In search of Umberto Eco's shrunk, empty spaces

The high school I attended was not particularly good or uniquely bad. Teachers knew their subjects, but the lectures weren’t captivating. Classrooms, though spacious and airy, were unpainted and grey. The playground was huge, but all brown with sand, without shade or grass. There was a library sans literature. You could study, but nothing other than the course. Back in the hostel, hawkish hostel-wardens would confiscate books that didn’t have exercises. It was all very irritatingly uninteresting.

I was no bright student either: hopeless with Maths and Physics, passable in Chemistry and Computers. English was the only lecture I ever wished to attend. Things made sense in that hour.

In 2007, as I entered class 12, the school hired a new English teacher, Santosh Kotiyal. A bespectacled, upstanding figure with salt and pepper hair and a lampshade moustache. He wasn’t the type of English teacher to tell you that the blue colour of the wall in a story reflected the author’s depression. No. His diction had a kind of gravity that absorbed attention. As the months wore on, and I lurched towards the inevitable crash in the mythically important board exams, the subject became my refuge. I took note of the umlaut, and, with ready childish incompetence, dismissed vector notations as funny caps for italicised letters.

I learnt by heart everything Mr Kotiyal taught in the class. Well, almost everything. For some reason, a chapter in which Umberto Eco talked to Mukund Padmanabhan about his book, The Name of the Rose, remained inaccessible to me.

Every time the loops of the course brought us to that chapter called “The Interview”, my attention dissipated. Because sometimes you have keep your head down in deference to the teacher, the escape could only be found in other pages of the slim textbook, Flamingo.

“Going Places”, the last chapter of the prose section, was a story about adolescent fantasies and hero worship. The character of Sophie is that of a dreamer who talks about becoming an actor or, more preferably, a fashion designer like Mary Quant. Jensie, her friend, is a realist who tries to keep her head straight; reluctantly, she also tries to talk adult sense to Sophie. And when Mr Kotiyal read out loud, “[listening to Sophie talk about her dreams and] knowing they were both earmarked for the biscuit factory, Jensie became melancholy”, it would actually make you sad. I could imagine the misery of Jensie, aware so early of the pains of wishful thinking.

My eyes drifted away from the text as he read. I remember looking out of the crisscrossed fence of the large window at the back of the classroom (there was no glass and the dust came right through to settle in the spine of books). It was winter, and the afternoon sun scoured the open field. It was not a lush view like the green grounds of St Xavier’s in Jaipur — a school where I’d rather be, if only I had better grades, or my family more money. But I did not and my family did not, and that was that.

Here, in Jhunjhunu, there wasn’t really much to stare at, except for the canteen and its empty, uncomfortable chairs, where the owner sat alone counting cash, in his blue half-sweater that he never changed. As Sophie and Jensie walked back from the biscuit factory, I wondered if I was also earmarked, like them, to a place I so desperately wished to evade. Maybe I won’t make it to the boulevard, like the one I saw in a corrupting wallpaper on cousin's desktop, with white lines in the middle and yellow on either side, and walk on it as the dusk bled red.

But, of course, it wouldn’t last.

Soon, I would snap back into the classroom, raising my hand to answer what the word “melancholy” meant. He always asked for the meaning of words foreign to the students of a town like Jhunjhunu, and I took a certain pleasure in answering. It happened with such repetition that, I think, he would have come to expect it over time. Maybe it was just as joyful for him as it was for me: a reward, an assurance.

At least someone, he must have thought, is listening. I would scan the part of the chapter that he was to read the next day and look for the meaning of such words in the dictionary. Part of it, admittedly, was to look impressive. The real drive, however, which would lead to manually flipping through a bulky Oxford, was to not disappoint him. Mixed with the fascination, I was beginning to nurture with the language. The driving set of emotions are always unalloyed; it gathers rust while coming to the surface.

Despite all of Mr Kotiyal’s qualities as a teacher, “The Interview” was a chapter that I couldn’t stand. I just didn’t get the point of it. There wasn’t anything exciting like the thrilling escape of a kleptomaniac (I had to refer to Oxford there) from the prison in “Evans Tries an O Level” or ticklish observations of a writer while Communism was being negated from the literary cirques around the world in Asokmitran’s “Poets and Pancakes”.

Nor did it offer something relatable like the characters in “Going Places”. Yet there it was, for me to read, learn and revise. I read, learnt and revised; but cringed every time Mr. Kotiyal brought it up.

This chapter was an excerpt from an interview published in The Hindu. Padmanabhan asks Eco sharp, yet conversational, questions and Eco replies with all honesty. It makes for a nice read now, as I can look at the progression of the questions through the interview, how well it is edited to preserve the manner of the interviewee’s speaking, how casually it can be absorbed by the reader, and other things that I have recently gained an understanding and appreciation for. But back in school, at the point where Eco asserts that he does most of the thinking about his books in “the empty spaces”, it was a concept so alien to me — for I was used to watching entire afternoons drain themselves out of my hostel room window — that I found it offensive.

“We have a lot of empty spaces in our lives. I call them interstices. Say you are coming over to my place. You are in an elevator and while you are coming up, I am waiting for you. This is an interstice, an empty space. I work in empty spaces.”

In a 2013 issue of The Caravan, Raja Sen wrote about Byomkesh Bakshi. He opens with a rehearsal on the sets of Rituparno Ghosh’s film about the same. Ghosh gets infuriated when the actors don’t take enough pauses in between the lines of their dialogue. “Speak slowly!” he cries, “It's 1940, they don’t have anything else to do.” Sen puts across the earnestness of the director powerfully. You can understand how important it is for Ghosh to mark the difference of time to be depicted in the way we talk.

So much can be seen in the way we talk. Mark Gatiss’ adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, set in contemporary London, fittingly illustrates how far we have come from Ghosh’s idea of the consulting detective. “I prefer to text,” Benedict Cumberbatch says — very fast — in the first episode.

(Interestingly, Gatiss does not zoom in on the phone’s screen to tell you what is going on. The text appears on a wall, literally, in Watson’s apartment. The same technique was later used by David Fincher in House of Cards. It is now a thing.)

The new Sherlock speaks fast, prefers to text and is socially awkward. He conforms to the oft-cited principle of modern society — the quantification of knowledge. The brain, he says, is like a hard-drive. But among the many things that appear obvious to Gatiss’ protagonist, the pointlessness of leisure is, perhaps, the only one he doesn’t articulate. Creators of the show cannot be blamed for pulling tricks here; this is just how we are now.

What Eco called the empty spaces have shrunk considerably, and probably, as a result, have become more charming, inviting, pleasant. Alternatively, I just opened up to them. Either way, five years later, I understand Eco; or at least what he said there. How parallel interests can be squeezed in the middle of other, more consuming pursuits.

On a recent Friday, as I apprehensively waited with coffee, in front of a desktop screen, for the editor’s notes on pages-to-be-published, I found, for the first time, Dr Seuss’s Oh! The Places You’ll Go. I read it again and again. Maybe four times. When the hypnosis of the verse watered down, something started to unravel.

Beneath the constant sense of anxiety, there lies a space. A space to find things and be intrigued, enamoured by them. When I first read Rudyard Kipling’s If as a child, I wrote it down on a piece of paper and carried it around like an amulet for years. Dr Seuss’ irrefutably optimistic monologue to kids came to me in my twenties. On an outgrown day of exhaustive work. In an interstice of time. There are jokes to be dug out of that juxtaposition, but timing doesn't matter much to me right now.

It is too late indeed, but I think Mr Kotiyal would be happy with the effort.