Far too many words have already been written about him for one more hack to scribble lines that may sound worthwhile. Yet how do you go about avoiding a man who changed your views on life and literature? What more can you say about the written word when sentences take you beyond the mundane, beyond the skies into a realm that even the gods have not trodden upon? We who live lives bordering on some kind of inanity, we who pontificate on half-baked values, what more can we do but seek relief in a writer who finds order in chaos, or, when you come to think of it, slapstick magic in harsh realism?
Early 1983. Modern Book Depot. Guwahati. One picks up the book merely because one had picked up each year’s Nobel laureate as a matter of habit. No name-dropping. No attempt at some kind of high brow activism. Merely a plunge into another’s mind. To delve into a new idea, a new thought, a new region, a new angle. A new universe. One picks up the book and gazes at the cover. Pale yellow blends with orange, petering off to whitish. The title’s bold black letters, and, below, small figures which seem to come alive. Women in longish black skirts, men in nondescript wide hats, languid beings that may disappoint or may not: all Nobel awardees do not carry genius, do not move the heart and the mind the way some do. One picks up the book not only because the newspaper the day before quotes the Nobel citation. One picks up from mere habit developed over the years.
You grew up with books, each chronological period punctuated by favourites who captioned into one’s psyche. Out of the seeming medley you discovered a Hadley Chase or an Edgar Rice Burroughs or still later a Jorge Luis Borges or Graham Greene. Each was a journey, each book a catharsis that allowed you a vista never felt or seen before. You remembered sentences, remembered characters, sequences, plots, dialogues and the attendant emotions that soared through you.
That year, in early 1983 you came across that one sentence that would lead you to a freedom that went beyond the banal definition of freedom. It would never be the same again. “Many years later,” the book begins, “as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” How many years is many years later? How many men made up the firing squad? Just how distant was that distant afternoon? A son, remembering his father moments before the shots are fired. And ice. Why ice? There were other first paragraphs, first sentences, from Daphne Du Maurier’s classic “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” to Alistair Maclean’s “A small dusty man in a small dust room. That’s how I always thought of him, just a small dusty man in a small dusty room” to Harper Lee’s “When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” In a short story the first sentence often encapsulates what the theme could be, a glimpse into the plot or even to the overriding philosophy, if at all. But very seldom in a novel is a writer able to intrigue the reader with the very first sentence.
“Many years later….” What was it about this one sentence that struck home something indefinable yet as definite as hunger pangs to a famished person. As you proceeded with page after page, as you encountered characters that lived incongruously off a surreally congruous locale you realized that, yes, it would never be the same again. The book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa, then, was read within a week, a feast that went beyond all feasts, gargantuan and breathless in its roller-coaster ride, a ride through which your bowels spilled out in sheer splendid disbelief. That one whole week was more than ten thousand years, ten thousand years that made you offer a prayer, a thanksgiving for treading a literary universe peppered with magical stars in a ground-on-the-feet locale, Macondo. Habits die hard. Having read a work that worked into your soul you sought more. And that is why the rest followed in frantic, quick succession. From No One Writes to The Colonel to Big Mama’s Funeral, from Chronicle of a Death Foretold to The General in His Labyrinth to Love in the Time of Cholera. Genius elevates, it soars into one’s imagination, into one’s very perception of life. That is what great sportsmen offer, great musicians, great paintings, and great scientists. New vistas, extraordinary reaches, superlatives unrestricted by boundaries. That was the magic irrespective of the realism, that was the realism irrespective of the magic. It was what made you “see the world in a grain of sand/ and heaven in a wild flower/ hold infinity in the palm of your hand/ and eternity in an hour”
The years passed, from 1983 to 2014, thirty one years during which you read, re-read the same works , savouring the new angles, the new insights, the seemingly fresh connections, the ribald and the ludicrous, the sombreness and the tragedy, the sophistication and the lowly, the uncontrolled imagery yet the controlled words. You were a reader; not a critic: there were no flaws; only a wonder at inhaling a brew that stimulated the mind, the senses. And all the time , behind each word, each sentence, each paragraph you thought of the writer, the creator, a being which shadowed your every eye-movement, every lurch in your heart, your groin, your mind. The man grew in stature, not only because he had by then already become a legend, spawned by a culture not quite similar to the one in which you had grown up yourself but by ingredients that had fed an uncluttered imagination, an imagination that had braved unconventionality.
Sometime in 1994 you came across an article by Mr Pankaj Mishra in the Indian Review of Books. It tore apart Marquez’s magic-realism. What was so grand about this style? What was so magical when you had to go through convoluted sentences that often hid more than what was made, or ought to have been, explicit? What was so realistic when exaggeration was just another lie worked out in contours that befuddled the average reader? What was this sorcery that compounded belief with disbelief, weaving facile facts that intertwined shamelessly with some-kind-of-puerile fiction? Was it hyperbole at best or just sheer nonsense posing as serious literature?
You read the article and you pondered. Brooded. For days. For weeks. You picked up the books by Marquez once again. In Evil Hour. The Autumn of the Patriarch. Innocent Erendira. You picked up the other Latin American writers. You read Fuentes, Borges, Vargos Llosa. Then, you picked up Grass and Rushdie. You picked up the great Faulkner and Hemingway and Steinbeck. And then one day, once again, you knew that, critic or no critic you could not quite demolish genius. But in all that happened you finally felt betrayal redefined. Betraying not only your own original convictions because someone had the temerity to question a style written in albeit a poor review but also because it showed your own weak character: the succumbing to forces that sought to disorient your true love, sought to belittle greatness when it is not in one’s capacity to discern greatness.
Certain memories belong to a period, an ineradicable period. The way Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination is a part of your existence. One was not born then but such is the impact that it remains stacked within you. In much the same way when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. “A giant leap for mankind.” Words that are more than mere words. The fall of the Berlin Wall: “When you return,” you tell your foot-loose friend, “please carry back a stone for me.” Memories and the genesis of those memories. The way you first sighted the rings around Saturn through a telescope. Unbelievable. Yet the rings were there. Are there. One winter’s morning as you read The Sun Also Rises as genius meanders into you; words and images that remain embedded in you forever. 9/11 and the twin towers exploding in a television screen, and you know, intuitively, that the world will not be the same again. “Where were you at that moment?” you ask even a decade later. Some memories never ever fade. And even as you knew this you sought a connection, no matter how remote, no matter how spurious. And so it was that I sought to meet Gabriel Garcia Marquez who formed a part of this ineradicable period in which I lived. “You think we can invite him to the literary festival?” I would ask my literary friends time and again. In February 2014 as we shared lunch at Kaziranga with the Colombian Ambassador to India, I asked her, quietly, “And how is Mr Marquez? Do you meet him often?” And still later, to my travel agent, “Tell me, how much it would take for a week’s stay and back from Mexico City?” But it does not happen. It does not happen because somewhere along the line you take things for granted, as if you will live forever, as if Marquez will live forever. It does not happen because despite your great love for the great author’s works your love for him is less than your love for his works. And when love for the creator is not equal to or less than the love for his creation you cannot quite connect the way you intended to with the creator. When I heard of his passing away that day, my one regret was that I could not shake hands with him. Memories of My Melancholy Whores, he authored. Memories of my melancholy non-passage, I would ponder.
I hark back to my own country, to my own people, to our own literary greats, to Lakhinath Bezboroa, to Amrita Pritam and Ishmat Chugtai, to Bhaben Saikia and Sunil Gangopadhya and to Maheswata Devi and I know that “good writing in the fiction category matters to us because fiction is where we readers expect writing to be the most eventful, where virtuosity within sentences meets the unplannable energy of the imagination, harnesses it to a narrative and enacts an entirely new and exhilarating and important occurrence dedicated to the readers’ delectation and renewal.” We write, all of us, but only once in a while, only once in a hundred years do we come across a force that breathes in fresh wind, fresh life. The Assamese novel, more than a hundred years old, the Assamese short story, equally old, and perhaps more powerful than the novel possesses all the ingredients that make our literature remarkable.
In saluting Gabriel Garcia Marquez we salute world literature, too, for in each one if us lies one hundred years of solitude, or akin to it, one hundred years of literary richness unique to our corner on Earth.
