Fragments of exhilaration

Fragments Against My Ruin: A Life 

Author: Farrukh Dhondy

Publisher: Context

Pages: 312

Price: Rs 699

In retrospect, the title of Farrukh Dhondy’s memoir Fragments Against My Ruin: A Life left me confounded. It is at odds with the substance of the book — a narrative of vivid, often exuberant recollections that moves swiftly, unencumbered by sentimental ramblings or digressions. The phrase “Fragments Against My Ruin” is a variation of a line that appears towards the end of T S Eliot’s 1922 poem, The Waste Land: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Cracked images of Europe traumatised by the First World War lie scattered across Eliot’s poem. 

Mr Dhondy’s memoir, however, isn’t about gathering the shards of a life jolted by dislocations. And it certainly isn’t about ruin.

But I will come to the seemingly incongruous title later. For now, Mr Dhondy’s narrative demands attention. He tells of his father, Lieutenant Colonel Jamshed Dhondy’s transfer to the Military Staff College in Quetta, and of a house in the cantonment there. A house with a garden and a chilli tree, which the family must leave in 1947, when the subcontinent is divided into India and Pakistan. Mr Dhondy is three years old and is spared the memory of crossing the border into India, in a crowded but guarded train. But his mother, Shireen Anita, “…for the rest of her life, would occasionally recall the horror, the sights and sounds of slaughter…” 

Childhood is an effective anaesthetic, and this dislocation — a seizure brought about by history — is but a haze in the memoir. There are other memories, though, more palpable, less ambiguous, almost audible in their retelling. Like attending The Bishop’s School in Pune (Mr Dhondy’s Poona), and discovering Thomas Hardy and Marie Corelli on the shelves of the Albert Edward Institute on East Street. He recalls holidays in Kashmir, where he attempts to make cherry wine, and in Kanpur, where his sister Zareen plays a record of the gloomy ballad Tom Dooley with exasperating persistence on the turntable. In Bombay, where he enrols for a course in chemical technology, he reads Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet on the wooden bench of a tram. 

Fragments Against My Ruin has tableaux of fortuitous encounters, new friendships, and the early stirrings of political ideologies that will influence his work as a writer. The young man who arrives at Pembroke College in Cambridge, England, in ill-fitting trousers, becomes aware of the British class system. “At Pembroke, this was visible in the personalities, accents, preoccupations and friendship patterns of my fellow undergraduates. Some were ‘toffs’ from the top public schools — scholars and intellectuals all, no doubt — and some were grammar school lads from working-class families and whose fathers earned their living as fishermen and factory workers.” He becomes friends with a working-class London Irish undergraduate, Paul Danaher, and finds himself drawn towards the clamour of socialism. Later, he and his partner Mala Sen join the Leicester Indian Workers’ Association, and subsequently, the British Black Panther Movement. 

Mr Dhondy’s activism — pamphleteering, organising pickets and strikes, writing pieces commissioned by Darcus Howe for Race Today magazine in the 1970s — provides smouldering material for his short stories and television dramas. His years at the commissioning editor for Channel 4 television, from 1984 to 1997, are also stoked by his political idealism. These are the years of power and influence, of a heady multiculturalism that leads to the setting up of an apprenticeship scheme for people of ethnic origin, of dining with Oprah Winfrey and arriving with Mira Nair at the Oscars, drunk and stoned. These are the years of provoking Cat Stevens into shouting, “Kill him!”, and of meeting Charles Sobhraj in his office. Mr Dhondy, the quintessential raconteur, provides anecdotes that are quirky, and sometimes incredulous, but never nostalgic. To him, looking back is an act of recollecting with lucidity, and Mr Dhondy’s narrative voice does not quaver with emotionality. 

There are vignettes that depict tenderness, like the blue air-mail letters he writes to Mala Sen from Cambridge. There are moments of deep and abiding friendship, like gifting a cat, picked from an animal shelter, to V S Naipaul. But these aren’t the tattered remains of memory. In fact, Fragments Against My Ruin is anything but fractured. The memoir tells of a life, whole and somewhat unscathed by the whims of fortune. It tells of a life in which talent meets exhilarating opportunities. Which brings me back to the perplexities caused by the title of the book. What fragments? Whose ruin? 

Mr Dhondy is hardly like the shell-shocked poet of The Waste Land, whose composition of multiple, shifting voices and experimental syntax reflects a collective vulnerability. But Fragments Against My Ruin does hint at mortality. Buried in the afterword is the inevitability of decline. Mr Dhondy mentions those friends who have passed away, and then admits, “I guess we are all on the runway, and such a flight holds no terror for me.” Perhaps that is what the title means: Death will come, but before that, we must gather the people and places that have made our lives grand.