A surreal world crumbling around us

In 1935, Evelyn Waugh put together a collection of what Graham Greene described as a collage. It had reports from Waugh’s immediate past, bits and pieces from his personal diary, scraps of newspaper advertisements, lines of poems and bits of social gossip. Greene confessed he did not know why Waugh might have chosen the pieces that he did.

But in March 2020, under the shadow of a mysterious, unknown and tiny virus that has caused a global pandemic, the collection appears apt and faintly familiar. They speak of people living through an unsettled reality, of unnamed dread and a certain black humour. Waugh at one place quoted Stephen Spender:

We, who live under the shadow of a war,

What can we do, that matters?

What indeed?

Waugh discussed two ideas for making films.

Ten men on a death row draw lots with matchsticks. One of them, a rich man, draws the longest one. He offers all his money to anyone who will take his place.

A prisoner agrees to take the rich man’s place for the sake of his family. Later when released, the rich man visits the family that benefited from his wealth while remained anonymous. He himself had nothing left but his life...

In the other story, two penniless men meet at a crossing, with one road leading to a scaffold and another to riches; they toss a coin and go their separate ways. But both end up in a town on the morning of a public execution.

Then there are scraps of advertisements that Waugh had clipped and kept, of corsets exuding an odd kind of sadistic pleasure over tightening them, and shoes, and stockings of the finest sheer silk.

There are bits of literary gossip too about writers.

Virginia Woolf had gone mad, believing herself to be Brownings’ dog Flush, wandering about unhappily. And about the widow of GK Chesterton with her bright, dyed red hair and a voice with a grating accent. How will we cope with illnesses, Waugh frets in his diary, when children separated from parents come down with tormenting sicknesses?

Cut to India in March 2020. Madness is in the air and suddenly the national scene reminds one of Manto’s Toba Tek Singh and Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas.

Images of a police officer in uniform blow ing a conch shell as part of a procession, a havan being held for the impending Ram Temple, policemen enforcing the ‘Janata Curfew’ which was supposed to be for the people and by the people or images of policemen beating up women anti-CAA protestors no longer shock, surprise or haunt us. We are now made of sterner stuff.

In contrast, food columns have mushroomed both here and abroad. Bored housewives in Indian middle classes, who have lived through food rationing, obsessively share recipes or exchange preference of films on Netflix. People want to eat well but watch movies about the poor under attack.

A food writer from New York advises readers about eating special mini sausages at a certain restaurant.

They’ve been apparently fermented for 24 hours, then cold-smoked, baked, seared to order and then served with a fruity whole grain mustard sauce, slick with delicious fat.

It is surreal reading about a Lebanese street artist, who has arrived in London with a suitcase full of smuggled goods, declare, “The idea of borders is stupid.”

Voices of sanity are routinely ridiculed. “Coronavirus is a sledge hammer to our brittle economy. Small and medium businesses and daily wage workers are the hardest hit.” tweets Rahul Gandhi.

A fairly innocuous and even obvious statement, one would have thought. But the response made even much less sense.

“...for him only money matters,” tweeted back Prakash Gaba, who describes himself as a trading mentor. Another web developer Atul Sood said, ”there are some people who just need a reason to show Modi in a poor light..”

Waugh quoted Tom Paine from Landor’s Imaginary Conversations:

“Eloquence has the varnish of false-hood; Truth has none...Burke is eloquent;

I am not. If I write better... it is because I have seen things more distinctly, and have had the courage to turn them up on their backs, in spite of tooth and claw...”