Jerry Pinto: ‘All language is a patchwork quilt, made out of history, stuffed with borrowed feathers’

The author of Em and the Big Hoom (Aleph) on translating Swadesh Deepak’s memoir, I Have Not Seen Mandu (Speaking Tiger Books)  

I believe that Swadesh Deepak wrote his memoir as an act of faith. Or as several small acts of faith which went into the magazine Kathadesh. He had an old faith in his readers who, he said, in a dedication to one of his short story collections, had kept the faith through the seven years he spent —  the silence of exile. 

One of the interesting things about reading I Have Not Seen Mandu was this leapfrogging through time and space. It was dizzying but I kept saying to myself, ‘Your discomfort is nothing compared to the discomfort Deepak went through when he was in the hospital. And even in recovery, to go back and excavate memory cannot have been easy.’

I believe that tidying up the text would do it a disservice of the worst kind because it would prioritise the reader's comfort over the gravamen of the text. 

There is nothing mechanical about the ways in which I read or write or edit or translate. Reading is what I do to feed my soul. And so it is integral to my sense of self. At one time, as a freelance journalist, I wrote to order and in some ways that was not the way I wanted to write. I wanted to be free to experience language and tell the stories that had been haunting me. By the grace of God, I can do that now. To translate offers the witchery and magic of the intersection of two or more languages. (Deepak’s book uses Hindustani, Urdu, Punjabi and English.) But go back a step. How does one choose what one wants to translate? That depends on what one reads. How does one choose what one reads? That is a loaded question and any honest answer must take in reading as a private act and pit it against the new mediated reading where your TBR is a public document. But suffice it to say that what one reads is also a personal choice. 

But I take it that you mean that I have had a deep and personal encounter with a different mind. Perhaps it was that which drew me to Swadesh Deepak’s magnificent book. Perhaps it was that which allowed me to take the risk of translating it.

 

I heard about the book when Sukant Deepak wrote a piece about his father in A Book of Light: When A Loved One Has a Different Mind, a book I edited for Speaking Tiger. I noted the name and promised myself that I would get around to it at some point. At the time I was helping Shirin Sabavala sort out Jehangir’s papers to send them off to the Museum.  And there was a copy of I Have Not Seen Mandu. It carried a Sabavala painting on the cover. I borrowed it and on the bus home, I began to read it and fell into the book. By the time I got home I was hooked. I knew that this book had to be translated and I suggested to Sukant that he should do it. He said it was too personal and without thinking I said, Then may I do it? He agreed and I was in.

Speaking Tiger has a rigorous editing process so I kept having to go back. At the time of the edit, I was also helping a friend write an account of her brother’s suicide and the effect it had on her and her family. Needless to say, that was a dark time.

I have no easy answers to your nuanced question. I have said that reading for me is an intensely personal thing and so I must allow that it should be intensely personal for everyone else as well. Thus if a reader puts down I Have Not Seen Mandu because of the misogyny of its voice, that must be her/his choice. 

And yes, we make judgements. It is a human thing to do. Even choosing to read Book X and not Book Y involves a judgement call. 

There have been many changes since the time Swadesh Deepak wrote his book. But I still believe we have miles to go before we come to a place where we can claim that mental ill health attracts no stigma. And this work has to be done at the macro level with more space in hospitals for psychiatric wards, better laws to protect the rights of the ill, the provision of mental ill health leave, more medication made available at subsidized rates in public hospitals and all that; and there must be work done at the personal level. We need to check ourselves for prejudice.

All language is a patchwork quilt, made out of history, stuffed with borrowed feathers that were on finer birds, stained with use, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.