Heroes of clay

Heroes of clay
Nonita Kalra

When I found myself muttering in the aisles of Crossword, in Breach Candy, I knew I was over-reacting. When I found myself dragging unsuspecting staffers, from the bookstore, and complaining, I knew I was being hysterical. But when I found I couldn’t stop myself, I realised it was because I was defending the child in me. And somehow that made it okay.

So, I carried on.

I stood over a pile of Dream Catcher: A Memoir by Margaret Salinger and spat venom. A relatively new release in India, the book that was offending me to the point of blind rage was a daughter’s account of how terrible her father was.

Budget 2001: Full Coverage

She was actually casting aspersions on a man who had given literature its best opening line ever: ‘‘If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it’’. What made it so sacrilegious was not that his own daughter was violating that code but that she was attacking the writer of The Catcher in the Rye.

I was 12 and already into the worst phase of my terrible teens when I first read the book. In two hours I had devoured it, and was sitting down to read it for a second time. I had finally found someone who understood me. Someone who was going through all the angst and confusion I was drowning in. Most of all, I had found someone who was actually talking to me and not at me. The Catcher in the Rye ‘‘if a body meet a body coming through the rye’’. A simple book about a simple truth: alienation. J D Salinger didn’t insult your intelligence by saying that it would go away, that life would get better, that happy endings were compulsory. No. Holden Caulfield was left to his own devices like all of us are. He just lived his life the only way that makes it better with a dollop of wry humour.

From The Catcher in the Rye I graduated to Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter and Seymour: An Introduction, Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories. All wonderful, wonderful sad-happy books. And while you felt Salinger knew you and talked only to you the one thing you never knew were the facts on the writer himself. A legendary recluse, he gave no interviews, allowed no photographs and never cashed-in on his fame. I remember four years ago I went on the Net looking for him and the only photograph aside of what was taken for a book jacket cover I found was Salinger reaching out to stop a photographer from taking his picture. So, it is ironic that his daughter now feels the need to violate his privacy. It is almost Machiavellian that she says she thinks nothing of cashing in on his name the name of a man she professes to hate (note: Margaret Salinger sticks to her maiden name, not married name).

Writers don’t need to be great people they just need to be great writers. And if they are less than perfect in their personal lives then for me it makes their achievements even greater. It is as if they drew from their flaws and rose above adversity to give us characters that were flawed and therefore more human. More like you and me. More real and therefore more reassuring. If Holden had been a good son, what would’ve become of a legion of troubled teenagers?

My rage subsided though, when I came across Sholay The Making of a Classic by Anupama Chopra. It is a funny thing, my anger. One look at a book that celebrates a film with fatally flawed characters and I can start to smile again. Like The Catcher in the Rye, Sholay is packed with people who are confused and complicated. In Ramesh Sippy’s film, the heroes drink too much, lie, cheat and swear and yet the film has run for over 25 years! Jai’s taciturn behaviour, Veeru’s drunken maudlin mutterings and Basanti’s verbal diarrhoea caught a nation’s fancy because for the first time we saw that, despite ourselves, there is a hero in all of us. Interestingly, the film too was made in spite of several mishaps. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong and yet a mega film, a classic, emerged. And this book celebrates that in every page.

And that is what I am trying to say. If people want to write behind-the scenes novels, then start with celebration not annihilation. Revel in the fact that the man who gave us Holden Caulfield had clay feet. Saligner gave us a character that was like us. Just like Sholay gave us heroes moulded from the same clay as people like us.

Nonita Kalra is executive editor, ELLE