpetuate the powerlessness of the powerless… It will be about what its future readers and critics say it’s about.

This collection, A Passage to Neem Dreams, as its name suggests, courts the influence of EM Forster, both as the novelist who wrote A Passage to India (1924) and a still pertinent writer on the novel in Aspects of the Novel (1955).

I hope my A Passage to Neem Dreams may be of interest to writers, writing students, people with a particular interest in India, neem, memoir, or writers on writing, and perhaps even the general reader.

Inez Baranay

November 2011

1 How does a novel begin?

Stories have so many beginnings and no real ends.

How does a novel begin? The reader says, a novel begins with the first line. The reader says, a novel begins with the desire to read, the desire to read a novel, the desire to read a particular kind of novel, the desire to read this novel. Each of these desires has its own beginning, its own origins.

How does a novel begin? The desire to write has multiple origins, the desire to write a novel, the desire to write this particular novel.

How does a novel begin? The writer says, I always wanted to write a novel set in India, or, these characters insisted I write about them, or, neem appeared as the perfect trope. This is what the writer says when a short answer is called for and the next question already formed.

Neem Dreams begins with the sentence: It is the best tree in the world.

Beginning the investigation raises, first, the question of beginning. How did this novel begin? When can it be said that the writer has begun writing a particular novel?

How far back can you trace the germs, the seeds, the sprouting seeds that grow into a novel? What is its reason for being? Its cause? What are the novel’s origins, its sources, its derivation?

As Edward Said says in his book Beginnings:

In each of the following relatively innocuous statements the sense derives prominently from a common sense understanding of the concept of ‘beginnings’: ‘Conrad began his career with Almayer’s Folly’; ‘Pride and Prejudice begins with the following sentence’; ‘Pope began to write at an early age’; ‘Before he began to write Hemingway would sharpen a dozen pencils’; ‘This is what one ought to do at the beginning’; ‘Civilization can be said to have begun in the Near East’; ‘As soon as he began to know Odette better Swann started to suspect her’; ‘From beginning to end Flaubert was ever the artist’. Of quite another order of meaning are such statements as ‘In the beginning was the Word’ or ‘In my beginning is my end’. (Said 1975: 4)

And so on. Researching beginning was an encounter with the first of several themes that revealed their potential to monopolise the whole of this dissertation.

I began to write when I was a child.

The writing of Neem Dreams begins with the writer’s origins, the early addiction to reading and writing, the meaning of reading and writing in her life. Perhaps it begins with the family though not all writers’ families are at all alike and they all produce writers. This writer was born elsewhere and came to live in an Australia that was very elsewhere.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett was a book of my childhood. Poor sickly Mary’s parents died of cholera in India but still India was somewhere you came from and missed, memory of rain and wind-chimes, and it had set you free to go to your secret garden.

I read Kipling’s Kim as a child. India was a place of characters you longed to encounter, adventures and experiences extreme and extremely desirable, of knowledge mysterious and profound and yet available to you if you were only there, a place a child could wander about in, protected and connected and working for some mysterious higher purpose.

Neem Dreams begins with a desire to write about India, to set a novel in India. And that desire can be seen as the desire to possess, to make a mark, especially these days when we have post-colonial language in which to wonder about desires like these. It begins with the desire for elsewhere, a desire that is as constant a part of the writer as her height and eye colour.

I began my career with Between Careers.

Neem Dreams begins with the writer’s own history of writing and publishing; the books that have already been created, teaching her to write and preparing her to write Neem Dreams. It begins with all the re-inventions of the desires to write, become a writer, to re-discover writing.

Before I begin writing I make a pot of coffee.

Neem Dreams begins when its characters begin to take on a life, that famous life-of-their-own moment in a fiction-writer’s life. The writer becomes pregnant: there is conception, not always consciously, there is quickening, there is growth into birth.

Each character claims to be the beginning of Neem Dreams, each character with their own origins, their struggle to breathe, grow, astonish you, be understood, fulfil their destiny.

Neem Dreams begins with the desire to write about yoga in a novel. It begins with the practice and study of yoga and it begins with the discovery or habit of finding fiction the place to search for - what can we call it? - call it truth.

What we call the beginning is often the end. (‘Little Gidding’, Eliot 221)

Another beginning is the anti-patents arguments in the neem patents issue. Sympathy and indignation are aroused. It begins with the kind of things that arouse sympathy and indignation. Indignation and more: anger, anguish, loathing at the increasing domination in our world of the culture of transnational corporations, and all that that implies. Sympathy for all the movements and philosophies that name and challenge this. Socialism, environmentalism, eco-feminism, and later, the movement against corporate globalisation. What can you do? What is your duty? You are a novelist. Put it in a novel.

Beginnings imply not only origins but causes. Aristotle famously said there are the four causes, the material, formal, efficient and final causes. A novel will encompass all those things. The writer’s body, the tools she uses, the established form of the novel, the offering of the novel to the world: all these are implied in attention to the beginning. The beginning implies the end.

The beginning, then, is the first step in the intentional production of meaning. (Said 1975: 5)

My childhood included Christian religious teachings so I always knew this about the beginning:

In the beginning was the Word. (John 1:1)

And while I have never succeeded in understanding quite what that is supposed to mean, nor taken the Bible as authority, still, it points to a powerful idea that the world itself is based on language. We talk of ‘reading’ the world.

It begins when you first go to India, breathe in the air of Bombay, dizzying with its masala of petrol fumes and all those spices, cardamom, cumin, fenugreek; of promise and experience, something you have always longed for without knowing what it is.

The novel began in the sixteenth century. (Said 1975: 5)

A novel begins with all the novels you have read before, which begin with all the novels before that.

(To begin. …But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest – for example the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both – must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that for the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.) (Calvino 1982a: 122)

From beginning to end I was always a writer.

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning. (Eliot 221)

What is between, is narrative.

Of all the beginnings, the oldest of these is India.

2 The meaning of India: early travels

I play the game knowing I am the game. That, is the meaning of India. (Rao, R. 1996: Introduction)

This was for aeons the future. That you would be in India. That suddenly you would have to be here. On every level, you tell yourself, it’s the next thing to do. Suddenly a certainty rhyming with a tickling little joy. (Neem Dreams )

I’ll always be homesick wherever I am. You wrote that line a long time ago and it often re-occurs to you. Always homesick, always missing some place. What are you homesick for? A particular house on its particular property? A city, a region? Being only a walk away from a decent café, being where the whereness of where you are makes you stop still, astounded by the beingness of being here. It’s not one place. You get homesick for nature, you get homesick for culture. You get homesick for not hearing your own language around you all the time or you get homesick for running into a decent conversation most days.

You’re homesick for how a place used to be and you’re homesick for how it is going to be, namely with you back in it.

One of the places you are homesick for is India.

India. The way you always say it. The very word, the sounds that say India. The syllable of intrusion, introdirection, consuming, in. The tongue caressing the palate, a deep-stroking nnn. Arrested on a dental stop: d. Swooning on a widening exhalation of sensation and wonder eee-aahh. Iinnddiiaa, say it, let it roll in your mouth, tasting of cloves and quinine. (Neem Dreams )

But what do you mean by India? You’ve only been to a few parts of it, it is a vast land, part of a vast sub-continent, famously various. You know the notion of nation is a construct of recent history; it’s not a nation you want to go to, it’s not even exactly a country.

Faced with such diversity, we can legitimately ask if India is indeed a nation. …On the one hand, India is a conglomeration of peoples, cultures, languages, and religions; on the other, it is a territory under the dominion of a state regulated by a national constitution. …India, as Jayaprakash Narayan once said, is ‘a nation in the making.’ (Paz 75)

India is that and more, it’s a place we need to be more than that. Raja Rao puts it best:

This exaltation for India, which we Indians ourselves share with others objectively, historically, spiritually, is not an indication by any means of the truth of India, but of the need for an India. (Rao 1996: 17)

It is 1980. You are returning to Australia after eighteen months ‘away’, though going to Europe had itself been kind of returning – place of your birth and ancestry – and you’d had parts of a hope you’d end up staying away.

It is the longest period you have been away from Australia and your first trip to Europe since you left it as a baby with your parents, refugees leaving the shattered Old World for, and it’s not quite a choice, The New World.

Now you have been to Hungary, your father’s birthplace, Switzerland, your mother’s, Italy, where you were born, some parts of Italy, and you looked hard in Italy for an offer you couldn’t refuse, one that would mean staying. You’ve been to Spain and Morocco, where life was flavored with all the intensity, strangeness, adventure and wonder you still persist in feeling life should always provide. There was cosy Amsterdam, echt gezellig through a long winter: real snow, a fur coat, warm cafés. You are leaving your first mature true-love affair. You’ve made new friends, re-connected with a few old ones. You have discovered you are an Australian. You have written the first draft of your first novel. You’ve turned thirty and now you can no longer put it off, are no longer able to say, Not yet, one day. Now you’re hearing, Now, it’s now, even, Now or never. You’re going back to Australia, not knowing where you will live, how you will earn money, sure you will write, no clue how it’s going to be.

You really don’t want to get in a plane in Amsterdam and get out a day later back in Sydney.

The cheapest air-fare back to Australia is with Indian Airlines, offering a stopover in India. A friend from Sydney visits. Jude will remain in Europe, live in Paris. (‘Why did you leave Australia?’ ‘The men.’) She tells stories about her recent travels in India: holi (an annual holiday, coloured paints thrown about in the streets) in Jaipur, a temple in Puri, the markets where she bought these intriguing little handcrafted toys. She wears a dark red silk pajama-type outfit and says you can get these all over India. It was 1980. Such were our choices.

Their pride, their city, the city of multiple millions, glittery and complex and mean and charming, ruled by a three-headed goddess. Politics, Commerce and Culture flourish in these dark and twinkling miles of movie studios, international agencies, copywriters, the seaside circus promenade, slums and shanties and street people, the crowds of men you saw coming in from the airport yesterday - India! I'm here! - at 2 a.m. on even then-crowded streets crackling with rude vitality, the existence of marginal things in extraordinary proportions. (Neem Dreams )

Gulping in the odorous air, I can just see you as you arrive for the first time in Bombay: the years in Southeast Asia made you a sucker for the dizzy delight of spiced breezes, spiced fuel exhaust, spice in the stenches and perfumes of a place that is so very other you almost feel at home.

The Scent of India is the title Pier Paolo Pasolini gave his travel diary. He describes looking at some Indians on the night of his arrival (it was 1962):

Along the little embankment which contains [the sea] there are some cars parked and near to them, are those fabulous beings without roots, without consciousness, full of ambiguous and disturbing meaning, but endowed with powerful fascination, who are the first Indians with experiences, experiences which desire to be exclusive, like mine. (Pasolini:10)

No one could say it like that these days, even think it, for our gaze has become much more self-conscious. He is talking about the beggars and the homeless, and you can’t not talk about them, for although they are among India’s greatest clichés, there are clichés that it is worse to avoid than insist on.

Steadying her parcels in the jolting rickshaw, wondering what the comforting thought can be, but among the beggars of India she is only feeling the same dumb things.

Observe the Indians, they’ll chase a beggar away, they’ll tell you beggars have bank accounts, then they’ll throw coins in the bowls of the beggars who line the entrance to temples. The right beggars, the wrong beggars.

Only give to the ones who are crippled. Only give to the ones who’ll never be able to get a job.

As if the able-bodied beggars were unemployed because of their own defects.

Weren’t they reaping karma?

As if this were consolation. As if you believed that. As if they did. (Neem Dreams )

Pasolini’s first night was spent, of course, at the Taj Mahal Hotel, a Bombay landmark, almost as famous as the distant monument it is named for. The Taj Mahal Hotel is also described in Octavia Paz’s In Light of India, also near the beginning:

If this book were a memoir and not an essay, I would devote pages to that hotel. It is real and chimerical, ostentatious and comfortable, vulgar and sublime. It is the English dream of India at the beginning of the century, an India populated by dark men with pointed mustaches and scimitars at their waists, by women with amber-colored skin, hair and eyebrows as black as crows’ wings and the huge eyes of lionesses in heat. Its elaborately ornamented archways, its unexpected nooks, its patios, terraces, and gardens are both enchanting and dizzying. It is a literary architecture, a serialized novel. Its passageways are the corridors of a