Hiding behind a name

On local trains in Bombay where I lived, I?d spend time speculating on strangers I travelled in close contact with.

Hidden Histories
(Anthology)
Granta 85
Rs 395

HT Image

I’ve always been fascinated by other people’s lives. On local trains in Bombay where I lived, I’d spend the great commute speculating on the strangers I travelled in such close contact with. The millions of people who rush in and out of Churchgate everyday — what worlds do they inhabit? What is going on in their lives?

Now that I no longer commute by local train, I find I need books about personalities to keep me happy. Which is why I absolutely loved Granta’s latest edition: Hidden Histories.

With a mix of real life accounts, fiction and a photo essay on the private life of a priest, Hidden Histories had me engrossed. In particular, Brian Cathcart’s ‘The Lives of Brian’ grabbed me by the throat. In 2002, the writer did a Google search on his name and came up with a news item about a street busker named Brian Cathcart, burned alive by a drunken criminal. Cathcart I had heard of Cathcart II before, a student activist whose name had popped up in the papers when Cathcart I was still in school, and the death of his namesake shook him. “For years I had assumed without realizing it that he was out there somewhere, being Brian Cathcart just like me, and I was happy to think he had once done something unusual, principled and brave. Now he had been burned to death.”

So Cathcart I decided to investigate Cathcart II’s life, and came up with some astounding similarities in background, as well as a world of differences. Chief among which was the fact that Cathcart II had died a violent death, while Cathcart the writer was alive to write about it.

It took me a while to get over this story, but I followed it with J Robert Lennon’s ‘Eight Pieces for the Left Hand’ — short, sharp pieces that invert convention and give you a glimpse of the truth behind the things people say. They made me laugh — the tale of the merger of two schools that once were violent rivals, forcing the now fellow students to look for an enemy in common was hysterical — but they also made me think about the inanities I indulge in in the name of civilisation.

You could get lost in Hidden Histories — I did. Imagine spending 15 years of your life writing letters and novels in someone else’s name, as translator and ghostwriter Jennie Erdal reveals she did in ‘Tiger’s Ghost’. How could Jennie keep Jennie out of what she wrote? And what made wannabe hero Geoffrey Spicer-Simson decide against fulfilling his mission when he was sent to Lake Tanganyika to fight a now-forgotten battle in World War I? Though writer Giles Foden tried to find out in ‘White Men’s Boats’, he couldn’t quite understand it either.

There’s more, lots more — an extract from Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s new book, for instance, and an investigation into psychosurgery. But there’s no point me waffling on about them — read this book.