Blue Summer Nights

Friday afternoon

2007-11-02T16:15:00.000+05:30

I stare at my monitor and yawn. My eyes water and I wipe away a tear. I look at the clock – it’s 4:17. I lean back in my chair and stretch, trying to get some blood flow back to my cramped muscles. The allergy medicine I took some hours ago has wrapped me me in a foggy cloud of numbness. I pace up and down the corridors, refilling my mug with endless glasses of water. The mug carries a lingering aftertaste of the coffee it usually holds and I grimace as I sip the water. I have some pending work – three or four urgent tasks to complete. This industry has left its mark – I think in the same language now - pending tasks TBD, EOD, FYA. Acronyms and jargon have overtaken my vocabulary.

I get two phone calls – two more tasks to complete. I really should be getting back to work. I stare at my monitor and start tapping out an email. The phone rings again. And then again – query after query. I look back at my email and find I have forgotten what I wanted to say. I have no will to work. I start at a spot on my arm, scratch it, go back to the cooler to get another glass of water. Someone’s phone goes off and the jarring ringtone breaks the silence around me. I turn on my ipod, plug in my headphones, hoping that the music might inspire me to action. It doesn’t. I rummage in my bag, smear on some lip gloss, suck on a mint.

4:40 – two hours to go before I can leave for the day. I look through the picture windows on the far end of my floor. Even though it is a clear, blue day outside, someone has drawn the shutters across the windows. Thinking back, I realize that I can’t remember when the shutters were last left open. In all the buildings this organization inhabits, regardless of the view outside, the shutters are always drawn. I wonder if there is some unstated organizational policy manadating that, while at work, employees completely shut out the outside world, including wind, weather and everything else that doesn’t pertain to work. Or maybe someone’s just forogtten to draw the shutters for the last year and a half?

It’s 5:33. Time to get a cup of coffee, time to get back to work, one hour before I can leave.

NaBloPoMo

2007-11-01T21:02:00.000+05:30

Ok, I'm finally going to try this. Let the games begin.

Impressions

2007-10-29T16:16:00.001+05:30

The man settles down in the seat across from me, oblivious or unmindful of our hostile glares. There are several seats available, so it is unclear why he chose this one. Placing his light-mauve backpack on his lap, he pulls out a foil-wrapped sub and eats it furtively, biting off mouthful after mouthful. The lingering smell of his BLT sickens my aleady travel-sick friend. She rolls her eyes violently in his direction and pointedly drinks Pepto Bismol. He dabs at his mouth effiminately, trying to catch any stray crumbs. Why doesn't he just take care of this with one manly swipe of a sleeve across his mouth? That's unlikely to happen - he is too fussily dressed for that.

He wears a caramel corduroy jacket, a striped shirt and an oddly bight, mustard tie with a hideous, self-coloured floral print. His pants are check flannels and look like pyjamas.He leafs through the complimentary tourist magazine supplied by Eurostar. He looks just like the kind of person who wouldn't carry something of his own to read.

I look out of the window as we cross an apartment complex and I see a woman dying her clothes on her balcony, the only one in the building to do so. Loking more closely, I see that the turquoise blue polyester garments hung over the balcony are a salwar kurta and the woman is Indian.

Guitarist

2007-05-13T22:54:00.000+05:30

He sat in the shadow of the palazzo, strumming his guitar. During the day, he was a doctor, an architect, a lawyer. His mornings were marked by neccesary routine - the mundanity of paying school fees and filing tax returns.

He came to the square in the late afternoons. He set up his equipment as the masses of tourists trickled away, seeking out restaurants and cafes around the square, drawn by their aromatic warmth and the promise of a hot meal.

He began to gently strum his guitar, cradling it to his person like a child, slipping into the melody, playing only for himself. In the dappled afternoon sunshine, pigeons pooled around him, milling restlessly and hopping away in little alarmed ripples as an American tourist bounced a basketball nearby. Swarms of visiting high school students hooted and caroused, indifferent to the historical significance of their surroundings. Unmindful of all this, the musician played on, caressing the strings of his guitar, familiarly, like a lover; intoxicated by the whispered secrets he coaxed out of it.

Dusk turned to night and the square emptied. As the evening lights came on, the archway under which he sat became a dramatic backdrop, framing him in a halo of lumination. A sudden cold breeze ruffled his air. He played on.

The night deepened. The guitarist's music echoed across the empty corridors behind him, heightening the grandeur of the setting. The hordes of tourists, stultified by heavy dinners of pasta and wine and trudging wearily back to their hotels and hostels, paused for a few minutes to listen to him play, mesmerized by the strains of his Spanish guitar. They murmured in appreciation, pulled a Euro or two out of their pockets to drop into his open guitar case, took a photograph, and then drifted away. Oblivious, the guitarist played on.

Numb

2007-03-17T23:48:00.000+05:30

I've been sitting in front of my monitor for twelve and a half hours without a break, searching for single-pixel misalignments.

Eight hours ago, one of my sandals broke. And then the other pair, the pair that I wisely keep stashed in my car for days such as these, gave way as well. I have been limping around the office for the last four hours, dragging one foot painfully behind the other like Quasimoto.

For the last three hours, individual regions in my body have slowly started to grow numb - first the back of my arms, then the base of my neck and shoulders and now, inexplicably, my tongue.

This is what a stroke must feel like.

Limbo

2007-03-12T18:56:00.000+05:30

Is there anything on Earth that more closely resembles Purgatory than the terminals of international airports? Particularly African international airports? The fluorescent lights and stale recycled air; the bleary eyes and two - day old stubble of other marooned passengers; the endless cups of bad coffee / local beer in a vain search for a stimulant; the aimless rambling through cookie - cutter shops?

A contemporary interpretation of Dante's Purgatorio could quite easily be set in the Nairobi international airport. The slothful would be purged by running endlessly between departure gates as their gates got constantly rescheduled; the gluttonous would be consigned to a ceaseless supply of airline food; the wrathful would be reformed through an endless wait for a connecting flight.

While on the subject, I decided to let this hitherto unpublished post see the light of day.

Sunday, 6th November.

I am now officially ensconced in Hell. Which is to say, I am in a cyber-cafe in the Jomo
Kenyat(t)a International Airport on a day when the powers-that-be considered it judicious and desirable to set the thermostat at a toasty 43 degrees celsius. Suffering this heat after Lusaka has just turned 'cloud to cloud', in the words of the inimitable ZNBC weathermen, makes me bitter, oh so bitter. Lusaka has been unseasonably warm for the last few months, and the highs are now between 5 and 6 degrees higher than they were a few years ago. The unbroken warm weather over the last few weeks also means that I have now lived through an eight - month long summer. And after that long, long, dry summer, the rains finally broke in Lusaka last night, on the eve of my departure. Meaningless, of course, because instead of sitting in our courtyard with a steaming cuppa, I am seated in an over-heated, under-staffed internet cafe in the middle of Kenya, despondent that the warm weather seems determined to adhere so lovingly to me and never let me go.

What I should do is wander over to the Kenya Airways transfer desk and make enquiries about my connecting flight. However, I'm not sure where the KA transfer gate is, exactly. I only know that it is up a flight of stairs, and I have no desire to lug my forty-kilos-or-so of hand baggage up forty stairs, so I'm wandering around the lower levels of this particular Inferno, waiting for an announcement about my departure gate.

Once the departure gate is announced, I drag my weary self to Terminal B16, only to be informed that there is a change in gates and the flight will now depart from Gate 2c. Once I cross the stampede at security, I manage to nab one of the last few available plastic bucket chairs at the gate. In doing so, I find I have positioned myself next to a couple who are intent on fornication. I avert my eyes and try to think pure thoughts.

Close to the scheduled time of departure, a delay is announced. There were technical difficulties and the flight had to stop in Lilongwe for an hour before it could come to Nairobi. The huddled masses at the departure gate are served assorted nuts and beverages to keep them quiet.

Six hours later, we have finally departed from Nairobi. Shortly after, lunch is served. I find myself presented with a fish meal. When I object, the steward removes the fish entree with a flourish and disappears into the depths of the plane. I devour my roll of bread and dessert (a cup of pudding) and hungrily await further developments. I realize the folly of this ten minutes later as the steward slides the vegetarian option in front me - airline-patented "yellow-powder curry" and rice that resembles old nail clippings. I avert my eyes and try to sleep.

Through the duration of the flight, I am marooned next to a lady who is irate because is unable to stretch out across all three seats and sleep. She mutters angrily every time I fidget. I am a fidgety person in general, so her protests last through most of the night, but fall on deaf ears. I have no intention of moving, and she can't make me.

Upon landing in Bombay, however, things start to look up. There is a rather kitschy Indian spin-off of the American Idol show that I have been following for weeks now and , over a period of time, I have started to nurture a minor crush on one of the participants. My delight knows no bounds when I find that self-same participant sitting barely a few seats away from me . So delighted, in fact, that when I go to pick up my luggae from the carousel, I cannot tear my eyes off him long enough to pick up the right suitcase.

As I wheel someone else's Samsonite suitcase toward the Jet Airways counter, all un-mindful, I reflect that many moons ago, I was a salaried member of society. Then I travelled the world chasing a dream. Now I am back where I started, except a little higher.

Emptiness

2007-03-10T21:55:00.000+05:30

As the plane circled downwards, I looked out the window. I felt suffocated by the weight of all my failures. There was so much I had run away from - a broken engagement, an abandoned job, an untold number of projects left incomplete. It had been a period in my life when everything I had essayed turned to ashed under my un-Midas touch. My family attributed it to planetary misalignment. They visited temples, lit lamps, said prayers to ward off the influence of Saturn in the seventh square of my astrological grid. They asked me to wear an amulet. They consulted dozens, scores of astrologers. Each astrologer without fail predicted one exact day in the coming months and years when my luck would turn. My friends explained my problem away as a quarter - life crisis. A well - meaning co-worker told me I was suffering from depression. I didn't know what to call it - I just knew that a chasm was opening before me that refused to be breached by the mundanities of daily routine. When the pressure of living from one day to the next became too much and the loneliness started to eat a cavity into my soul, I decided to leave. Looking down out of the window of ther plane, I felt soothed by the barren landscape. Looking down at the dusty trees, the scattered handfuls of dry grass and the impossible remoteness of this foreign country, I felt like I had come home.

Daily rant

2007-03-09T19:29:00.000+05:30

I'm sitting here drawing on a large, cold coffee, trying to slurp past the ice slush, trying to alleviate this boredom.

So what do I write about?

Describing the pangs of guilt about my long, long overdue set of video library DVDs? ("Yes, I'll bring them back this weekend. I'm sorry, I've been out of town.") And the set of books that my lending library is resigned to never seeing again? ("Yes, I received your reminder. Yes, I'll bring them back this weekend. I'm sorry, I've been out of town.") Writing about it will only induce further pangs of guilt.

Writing about my joy at downloading the five final episodes of the teen TV show that I watch furtively, obsessively? This will just deepen the pangs of guilt about the overdue library books and overdue library DVDs.

Writing about the creeping caffeinated bliss of my most excellent cup of coffee? Analyzing it will only ruin it.

So, casting all this aside, I'll do what comes best. I'll rant.

Here's a question for the pedestrian proletariat that flood the streets and bylanes of this fair city.

When you attempt to dash across a busy four-lane road, occupied by seven-and-a half lanes of traffic, and you hold out your hand, indicating that the oncoming traffic should stop and allow you to cross, what exactly are you hoping to achieve? The drivers you are trying to hold off are people who are dismissive of traffic lights, and indifferent to road rules. These are drivers who will swerve dangerously around a wobbly cyclist and then rant at him for occupying even that modest space on the road. These are people who are venting the pent-up, accumulated frustration of their collective lives by stepping on the gas. People like me, who are impatient and jaded and need to get wherever they are going very, very quickly. So, pedestrian, do you really hope to check this wild impetus by sauntering across the road with your hand extended?

And should the drivers choose to ignore you, as they often do, then what? When a large body of steel and glass is hurtling at you, horns blaring, are you really that willing to trust your life in the hands of the driver behind that wheel? As I ply my way through the relentless chaos by IIT Madras every morning, this leap of faith never cases to amaze.

*End rant*

New Yorker fiction

2006-06-07T11:28:00.000+05:30

Papa lands the machete on Maman’s head. Her voice chokes and she falls off the bed and onto her back on the wooden floor. It’s like a dream. The knife tumbles out of Papa’s hand. His eyes are closed, his face calm, though he’s shaking.
Maman straightens out on the floor as if she were yawning. Her feet kick, and her chest rises and locks as if she were holding her breath. There’s blood everywhere—on everybody around her. It flows into Maman’s eyes. She looks at us through the blood. She sees Papa become a wizard, sees his people telling him bad things. The blood overflows her eyelids, and Maman is weeping red tears. My bladder softens and pee flows down my legs toward the blood. The blood overpowers it, bathing my feet. Papa opens his eyes slowly. His breaths are long and slow. He bends down and closes Maman’s eyes with shaky hands.
“If you let any Tutsi live,” they tell him, “you’re dead.” And then they begin to leave, some patting him on the back.

Another excellent selection of fiction from the New Yorker

Stupid Friday fun

2006-03-17T09:47:00.001+05:30

Ten Top Trivia Tips about BlueSummerNights!

Contrary to popular belief, BlueSummerNights is not successful at sobering up a drunk person, and in many cases she may actually increase the adverse effects of alcohol!
Two thirds of the world's eggplant is grown in BlueSummerNights!
Only one child in twenty will be born on the day predicted by BlueSummerNights!
A BlueSummerNightsometer is used to measure BlueSummerNights!
It is bad luck to light three cigarettes with the same BlueSummerNights.
Native Americans never actually ate BlueSummerNights; killing such a timid prey was thought to indicate laziness.
The smelly fluid secreted by skunks is colloquially known as BlueSummerNights.
The liquid inside BlueSummerNights can be used as a substitute for blood plasma!
BlueSummerNights can eat up to four kilograms of insects in a single night!
In the kingdom of Bhutan, all citizens officially become BlueSummerNights on New Year's Day.

Carpe Diem, or whatever

2006-03-15T03:08:00.000+05:30

I just realized that Blogger has been messing with me. My most recent posts and all but the title of my last - but - one post seem to have vanished into nothingness.

I originally posted this poem by Ernie Morrison, obtained via thespark.com, on a morose Tuesday morning when I was in a funk and the end of the week was nowhere in sight. Now, even though the feeling has passed, the poem's too funny (juvenile, yes, but funny nevertheless) to ignore. Take THAT, Oprah!

Cärpe Diem

Believe in yourself, my friend,
There is nothing you can't do,
That is, until the Dark One rises,
and tears your soul in two.

Make the most of today, because tomorrow,
You will burn with the mark of the Beast,
Prepare your head for the Qrown of Thornz,
Inherit death like the rest of the meek.

It's time for Cärpe Diem,
Get lots of stuff done real fast,
Satan: you can't flee Him,
Seize the day, because today will be your last.

Suffer. [repeat X 36]

For more of the same, go here.

Hello World, again

2006-03-12T20:28:00.000+05:30

It's been months since I loitered past this little outpost of the world wide web, and now, blowing the dust off this blog and wiping away the cobwebs, I find a sudden itch to write. But what's good enough to write about after a four month hiatus? I've written, deleted, re-written and tweaked several potential posts over the last few weeks because the content was too outdone, too trivial , or designed to induce massive pangs of guilt ( god, I have to return those library books).

But maybe I'll set the bar low and ease back into posting with this fleeting observation:

What weirder way to start the day than to watch two roaches mate in the office cafeteria? Ugh. Monday, bring it on.

The Year of Spaghetti

2005-11-17T11:15:00.000+05:30

I came across a lovely piece of writing by Haruki Murakami that was definitely worth saving.

Nineteen-seventy-one was the Year of Spaghetti.

In 1971, I cooked spaghetti to live, and lived to cook spaghetti. Steam rising from the pot was my pride and joy, tomato sauce bubbling up in the saucepan my one great hope in life.

I went to a cooking specialty store and bought a kitchen timer and a huge aluminum pot, big enough to bathe a German shepherd in, then went around to all the supermarkets that catered to foreigners, gathering an assortment of odd-sounding spices. I picked up a pasta cookbook at the bookstore, and bought tomatoes by the dozen. I purchased every brand of spaghetti I could lay my hands on, simmered every sauce known to man. Fine particles of garlic, onion, and olive oil swirled in the air, forming a harmonious cloud that penetrated every corner of my tiny apartment, permeating the floor and the ceiling and the walls, my clothes, my books, my records, my tennis racquet, my bundles of old letters. It was a fragrance one might have smelled on ancient Roman aqueducts.

This is a story from the Year of Spaghetti, 1971 A.D.

As a rule, I cooked spaghetti, and ate it, by myself. I was convinced that spaghetti was a dish best enjoyed alone. I can’t really explain why I felt that way, but there it is.

I always drank tea with my spaghetti and ate a simple lettuce-and-cucumber salad. I’d make sure I had plenty of both. I laid everything out neatly on the table and enjoyed a leisurely meal, glancing at the paper as I ate. From Sunday to Saturday, one Spaghetti Day followed another. And each new Sunday started a brand-new Spaghetti Week.

Every time I sat down to a plate of spaghetti—especially on a rainy afternoon—I had the distinct feeling that somebody was about to knock on my door. The person who I imagined was about to visit me was different each time. Sometimes it was a stranger, sometimes someone I knew. Once, it was a girl with slim legs whom I’d dated in high school, and once it was myself, from a few years back, come to pay a visit. Another time, it was William Holden, with Jennifer Jones on his arm.

William Holden?

Not one of these people, however, actually ventured into my apartment. They hovered just outside the door, without knocking, like fragments of memory, and then slipped away.

Spring, summer, and fall, I cooked and cooked, as if cooking spaghetti were an act of revenge. Like a lonely, jilted girl throwing old love letters into the fireplace, I tossed one handful of spaghetti after another into the pot.

I’d gather up the trampled-down shadows of time, knead them into the shape of a German shepherd, toss them into the roiling water, and sprinkle them with salt. Then I’d hover over the pot, oversized chopsticks in hand, until the timer dinged its plaintive note.

Spaghetti strands are a crafty bunch, and I couldn’t let them out of my sight. If I were to turn my back, they might well slip over the edge of the pot and vanish into the night. The night lay in silent ambush, hoping to waylay the prodigal strands.

Spaghetti alla parmigiana

Spaghetti alla napoletana

Spaghetti al cartoccio

Spaghetti aglio e olio

Spaghetti alla carbonara

Spaghetti della pina

And then there was the pitiful, nameless leftover spaghetti carelessly tossed into the fridge.

Born in heat, the strands of spaghetti washed down the river of 1971 and vanished.

I mourn them all—all the spaghetti of the year 1971.

Seven

2005-10-28T22:02:00.000+05:30

Being a lurker on various blogs, I got tagged to do this:

7 things I want to do in this lifetime:
1. Adopt a child, or two

2. Own a floor - to - ceiling library of 10,000 books, including a *complete* collection of Wodehouse (articles, lyrics and plays included)

3. Take Norman Murphy's Wodehouse Walk

4. Meet V.S.Naipaul (which I came so very close to doing once)

5. Skydive

6. Get through In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses and the Lord of the Rings trilogy

7. Take a long and leisurely vacation through southern Europe

7 things I can do:
1. Stay awake for 60 hours at a stretch

2. Reread and reread and reread every book I own

3. Speak four langugaes

4. Shower and dress in 7 minutes flat

5. Multitask with 22 windows open simultaenously

6. Obsess and lose sleep over trivial little nothings

7. Be a good listener

7 things I can not do:
1. Leave home without a book

2. Curb my addiction to mindless Hindi tele-serials each time I visit home

3. Drink milk

4. Kill roaches and/or clear away their carcasses afterwards

5. Make small-talk

6. Stop and smell the roses (or most other flowers, for fear of triggering raging allergies)

7. Use SMSese (think 'U R Gr8!')

7 things that attract me to another person:
1. Well-read without being pedantic

2. Dead-pan humour

3.Shell-framed glasses

4.Articulate

5. Curly hair

6. Fixation with grammatical correctness

7.Predilection for Polo mints

7 things I say most often:
1. ..don't you think?

2...you know?

3. That's ridiculous!

4. umm, uh, and other fillers

5. How's it going?

6. Absolutely

7. (And I cringe as I type in this final one) It's, like,...

7 people I'd love to do this:
1. InAustin and Blue dragon

2.Aru, who should start a blog

3.The lurkers who never leave comments

4.My non-blogging friends, Sonali and Shweeth and Anita and Raz and Rev and Bondhu

5. Priya, who regularly sends me this kind of forward on hotmail, even though I'm too lazy to respond

6. The WI crowd, most of whom can feature 'Quote large tracts of RH,J from memory' high up on their lists of 7 things they can do

7. (This is random, but...) Anthony Lane

Another Friday, Another 55, of a sort

2005-10-28T19:01:00.000+05:30

Suspense

The clock ticks loudly, as seconds and minutes drag on.

Time seems to stand still. I wait, breathlessly, anxiously, endlessly. I rant, I plead, I cajole, I threaten. All in vain.

The suspense kills me slowly, as I try to check my email on a 7 kbps (7!) dial-up connection. All hail Zamnet, ISP extraordinaire.

Another Friday, Another 55 (give or take a few)

2005-10-14T18:01:00.000+05:30

As it starts to drizzle, the brick pavement glistens and green streetlights are reflected off puddles. Across the street, two Chinese people stop and look admiringly at a flowery trashcan shaped whimsically like a teddy bear. An African American man walks past the window and then bends down to do his namaaz.

I look at the rosy-pink cover of ‘The Crazed’ that I have laid aside for a few minutes. At the next table, a young Indian man smiles briefly at me before turning back to his laptop. Tired and a little cold, I sit inside the warm yellow interior of the café, sipping a vanilla latte and savouring possibilities.

In defence of the extra 55 words here, I present the following:
"... brevity has the cardinal virtue of preserving time for advertising. I don’t see it as the concern of literature to perpetuate or enshrine this" - W. Paul Anderson

Intelligent Design

2005-09-29T19:32:00.000+05:30

So I missed the boat as far as finding this online, but it was worth the effort of typing it out just to put this up.

Intelligent Design (Or, as this blogger dubbed it, 'Queer Eye for the God Guy')

By Paul Rudnick

Day No. 1:

And the Lord God said, “Let there be light,” and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, “Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will look younger?”

“I’m loving that,” said Buddha. “It’s new.”

“You should design a restaurant,” added Allah.

Day No. 2:

“Today,” the Lord God said, “let’s do land.” And lo, there was land.

“Well, it’s really not just land,” noted Vishnu. “You’ve got mountains and valleys and—is that lava?”

“It’s not a single statement,” said the Lord God. “I want it to say, ‘Yes, this is land, but it’s not afraid to ooze.’ ”

“It’s really a backdrop, a sort of blank canvas,” put in Apollo. “It’s, like, minimalism, only with scale.”

“But—brown?” Buddha asked.

“Brown with infinite variations,” said the Lord God. “Taupe, ochre, burnt umber—they’re called earth tones.”

“I wasn’t criticizing,” said Buddha. “I was just noticing.”

Day No. 3:

“Just to make everyone happy,” said the Lord God, “today I’m thinking oceans, for contrast.”

“It’s wet, it’s deep, yet it’s frothy; it’s design without dogma,” said Buddha, approvingly.

“Now, there’s movement,” agreed Allah. “It’s not just ‘Hi, I’m a planet—no splashing.’ ”

“But are those ice caps?” inquired Thor. “Is this a coherent vision, or a highball?”

“I can do ice caps if I want to,” sniffed the Lord God.

“It’s about a mood,” said the Angel Moroni, supportively.

“Thank you,” said the Lord God.

Day No. 4:

“One word,” said the Lord God. “Landscaping. But I want it to look natural, as if it all somehow just happened.”

“Do rain forests,” suggested a primitive tribal god, who was known only as a clicking noise.

“Rain forests here,” decreed the Lord God. “And deserts there. For a spa feeling.”

“Which is fresh, but let’s give it glow,” said Buddha. “Polished stones and bamboo, with a soothing trickle of something.”

“I know where you’re going,” said the Lord God. “But why am I seeing scented candles and a signature body wash?”

“Shut up,” said Buddha.

“You shut up,” said the Lord God.

“It’s all about the mix,” Allah declared in a calming voice. “Now let’s look at some swatches.”

Day No. 5:

“I’d like to design some creatures of the sea,” the Lord God said. “Sleek but not slick.”

“Yes, yes, and more yes—it’s a total gills moment,” said Apollo. “But what if you added wings?”

“Fussy,” whispered Buddha to Zeus. “Why not epaulets and a sash?”

“Legs,” said Allah. “Now let’s do legs.”

“Are we already doing dining-room tables?” asked the Lord God, confused.

“No, design some creatures with legs,” said Allah. So the Lord God, nodding, designed an ostrich.

“First draft,” everyone agreed, and so the Lord God designed an alligator.

“There’s gonna be a waiting list,” Zeus murmured appreciatively.

“Now do puppies!” pleaded Vishnu. “And kitties!”

“Ooooo!” all the gods cooed. Then, feeling a bit embarrassed, Zeus ventured, “Design something more practical, like a horse or a mule.”

“What about a koala?” asked the Lord God.

“Much better,” Zeus declared, cuddling the furry little animal. “I’m going to call him Buttons.”

Day No. 6:

“Today I’m really going out there,” said the Lord God. “And I know it won’t be popular at first, and you’re all gonna be saying, ‘Earth to Lord God,’ but in a few million years it’s going to be timeless. I’m going to design a man.”

And everyone looked upon the man that the Lord God designed.

“It has your eyes,” Zeus told the Lord God.

“Does it stack?” inquired Allah.

“It has a naïve, folk-artsy, I-made-it-myself vibe,” said Buddha. The Inca sun god, however, only scoffed. “Been there. Evolution,” he said. “It’s called a shaved monkey.”

“I like it,” protested Buddha. “But it can’t work a strapless dress.” Everyone agreed on this point, so the Lord God announced, “Well, what if I give it nice round breasts and lose the penis?”

“Yes,” the gods said immediately.

“Now it’s intelligent,” said Aphrodite.

“But what if I made it blond?” giggled the Lord God.

“And what if I made you a booming offscreen voice in a lot of bad movies?” asked Aphrodite.

Day No. 7:

“You know, I’m really feeling good about this whole intelligent-design deal,” said the Lord God. “But do you think that I could redo it, keeping the quality but making it at a price point we could all live with?”

“I’m not sure,” said Buddha. “You mean, what if you designed a really basic, no-frills planet? Like, do the man and the woman really need all those toes?”

“Hello!” said the Lord God. “Clean lines, no moving parts, functional but fun. Three bright, happy, wash ’n’ go colors.”

“Swedish meets Japanese, with maybe a Platinum Collector’s Edition for the geeks,” Buddha decided.

“Done,” said the Lord God. “Now let’s start thinking about Pluto. What if everything on Pluto was brushed aluminum?”

“You mean, let’s do Neptune again?” said Buddha.

Jitters

2005-09-03T00:30:00.000+05:30

Since it is my first free Friday in weeks, it seemed time to jump on this bandwagon.

His nervousness increased as the plane began its descent into the Dark Continent, and his ears rang with all the dire warnings he had heard about the hardships that would beset a hapless and unsuspecting TamBrahm in sub – Saharan Africa: poverty and AIDS and uncivilized natives. And an utter and total lack of Udupi restaurants.

The Travails of Moving

2005-08-24T05:07:00.000+05:30

"I'd like to reconfirm my reservation for travel. Yes, I made a reservation two weeks ago. No, I am not travelling six months from now, I am travelling next week. No, I would not like the halaal meal, I would like the vegetarian meal. No, they are not the same thing." And may I mention in passing that you are not the first person to wittily drawl that it surrrre must have taken me a looong time to learn to spell that 15-letter-long last name when I was in kindergarten.

Heartache, heartache and more heartache as I try to thin out my oh-so-precious collection of books and decide which ones I can bear to get rid of.

A flood of tears as I deposit my priceless collection of Wodehouses, painstakingly collected over the last fourteen years, into a flimsy and frayed USPS sack and send them off into the unknown, to be delivered to darkest Africa eight weeks hence.

Yes, I still have my car for sale. And no, I cannot trade it in for a used laptop and $200. Or for $800 and a free ride to the rental car store. Nor can I accept a money order three times the value of the car and wire the balance back to the sender. Not even if God blesses me if I do. Oh, and if you do not have a drivers' license, you CAN NOT drive my car over to your mechanic, desi-desi bhai-bhai notwithstanding!

Packing, packing, endless packing. Is that all a suitcase can hold? WHY do I own so many clothes?

Even though you are a poor Asian post-doctoral student, I am an even poorer Asian ex-doctoral student. For this reason, I cannot sell you my fairly-new printer for $30 and throw in the microwave for free. I also will not do home deliveries on the assorted goods that I am giving away.

The woeful sight of watching the first car I owned being driven away for good. The very small compensation of flying down the interstate in a dazzling rental car that I could not afford to own.

And finally, the forlorn emptiness of vast tracts of carpet in a bare apartment, with the few, scattered remnants of my year here lying strewn across the floor.

C-13, Village South, I'll miss you.

How many have you read?

2005-08-10T22:39:00.000+05:30

For all of you who have been waiting with bated breath, as I have, the list is finally out!

The eleven writers selected for this year's Man Booker Prize longlist are (the names with the * have won or been nominated for the prize before):

The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw
The Sea by John Banville *
Arthur & George by Julian Barnes *
A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry
Slow Man by JM Coetzee *
In the Fold by Rachel Cusk
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro *
All For Love by Dan Jacobson
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel
Saturday by Ian McEwan *
The People's Act of Love by James Meek
Shalimar The Clown by Salman Rushdie *
The Accidental by Ali Smith *
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
This Thing Of Darkness by Harry Thompson
This Is The Country by William Wall

Some surprising exclusions, in my opinion, are Shantaram and Magic Seeds. Well, maybe not Magic Seeds, so much, since its author has declared on numerous occasions that the novel, as a literary form, is dead.

Do you have any predictions about the outcome? Care to stake some money on it? Ladbrokes has picked Julian Barnes as a favourite, and William Hill has its money on Ian McEwan. So do I. I haven't read Saturday yet, but I read an excerpt a few months ago, and I loved it.

The Guardian has this to say about this year's selection.

Angst

2005-08-10T06:27:00.000+05:30

What you said: "....I'm sorry"

What I said: "...I'll live"

What you said: "You'll probably need me right now, right? So I'll come"

What I said: "Come if you want. If not, don't worry about it. I'll manage"

What I should have said: "I need you so much right now. Please, please come and tell me that things will be okay"

What you should have said: "I want to be there with you right now and that is why I am coming. I am coming because I love you. You will be alright. Everything will be alright"

Bridget Jones on Dumbledore

2005-08-09T16:21:00.000+05:30

Or rather, Hermione on Dumbledore. I thought this was amusing because I am one of those obnoxious members of the many-headed who are disparaging of all popular fiction, including the HP saga and Bridget Jones, even though I secretly enjoy reading both.

Dumbledore's death in the style of Helen Fielding

Hermione Granger's Diary
16th July 2005

Spells cast: 33 (bad, but v. extenuating circumstances)

Number of deaths: 1 (v.g. except note v. v. key character)

Portents of doom: 12,204 (& counting) (v.g. all things considered)

V. bad day. Dumbledore keeled over right in middle of Gryffindor turkeygriff buffet. Everyone being v. British, milling about discussing Hagrid's chrysanthemums, until Neville came out with what all were thinking: Old Dumbo had "kicked bucket".

Draco Malfoy wandered over, all sympathy. Rather outrageously tried to chat up yours truly over corpse of dearly departed mentor. Note to self: must not be attracted to charming, rakish but doubtless somewhat evil Slytherin types, especially DM. Been there, done that, got commemorative broomstick.

Harry looked v. v. distressed re Old D. Is v. unlucky w/ father figures (e.g. see previous diary entry Summer 2003 re Sirius Black, previous diary entry near beginning somewhere re fate of HP's actual father, etc etc). DM noted HP is magnet for sudden tragic deaths. HP v. angry, threatened to knock DM's pureblood block off, etc etc. Had to cast multitude of restraint spells on HP to prevent HP throwing DM in lake. Sometimes HP v. v. infuriating!

DM v. good about whole thing, suggested dinner at little coven by coast. Took deep breath & was v. empowered & questioned appropriateness of dinner invitation with grandfatherly wizard headmaster still lying amongst buffet, barely as cold as turkeygriff slices. DM referred to longstanding ability to cheer up grieving witches such as self especially when witch as damned bewitching as self is. Almost persuaded but took v. deep breath & declined & told DM busy this evening washing cape.

Note to self: must remember DM is Slytherin scoundrel! V. v. important not to fall for charms of servants of evil (remember New Year's resolutions!)

Also: must select appropriate length skirt for Dumbo's funeral. Wonder if DM will be there?

Courtesy: Linda Whittle , http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,10761,1527766,00.html

Insomnia

2005-08-09T16:11:00.000+05:30

I have been wide awake since 2:18 this morning, after dozing off at 10 last night, and the world feels out of kilter for the following reasons:

1) My air conditioner is on the fritz and intermittently bursts into muffled roars and then subsides into ominous silences. It has been doing this all night. It looks sullen and brooding, and I fear that it may burst into a ball of flames at any moment now.

2) The aforesaid air conditioner has also developed a leak. It drips, audibly. This is not good for my fevered imagination that has been incited to flights of fancy by my recent glut of Agatha Christies. Lying wakeful, I can visualize a body lying in my living room, stabbed in the back with an Oriental dagger, blood dripping onto the carpet. Drip drip drip. Damn the air-conditioner!

3) I had my first microwave fire earlier this evening, as I absentmindedly microwaved something without remoiving its foil covering! I am convinced that senile dementia is setting in early. Give me a month or two, and I'm sure I'll be forced to wear my name and address on a placard round my neck, so that some kindly soul can direct me homewards when I am found alone and palely loitering on a city street at 3 am.

Calling all ye bookworms

2005-07-28T11:02:00.000+05:30

BOOKERED OUT: BE A BOOKER PUNDIT

Could you read 20 books in 28 days? Would you like to take part in a new BBC Four programme?

We’re looking for six enthusiastic, energetic and dedicated people to take part in this book marathon for a programme called Bookered Out. You don’t have to be a book worm or a literature buff to take part. Novice readers are more than welcome!

You'll need to read every book on this year's Booker Prize longlist and decide which six you would shortlist. In addition to reading the books, you must also keep a video diary of your month (cameras and training provided).

You have until Thursday 4 August to tell us why you think you're the perfect candidate. The Booker Prize longlist is published on Wednesday 10 August, and we will announce who has been selected shortly afterwards.

Go here to apply:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/books/features/booker-recruit.shtml

Feeding on his damask leg, like a worm i' the bud

2005-07-28T09:03:00.000+05:30

Another little bauble from David Sedaris, the master of self-deprecatory humour.

He was eight years old and living in the Congo, when he noticed a red spot on his leg; nothing huge—a mosquito bite, he figured. The following day, the spot became more painful, and the day after that he looked down and saw a worm poking out.

A few weeks later, the same thing happened to Maw Hamrick, which is what I call Hugh’s mother, Joan, and though her worm was a bit shorter, I think it’s much worse in terms of trauma or whatnot. If I was a child and saw something creeping out of a hole in my mother’s leg, I would march to the nearest orphanage and put myself up for adoption. I would burn all pictures of her, destroy anything she had ever given me, and start all over because that is just disgusting. A dad can be crawling with parasites and somehow it’s O.K., but on a mom, or any woman, really, it’s unforgivable.

As a fellow survivor of the worm-nesting-in-flesh syndrome, I can sympathize with this. It really is more creepy than it is painful. And it is more commonplace than you would think.

The setting: A semi-tropical country in sub-Saharan Africa

The scene: The lord of the manor (although it's more of a smallish townhouse than a manor, really) casually tosses his shirt into his laudry basket, confident in the knowledge that the resident maid will wash it and iron it and return it to store, duly sanitized. Ah, little does he know!

The maid does indeed wash and dry the shirt and then, while ironing it, thinking of this and that, no doubt, she omits to iron a little corner by the collar.

Three days later the master wakes to find an impressive, swollen-looking red bump growing under his collarbone. Alarmed and despondent, he rushes to the nearest medicine-man who surveys the bump grimly and informs the lord-of-the-manor that he is now host to a putsy-fly worm. Thr l.o.t.m's options are twofold:

1) He can ignore the bump and allow the resident worm to grow and mature till it becomes a fully formed fly that will, unbidden, burst forth into the world (I kid you not!) . Or,

2) He can cover the bump with Vaseline petroleum jelly (a product with multiple uses, if you are a denizen of sub-Saharan Africa) and an adhesive plaster and wait till the larva, starved of oxygen, worms its way to the surface of his skin and attaches itself to the adhesive plaster.

Chances are that he will select option # 2. While in the middle of a tense business meeting or a languid lunch with friends, it is always difficult to explain away the fly that just flew out from under your skin.

I too, in my youth, played host to just such a putsy fly. And while the bump itself didn't ache that much, the thought of putsy fly eggs under my skin was indescribably gruesome. The seven day wait to be divested of them was possibly the longest week of my life. I carry the scar to this day - just your everyday battle scar from life in sub-Saharn Africa.

For the rest of the Sedaris article, go here: http://www.newyorker.com/shouts/content/articles/050801sh_shouts

Pati

2005-07-27T15:08:00.000+05:30

I've been musing about last weekend and why it was such an emotional maelstrom. The call came at 6 something in the am, a mere 3 hours after I had gone to bed after glutting myself on 6 back-to-back episodes of Rumpole of the Bailey. It was my father, calling to inform me that pati had passed away.

If all of us are truly honest with ourselves, it must be admitted that we have all been sort of waiting for this to happen for a while now. There have been increasing rifts in the lute of our little family circle arising from the strain of taking care of pati. Noone was willing to move back to Madras to look over a problematic old lady for whom they felt only a tepid affection. Emails and phone calls of an increasingly nasty tone flew back and forth across the globe as everyone accused everyone else of either negligence or interference.

So when the news of pati's death finally came, why was it so painful? I felt like such a hypocrite for feeling any kind of grief. I can't deny that it was only a sense of filial duty and TamBrahm guilt that pushed me to go see her for a couple of hours once every fortnight or so. Yet I can't quite assimilate the thought that I will never see her again, this person who has been such a constant in my life. Despite all the wonderful Sify memories, my strongest associations of India and Madras will always be 258 Lloyds Road, and pati sitting on a bench in the hall ( surely that room with its 1.5 chairs and dusty, dusty cabinets cannot be described as a living room?)

When I think of pati, I think my primary emption is guilt. That I wasn't a better granddaughter, that I didn't love her more, that I didn't go and spend more time with her during the year that I lived in Madras. What must it have been like, living the life that she did? Living out the last few years of her life confined to three rooms because she wasn't able to walk out beyond them, outliving her daughter and the son she loved best, unable to eat the foods she loved because her body was failing her, getting to see the occasional family member only once every few months, and nothing but a few shrill Tamil programmes on TV to keep her sane.

And then I wonder whether my life now isn't in some way a reflection of hers?

I associate her with all the most personal, most painful facets of me that I need to keep hidden from the world. My closest family has always compared me with her. And even though I have always denied these similarities, I know that of all her children and grandchildren, I am the one who resembles her the most, in physique and temperament. And I can't help but wonder whether, in my old age, I will grow into the same sort of person she was.

Which is why as I now grieve for her, I wish I had taken the time to understand her better. I wish I had spent more time with her, to ease her loneliness. I wish I had been less impatient of the times when we sat togther for an hour with nothing but banalities to say to each other. I wish she could have known how much I identified with her. And I hope and hope that after these last few agonizing years, her soul has finally found peace.

2005-07-27T08:19:00.000+05:30

You know that you have a caffeine problem when you find yourself sipping simultaneously on a hot and richly caffeinated latte and an icy-cold Diet Coke. So much for any hopes of sleep tonight. *Sigh*

Wooster on Wodehouse

2005-07-16T12:09:00.000+05:30

Hugh Laurie Wodehouse Saved my Life
The Daily Telegraph 27.5.99

With today's reissue of PG Wodehouse's books, Hugh Laurie tells how the comic genius made him clean up his 'squalid' existence To be able to write about PG Wodehouse is the sort of honour that comes rarely in any man's life, let alone mine. This is rarity of a rare order. Halley's comet seems like a blasted nuisance in comparison. If you'd knocked on my head 20 years ago and told me that a time would come when I, Hugh Laurie - scraper-through of O-levels, mover of lips (own) while reading, loafer, scrounger, pettifogger and general berk of this parish - would be able to carve my initials in the broad bark of the Master's oak, I'm pretty certain that I would have said "garn", or something like it.

I was, in truth, a horrible child. Not much given to things of a bookey nature, I spent a large part of my youth smoking Number Six and cheating in French vocabulary tests. I wore platform boots with a brass skull and crossbones over the ankle, my hair was disgraceful, and I somehow contrived to pull off the gruesome trick of being both fat and thin at the same time. If you had passed me in the street during those pimply years, I am confident that you would, at the very least, have quickened your pace.

You think I exaggerate? I do not. Glancing over my school reports from the year 1972, I observe that the words "ghastly" and "desperate" feature strongly, while "no", "not", "never" and "again" also crop up more often than one would expect in a random sample. My history teacher's report actually took the form of a postcard from Vancouver.

But this, you will be nauseated to learn, is a tale of redemption. In about my 13th year, it so happened that a copy of Galahad at Blandings by PG Wodehouse entered my squalid universe, and things quickly began to change. From the very first sentence of my very first Wodehouse story, life appeared to grow somehow larger. There had always been height, depth, width and time, and in these prosaic dimensions I had hitherto snarled, cursed, and not washed my hair. But now, suddenly, there was Wodehouse, and the discovery seemed to make me gentler every day. By the middle of the fifth chapter I was able to use a knife and fork, and I like to think that I have made reasonable strides since.

I spent the following couple of years meandering happily back and forth through Blandings Castle and its environs - learning how often the trains ran, at what times the post was collected, how one could tell if the Empress was off-colour, why the Emsworth Arms was preferable to the Blue Boar - until the time came for me to roll up the map of adolescence and set forth into my first Jeeves novel. It was The Code of the Woosters, and things, as they used to say, would never be the same again.

The facts in this case, ladies and gentlemen, are simple. The first thing you should know, and probably the last, too, is that PG Wodehouse is still the funniest writer ever to have put words on paper. Fact number two: with the Jeeves stories, Wodehouse created the best of the best. I speak as one whose first love was Blandings, and who later took immense pleasure from Psmith, but Jeeves is the jewel, and anyone who tries to tell you different can be shown the door, the mini-cab, the train station, and Terminal 4 at Heathrow with a clear conscience. The world of Jeeves is complete and integral, every bit as structured, layered, ordered, complex and self-contained as King Lear, and considerably funnier.

Now let the pages of the calendar tumble as autumn leaves, until 10 years are understood to have passed. A man came to us - to me and to my comedy partner, Stephen Fry - with a proposition. He asked me if I would like to play Bertram W. Wooster in 23 hours of televised drama, opposite the internationally tall Fry in the role of Jeeves.

"Fiddle," one of us said. I forget which. "Sticks," said the other. "Wodehouse on television? It's lunacy. A disaster in kit form. Get a grip, man." The man, a television producer, pressed home his argument with skill and determination. "All right," he said, shrugging on his coat. "I'll ask someone else." "Whoa, hold up," said one of us, shooting a startled look at the other. "Steady," said the other, returning the S. L. with top-spin. There was a pause. "You'll never get a cab in this weather," we said, in unison.

And so it was that, a few months later, I found myself slipping into a double-breasted suit in a Prince of Wales check while my colleague made himself at home inside an enormous bowler hat, and the two of us embarked on our separate disciplines. Him for the noiseless opening of decanters, me for the twirling of the whangee.

So the great PG was making his presence felt in my life once more. And I soon learnt that I still had much to learn. How to smoke plain cigarettes, how to drive a 1927 Aston Martin, how to mix a Martini with five parts water and one part water (for filming purposes only), how to attach a pair of spats in less than a day and a half, and so on.

But the thing that really worried us, that had us saying "crikey" for weeks on end, was this business of The Words. Let me give you an example. Bertie is leaving in a huff: " 'Tinkerty tonk,' I said, and I meant it to sting." I ask you: how is one to do justice of even the roughest sort to a line like that? How can any human actor, with his clumsily attached ears, and his irritating voice, and his completely misguided hair, hope to deliver a line as pure as that? It cannot be done. You begin with a diamond on the page, and you end up with a blob of Pritt, The Non-Sticky Sticky Stuff, on the screen.

Wodehouse on the page can be taken in the reader's own time; on the screen, the beautiful sentence often seems to whip by, like an attractive member of the opposite sex glimpsed from the back of a cab. You, as the viewer, try desperately to fix the image in your mind - but it is too late, because suddenly you're into a commercial break and someone is telling you how your home may be at risk if you eat the wrong breakast cereal.

Naturally, one hopes there were compensations in watching Wodehouse on the screen - pleasant scenery, amusing clothes, a particular actor's eyebrows - but it can never replicate the experience of reading him. If I may go slightly culinary for a moment: a dish of foie gras nestling on a bed of truffles, with a side-order of lobster and caviar may provide you with a wonderful sensation; but no matter how wonderful, you simply don't want to be spoon-fed the stuff by a perfect stranger. You need to hold the spoon, and decide for yourself when to wolf and when to nibble.

And so I am back to reading, rather than playing Jeeves. And my Wodehousian redemption is, I hope, complete. Indeed, there is nothing left for me to say, except to wish, as I fold away my penknife and gaze up at the huge oak towering overhead, that my history teacher could see me now. Text © Hugh Laurie/Daily Telegraph Layout © R.D. Collins 2004

MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES

2005-07-16T12:03:00.000+05:30

Despite being considerably longer than your average blog post, this article definitely repays further inspection.

David Grann, The New Yorker, Dec 13, 2004 v80 i39 p058
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Richard Lancelyn Green, the world's foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes, believed that he had finally solved the case of the missing papers. Over the past two decades, he had been looking for a trove of letters, diary entries, and manuscripts written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Holmes. The archive was estimated to be worth nearly four million dollars, and was said by some to carry a deadly curse, like the one in the most famous Holmes story, "The Hound of the Baskervilles."

The papers had disappeared after Conan Doyle died, in 1930, and without them no one had been able to write a definitive biography--a task that Green was determined to complete. Many scholars feared that the archive had been discarded or destroyed; as the London Times noted earlier this year, its whereabouts had become "a mystery as tantalizing as any to unfold at 221B Baker Street," the fictional den of Holmes and his fellow-sleuth, Dr. Watson.

Not long after Green launched his investigation, he discovered that one of Conan Doyle's five children, Adrian, had, with the other heirs' agreement, stashed the papers in a locked room of a chateau that he owned in Switzerland. Green then learned that Adrian had spirited some of the papers out of the chateau without his siblings' knowledge, hoping to sell them to collectors. In the midst of this scheme, he died of a heart attack--giving rise to the legend of the curse. After Adrian's death, the papers apparently vanished. And whenever Green tried to probe further he found himself caught in an impenetrable web of heirs--including a self-styled Russian princess--who seemed to have deceived and double-crossed each other in their efforts to control the archive.

For years, Green continued to sort through evidence and interview relatives, until one day the muddled trail led to London--and the doorstep of Jean Conan Doyle, the youngest of the author's children. Tall and elegant, with silver hair, she was an imposing woman in her late sixties. ("Something very strong and forceful seems to be at the back of that wee body," her father had written of Jean when she was five. "Her will is tremendous.") Whereas her brother Adrian had been kicked out of the British Navy for insubordination, and her elder brother Denis was a playboy who had sat out the Second World War in America, she had become an officer in the Royal Air Force, and was honored, in 1963, as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

She invited Green into her flat, where a portrait of her father, with his walrus mustache, hung near the fireplace. Green had almost as great an interest in her father as she did, and she began sharing her memories, as well as family photographs. She asked him to return, and one day, Green later told friends, she showed him some boxes that had been stored in a London solicitor's office. Peering inside them, he said, he had glimpsed part of the archive. Dame Jean informed him that, because of an ongoing family dispute, she couldn't yet allow him to read the papers, but she said that she intended to bequeath nearly all of them to the British Library, so that scholars could finally examine them. After she died, in 1997, Green eagerly awaited their transfer--but nothing happened.

Then, last March, Green opened the London Sunday Times and was shocked to read that the lost archive had "turned up" at Christie's auction house and was to be sold, in May, for millions of dollars by three of Conan Doyle's distant relatives; instead of going to the British Library, the contents would be scattered among private collectors around the world, who might keep them inaccessible to scholars. Green was sure that a mistake had been made, and hurried to Christie's to inspect the materials. Upon his return, he told friends that he was certain that many of the papers were the same as those he had uncovered. What's more, he alleged, they had been stolen--and he had proof.

Over the next few days, he approached members of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, one of hundreds of fan clubs devoted to the detective. (Green had once been chairman.) He alerted other so-called Sherlockians, including various American members of the Baker Street Irregulars, an invitation-only group that was founded in 1934 and named after the street urchins Holmes regularly employed to ferret out information. Green also contacted the more orthodox scholars of Conan Doyle, or Doyleans, about the sale. (Unlike Green, who moved between the two camps, many Doyleans distanced themselves from the Sherlockians, who often treated Holmes as if he were a real detective and refused to mention Conan Doyle by name.)
Green shared with these scholars what he knew about the archive's provenance, revealing what he considered the most damning piece of evidence: a copy of Dame Jean's will, which stated, "I give to The British Library all . . . my late father's original papers, personal manuscripts, diaries, engagement books, and writings." Determined to block the auction, the makeshift group of amateur sleuths presented its case to Members of Parliament. Toward the end of the month, as the group's campaign intensified and its objections appeared in the press, Green hinted to his sister, Priscilla West, that someone was threatening him. Later, he sent her a cryptic note containing three phone numbers and the message "please keep these numbers safe." He also called a reporter from the London Times, warning that "something" might happen to him.
On the night of Friday, March 26th, he had dinner with a longtime friend, Lawrence Keen, who later said that Green had confided in him that "an American was trying to bring him down." After the two men left the restaurant, Green told Keen that they were being followed, and pointed to a car behind them.

The same evening, Priscilla West phoned her brother, and got his answering machine. She called repeatedly the next morning, but he still didn't pick up. Alarmed, she went to his house and knocked on the door; there was no response. After several more attempts, she called the police, who came and broke open the entrance. Downstairs, the police found the body of Green lying on his bed, surrounded by Sherlock Holmes books and posters, with a cord wrapped around his neck. He had been garroted.

"I will lay out the whole case for you," John Gibson, one of Green's closest friends, told me when I phoned him shortly after learning of Green's death. Gibson had written several books with Green, including "My Evening with Sherlock Holmes," a 1981 collection of parodies and pastiches of the detective stories. With a slight stammer, Gibson said of his friend's death, "It's a complete and utter mystery."

Not long after, I travelled to Great Bookham, a village thirty miles south of London, where Gibson lives. He was waiting for me when I stepped off the train. He was tall and rail-thin, and everything about him--narrow shoulders, long face, unruly gray hair--seemed to slouch forward, as if he were supported by an invisible cane. "I have a file for you," he said, as we drove off in his car. "As you'll see, there are plenty of clues and not a lot of answers."
He sped through town, past a twelfth-century stone church and a row of cottages, until he stopped at a red brick house surrounded by hedges. "You don't mind dogs, I hope," he said. "I've two cocker spaniels. I only wanted one but the person I got them from said that they were inseparable, and so I took them both and they've been fighting ever since."

When he opened the front door, both spaniels leaped on us, then at each other. They trailed us into the living room, which was filled with piles of antique books, some reaching to the ceiling. Among the stacks was a near-complete set of The Strand Magazine, in which the Holmes stories were serialized at the turn of the twentieth century; a single issue, which used to sell for half a shilling, is now worth as much as five hundred dollars. "Altogether, there must be about sixty thousand books," Gibson said.

We sat on a couch and he opened his case file, carefully spreading the pages around him. "All right, dogs. Don't disturb us," he said. He looked up at me. "Now I'll tell you the whole story."
Gibson said that he had attended the coroner's inquest and taken careful notes, and as he spoke he picked up a magnifying glass beside him and peered though it at several crumpled pieces of paper. "I write everything on scraps," he said. The police, he said, had found only a few unusual things at the scene. There was the cord around Green's neck--a black shoelace. There was a wooden spoon near his hand, and several stuffed animals on the bed. And there was a partially empty bottle of gin.

The police found no sign of forced entry and assumed that Green had committed suicide. Yet there was no note, and Sir Colin Berry, the president of the British Academy of Forensic Sciences, testified to the coroner that, in his thirty- year career, he had seen only one suicide by garroting. "One," Gibson repeated. Self-garroting is extremely difficult to do, he explained; people who attempt it typically pass out before they are asphyxiated. Moreover, in this instance, the cord was not a thick rope but a shoelace, making the feat even more unlikely.
Gibson reached in his file and handed me a sheet of paper with numbers on it. "Take a look," he said. "My phone records." The records showed that he and Green had spoken repeatedly during the week before his death; if the police had bothered to obtain Green's records, Gibson went on, they would no doubt show that Green had called him only hours before he died. "I was probably the last person to speak to him," he said. The police, however, had never questioned him.
During one of their last conversations about the auction, Gibson recalled, Green had said he was afraid of something.

"You've got nothing to worry about," Gibson told him.

"No, I'm worried," Green said.

"What? You fear for your life?"

"I do."

Gibson said that, at the time, he didn't take the threat seriously but advised Green not to answer his door unless he was sure who it was.

Gibson glanced at his notes. There was something else, he said, something critical. On the eve of his death, he reminded me, Green had spoken to his friend Keen about an "American" who was trying to ruin him. The following day, Gibson said, he had called Green's house and heard a strange greeting on the answering machine. "Instead of getting Richard's voice in this sort of Oxford accent, which had been on the machine for a decade," Gibson recalled, "I got an American voice that said, 'Sorry, not available.' I said, 'What the hell is going on?' I thought I must've dialled the wrong number. So I dialled really slowly again. I got the American voice. I said, 'Christ almighty.' "

Gibson said that Green's sister had heard the same recorded greeting, which is one reason that she had rushed to his house. Reaching into his file, Gibson handed me several more documents. "Make sure you keep them in chronological order," he said. There was a copy of Jean Conan Doyle's will, several newspaper clippings on the auction, an obituary, and a Christie's catalogue.
That was pretty much all he had. The police, Gibson said, had not conducted any forensic tests or looked for fingerprints. And the coroner--who had once attended a meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society to conduct a mock inquest of the murder from a Conan Doyle story in which a corpse is discovered in a locked room--found himself stymied. Gibson said that the coroner had noted that there was not enough evidence to ascertain what had happened, and, as a result, the official verdict regarding whether Green had killed himself or been murdered was left open.

Within hours of Green's death, Sherlockians seized upon the mystery, as if it were another case in the canon. In a Web chat room, one person, who called himself "inspector," wrote, "As for self-garroting, it is like trying to choke oneself to death by your own hands." Others invoked the "curse," as if only the supernatural could explain it. Gibson handed me an article from a British tabloid that was headlined " 'curse of conan doyle' strikes holmes expert."

"So what do you think?" Gibson asked.

"I'm not sure," I said.

Later, we went through the evidence again. I asked Gibson if he knew whose phone numbers were on the note that Green had sent to his sister.

Gibson shook his head. "It hadn't come up at the inquest," he said.

"What about the American voice on the answering machine?" I asked. "Do we know who that is?"

"Unfortunately, not a clue. To me that's the strangest and most telling piece of evidence. Did Richard put that on his machine? What was he trying to tell us? Did the murderer put it on there? And, if so, why would he do that?"

I asked if Green had ever displayed any irrational behavior. "No, never," he said. "He was the most levelheaded man I ever met."

He noted that Priscilla West had testified at the inquest that her brother had no history of depression. Indeed, Green's physician wrote to the court to say that he had not treated Green for any illnesses for a decade.

"One last question," I said. "Was anything taken out of the apartment?"
"Not that we know of. Richard had a valuable collection of Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle books, and nothing appears to be missing."

As Gibson drove me back to the train station, he said, "Please, you must stay on the case. The police seem to have let poor Richard down." Then he advised, "As Sherlock Holmes says, 'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' "
Some facts about Richard Green are easy to discern--those which illuminate the circumstances of his life, rather than the circumstances of his death. He was born on July 10, 1953; he was the youngest of three children; his father was Roger Lancelyn Green, a best-selling children's author who popularized the Homeric myths and the legend of King Arthur, and who was a close friend of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien; and Richard was raised near Liverpool, on land that had been given to his ancestors in 1093, and where his family had resided ever since.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was the American consul in Liverpool in the eighteen-fifties, visited the house one summer, and he later described it in his "English Notebooks":

We passed through a considerable extent of private road, and finally drove through a lawn, shaded with trees, and closely shaven, and reached the door of Poulton Hall. Part of the mansion is three or four hundred years old. . . . There is [a] curious, old, stately staircase, with a twisted balustrade, much like that of the old Province House in Boston. The drawing-room looks like a very handsome modern room, being beautifully painted, gilded, and paper-hung, with a white-marble fire-place, and rich furniture; so that the impression is that of newness, not of age.
By the time Richard was born, however, the Green family was, as one relative told me, "very English--a big house and no money." The curtains were thin, the carpets were threadbare, and a cold draft often swirled through the corridors.

Green, who had a pale, pudgy face, was blind in one eye from a childhood accident, and wore spectacles with tinted lenses. (One friend told me that, even as an adult, Green resembled "the god of Pan," with "cherubic-like features, a mouth which curved in a smile which was sympathetic, ironic, and always seeming to suggest that there was just one little thing that he was not telling you.") Intensely shy, with a ferociously logical mind and a precise memory, he would spend hours roaming through his father's enormous library, reading dusty first editions of children's books. And by the time he was eleven he had fallen under the spell of Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes was not the first great literary detective--that honor belongs to Edgar Allan Poe's Inspector Auguste Dupin--but Conan Doyle's hero was the most vivid exemplar of the fledgling genre, which Poe dubbed "tales of ratiocination." Holmes is a cold, calculating machine, a man who is, as one critic put it, "a tracker, a hunter-down, a combination of bloodhound, pointer, and bull-dog." The gaunt Holmes has no wife or children; as he explains, "I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix." Rigidly scientific, he offers no spiritual bromides to his bereaved clients. Conan Doyle reveals virtually nothing about his character's interior life; he is defined solely by his method. In short, he is the perfect detective, the superhero of the Victorian era, out of which he blasted with his deerstalker hat and Inverness cape.

Richard read the stories straight through, then read them again. His rigorous mind had found its match in Holmes and his "science of deduction," which could wrest an astonishing solution from a single, seemingly unremarkable clue. "All life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it," Holmes explains in the first story, "A Study in Scarlet," which establishes a narrative formula that subsequent tales nearly always follow. A new client arrives at Holmes's Baker Street consulting room. The detective stuns the visitor by deducing some element of his life by the mere observation of his demeanor or dress. (In "A Case of Identity," he divines that his client is a shortsighted typist by no more than the worn "plush upon her sleeves" and "the dint of a pince-nez at either side of her nose.") After the client presents the inexplicable facts of the case, "the game is afoot," as Holmes likes to say. Amassing clues that invariably boggle Watson, the stories' more earthbound narrator, Holmes ultimately arrives at a dazzling conclusion--one that, to him and him only, seems "elementary." In "The Red-Headed League," Holmes reveals to Watson how he surmised that an assistant pawnbroker was trying to rob a bank by tunnelling underneath it. "I thought of the assistant's fondness for photography, and his trick of vanishing into the cellar," Holmes says, explaining that he then went to see the assistant. "I hardly looked at his face. His knees were what I wished to see. You must yourself have remarked how worn, wrinkled and stained they were. They spoke of those hours of burrowing. The only remaining point was what they were burrowing for. I walked round the corner, saw the City and Suburban Bank abutted on our friend's premises, and felt that I had solved my problem."

Following the advice that Holmes often gave to Watson, Green practiced how to "see" what others merely "observed." He memorized Holmes's rules, as if they were catechism: "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data"; "never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details"; "there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact."
Not long after Green turned thirteen, he carried an assortment of artifacts from local junk sales into the dimly lit attic of Poulton Hall. Part of the attic was known as the Martyr's Chamber and was believed to be haunted, having once "been tenanted by a lady, who was imprisoned there and persecuted to death for her religion," according to Hawthorne. Nevertheless, up in the attic, Green assembled his objects to create a strange tableau. There was a rack of pipes and a Persian slipper stuffed with tobacco. There was a stack of unpaid bills, which he stabbed into a mantle with a knife, so that they were pinned in place. There was a box of pills labelled "Poison"; empty ammunition cartridges and trompe-l'oeil bullet marks painted on the walls ("I didn't think the attic would stand up to real bullets," he later remarked); a preserved snake; a brass microscope; and an invitation to the Gasfitters' Ball. Finally, outside the door of the room, Green hung a sign: "Baker Street."

Relying on the stray details sprinkled throughout Conan Doyle's stories, Green had pieced together a replica of Holmes and Watson's apartment--one so precise that it occasionally drew Holmes aficionados from other parts of England. One local reporter described the uncanny sensation of climbing the seventeen stairs--the same number specified in the stories--as a tape recording played in the background with the sounds of Victorian London: the rumble of cab wheels, the clopping of horses' hooves on cobblestones. By then, Green had become the youngest person ever inducted into the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, where members sometimes dressed in period costumes--in high-waisted trousers and top hats.

Though Holmes had first appeared in print nearly a century earlier, he had spawned a literary cult unlike that of any other fictional character. Almost from his inception, readers latched onto him with a zeal that bordered on "the mystical," as one Conan Doyle biographer has noted. When Holmes made his debut, in the 1887 Beeton's Christmas Annual, a magazine of somewhat lurid fiction, he was considered not just a character but a paragon of the Victorian faith in all things scientific. He entered public consciousness around the same time as the development of the modern police force, at a moment when medicine was finally threatening to eradicate common diseases and industrialization offered to curtail mass poverty. He was the proof that, indeed, the forces of reason could triumph over the forces of madness.

By the time Green was born, however, the worship of scientific thinking had been shattered by other faiths, by Nazism and Communism and Fascism, which had often harnessed the power of technology to demonic ends. Yet, paradoxically, the more illogical the world seemed, the more intense the cult surrounding Holmes became. This symbol of a new creed had become a figure of nostalgia--a person in "a fairy tale," as Green once put it. The character's popularity even surpassed the level of fame he had attained in Conan Doyle's day, as the stories were reenacted in some two hundred and sixty movies, twenty-five television shows, a musical, a ballet, a burlesque, and six hundred radio plays. Holmes inspired the creation of journals, memorabilia shops, walking tours, postage stamps, hotels, themed ocean cruises.

Edgar W. Smith, a former vice-president of General Motors and the first editor of the Baker Street Journal, which publishes scholarship on Conan Doyle's stories, wrote in a 1946 essay, "What Is It That We Love in Sherlock Holmes?":

We see him as the fine expression of our urge to trample evil and to set aright the wrongs with which the world is plagued. He is Galahad and Socrates, bringing high adventure to our dull existences and calm, judicial logic to our biased minds. He is the success of all our failures; the bold escape from our imprisonment.

What has made this literary escape unlike any other, though, is that so many people conceive of Holmes as a real person. T. S. Eliot once observed, "Perhaps the greatest of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries is this: that when we talk of him we invariably fall into the fancy of his existence." Green himself wrote, "Sherlock Holmes is a real character . . . who lives beyond life's span and who is constantly rejuvenated."

At the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, Green was introduced to "the great game," which Sherlockians had played for decades. It was built around the conceit that the stories' true author was not Conan Doyle but Watson, who had faithfully recounted Holmes's exploits. Once, at a gathering of the elite Baker Street Irregulars (which Green also joined), a guest referred to Conan Doyle as the creator of Holmes, prompting one outraged member to exclaim, "Holmes is a man! Holmes is a great man!" If Green had to invoke Conan Doyle's name, he was told, he should refer to him as merely Watson's "literary agent." The challenge of the game was that Conan Doyle had often written the four Holmes novels and fifty-six short stories--"the Sacred Writings," as Sherlockians called them--in haste, and they were plagued with inconsistencies that made them difficult to pass off as nonfiction. How, for instance, is it possible that in one story Watson is described as having been wounded in Afghanistan in the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, though in another story he complains that the wound was in his leg? The goal was thus to resolve these paradoxes, using the same airtight logic that Holmes exhibits. Similar textual inquiries had already given birth to a related field, known as Sherlockiana--mock scholarship in which fans tried to deduce everything from how many wives Watson has (one to five) to which university Holmes attended (surely Cambridge or Oxford). As Green once conceded, quoting the founder of the Baker Street Irregulars, "Never had so much been written by so many for so few."

After Green graduated from Oxford, in 1975, he turned his attention to more serious scholarship. Of all the puzzles surrounding the Sacred Writings, the greatest one, Green realized, centered on the man whom the stories had long since eclipsed--Conan Doyle himself. Green set out to compile the first comprehensive bibliography, hunting down every piece of material that Conan Doyle wrote: pamphlets, plays, poems, obituaries, songs, unpublished manuscripts, letters to the editor. Carrying a plastic bag in place of a briefcase, Green unearthed documents that had long been hidden behind the veil of history.

In the midst of this research, Green discovered that John Gibson was working on a similar project, and they agreed to collaborate. The resulting tome, published in 1983 by Oxford University Press, with a foreword by Graham Greene, is seven hundred and twelve pages long and contains notations on nearly every scrap of writing that Conan Doyle ever produced, down to the kind of paper in which a manuscript was bound ("cloth," "light blue diaper-grain"). When the bibliography was done, Gibson continued in his job as a government property assessor. Green, however, had inherited a sizable sum of money from his family, who had sold part of their estate, and he used the bibliography as a launching pad for a biography of Conan Doyle.
Writing a biography is akin to the process of detection, and Green started to retrace every step of Conan Doyle's life, as if it were an elaborate crime scene. During the nineteen-eighties, Green followed Conan Doyle's movements from the moment he was born, on May 22, 1859, in a squalid part of Edinburgh. Green visited the neighborhood where Conan Doyle was raised, by a devout Christian mother and a dreamy father. (He drew one of the first illustrations of Sherlock Holmes--a sketch of the detective discovering a corpse, which accompanied a paperback edition of "A Study in Scarlet.") Green also amassed an intricate paper record that showed his subject's intellectual evolution. He discovered, for instance, that after Conan Doyle studied medicine, at the University of Edinburgh, and fell under the influence of rationalist thinkers like Oliver Wendell Holmes--who undoubtedly inspired the surname of Conan Doyle's detective--he renounced Catholicism, vowing, "Never will I accept anything which cannot be proved to me."
In the early eighties, Green published the first of a series of introductions to Penguin Classics editions of Conan Doyle's previously uncollected works--many of which he had helped to uncover. The essays, written in a clinical style, began garnering him attention outside the insular subculture of Sherlockians. One essay, running more than a hundred pages, was a small biography of Conan Doyle unto itself; in another, Green cast further light on the short story "The Case of the Man Who Was Wanted," which had been found in a chest more than a decade after Conan Doyle's death and was claimed by his widow and sons to be the last unpublished Holmes story. Some experts had wondered if the story was a fake and even if Conan Doyle's two sons, in search of money to sustain their lavish life styles, had forged it. Yet Green conclusively showed that the story was neither by Conan Doyle nor a forgery; instead, it was written by an architect named Arthur Whitaker, who had sent it to Conan Doyle in hopes of collaborating. Scholars described Green's essays variously as "dazzling," "unparalleled," and--the ultimate compliment--"Holmesian."

Still, Green was determined to dig deeper for his now highly anticipated biography. As the mystery writer Iain Pears has observed, Conan Doyle's hero acts in nearly the same fashion as a Freudian analyst, piecing together his clients' hidden narratives, which he alone can perceive. In a 1987 review of Conan Doyle's autobiography, "Memories and Adventures," which was published in 1924, Green noted, "It is as if Conan Doyle--whose character suggested kindliness and trust--had a fear of intimacy. When he describes his life, he omits the inner man."
To reveal this "inner man," Green examined facts that Conan Doyle rarely, if ever, spoke of himself--most notably, that his father, an epileptic and an incorrigible alcoholic, was eventually confined to an insane asylum. Yet the more Green tried to plumb his subject, the more he became aware of the holes in his knowledge of Conan Doyle. He didn't want just to sketch Conan Doyle's story with a series of anecdotes; he wanted to know everything about him. In the draft of an an early mystery story, "The Surgeon of Gaster Fall," Conan Doyle writes of a son who has locked his raving father inside a cage--but this incident was excised from the published version. Had Conan Doyle been the one to commit his father to the asylum? Was Holmes's mania for logic a reaction to his father's genuine mania? And what did Conan Doyle mean when he wrote, in his deeply personal poem "The Inner Room," that he "has thoughts he dare not say"?
Green wanted to create an immaculate biography, one in which each fact led inexorably to the next. He wanted to be both Watson and Holmes to Conan Doyle, to be his narrator and his detective. Yet he knew the words of Holmes: "Data! Data! Data! I can't make bricks without clay." And the only way to succeed, he realized, was to track down the lost archive.
"Murder," Owen Dudley Edwards, a highly regarded Conan Doyle scholar, said. "I fear that is what the preponderance of the evidence points to."

I had called him in Scotland, after Gibson informed me that Edwards was pursuing an informal investigation into Green's death. Edwards had worked with Green to stop the auction, which took place, in spite of the uproar, almost two months after Green's body was found. Edwards said of his friend, "I think he knew too much about the archive."

A few days later, I flew to Edinburgh, where Edwards promised to share with me his findings. We had arranged to meet at a hotel on the edge of the old city. It was on a hill studded with medieval castles and covered in a thin mist, not far from where Conan Doyle had studied medicine under Dr. Joseph Bell, one of the models for Sherlock Holmes. (Once, during a class, Bell held up a glass vial. "This, gentlemen, contains a most potent drug," he said. "It is extremely bitter to the taste." To the class's astonishment, he touched the amber liquid, lifted a finger to his mouth, and licked it. He then declared, "Not one of you has developed his power of perception . . . while I placed my index finger in the awful brew, it was my middle finger--aye--which somehow found its way into my mouth.")

Edwards greeted me in the hotel lobby. He is a short, pear-shaped man with wild gray sideburns and an even wilder gray beard. A history professor at the University of Edinburgh, he wore a rumpled tweed coat over a V-neck sweater, and carried a knapsack on his shoulder.
We sat down at the restaurant, and I waited as he rummaged through the books in his bag. Edwards, who has written numerous books, including "The Quest for Sherlock Holmes," an acclaimed account of Conan Doyle's early life, began pulling out copies of Green's edited collections. Green, he said, was "the world's greatest Conan Doyle expert. I have the authority to say it. Richard ultimately became the greatest of us all. That is a firm and definite statement of someone who knows."

As he spoke, he tended to pull his chin in toward his chest, so that his beard fanned out. He told me that he had met Green in 1981, while researching his book on Conan Doyle. At the time, Green was still working on his bibliography with Gibson; even so, he had shared all his data with Edwards. "That was the kind of scholar he was," he said.
To Edwards, Green's death was even more baffling than the crimes in a Holmes story. He picked up one of the Conan Doyle collections and read aloud from "A Case of Identity," in the cool, ironical voice of Holmes:

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusion most stale and unprofitable.

After Edwards closed the book, he explained that he had spoken frequently with Green about the Christie's sale. "Our lives have been dominated by the fact that Conan Doyle had five children, three of whom became his literary heirs," Edwards said. "The two boys were playboys. One of them, Denis, was, I gather, utterly selfish. The other one, Adrian, was a repulsive crook. And then there was an absolutely wonderful daughter."

Green, he said, had become so close to the daughter, Dame Jean, that he came to be known as the son she never had, even though in the past Conan Doyle's children had typically had fractious relationships with their father's biographers. In the early nineteen-forties, for example, Adrian and Denis had cooperated with Hesketh Pearson on "Conan Doyle: His Life and Art," but when the book came out and portrayed Conan Doyle as "the man in the street," a phrase Conan Doyle himself had used, Adrian rushed into print his own biography, "The True Conan Doyle," and Denis allegedly challenged Pearson to a duel. Dame Jean had subsequently taken it upon herself to guard her father's legacy against scholars who might present him in too stark a light. Yet she confided in Green, who had tried to balance his veneration of his subject with a commitment to the truth.

Edwards said that Dame Jean not only gave Green a glimpse of the treasured archive; she also asked for his help in transferring various papers to her solicitor's office. "Richard told me that he had physically moved them," Edwards said. "So his knowledge was really quite dangerous."
He claimed that Green was "the biggest figure standing in the way" of the Christie's auction, since he had seen some of the papers and could testify that Dame Jean had intended to donate them to the British Library. Soon after the sale was announced, Edwards said, he and Green had learned that Charles Foley, Sir Arthur's great-nephew, and two of Foley's cousins were behind the sale. But neither he nor Green could understand how these distant heirs had legally obtained control of the archive. "All we were clear about was that there was a scam and that, clearly, someone was robbing stuff that should go to the British Library," Edwards said. He added, "This was not a hypothesis--it was quite certain in our own minds."

Edwards also had little doubt that somebody had murdered his friend. He noted the circumstantial details--Green's mention of threats to his life, his reference to the American who was "trying to bring him down." Some observers, he said, had speculated that Green's death might have been the result of autoerotic asphyxiation, but he told me that there were no signs that Green was engaged in sexual activity at the time. He added that garroting is typically a brutal method of execution--"a method of murder which a skilled professional would use." What's more, Green had no known history of depression. Edwards pointed out that Green, on the day before he died, had made plans with another friend for a holiday in Italy the following week. Moreover, he said, if Green had killed himself, there surely would have been a suicide note; it was inconceivable that a man who kept notes on everything would not have left one.
"There are other things," Edwards continued. "He was garroted with a bootlace, yet he always wore slip-on shoes." And Edwards found meaning in seemingly insignificant details, the kind that Holmes might note--particularly, the partially empty bottle of gin by his bed. To Edwards, this was a clear sign of the presence of a stranger, since Green, an oenophile, had drunk wine at supper that evening, and would never have followed wine with gin.
"Whoever did this is still at large," Edwards said. He put a hand on my shoulder. "Please be careful. I don't want to see you garroted, like poor Richard." Before we parted, he told me one more thing--he knew who the American was.

The American, who asked that I not use his name, lives in Washington, D.C. After I tracked him down, he agreed to meet me at Timberlake's pub near Dupont Circle. I found him sitting at the bar, sipping red wine. Though he was slumped over, he looked strikingly tall, with a hawkish nose and a thinning ring of gray hair. He appeared to be in his fifties and wore bluejeans and a button-down white shirt, with a fountain pen sticking out of the front pocket, like a professor.
After pausing a moment to deduce who I was, he stood and led me to a table in the back of the room, which was filled with smoke and sounds from a jukebox. We ordered dinner, and he proceeded to tell me what Edwards had loosely sketched out: that he was a longtime member of the Baker Street Irregulars and had, for many years, helped to represent Conan Doyle's literary estate in America. It is his main job, though, that has given him a slightly menacing air--at least in the minds of Green's friends. He works for the Pentagon in a high-ranking post that deals with clandestine operations. ("One of Donald Rumsfeld's pals," as Edwards described him.)
The American said that after he received a Ph.D. in international relations, in 1970, and became an expert in the Cold War and nuclear doctrine, he was drawn into the Sherlockian games and their pursuit of immaculate logic. "I've always kept the two worlds separate," he told me at one point. "I don't think a lot of people at the Pentagon would understand my fascination with a literary character." He met Green through the Sherlockian community, he said. As members of the Baker Street Irregulars, both had been given official titles from the Holmes stories. The American was "Rodger Prescott of evil memory," after the American counterfeiter in "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs." Green was known as "The Three Gables," after the villa in "The Adventure of the Three Gables," which is ransacked by burglars in search of a scandalous biographical manuscript.

In the mid-nineteen-eighties, the American said, he and Green had collaborated on several projects. As the editor of a collection of essays on Conan Doyle, he had asked Green, whom he considered then "the single most knowledgeable living person on Conan Doyle," to write the crucial chapter on the author's 1924 memoir. "My relationship with Richard was always productive," he recalled. Then, in the early nineteen-nineties, he said, they had had a falling out--a result, he added, of a startling rupture in Green's relationship with Dame Jean.
"Richard had gotten very close to Dame Jean, and was getting all sorts of family photographs, having represented himself as a great admirer of Conan Doyle," he said. "And then she saw something in print by him and suddenly realized that he had been representing his views very differently, and that was kind of the end of it."

The American insisted that he couldn't remember what Green had written that upset her. But Edwards, and others in Holmesian circles, said that the reason nobody could recall a specific offense was that Green's essays had never been particularly inflammatory. According to R. Dixon Smith, a friend of Green's and a longtime Conan Doyle book dealer, the American played on Dame Jean's sensitivities about her father's reputation and seized upon some of Green's candid words, which had never upset her before, then "twisted" them like "a screw." Edwards said of the American, "I think he did everything he possibly could to injure Richard. He drove a wedge between Richard and Dame Jean Conan Doyle." After Dame Jean cast Green out, Edwards and others noted, the American grew closer to her. Edwards told me that Green never got over the quarrel with Dame Jean. "He used to look at me like his heart was breaking," he said.

When I pressed the American further about the incident, he said simply, "Because I was Jean's representative, I got caught in the middle of it." Soon after, he said, "the good feeling and cooperation by Green toward me ended." At Sherlockian events, he said, they continued to see each other, but Green, always reserved, would often avoid him.

Smith had told me that in Green's final months he often seemed "preoccupied" with the American. "He kept wondering, What's he gonna do next?" During the last week of his life, Green told several friends that the American was working to defeat his crusade against the auction, and he expressed fear that his rival might try to damage his scholarly reputation. On March 24th, two days before he died, Green learned that the American was in London and was planning to attend a meeting that evening of the Sherlock Holmes Society. A friend said that Green called him and exclaimed, "I don't want to see him! I don't want to go." Green backed out of the meeting at the last minute. The friend said of the American, "I think he scared Richard."
As I mentioned some of the allegations of Green's friends, the American unfolded his napkin and touched the corners of his mouth. He explained that during his visit to London he had offered counsel to Charles Foley--whom he now served as a literary representative, as he had for Dame Jean--and discussed the sale of the archive at Christie's. But the American emphasized that he had not seen or spoken to Green for more than a year. On the night that Green died, he revealed with some embarrassment, he was walking through London with his wife on a group tour of Jack the Ripper's crime scenes. He said that he had learned only recently that Green had become fixated on him before his death, and he noted that some Sherlockians blurred the line between fandom and fanaticism. "It was because of the way people felt about the character," he said. Holmes was a sort of "vampire-like creature," he said; he consumed some people.
The waiter had served our meals, and the American paused to take a bite of steak and onion rings. He then explained that Conan Doyle had felt oppressed by his creation. Though the stories had made him the highest-paid author of his day, Conan Doyle wearied of constantly "inventing problems and building up chains of inductive reason," as he once said bitterly. In the stories, Holmes himself seems overwhelmed by his task, going days without sleep, and, after solving a case, often shooting up cocaine ("a seven-percent solution") in order to spell the subsequent drain and boredom. But, for Conan Doyle, there seemed to be no similar release, and he confided to one friend that "Holmes is becoming such a burden to me that it makes my life unendurable."
The very qualities that had made Holmes invincible--"his character admits of no light or shade," as Conan Doyle put it--eventually made him intolerable. Moreover, Conan Doyle feared that the detective stories eclipsed what he called his "more serious literary work." He had spent years researching several historical novels, which, he was convinced, would earn him a place in the pantheon of writers. In 1891, after he finished "The White Company," which was set in the Middle Ages and based on tales of "gallant, pious knights," he proclaimed, "Well, I'll never beat that." The book was popular in its day, but it was soon obscured by the shadow of Holmes, as were his other novels, with their comparatively stilted, lifeless prose. After Conan Doyle completed the domestic novel "A Duet with an Occasional Chorus," in 1899, Andrew Lang, a well-known editor who had helped publish one of his previous books, summed up the sentiment of most readers: "It may be a vulgar taste, but we decidedly prefer the adventures of Dr. Watson with Sherlock Holmes."

Conan Doyle was increasingly dismayed by the great paradox of his success: the more real Holmes became in the minds of readers, the less the author seemed to exist. Finally, Conan Doyle felt that he had no choice. As the American put it, "He had to kill Sherlock Holmes." Conan Doyle knew that the death had to be spectacular. "A man like that mustn't die of a pin-prick or influenza," he told a close friend. "His end must be violent and intensely dramatic." For months, he tried to imagine the perfect murder. Then, in December, 1893, six years after he gave birth to Holmes, Conan Doyle published "The Final Problem." The story breaks from the established formula: there is no puzzle to be solved, no dazzling display of deductive genius. And this time Holmes is the one pursued. He is being chased by Professor Moriarty, "the Napoleon of crime," who is "the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city" of London. Moriarty is the first true counterpart to Holmes, a mathematician who is, as Holmes informs Watson, "a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker." Tall and ascetic-looking, he even physically resembles Holmes.

What is most striking about the story, though, is that the two great logicians have descended into illogic--they are paranoid, and consumed only with each other. At one point, Moriarty tells Holmes, "This is not danger. . . . It is inevitable destruction." Finally, the two converge on a cliff overlooking Reichenbach Falls, in Switzerland. As Watson later deduces from evidence at the scene, Holmes and Moriarty struggled by the edge of the precipice before plunging to their deaths. After finishing the story, Conan Doyle wrote in his diary, with apparent delight, "Killed Holmes."

As the American spoke of these details, he seemed stunned that Conan Doyle had gone through with such an extraordinary act. Still, he pointed out, Conan Doyle could not escape from his creation. In England, men reportedly wore black armbands in mourning. In America, clubs devoted to the cause "Let's Keep Holmes Alive" were formed. Though Conan Doyle insisted that Holmes's death was "justifiable homicide," readers denounced him as a brute and demanded that he resuscitate their hero; after all, no one had actually seen him go off the cliff. As Green wrote in a 1983 essay, "If ever a murderer was to be haunted by the man he had killed and to be forced to atone for his act, it was the creator, turned destroyer, of Sherlock Holmes." In 1901, under increasing pressure, Conan Doyle released "The Hound of the Baskervilles," about an ancient family curse, but the events in the story antedated Holmes's death. Then, two years later, Conan Doyle succumbed completely, and began writing new Holmes stories, explaining, less than convincingly, in "The Adventure of the Empty House," that Holmes had never plunged to his death but merely arranged it to look that way so he could escape from Moriarty's gang.
The American told me that even after Conan Doyle died Holmes continued to loom over his descendants. "Dame Jean thought that Sherlock Holmes was the family curse," he said. Like her father, he said, she had tried to draw attention to his other works but was constantly forced to tend to the detective's thousands of fans--many of whom sent letters addressed to Holmes, requesting his help in solving real crimes. In a 1935 essay entitled "Sherlock Holmes the God," G. K. Chesterton observed of Sherlockians, "It is getting beyond a joke. The hobby is hardening into a delusion."

Several actors who played Holmes were also haunted by him, the American said. In a 1956 autobiography, "In and Out of Character," Basil Rathbone, who played the detective in more than a dozen films, complained that because of his portrayal of Holmes his renown for other parts, including Oscar-nominated ones, was "sinking into oblivion." The public conflated him with his most famous character, which the studio and audience demanded he play again and again, until by the end he, too, lamented that he "could not kill Mr. Holmes." Another actor, Jeremy Brett, had a breakdown while playing the detective and was eventually admitted to a psychiatric ward, where he was said to have cried out, "Damn you, Holmes!"
At one point, the American showed me a thick book, which he had brought to the pub. It was part of a multivolume history that he was writing on the Baker Street Irregulars and Sherlockian scholarship. He had started the project in 1988. "I thought if I searched pretty assiduously I'd find enough material to do a single hundred-and-fifty-page volume," he said. "I've now done five volumes for more than fifteen hundred pages, and I've only gotten up to 1950." He added, "It's been a slippery slope into madness and obsession."

As he spoke of his fascination with Holmes, he recalled one of the last times he had seen Green, three years earlier, at a symposium at the University of Minnesota. Green had given a lecture on "The Hound of the Baskervilles." "It was a multimedia presentation about the origins of the novel, and it was just dazzling," the American said. He repeated the word "dazzling" several times ("It's the only word to describe it"), and as he sat up in his chair and his eyes brightened I realized that I was talking not to Green's Moriarty but to his soul mate. Then, catching himself, he reminded me that he had a full-time job and a family. "The danger is if you have nothing else in your life but Sherlock Holmes," he said.

In 1988, Richard Green made a pilgrimage to Reichenbach Falls to see where his childhood hero had nearly met his demise. Conan Doyle himself had visited the site in 1893, and Green wanted to repeat the author's journey. Standing at the edge of the falls, Green stared at the chasm below, where, as Watson noted after he called out, "My only answer was my own voice reverberating in a rolling echo from the cliffs around me."

By the mid-nineteen-nineties, Green knew that he would not have access to the Conan Doyle archive until Dame Jean died--presuming that she bequeathed the papers to the British Library. In the meantime, he continued researching his biography, which, he concluded, would require no less than three volumes: the first would cover Conan Doyle's childhood; the second,
the arc of his literary career; the third, his descent into a kind of madness.

Relying on public documents, Green outlined this last stage, which began after Conan Doyle started using his powers of observation to solve real-world mysteries. In 1906, Conan Doyle took up the case of George Edalji, a half-Parsi Indian living near Birmingham, who faced seven years of hard labor for allegedly mutilating his neighbors' cattle during the night. Conan Doyle suspected that Edalji had been tagged as a criminal merely because of his ethnicity, and he assumed the role of detective. Upon meeting his client, he noticed that the young man was holding a newspaper inches from his face.

"Aren't you astigmatic?" Conan Doyle asked.

"Yes," Edalji admitted.

Conan Doyle called in an ophthalmologist, who confirmed that Edalji's malady was so severe that he was unable to see properly even with glasses. Conan Doyle then trekked to the scene of the crime, traversing a maze of railroad tracks and hedges. "I, a strong and active man, in broad daylight, found it a hard matter to pass," he later wrote. Indeed, he contended, it would have been impossible for a nearly blind person to make the journey and then slaughter an animal in the pitch black of night. A tribunal soon concurred, and the New York Times declared, "conan doyle solves a new dreyfus case."

Conan Doyle even helped in solving a case of a serial killer, after he spotted newspaper accounts in which two women had died in the same bizarre manner: the victims were recent brides, who had "accidentally" drowned in their bathtubs. Conan Doyle informed Scotland Yard of his theory, telling the inspector, in an echo of Holmes, "No time is to be lost"; the killer, dubbed "the Bluebeard of the Bath," was subsequently caught and convicted in a sensational trial.

Around 1914, Conan Doyle tried to apply his rational powers to the most important matter of his day--the logic of launching the First World War. He was convinced that the war was not simply about entangling alliances and a dead archduke; it was a sensible way to restore the codes of honor and moral purpose that he had celebrated in his historical novels. That year, he unleashed a spate of propaganda, declaring, "Fear not, for our sword will not be broken, nor shall it ever drop from our hands." In the Holmes story "His Last Bow," which is set in 1914, the detective tells Watson that after the "storm has cleared" a "cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine."

Though Conan Doyle was too old to fight, many of his relatives heeded his call "to arms," including his son Kingsley. The glorious battle Conan Doyle envisioned, however, became a cataclysm. The products of scientific reason--machines and engineering and electronics--were transformed into agents of destruction. Conan Doyle visited the battlefield by the Somme, where tens of thousands of British soldiers died, and where he later reported seeing a soldier "drenched crimson from head to foot, with two great glazed eyes looking upwards through a mask of blood." In 1918, a chastened Conan Doyle realized that the conflict was "evidently preventable." By that time, ten million people had perished, including Kingsley, who died from battle wounds and influenza.

After the war, Conan Doyle wrote a handful of Holmes stories, yet the field of detective fiction was changing. The all-knowing detective gradually gave way to the hardboiled dick, who acted more on instinct and gin than on reason. In "The Simple Art of Murder," Raymond Chandler, while admiring Conan Doyle, dismissed the tradition of the "grim logician" and his "exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues," which now seemed like an absurdity.

Meanwhile, in his own life, Conan Doyle seemed to abandon reason altogether. As one of Green's colleagues in the Baker Street Irregulars, Daniel Stashower, relates in a 1999 book, "Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle," the creator of Holmes began to believe in ghosts. He attended seances and received messages from the dead through "the power of automatic writing," a method akin to that of the Ouija board. During one session, Conan Doyle, who had once considered the belief in life after death as "a delusion," claimed that his dead younger brother said, "It is so grand to be in touch like this."

One day, Conan Doyle heard a voice in the seance room. As he later described the scene in a letter to a friend:

I said, "Is that you, boy?" , He said in a very intense whisper and a tone all his own, "Father!" and then after a pause, "Forgive me!", I said, "There was never anything to forgive. You were the best son a man ever had." A strong hand descended on my head which was slowly pressed forward, and I felt a kiss just above my brow., "Are you happy?" I cried. , There was a pause and then very gently, "I am so happy."

The creator of Sherlock Holmes had become the St. Paul of psychics. Conan Doyle claimed to see not only dead family members but fairies as well. He championed photographs taken in 1917 by two girls that purported to show such phantasmal creatures, even though, as one of the girls later admitted, "I could see the hatpins holding up the figures. I've always marvelled that anybody ever took it seriously." Conan Doyle, however, was convinced, and even published a book called "The Coming of Fairies." He opened the Psychic Bookshop, in London, and told friends that he had received messages that the world was coming to an end. "I suppose I am Sherlock Holmes, if anybody is, and I say that the case for spiritualism is absolutely proved," he declared. In 1918, a headline in the Sunday Express asked, "is conan doyle mad?"

For the first time, Green struggled to rationalize his subject's life. In one essay, Green wrote, "It is hard to understand how a man who had stood for sound common sense and healthy attitudes could sit in darkened rooms watching for ectoplasm." Green reacted at times as if his hero had betrayed him. In one passage, he wrote angrily, "Conan Doyle was deluding himself."

"One thing Richard couldn't stand was Conan Doyle's being involved with spiritualism," Edwards said. "He thought it crazy." His friend Dixon Smith told me, "It was all Conan Doyle. He pursued him with all his mind and body." Green's house became filled with more and more objects from Conan Doyle's life: long-forgotten propaganda leaflets and speeches on spiritualism; an arcane study of the Boer War; previously unknown essays on photography. "I remember once, I discovered a copy of 'A Duet with an Occasional Chorus,' " Gibson said. "It had a great red cover on it. I showed it to Richard and he got really excited. He said, 'God, this must have been the salesman's copy.' " When Green found one of the few surviving copies of the 1887 Beeton's Christmas Annual, with "A Study in Scarlet," which was worth as much as a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, he sent a card to a friend with two words on it: "At last!"

Green also wanted to hold things that Conan Doyle himself had held: letter openers and pens and spectacles. "He would collect all day and all night, and I mean night," his brother, Scirard, told me. Green covered many of his walls with Conan Doyle's family photographs. He even had a piece of wallpaper from one of Conan Doyle's homes. " 'Obsession' is by no means too strong a word to describe what Richard had," his friend Nicholas Utechin, the editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal, said.

"It's self-perpetuating and I don't know how to stop," Green confessed to an antiques magazine in 1999.

By 2000, his house resembled the attic at Poulton Hall, only now he seemed to be living in a museum dedicated to Conan Doyle rather than to Holmes. "I have around forty thousand books," Green told the magazine. "Then, of course, there are the photographs, the pictures, the papers, and all the other ephemera. I know it sounds a lot, but, you see, the more you have, the more you feel you need."

And what he longed for most remained out of reach: the archive. After Dame Jean died, in 1997, and no papers materialized at the British Library, he became increasingly frustrated. Where he had once judiciously built his conjectures about Conan Doyle's life, he now seemed reckless. In 2002, to the shock of Doyleans around the world, Green wrote a paper claiming that he had proof that Conan Doyle had had a tryst with Jean Leckie, his delicately beautiful second wife, before his first wife, Louisa, died of tuberculosis, in 1906. Though it was well known that Conan Doyle had formed a bond with Leckie during his wife's long illness, he had always insisted, "I fight the devil and I win." And, to maintain an air of Victorian rectitude, he often brought along chaperones when he and Leckie were together. Green based his allegation on the 1901 census, which reported that on the day the survey was taken Conan Doyle was staying at the Ashdown Forest Hotel, in East Sussex. So, too, was Leckie. "Conan Doyle could not have chosen a worse weekend on which to have a private tryst," Green wrote. Yet Green failed to note one crucial fact also contained in the census report--Conan Doyle's mother was staying in the hotel with him, apparently as a chaperone. Later, Green was forced to recant, in a letter to The Sherlock Holmes Journal, saying, "I was guilty of the capital mistake of theorising without data."

Still, he continued to lash out at Conan Doyle, as Conan Doyle once had at Sherlock Holmes. Edwards recalled that, in one conversation, Green decried Conan Doyle as "unoriginal" and "a plagiarist." He confessed to another friend, "I've wasted my whole life on a second-rate writer."

"I think he was frustrated because the family wasn't coming to any agreement," Smith said.

"The archive wasn't made available, and he got angry not at the heirs but at Conan Doyle."

Last March, when Green hurried to Christie's after the auction of the papers was announced, he discovered that the archive was as rich and as abundant as he'd imagined. Among the thousands of items were fragments of the first tale that Conan Doyle wrote, at the age of six; illustrated logs from when Conan Doyle was a surgeon on a Scottish whaling ship, in the eighteen-eighties; letters from Conan Doyle's father (whose drawings in the asylum resembled the fairies that his son later seized upon as real); a brown envelope with a cross and the name of his dead son inscribed upon it; the manuscript of Conan Doyle's first novel, which was never published; a missive from Conan Doyle to his brother, which seemed to confirm that Green's hunch had been right, and that Conan Doyle had in fact begun an affair with Leckie. Jane Flower, who helped to organize the papers for Christie's, told reporters, "The whereabouts of this material was previously unknown, and it is for this reason that no modern-day biography of the author exists."

Meanwhile, back at his home, Green tried to piece together why the archive was about to slip into private hands once more. According to Green's family, he typed notes in his computer, reexamining the trail of evidence, which he thought proved that the papers belonged to the British Library. He worked late into the night, frequently going without sleep. None of it, however, seemed to add up. At one point, he typed in bold letters, "stick to the facts." After another sleepless night, he told his sister that the world seemed "Kafkaesque."

Several hours before Green died, he called his friend Utechin at home. Green had asked him to find a tape of an old BBC radio interview, which, Green recalled, quoted one of Conan Doyle's heirs saying that the archive should be given to the British Library. Utechin said that he had found the tape, but there was no such statement on the recording. Green became apoplectic, and accused his friend of conspiring against him, as if he were another Moriarty. Finally, Utechin said, "Richard, you've lost it!"

One afternoon while I was at my hotel in London, the phone rang. "I need to see you again," John Gibson said. "I'll take the next train in." Before he hung up, he added, "I have a theory."
I met him in my hotel room. He was carrying several scraps of paper, on which he had taken notes. He sat down by the window, his slender figure silhouetted in the fading light, and announced, "I think it was suicide."

He had sifted through the data, including details that I had shared with him from my own investigation. There was mounting evidence, he said, that his rationalist friend was betraying signs of irrationality in the last week of his life. There was the fact that there was no evidence of forced entry at Green's home. And there was the fact, perhaps most critically, of the wooden spoon by Green's hand.

"He had to have used it to tighten the cord" like a tourniquet, Gibson said. "If someone else had garroted him, why would he need the spoon? The killer could simply use his hands." He continued, "I think things in his life had not turned out the way he wanted. This Christie's sale simply brought everything to a head."

He glanced nervously at his notes, which he strained to see without his magnifying glass. "That's not all," he said. "I think he wanted it to look like murder."

He waited to assess my reaction, then went on, "That's why he didn't leave a note. That's why he took his voice off the answering machine. That's why he sent that message to his sister with the three phone numbers on it. That's why he spoke of the American who was after him. He must have been planning it for days, laying the foundation, giving us false clues."

I knew that, in detective fiction, the reverse scenario generally turns out to be true--a suicide is found to have been murder. As Holmes declares in "The Resident Patient," "This is no suicide. . . . It is a very deeply planned and cold-blooded murder." There is, however, one notable exception. It is, eerily enough, in one of the last Holmes mysteries, "The Problem of Thor Bridge," a story that Green once cited in an essay. A wife is found lying dead on a bridge, shot in the head at point-blank range. All the evidence points to one suspect: the governess, with whom the husband had been flirting. Yet Holmes shows that the wife had not been killed by anyone; rather, enraged by jealousy over her husband's illicit overtures to the governess, she had killed herself and framed the woman whom she blamed for her misery. Of all Conan Doyle's stories, it digs deepest into the human psyche and its criminal motivations. As the governess tells Holmes, "When I reached the bridge she was waiting for me. Never did I realize till that moment how this poor creature hated me. She was like a mad woman--indeed, I think she was a mad woman, subtly mad with the deep power of deception which insane people may have."

I wondered if Green could have been so enraged with the loss of the archive that he might have done something similar, and even tried to frame the American, whom he blamed for ruining his relationship with Dame Jean and for the sale of the archive. I wondered if he could have tried, in one last desperate attempt, to create order out of the chaos around him. I wondered if this theory, however improbable, was in fact the least "impossible."

I shared with Gibson some other clues I had uncovered: the call that Green had made to the reporter days before his death, saying that "something" might happen to him; a reference in a Holmes story to one of Moriarty's main henchmen as a "garroter by trade"; and a statement to the coroner by Green's sister, who said that the note with the three phone numbers had reminded her of "the beginning of a thriller."

After a while, Gibson looked up at me, his face ghastly white. "Don't you see?" he exclaimed. "He staged the whole thing. He created the perfect mystery."

Before I went back to America, I went to see Green's sister, Priscilla West. She lives near Oxford, in a three-story, eighteenth-century brick house with a walled garden. She had long, wavy brown hair, an attractive round face, and small oval glasses. She invited me inside with a reticent voice, saying, "Are you a drawing-room person or a kitchen person?"

I shrugged uncertainly, and she led me into the drawing room, which had antique furniture and her father's children's books on the shelves. As we sat down, I explained to her that I had been struggling to write her brother's story. The American had told me, "There is no such thing as a definitive biography," and Green seemed particularly resistant to explication.

"Richard compartmentalized his life," his sister said. "There are a lot of things we've only found out since he died." At the inquest, his family, and most of his friends, had been startled when Lawrence Keen, who was nearly half Green's age, announced that he had been Richard's lover years ago. "No one in the family knew" that Green was gay, his sister explained. "It wasn't something he ever talked about."

As West recalled other surprising fragments of Green's biography (travels to Tibet, a brief attempt at writing a novel), I tried to picture him as best I could with his glasses, his plastic bag in hand, and his wry smile. West had seen her brother's body lying on the bed, and several times she told me, "I just wish . . ." before falling silent. She handed me copies of the eulogies that Green's friends had delivered at the memorial service, which was held on May 22nd, the day Conan Doyle was born. On the back of the program from the service were several quotes from Sherlock Holmes stories:

I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain., He appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge., His career has been an extraordinary one.

After a while, she got up to pour herself a cup of tea. When she sat down again, she said that her brother had willed his collection to a library in Portsmouth, near where Conan Doyle wrote the first two Holmes stories, so that other scholars could have access to it. The collection was so large that it had taken two weeks, and required twelve truckloads, to cart it all away. It was estimated to be worth several million dollars--far more, in all likelihood, than the treasured archive. "He really did not like the idea of scholarship being put second to greed," West said. "He lived and died by this."

She then told me something about the archive which had only recently come to light, and which her brother had never learned: Dame Jean Conan Doyle, while dying of cancer, had made a last-minute deed of apportionment, splitting the archive between herself and the three heirs of her former sister-in-law, Anna Conan Doyle. What was being auctioned off, therefore, belonged to the three heirs, and not to Dame Jean, and, though some people still questioned the morality of the sale, the British Library had reached the conclusion that it was legal.
Green also could not know that after the auction, on May 19th, the most important papers ended up at the British Library. Dame Jean had not allotted those documents to the other heirs, and had willed many of them to the library; at the same time, the library had purchased much of the remaining material at the auction. As Gibson later told me, "The tragedy is that Richard could have still written his biography. He would have had everything he needed."
Two questions, however, remained unclear. How, I asked West, did an American voice wind up on her brother's answering machine?

"I'm afraid it's not that complicated," she said. The machine, she continued, was made in the United States and had a built-in recorded message; when her brother took off his personal message, a prerecorded American voice appeared.

I then asked about the phone numbers in the note. She shook her head in dismay. They added up to nothing, she said. They were merely those of two reporters her brother had spoken to, and the number of someone at Christie's.

Finally, I asked what she thought had happened to her brother. At one point, Scirard Lancelyn Green had told the London Observer that he thought murder was "entirely possible"; and, for all my attempts to build a case that transcended doubt, there were still questions. Hadn't the police told the coroner that an intruder could have locked Green's apartment door while slipping out, thus giving the illusion that his victim had died alone? Wasn't it possible that Green had known the murderer and simply let him in? And how could someone, even in a fit of madness, garrote himself with merely a shoelace and the help of a spoon?

His sister glanced away, as if trying one last time to arrange all the pieces. Then she said, "I don't think we'll ever know for sure what really happened. Unlike in detective stories, we have to live without answers."

Only Disconnect

2005-04-26T09:31:00.000+05:30

Unedited version of an interview (conducted via conference call) with V.S. Naipaul that ran in Harper's Magazine, courtesy www.akashkapur.com

Warning: not for the faint of heart

Akash Kapur (Pondicherry, India): "Can you hear me?

V. S. Naipaul (The Surrey Hotel in New York): "Yes, I can hear you. Can you hear me?"

AK: "Yes. Were you able to look at the questions? Did they fax them to you?"

VN: "Yes. Some of them we are going to skip."

AK: "OK, that's fine. Just let know..."

VN: "They're.... If a man says
'I am walking down the street,' you will say, you will say, 'why do
you say you are walking down the street?' They have quality of
obviousness. You know?

AK: Okay --

VN: You should --

AK: Okay --

VN: Yes, yes --

AK: Okay, let me know whichever --

VN: Yes, yes --

AK: Ones you want to ignore --

VN: Yes --

AK: Can we start with the first one?

VN: No. I think we can ignore all these, these early ones--yes.
Because they really shouldn't be asked, the questions -- the answers
are all contained in what you've been reading. I can't- -

AK: Mmhmm --

VN: I musn't repeat my books. There'd be no --

AK: Mmhmm --

VN: end to this kind of thing, you know --

AK: Mmhmm --

VN: I write the books five times over.

AK: Mmhmm--

VN: You must ask questions --

AK: So ah --

VN: which genuinely interest you. You know, you musn't just ask
things which you think sound nice.

AK: Mmhmm. I think that the, I mean, the first one in particular, I
thi --

VN: I don't want to deal with that, I've told you, it's already
contained in the text you've been reading --

AK: Okay --

VN: And it's up to you -- to -- to, um, to make that clear.

AK: Okay. Ah, which -- are there any of them that you would like to
start with?

VN: (Grunt. Long pause. Sigh.) I don't know. I really don't know.
The first page I think is pretty awful actually.

AK: Really?

VN: Ah, yes.

AK: How about the um, the one about the ah, I think it should be
listed as number three or four, about your knowledge, the security of
your knowledge as a writer. How often have you had that feeling?

VN: Um. I've written about it. It's contained in so many sources.
Please don't ask me to talk again about these things. That's a fact
about me. It's very well known, so don't ask me to do it again.

AK: Mmhmm --

VN: Do you see?

AK: No, I know. The -- the security of knowledge. But, but, ah,
whether you've -- you've --how often you've wondered about "the job,
the wife, the family."

VN: Don't um -- please, please don't ah -- please don't. Ah. Let's
leave that out. Let's talk about something serious.

AK: Okay.

VN: Yes.

AK: (Beat) Do you have any suggestions?

VN: (sigh) Ah -- Well, I want to know, I want to know. You see the
thing about questions is they should reveal the interviewer's
interests. You know --

AK: Mmhmm --

VN: And I don't -- I can't pick your interests out in anything. I
can't understand why you want to know anything apart from the sake of
doing an interview. You know? Which -- I don't play that kind of
game. I send people away.

AK: Mmhmm. But --

VN: They wish to waste my time. Or just get me to repeat things
they've read elsewhere and things like that. So I wish, in a way,
this was more original. I could get a true mind making a genuine
inquiry.

AK: Mmhmm. I think, um -- Would you like me to tell you what I --

(At this point the line starts to break and the connection is cut off.)

Editor2: Hello?

VN: Yes?

Editor2: Did you get disconnected?

VN: Yes, we got disconnected.

Editor2: Okay. Hang on. Let me just try -- I'll reconnect you.

(Editor2 runs down the hallway in search of Editor1 who returns to
make the second attempt.)

Attempt Two

VN: Hello?

Editor1: Hello. Okay. This is [Magazine Name] again. Are you ready to be
connected?

VN: All right. Let's see. Yes. Let's see if the questions are ah
-- have improved.

Editor1: Okay. Okay. Akash?

VN: Yes?

AK: Hello? Yes. Sorry about that disconnecting. It wasn't done on
purpose. I didn't. It --

VN: Are you there? I mean -- can you hear me?

(The line is very crackly)

AK: Yeah -- I can hear you. I'm in India. That's why --

VN: The line is a bit -- um, a bit crackly.

AK: Yeah.

VN: I think you --

AK: Well, I thought we were talking about --

VN: I think you -- The line is so bad.

(More cracks)

VN: The line is so bad. Something has to be done to make it better.

(More cracks. No Akash.)

Editor2: We are going to try to connect this line again. I'm really
sorry.

VN: You want me to put the telephone down?

Editor2: Um. Yes. We'll try one more time.

VN: Okay fine. Right. Good.

Editor2: Thank you.

VN: Right.

(Editor2, again, runs down the hallway to get Editor1. Editor1 returns to
the office and connects the line again.)

Attempt Three

VN: Yes?

AK: Um. So Picking up on --

VN: Now let me know what interests you --

AK: -- where we were --

VN: -- what truly interest you --

AK: -- particularly with the lack of inquiring minds --

VN: -- and what you'd like me to --

AK: -- in the questions. Um.

VN: Which is this?

AK: What -- what would you say to me. Um. I mean, as someone who
obviously does have an inquiring mind and who has been a unique
writer. What would you say to me? Where would I begin with looking
for an inquiring mind?

VN: Repeat it again. The, the -- repeat the -- the query again.
What would I say to you?

(No answer)

AK: Hello?

VN: Have I lost you?

AK: I think we have just been disconnected again.

VN: Yes. Now tell me. Now tell me. What was the question?

(long Pause)

Editor2: Can you hear each other?

VN: I don't know. I think there is a kind of -- a lack of --

Editor2: Akash? Hello?

VN: I think -- I can't hear him.

Editor2: I am terribly sorry about this.

VN: Yes.

Editor2: Akash? All right we will try --

(Dial tone.)

Editor2: Hello? We will try one more time. Okay.

(Running down hallway. Geting Editor1. Editor1 returns.)

Attempt Four

VN: Hello?

Editor1: Hi. Okay. Could we try this one more time?

VN: Let's try it. Let's try it one more... one more time.

AK: Yeah. We'll try one last time, I think.

Editor1: Okay. All right.

VN: Have you got -- you have the questions now, the questions that
truly interest you? Can you hear me?

(No answer.)

VN: I think he's --

Editor1: Akash?

VN: I think we've lost it.

AK: Hello?

VN: I think we've lost it.

Editor1: Akash, can you hear Naipaul?

AK: (sigh) I don't. I don't think that this is a problem
with the line to India. I think this is something weird with your
conference call -- problem.

(Someone hangs up. Silence.)

Feelings

2005-04-26T09:18:00.000+05:30

FEELINGS
by ANTHONY LANE

Here is something that we never thought to see. Something that exists beyond the bounds of logic: a scary Elijah Wood. Presumably, the actor looked around, seeking a film that would dispel the ripe aroma of Frodo Baggins, happened upon “Sin City,” and found the role of Kevin—a mute, bespectacled type who removes the heads of young women and dines upon the rest of them. Wood is ominously good at the stillness of this maniac, which only doubles the shock. It’s like discovering that Gandalf used to lure young hobbits into a shed and show them his special wand.

From The New Yorker, of 04-11-2005

Words

2005-04-26T07:23:00.000+05:30

WORDS

By Salman Rushdie

Does writing change anything? A butterfly flaps its wings in India, and we feel the breeze on our cheeks here in New York. A throat is cleared somewhere in Africa and in California there's an answering cough. Everything that happens affects something else, so to answer "yes" to the question before us is not to make a large claim. Books come into the world, and the world is not what it was before those books came into it. The same can be said of babies or diseases.

Books, since we are speaking of books, come into the world and change the lives of their authors for good or ill, and sometimes change the lives of their readers too. This change in the reader is a rare event. Mostly we read books and set them aside, or hurl them from us with great force, and pass on. Yet sometimes there is a small residue that has an effect. The reason for this is the always unexpected and unpredictable intervention of that rare and sneaky phenomenon, love. One may read and like or admire or respect a book and yet remain entirely unchanged by its contents, but love gets under one's guard and shakes things up, for such is its sneaky nature. When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. We love relatively few books in our lives, and those books become parts of the way we see our lives; we read our lives through them, and their descriptions of the inner and outer worlds become mixed up with ours — they become ours.

Love does this, hate does not. To hate a book is only to confirm to oneself what one already knows, or thinks one knows. But the power of books to inspire both love and hate is an indication of their ability to make alterations in the fabric of what is.

Writing names the world, and the power of description should not be underestimated. Literature remembers its religious origins, and some of those first stories of sky gods and sea gods not only became the source of an ocean of stories that flowed from them but also served as the foundations of the world into which they, the myths, were born. There would have been little blood sacrifice in Latin America or ancient Greece if it had not been for the gods. Iphigenia would have lived, and Clytemnestra would have had no need to murder Agamemnon, and the entire story of the House of Atreus would have been different; bad for the history of the theater, no doubt, but good in many ways for the family concerned.

Writing invented the gods and was a game the gods themselves played, and the consequences of that writing, holy writ, are still working themselves out today, which just shows that the demonstrable fictionality of fiction does nothing to lessen its power, especially if you call it the truth. But writing broke away from the gods, and in that rupture much of its power was lost. Prophecy is no longer the game, except for futurologists, but then futurology is fiction too. It can be defined as the art of being wrong about the future. For the rest of us, the proper study of mankind is Man. We have no priests; we can appeal to no ultimate arbiter, though there are critics among us who would claim such a role for themselves.

In spite of this, fiction does retain the occasional surprising ability to initiate social change. Here is the fugitive slave Eliza running from Simon Legree. Here is Wackford Squeers, savage head of Dotheboys Hall. Here is Oliver Twist asking for more. Here is a boy wizard with a lightning scar on his forehead, bringing books back into the lives of a generation that was forgetting how to read. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" changed attitudes toward slavery, and Charles Dickens' portraits of child poverty inspired legal reforms, and J.K. Rowling changed the culture of childhood, making millions of boys and girls look forward to 800-page novels, and improbably popularizing vibrating broomsticks and boarding schools. On the opening night of "Death of a Salesman," the head of Gimbel's department store rushed from the theater vowing not to fire his own aging Willy Lomans.

In this age of information overkill, literature can still bring the human news, the hearts-and-minds news. The poetry of Milosz and Herbert and Szymborska and Zagajewski has done much to create the consciousness, to say nothing of the conscience, of those great poets' time and place. The same may be said of Heaney, Brodsky, Walcott. Nuruddin Farah, so long an exile from Somalia, has carried Somalia in his heart these many years and written it into being, brought into the world's sight that Somalia to which the world might otherwise have remained blind. From China, from Japan, from Cuba, from Iran, literature brings information, the base metal of information, transmuted into the gold of art, and our knowledge of the world is forever altered by such transformational alchemy.

[Last week we honored] the memory of Susan Sontag and Arthur Miller, great writers, intellectuals and truth-tellers. The old idea of the intellectual as the one who speaks truth to power is still an idea worth holding on to. Tyrants fear the truth of books because it's a truth that's in hock to nobody; it's a single artist's unfettered vision of the world. They fear it even more because it's incomplete, because the act of reading completes it, so that the book's truth is slightly different in each reader's different inner world, and these are the true revolutions of literature, these invisible, intimate communions of strangers, these tiny revolutions inside each reader's imagination; and the enemies of the imagination, politburos, ayatollahs, all the different goon squads of gods and power, want to shut these revolutions down, and can't. Not even the author of a book can know exactly what effect his book will have, but good books do have effects, and some of these effects are powerful, and all of them, thank goodness, are impossible to predict in advance.

Literature is a loose cannon. This is a very good thing.

Salman Rushdie, the author of nine novels, including the forthcoming "Shalimar the Clown," is president of PEN American Center. He gave this speech April 18 at the PEN World Voices Conference: "The Power of the Pen: Does Writing Change Anything?"

Interview with Sir Vidia

2005-04-23T08:32:00.000+05:30

V.S. NAIPAUL

March 3, 2000

I've been taking snapshots of cultures in difficult stages, or civilizations in difficult stages. I'm doing it purely in human terms, seeing the pressures worked out in people's lives. That's what I've been doing a lot of since I began traveling, especially those Islamic books and the books about India, exploring that side of one's inheritance, because although I come from the Caribbean-- Trinidad-- I'm of Indian origin, and the Indian experience has always been interesting to me and necessary for me to explore and to come to terms with. You see, my interest begins with my community and my place of birth. My community commits me to an exploration of India and the Islamic world. My place of birth commits me to an understanding of the new world, the Spanish invasion, slavery, revolution in the new world. It also commits me to an attempt to understand Africa. So from that starting point, I have looked at the world, or tried to look at the world, and this is the venture I've been engaged in. It's lasted a long time.

The thing about the novel is that you carry only so much experience in yourself, so you quickly come to an end of the material because to write imaginatively, you do a kind of intimate processing of your own experience, if you're a serious writer. But the person who, as it were, converts experience into imaginative adventure, he can only do a limited amount of work. I did my own background. I did about people moving around the world. Then I was interested in the world. I have a great interest in the world and I had to find ways of expressing my interest in the world, so that's why I turned to doing these travel books. It didn't... they were not strictly about me traveling. They were about the people I was among. And they weren't about great characters, they were about cultures, civilizations.

From "The Misanthrope"

2005-03-10T03:40:00.000+05:30

ALCESTE: Sir, these are delicate matters; we all desire
To be told that we've the true poetic fire.
But once, to one whose name I shall not mention,
I said, regarding some verse of his invention,
That gentlemen should rigorously control
That itch to write which often afflicts the soul;
That one should curb the heady inclination
To publicize one's little avocation;
And that in showing off one's works of art
One often plays a very clownish part. ...
You're under no necessity to compose;
Why you should wish to publish, heaven knows.
There's no excuse for printing tedious rot
Unless one writes for bread, as you do not.
Resist temptation, then, I beg of you;
Conceal your pastimes from the public view.

from "The Misanthrope", by Moliere (1666)
Translated by Richard Wilbur (1965).

Cannes Bertie Speak Nice French?

2004-12-17T16:30:00.000+05:30

Cannes Bertie Speak Nice French?
By Tony Ring

You recall that young Bertie's a Magdalen man
And the idea of work left him cold.
Though the subject he studied was never revealed
I'll try now if I might be so bold.

If you re-read the words that appear in the texts
Of his French he knew more than a jot.
And you'll see from my choice of quotations below
A mot juste with sang-froid's what you got.

If the Code of the Woosters is noblesse oblige
And he'd seek to be preux chevalier,
When a lady upset him he'd be heard to sigh
Tout comprendre and c'est tout pardonner.

An amende honorable he'd be likely to give
To an aunt he'd annoyed, faute de mieux,
And to calm himself down he'd go out with ses gents,
Son chapeau et whangee de monsieur.

If the odd objet d'art became lost or perdu
And Sir Watkyn and Spode were, en masse,
On the trail in his chambre or dans son armoire
You'd hear "Voilà, it's just une impasse".

At the Drones or at home he was never alone
But from Jeeves he received most critiques,
For when Bertie proposed an idea that went wrong
He stuck firm with the same idée fixe.

You'll find all these French words in the speech he was given
Except one, which I've put in today.
But I hope that I've proved what I argued at first:
There's no doubt Bertie took a B. A.

2004-12-04T14:31:00.000+05:30

"All of us are born with a set of instinctive fears--of falling, of the dark, of lobsters, of falling on lobsters in the dark, or speaking before a Rotary Club, and of the words "Some Assembly Required."---- Dave Barry

2004-11-25T15:31:00.000+05:30

Resume

Razors pain you; Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give;
Gas smells awful; You might as well live.

-Dorothy Parker

2004-11-09T07:20:00.000+05:30

Was it all destined thus -
That this kepypad be so caressed?
What rough, aquatic beast
Trudged on land, then lost its slouch,
Then grew its thumbs opposable,
So as to molt away its days
Hunting, pecking,
Punching, jabbing
Its freakin' Blackberry?

- David Friend

2004-10-29T21:11:00.000+05:30

Countless overwrought housewives,
Minds unravelling like threads,
Try lipstick shades to tranquilize
Fears of age and general dreads.

-Dorothea Tanning

2004-10-26T09:03:00.000+05:30

Que reste-t-il de nos amours?
Que reste-t-il de ces beaux jours?
Une photo, vieille photo de ma jeunesse

Que reste-t-il des billets doux
Des mois d'avril, des rendez-vous?
Un souvenir qui me poursuit sans cesse

Bonheurs fanes, cheveux au vent
Baiser voles, reves emouvants
Que reste-t-il de tout cela? Dites-le moi

Un petit village un vieux clocher
Un paysage si bien cache
Et dans un nuage le cher visage
De mon passe

- Charles Trenet

2004-10-15T02:40:00.000+05:30

Musings on the life of a doctoral student

I am he who has adopted the Sorrows... the Serious, the Severe, the Stubborn, the Unappeased.

-Jack Kerouac

2004-10-13T00:26:00.000+05:30

The one l lama, he is a priest
The two l llama, he is a beast
And I bet you my silk pyjama
There's no such thing as a three l lllama
- Ogden Nash

Anything to avoid dwelling on Managerial Economics theory on a sleepy Tuesday afternoon.

2004-10-12T21:46:00.000+05:30

Happiness is a rainy day, a cup of coffee and an hour long phone call with a group of 15 people all smitten by the charms of P.G. Wodehouse. I mean to say, what, what?

2004-10-12T08:16:00.000+05:30

This is how you get into Columbia University. You get a call from the director of admissions, whom you greet with the words “Yyyyyyo, what’s crackin’?” The director’s name is Louise, so you call her first Louise and then, without invitation, Lou. She asks you to come for an interview. You agree, but you show up late, explaining, “I totally fucked up on the subway.” The director is wearing a low-cut summer dress. At the conclusion of the interview, you leave the building, but she hastens after you, summons you back, and invites you to her home for further discussion. She pours two glasses of wine and sits down next to you, at which point you observe, not without justification, that “I’m really digging this executiverecruitment thing.” You produce a contraceptive, which suggests that this turn of events is no surprise, and have sex on her couch. Finally, you depart, having graciously described the experience as “fucking awesome.” Sometime later, the director informs you that you have been accepted as a student at Columbia.

Now, personally, I can see nothing wrong with this procedure. Studies in recent years have begun to cast serious doubt upon the efficacy and reliability of the S.A.T.s, so any alternative set of criteria by which potential candidates can be fairly assessed is, of course, worthy of consideration. Nevertheless, I persist in wondering whether the practice of W.A.C., or wine-and-copulation, might, over the long term, run into a number of practical snags. For instance, it is just possible that some applicants might not, for whatever reason, wish to have sex on the day of their interview. Furthermore, given that opinions can differ quite sharply as to what does or does not constitute “fucking awesome” in the matter of sexual performance, it might prove necessary for the university to provide an independent referee, who can attend the performance and grade it accordingly; and referees cost money. Still, it’s gratifying to learn that Columbia is cleaving to its custom of academic innovation, and that it so generously plans to spread the word.

And we have that on the authority of the New Yorker.

A review of 'P.S.' by Anthony Lane
Issue of 2004-10-18
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/

2004-10-11T14:36:00.000+05:30

Midsummer, Tobago

Broad sun-stoned beaches.
White heat.
A green river.
A bridge,
scorched yellow palms
from the summer-sleeping house
drowsing through August.
Days I have held,
days I have lost,
days that outgrow, like daughters,
my harbouring arms.
-- Derek Walcott

2004-04-19T22:25:00.000+05:30

Sensation

Par les soirs bleus d'été, j'irai dans les sentiers,
Picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue,
Rêveur, j'en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.

Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien :
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,
Et j'irais loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la nature, heureux comme avec une femme.

mars 1870

2004-04-10T13:01:00.000+05:30

Warning

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

-- Jenny Joseph

2004-04-03T19:22:00.000+05:30

Acceptance is smug but rebellion is clicheed.

2004-03-31T10:18:00.000+05:30

Sensation

Through blue summer nights I will pass along paths,
Pricked by wheat, trampling short grass:
Dreaming, I will feel coolness underfoot,
Will let breezes bathe my bare head.

Not a word, not a thought:
Boundless love will surge through my soul,
And I will wander far away, a vagabond
In Nature - as happily as with a woman.

2004-03-30T15:24:00.000+05:30

"It seems that the taste for books grows with intelligence, a little below it but on the same stem, as every passion is accomplished by a predilection for that which surrounds its object, which has an affinity for it, which in its absence still speaks of it. So, the great writers, during those hours when they are not in direct communication with their thought, delight in the society of books. Besides, is it not chiefly for them that they have been written; do they not disclose to them a thousand beauties, which remain hidden to the masses?" (Proust; Reading in Bed)