Home>Possessed>The Last Jet Engine Laugh - Ruchir Joshi

Very little of Ruchir Joshi was known to me before I started reading this book. What I figured out from the usual-suspect sources is what I am collating for you. Ruchir Joshi seems to be a Gujrati who was born and brought in Calcutta. He is a filmaker and photographer and now lives in Delhi. Well, what are the films he has directed....I really could not get any stuff at all on that, except for 'Memories of a milk City' which is described as : Ahmedabad, in the Gujarat region of India, is a troubled city. Once home to the ideas of Rajiv Gandhi, it has more recently suffered appalling communal violence. In MEMORIES OF MILK CITY, award winning director Ruchir Joshi juxtaposes contemporary im ages -- a small boy peddling ice cream on the street, young men who've gathered to ogle young women -- with verse read by Madhu Rye to create a powerful but elegant lament to the city that once was. Nothing could be further from the routine documentary than the vivid originality of Joshi's poetic portrait of cows and ice-cream in the streets of Ahmedabad." -- Guardian (London) "A quick dip into the bran tub of life as lived in the city of Ahmedabad, where sacred cows wander freely in shopping malls." --Time Out (London) 10 minutes. Color. 1991 In addition to this, I also found an article which he has written for outlook-india.com. Here he describes his experiences in New York in 1998 at an anti-nuke rally. Even in that early 1998 artcile, he starts with his characteristic risque style, "I came from a land renowned for its processions...." There is just one photograph I have seen, and this is on the book jacket itself. I sadly have not yet managed to scan it, as soon it happens, I shall upload it. In my own broken Bombay gujju(cash enriched...hmph....what was that), Ruchir (Gujju) bhai bahu saru lakhe chhe.... (From the album jacket) Calcutta 2030: an old man turns the content of his head and life upside down. Paresh Bhatt, photogrpaher, lover of women, exile from both East and West-above all, son of his parents and father of Para. His life is a prayer to his severe Gandhian parents and their traditions-traditions he knows he is consciously breaking. And it is an invocation to Para, free spirit and crack fighter pilot fighting her own freedom struggle, reliving her grandparents' lives in her own. An act of imagination and remembrance, The Last Jet-Engine Laugh is a story that moves through layers of memory. Traveling sideways, backwards and forwards, attempting to make sense of the past while drawing a map of the future. Three turbulent generations - Para, Paresh, Suman and Mahadev - linked by blood and separated by time, mapping out the arcs of their lives on the inside of Paresh's head. Ruchir Joshi mixes black comedy, pathos and an incredibly acute eye for detail. the result is a riveting, thought-provoking work of startling originality.

The Last Jet Engine Laugh - Ruchir Joshi (Whistles and more whisltes...any listeners)

I brought his book after reading a pre-release review. almost nothing of the book or the author was known to me, what attracted me was the cover photo (I have the copy with the dangling banana and not the other one....) and of course the title.

'What did the note say?' Para, asked almost upset that I'd said the word 'written', an almost 'why couldn't he type it?' in her voice. I answer without being asked, answer inside my head : 'He could not type it because typewriters were far and few between and came only in English and belonged to the police, government officials, lawyers and rich mill owners accountants. No one typed love letters in those days, not in Ahmedabad and not in English, love was a human thing and you couldn't express it in English'. What did the note say?

The style stinks, but guess what it leaves you gasping for more. It is easily one of the best books coming from India. I really cant off the cuff recall, many other authors who can write even half as well about contemprary life in modern India. (Is there a paradox here....well, we Indians not only profess duality, we partake it.....is that what they call walking the walk).

As I try to rack my head about others authors who write about the dilemmas of modern day India, Upamanyu Chaterjee is one who comes into my radar. Others like Amitava Ghosh (who I find is a pathetically hyped up writer unlike chaterjee and now Joshi) did corrupt my radar, but honestly, their writing lacks the punch.

As the introductory excerpt says, there is a healthy dis-repesct for the English language, especially from an Indian (my) viewpoint. I totally agree, I could never convey a lot in English alone. The book does not use English alone, infact it liberally uses Bengali, Hindi, Gujrati and of course the smooth fabric of English, of (my) English, of (Indian) English and the effect is simply too natural, too real...not to be liked that is.

"This English is a bhenchod limited language, as brittle as their dead leaves in their autumn."

I (and possibly hazaar of other bombayities) speak like Ruchir writres. Note....we dont say multitude, we say hazaar....we dont say sister-fucker, but we do say bhenchod....I hate to make it sound so crude, but does it not illustrate a real point.

If you ask me my favorite author, I had give Rushdie the trump hands down. Yet....I think Ruchir is a better Indian writer per se than Rushdie. Rushdie might manage to weave the Indian message in the fabric of creative economy, what Ruchir does is mesh real everyday desi (better than saying Indian....once again my language is so bombayish) stories, almost developing a cult narrative style.

'Yeah. But never tell the guys you work with. These goras use it against you, you know, like, bhosadina, over a drink, boss ne keh, "You know this Eendyun guy Parekh is chickunn, Parekh shits bricks when he flies, I'll take the job." Stupid, bhenchod, gora byaastards, you know? Supposed to be your colleegs, you know. Never trust these goras.'

'Bhosadi bitch. But they all give, hawn? You have to know how to play it but aa baddij aapey hawn, sooner or later. Dying for it, you know? And actually from us. Indian men something special..... one or two told me, maaney actually kidhu, actually told me, ke we last longer....

What more do I say, about the inventive use of language. The whole para is a testimony to my (our) desi sub-culture. This is how we speak. Its not just precise, its shit.....exact. And as I said before, a desi wont feel comfortable unless he abuses in hindi. This is probably the first desi book which indulges in the creative license to use this degree of crass abuses.

Of course it is possbily easy to go ga-ga over the shock value of the content. I think my appreciation is not at all concerned with the 'in your face' kind of dumps. What I liked is the transcribing of our everyday world in such minutiae detail.

All through the book, every thing reminded me of the world around me, the inherent duality (or more) of the desi pysche.

The story itself (as the jacket says), is infact a series of sub-stories, infact so many of them, you lose control of them. And that possibly can be viewed as object of the author's distraction. Some of these stories end abruptly, and they leave you feeling of some kind of incomplete narration. Either that, or those stories were in actuality meant to be abrupt (Creative misdemeanors....or is that being too harsh.).

Most stories revolve around the main protagonist's (Paresh Bhatt, the photogrpaher) and his own experiences of life. His parents, their love story, his flings (if I may use that to club all the women other than this wife), his German wife, and of course most importantly, his only daughter (Paramita Bhatt, later on Para).

The relationship between each of these characters is etched extremely well, given the sparse length and text of the novel. I liked the conversation between Para and her father. Some of these conversations are so natural and yet so compelling.

'A bit like you and Mamma fighting', Para says and I almost slap her.
'Mamma and I don't hit each other.'
'No, but you shout, both of you, and its like hitting.'
'No, hitting is different.'. I suddenly remember, my parents quarelling and my answer lacks conviction. In their case, even the silence could be like hitting.
'So?'

The book is also inexplicably about detail. By detail, I dont mean longwinded narrative imagery (The stephen king types), what I mean is the author's eye for details, especially for those tiny wee bits which define the desi Diaspora. I read the following description in a review and must say its quite to the point,
"Ruchir Joshi's debut The Last Jet-Engine Laugh is buoyed by the belief that 'everything matters', that every ephemeral peak, deepening drop, every drive, every breakfast, every touch, sound and word slowly forming, extends to the heart of some fundamental genetic momentum"

You might wonder, how exactly does the title have any relevance to the whole book. I think I might have a clue, though I also must mention honestly that I could be reading too much into nothing. Somewhere around the first half of the book, Paresh mentions his friend Viral, a pukka gujju ( a complete gujju, I mean...). While recounting their memories of being together, he mentions that in school and college, Paresh and Viral had this 'patented' different style of laughing. They used to begin with a loud pitch and trail off like the jet engine laugh. this fact is mentioned as just another irreverant fact in the book. Its only at the end of the book, it might dawn to you, that Paresh in fact now wants to laugh on his being, on his life, mock at them....and ironically and possibly.....it suggests...A Last Jet Engine Laugh.

Though I could not detect any major period flaws (which was so possible with a book dealing three generations), save one (possible one), where the author mentions Maruti car in a poem about Indira Gandhi. Maruti as a vehicle company existed since the 1980's though I am not sure, it was common vehicle before the death of Indira. (Refer to page 296 for what I think is a flaw, unless of course my stupid comprehesion turns the tables on me).

One other flaw which I see in the book is its  multiple plots, which as I said before leave the reader with no clear view of the what the author intended to do. In some sense, that makes the book a difficult read for someone looking for a sequenced story (not me, never looking for a story in a book....I have enough of them crashing around me....)

One of my friends had the following to say about the book,

Though my friend (shahkash@yahoo.com) feels that the protagonist is not too affected by lonliness and pain. I think the book is a saga of melancholy. To end this whole essay, and to emphasise my last point, here goes.

There was a time when people all over the world were worried about things like AIDS and such shit, other diseases, but they missed the real business - isolation is a disease that is far more virulent than any of these. And I've got it. The woman with the placard didn't know of it, she would have never suffered from it, no matter what else she suffered from, but me, its my new and only job, fighting this thing, that stayed climbed onto me for years. And fight I will. And lose, I know, everyday till the day I die.

November 27th 2001, Tuesday - Amitabh Iyer