With no light at the end of the tunnel created by the triple viruses of corona, Trumpism and racism, I decided to pursue my go-to escape routes in life – painting and reading.
Many books I had picked when green and abandoned then as too cynical now beckoned, especially at this ripened end of my life. It was just as well that quite a few were off the bestseller lists but on free audiobooks online, which I have since freely plundered. These past frightful days I have listened to Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Paulo Coelho etc. I’m making my way currently through the Odyssey of Ulysses, courtesy James Joyce.
Having been educated by Irish nuns and having visited and stayed in Ireland at least a couple of times, albeit for a month and a half in all, finally hearing the the Irishness of Joyce is amazing. Y’all know what I mean, the idiom and language, the earthiness, the ominous awareness of the Catholic Church in every breath, the simultaneous derision and awe for the oppressive English. All happening with the total evocation of Sandymount and Wicklow and Grafton Street, Dublin in general, and it’s usually impecunious endearing natives. To me when I saw it first, the comparative drabness of Dublin to London was due to the obvious fact that one was glistening from the fat of colonised lands. You know which one that was, “don’t you know”, to borrow a parodied Britishism from Joyce.
What is curious to me is the universal appeal of Joyce despite his utter Irishness, more particularly in places like Kashmir, where for the most part England subsumed Ireland, Wales, Scotland and was one entity. Our posh ex-colonial schools were mainly of the missionary kind, full of Irish men and women, but they made no impact outside the schoolyard. Frankly, even if I had persevered as a girl and read Joyce from cover to cover, considered a masochistic exercise even by the cognoscenti from what I remember, I don’t think I would have got the full measure of the man as I do now. There are so many reasons for that.
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I must say that Joyce has been made infinitely more digestible for me today, even after all my travels, thanks to the audiobooks that are making my isolation ever so slightly splendid. The different voices and accents of narrators have made his hitherto incomprehensible virtually monolithic stream of consciousness ramblings nuanced and more akin to regular stuff. And hugely enjoyable at a very difficult incomprehensible time. Just to give you an idea, Ulysses is a 9.5-hour auditory slog but has come in perfectly handy for my other lonely pursuit – art. Look, no hands! The two together have put wings on my time.
Thus have I decided to catch up on and enjoy books that daunted me as a teenager when, I inherited books that my English professor grandfather passed on to my English professor aunt who then passed on to me. I was supposed to follow in their footsteps and enter academia as a teacher, but I turned out to be a black sheep and shortsightedly pursued political science, a subject eventually cannibalised by other more pertinent social sciences.
Sudha Koul is author of Tiger Ladies: A Memoir of Kashmir.
