Shared suggestions

Busybee’s stray thoughts opened up a new world for writers to inhabit

Shama Futehally

In the last few weeks, newspapers have seen a spate of affectionate tributes to Behram Contractor. While this was only to be expected, the warmth of the homage has surprised even a Busybee fan like myself. It all takes me back to hot afternoons in Bombay (sorry, when talking of Busybee one somehow forgets to say ‘‘Mumbai’’) and to packed dusty compartments in suburban trains — all made easier to bear because one had bought Mid-Day and Busybee’s column was inside it.

That column did many things. It turned life in our crazy city into something gentle, humorous, middle-brow — in a word, sane. And like all sane things it reminded you that you were not alone — that others, like yourself, were always out when the gas cylinder came and always looking for a taxi on the wrong side of the road.

For me personally, however, the most important thing which that column did was to make me realise — long before a Rushdie or a Ghosh had appeared on the scene — that there could be such a thing as a real Indian English writing. Because in the early seventies, if you aspired to write in English, you were aspiring to an activity which did not exist. Writers in English were either expatriates (mental or physical) like V.S. Naipaul or Dom Moraes — or they were self-consciously native like Kamala Markandeya. Writers who looked neither upwards nor downwards, who looked unpretendingly back at us and spoke our own idiom — and, yes, who were always out when the gas cylinder came — these did not exist. I still remember my youthful despair about not being able to write, not for lack of will but because there was no world for the writing to inhabit.

And I remember the exact moment at which I realised that such a world might lie ahead. It was the day on which Busybee’s ill-assorted imaginary family had returned from a trip to Delhi, and his column spoke of cruising the Delhi streets and of seeing its acres of greenery. Then came this gem of a sentence: ‘‘And then there are all these government houses, filled with government families.’’

As far as I was concerned, the language barrier had been broken. Here was a sentence which could only come from an Indian speaking to Indians. It followed the laid-back, seemingly purposeless rhythm (‘‘And then there are all...’’) of the Indian vernaculars. At the same time it was packed with witty suggestion, because the concept of a ‘‘government family’’ can be understood by us and by nobody else on this planet. A government family means a certain type of worthy family which follows the two-child norm and which owns an ancient Fiat. It may not be the most exciting company possible but it is finally — I belong to a government family myself — not so very bad. That Busybee could use the phrase meant that he was relying on shared suggestion; and once suggestion is shared, a writer’s world has come into being.

Sharing to this extent obviously means having the humility to become one with your readers, rather than keeping them at arms’ length so they can admire your cleverness. Busybee’s writing contained the manners, the rhythms, the very body-language of the Indian middle-class. Even his pen-name, which is straight out of an English-medium nursery school, cheerfully proclaims it. And what, after all can be more desi than ‘‘a few stray thoughts and a few general opinions’’ without necessary or probable connection? Stray as they are, they stay with us as much of the brash new writing does not. We may yet have much to learn from this unpretending man who was always on the back page.