A patient's choice
Readings from a sick bed

During a recent intermission of lying in bed and getting my bones mended, I spent my days and nights reading. Though it may not have kept ennui away, it did help the passage of time.

Bookish affair

I began with the sequel of Thomas Harris's The Silence Of The Lambs. For those who may not have read the original or seen the movie, it has Dr. Hannibal Lectre (Hannibal, the Cannibal) incarcerated deep in a maximum security cell of a lunatic asylum, wearing a dog's muzzle on his face, to prevent him from biting off large chunks from the faces of fellow human beings.

Though eventually he succeeds and escapes after biting through the throat, lower jowls and cheeks of a guard. The sequel, Hannibal, finds the doctor in Florence, the world's greatest living museum, a city of classical pedigree. This part reads like Lord Byron on a discovery of Renaissance Italy, thus clothing the book in Gothic horror. Meanwhile, out in the green pastureland of Richmond county, the sadistic Mason Verger plots fiction's most sadistic revenge possible. He has reason to, he lives on life supports, as a skeleton, having pared off skin and flesh from face and body, these being consumed by Verger's pet dogs, as they fell to the floor.

His great thrill is making little children cry, then an assistant catching their tears in fine gauze and squeezing them into a glass for him to drink. His revenge is Sardinian pigs, the largest, strongest grunters in the world, kept hungry for three days, then let out to feed, chew and digest Dr. Lecter's legs. That's the first evening, then he is kept alive through the night with anti-biotics and saline, for the rest of him to be fed the next day. A large mirror is fixed above the body so that the doctor can see himself being fed, the meat first cleaned off the bones, then the bones being chewed.

Perhaps, it was a wrong book to read while lying in bed with broken bones, but I suppose there is a little bit of Hannibal, the Cannibal in all of us. The critics have referred to its sly erudition and sheer exquisite writing, taking it to sublime levels of gothic grandeur. The orthopaedic who visited me, seeing the book on the bed said he had enjoyed the sequel more than the original.

I also read my friend Bunny Reuben's Savage Trio. He had invited me for the release of the book at Crosswords, by that great survivor, Dev Anand. Unfortunately, I could not move from the left side of my bed to the right, so he autographed a copy and sent to me to read.

Bunny Reuben has always surprised me. He is a large, blunt-faced man, in white shoes, the kind favoured by movie stars of another era, a bit of a huckster, perhaps. He has been a film publicist, handled all the films of Raj Kapoor, B.R. Chopra, Mehboob Khan, wrote their biographies. In the course of his work, he has taken me on location shoots to Mussoorie, Goa, etc.

But he is a man of many parts, he is a painter and a writer, and his present book is certainly the work of a polished and accomplished author. They are basically three long-short stories, located in rural India, and about young village women, their figures sculpted into elegant silhouettes from countless trips to the village wells, balancing rows of pots on their heads.

The insensitive young men they find themselves entangled with come from the cities, dropped by passing trains with haunting whistles. They are slight stories, mood pieces, covering a few days, before the men return to their cities, leaving loneliness and destruction behind them, and in one case death. But the theme always is that the woman emerges as the stronger character, almost protective towards her man. Shades of Mother India, but considerably more subtle. After all, how many decades have passed since that chestnut was released? I would have never thought that men who wear white shoes could write such sensitive pieces.

Mr. Reuben is both a story-teller and an essayist, they are reminiscent of the short stories of Somerset Maugham, located in rubber plantations of Malaya (the stories, collected in three large volumes, are unmatchable in English or any other literature).

However, most of my convalesecense was spent reading The New Yorker, the world's most sophisticated magazine and the only example of how a purely city magazine can embrace the world, both in readership and content, without losing its original New York flavour.

I particularly appreciated a double issue it brought out during the Olympic Games and its cover story on Tiger Woods. If Don Bradman and Muhammad Ali were the sports icons of the 20th century, Tiger Woods is of the 21st century. Mark my words, though neither you nor I will be there for the final judgement. In a sport in which good players seldom peak before their thirties, and often remain competitive at the highest level well into their forties, Woods is off to a mind-boggling start.

Most recently, he won the British Open with a record breaking score of nineteen under par. After that blowout, Ernie Els, a terrific young South African player and the winner of two United States Opens, said with a resigned smile: "We'll have to go to the drawing-board again, and maybe make the holes bigger for us and a little smaller for him.

"Time to write"

There is another story. For many years, Golf Digest has published detailed photographic sequences that anatomise the swing of the game's best players. It is like digital photography, where a swing is broken up into hundreds of frames. A special high-speed camera called Hulcher is used, which was originally developed to take stop-action pictures of missiles. The camera shoots hundreds of high quality images at a rate of sixty-five frames a second - fast enough to break a golf swing into its constituent parts.

When Woods performed for the Hulcher, the camera recorded fifteen driver swings from five different angles. However, when the prints were made, the editors found there was not a single frame that captures Woods's swing at the approximate moment when his club head came into contact with the ball, a problem they had never encountered before. It was worked out that between one Hulcher frame and the next, a matter of split fractions of seconds, Woods's driver travelled through roughly 200 degrees of arc, which means that the ball sitting unthreatened on the tee in one frame would be long gone in the next. I have the article with me and I will be happy to provide copies of it to keen local golfers.

As for myself, my reading interlude has ended. I am physically mobile once again; now is the time to write, not read.