Once Upon a Time by Ashok Srinivasan

Author:Ashok Srinivasan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Published: 2016-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

A Doll’s House

Some people believe that all individuals are infinitesimal nameless parts of an unknown god. There are no real questions of self and other because each one of us admits to being a home to continuities of bacteria, viruses, mitochondria, organelles, fears, drives, anxieties and confusions steeped in boredom, hope and despair which continue long after we are all gone. We are all one and many at one and the same time: hybrids, symbionts, schizophrenics, manikins, puppets and ventriloquists’ dolls. And when we die, what then? Once contacted, close and far relations, twice or thrice removed, close in on one by tonga, foot, rail, air or water, to remove and purify by fire whatever remains of one’s anonymous selves disguised as a unique self to the funeral pyre without haste, signature, trace, trail, distaste, retina-scan or fingerprint. Some maintain (and who can say they are wrong) that, that is the end.

A Doll’s House: From the asylum papers of Janak Murty

Between modelling assignments, I worked for a smelly publishing company before moving on to a modelling agency. The Garlic Press managed to make money out of poetry when all the other publishing houses – including the Oxford University Press – had struck off poets from their lists. It was another matter that most of the poems they published were love poems by poets who were in love with themselves and, as such, they agreed in advance to buy up the entire print run.

When it came to publishing poets who could not buy back their books the Garlic Press resorted to another strategy. They had a standing arrangement with the American Library of Congress (which dished out catalogue card numbers) in which the ALC agreed to purchase a certain number of bulk copies without prejudice to the published price of the book. The Garlic Press limited the print runs of such titles to exactly ten copies over the number being picked up by the ALC. This the publisher could do with impunity as he was not contractually obliged to reveal the number of copies printed to the hapless author. The author got his mandatory five copies and the remaining five copies were retained by the publisher for contingencies that, as far as anyone could see, never arose. These copies went at inflated prices to collectors of first editions.

Several fops and society ladies now figured on the Garlic list of poets, which was far bulkier than the slim volumes of verse that they published. In terms of sheer numbers they had more versifiers in their stable than all the poets published by Faber & Faber, Carcanet Press and Bloodaxe Books put together. But the real secret of the big money that the publishers made was their clandestine publication programme of hard-core pornography. After some time, I tired of the racket and worked full time for a branded modelling agency.

I spent days going through my father’s letters looking for a clue that would put me on the trail of why things had turned out the way they had.

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