the feast

Random Access Memory, First City magazine, © Amruta Patil, 2009

Issue 8 out soon!

From Mindfields: Journal about Ideas & Learning
Text and Image: Amruta Patil
www.mindfields.in

timekeeping

it's perfectly understandable why time stands still in provence
photo: amruta patil

solstice

Random Access Memory, First City magazine, © Amruta Patil, 2009

how the garden grows

storyboarding 'Parva/The Epic' on sturdy, discarded wallpaper

Saint-Ex and Gauri

There are people who have had mysteriously bountiful reading lives – in places that had bookstores, and bookstores that had all the books required to stir a soul and nurture a worldview. My own early memory of beloved books is marked by a fugitive air - longing, occasional thievery, but never guilt – for a beloved is never stolen, just rescued from one place to a worthier other.

How far would you go for That One Book? And, in extension, for That One Writer? Pretty damn far. Over the years, I have stolen John Steinbeck’s ‘Burning Bright’ from Peanuts Circulating Library; hidden copies of Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ in odd corners of bookstores so that they may not be touched by unworthy paws. I have encoded Jeanette Winterson’s ‘The Passion’ into my first graphic novel’s blood. But it was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s ‘Little Prince’ that was the first among such loves – First Book among those that ought be guarded close to the heart, transported inside one’s shirt.

‘Little Prince’ fell into my life in 1991, when I was twelve.
It was in the Naval Officers Library in Goa, where it had been erroneously filed away in the Under-7 bookshelf – presumably on account of its slimness (who dare take such slimness seriously?) and the drawings of sheep, planets, and an elephant inside a boa constrictor. 1991 predated the time when I could make glib synopses of my emotional state. What was sufficiently clear was that the fox, the rose, the snake and Saint-Exupéry knocked the wind out of me. I borrowed the book eight times over before the librarian coldly informed me that I could squat on it no longer and really it was time my parents bought me a copy of my own.

Easier said than done. The local bookstore drew a blank.
I did not, however, need to steal my copy of the ‘Little Prince’. Instead, the indulgent parents helped me put together a homegrown version of it. Baba got the book photocopied. Where the photocopy machine’s ink had given up, I hand-drew and handwrote the content. Mom sewed the spine on her Singer machine – with a plastic sheet protecting the cover. And thus was made permanent and proprietary, Little Prince’s place in my life.

Saint-Exupéry’s most fierce gift is that of brevity – with word, and with drawing. There is also an unquestionable synchronicity between the written and drawn – something that has permanently influenced my own relationship with text and words. ‘Perfection is achieved,’ wrote Saint-Exupéry, ‘not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.’ The text is tightly coiled, whittled away of all surplus word and emotion. The illustrations, watercolours by the author himself, have the same purposefulness and simplicity. Who amongst us hasn’t known a rose that revealed her single thorn to prove how strong she was? Who amongst us hasn’t churned with the knowledge that you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed?

I am not a foreword person. What reason could there possibly be to unravel a writer and his purpose before one unravels the painstaking content of his work? I have always had a clear mental image of Saint-Exupéry - loner in the cockpit of an airplane, the man of stormy loves and deep wisdom – but our acquaintance has been a slow one. Over the years, I have gone on to read his other writing, the aviation books, and his wife Consuelo’s autobiography ‘Mémoires de la rose’, published more than half a century after his death. "He wasn't like other people," Consuelo wrote, "but like a child or an angel who has fallen down from the sky."

This year I find myself in Saint-Exupéry’s land – South of France with its divine roses; the city of Lyon, where he was born; the pristine sea off Corsica where his P38 Lightning crashed during a reconnaissance flight. I also have me a blemishless store-bought copy of ‘Le Petit Prince’ – so I may read the words as they sounded in the author’s mind. All of which is good – but these are frills; sighs of recognition, not exclamation marks. The real bond – between stricken twelve-year-old and the long-dead French aviator – was forged with a photocopied book years ago.
*
First published in the writers' favourites special issue of 'First City', June 2009

Conversing with Sfar

Top: Page 9, The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar

Bottom: Conversing with Page 9, © Amruta Patil, 2009

The image is to be part of an exhibition in the New Museum of Comic Art, Angouleme, in January 2010. Artists 'converse' with the work of artists they love. Good to have got a chance to 'talk' to a beloved book...

Stone

Random Access Memory, First City magazine, © Amruta Patil, 2009

Near Rennes le Chateau

Germ

the 1918 spanish flu virus, wikipedia

an invincible april - splendid weather, william shakespeare's 400th birthday, london marathon - was checked in its golden tracks by news of the piggy virus. people on the metro who glean all wisdom from free tabloids learn of a Possible Pandemic. soon a sneezing person will be given hostility, not tissue paper. soon we will jump out of our skins like scaredy cats until the media medusa chooses to distract us with the next lascivious tidbit.

they play with us every now and then, do microbes. whittle away at our numbers and at our cockiness, remind us that we are a colony of cohabiting cells. the spaniards' smallpox unravelled the Incas faster than their swords ever could. but guerrilla microbes have surely strengthened civilisations as well. when you move into my town, you bring along your life, belongings, skills, memories, and microbes with you. when i move into your town, i eat off your land, i share of my being, i increase your immunity. each to the other is possibly life, possibly learning, possibly nothing, possibly a pandemic.