Bindi by Paul Matthew Maisano

Author:Paul Matthew Maisano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

XX

The new year had wrapped London in a blanket of freezing Scandinavian fog that had kept Nayana indoors for weeks with the radiators cranked up to combat the unusual cold. She boiled water at regular intervals to keep the air inside from getting too dry, and she used it to make herbal tea to address the persistent low-level nausea she felt. The new year had also put an end to Nayana’s procrastinating. She would have nothing but time now that she would not be returning to teach. She no longer had an excuse and resolved to get back to work, to writing the book.

It wasn’t the book she’d originally wanted to write in graduate school. The one for which she’d even chosen a title: Parroting Madame Bovary: The Politics of Translation. The book whose proposal her adviser had shut down; instead, he firmly encouraged Nayana to focus on “what she knew,” which was the postcolonial experience, according to him. At first, she’d persisted with her ideas for Bovary, and her professors humored her for a while. “Yes, that idea is good, very good.” But sooner or later, she was advised that her idea might more productively be applied to South Asian writing. They may as well have suggested the title: Parroting the Queen’s English: Contemporary Indian Literature. Dismayed and dejected, but finally angry, Nayana yielded, if only to show them they were wrong. She’d wanted to outline Indian traditions in literature that defied colonization by the English language. She didn’t have all the Indian languages required to truly do the research, so she read Hindi or English translations and fudged it, pitting them against classic literature in English. Her plan was then to do the same comparison against contemporary writing in English. But this, it turned out, had not been her main impediment. Writing from a place of anger and retaliation had. Eventually, her desire to prove the academy wrong fizzled, deadlines came and went, and she finally submitted a thesis of which she was not proud and for which she was certain she would not have received credit if her professors hadn’t been eager to see the back of her.

It was this book she’d come back to. The truth was she’d never had the French required to write the other, and she certainly didn’t have it now. But she was still convinced she could have made up for it with gumption if she’d had even a little support. This book, though it seemed to make an obvious point to her, felt just as important today as it had in graduate school. There was still no title, but she decided to start with a state-of-affairs introductory section—looking at the trajectory of writers from South Asia and the diaspora, from Sake Dean Mahomet to Saadat Hasan Manto to Raja Rao; from Naipaul and Rushdie to Ghosh and Mistry. She was debating whether to include a personal preface about her own experience as an Indian scholar of literature in England. She could

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