Panorama of the Past

WHEN MY SISTER and I visited Taos, New Mexico, we did not hot air balloon over the Rio Grande River, or detour to Los Alamos of atomic bomb fame, or pay homage to DH Lawrence’s shrine at Kiowa Ranch, of which the poet WH Auden wrote in 1939, “Cars of women pilgrims go up every day to stand reverently there and wonder what it would have been like to sleep with him.” Despite our mutual obses­sion for houses, we did not visit Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch nor her home in Abiquiú, nor did we make it to the grand pink adobe-palazzo ‘Los Gallos’—hub of much 20th century bohemian activity—owned by the American heiress Mabel Dodge Sterne, who magicked a whole troupe of artists, writers and dancers to come fall in love with Taos.

But we did drive around for hours in that technicoloured scenery. All those craggy pink mountains dotted with sagebrush, bare white cottonwoods, the river—a turquoise ribbon, along whose banks clumps of willows glinted a burnished red. The landscape was overwhelming, ungraspable. Desert, mountain, riverine. Vast endless flat plains where the basin had been flooded by ocean thrice in its volcanic history, a ring of snow-capped mountains in the distance, rosy mesas that erupted out of the earth like teeth, and the deep ancient rift of the Rio Grande, where my sister and I walked along the rim one morning—miles and miles of precipice, nothing to hold us in.

It felt as though we were spooling back into the past, onto a ‘Cowboys and Indians’ film set, as though a herd of bison might come clattering over the plains kicking up a storm of dust with their hooves, and before that, a time of dinosaurs. The land was old and violent and spectacular. We felt it underfoot, walking across its surface as a tawny eagle swooped in circles ahead of us like some harbinger who has survived all these times.

Here is Lawrence, arriving in New Mexico on September 11, 1922, his 37th birthday, 10 months after Mabel Dodge first wrote, enticing him to come to Taos. “Is there a colony of rather dreadful subarty people there?” Lawrence had written, “Are there any trees? Is there any water? Stream, river, lake?” Lawrence, who wished to arrive in America from the West, detours through the overpowering scent of coconut oil in Ceylon and the wide expanses of Australia. By the time Frieda and he arrive in San Francisco, they’re almost out of cash. “I thought of stopping off at Yosemite Valley,” he writes to Mabel, “But feel—Oh damn scenery.” Even grumpy, travel-weary Lawrence had to admit that New Mexico was as close to a religious ex­perience as he had ever had, that from the moment he got there, something stood still in his soul and he “started to attend.”

It snowed when my sister and I landed in New Mexico. Does anyone who has grown up in the tropics ever quite get over the impossibility of snow? I was eight the first time I saw snow. It was April then too. We were visiting our grandmother in North Wales, and it had been a habit of ours to tumble out of the bunk beds and stare through the window at the fields outside to see what kind of a day it would be. My sister, who had read enough Enid Blyton to identify the strange powdery stuff falling from the sky, rushed out of the door into that white­ness immediately. There are pictures of us with our grandmother and the slightly drippy snowman we built. I remember, every day after, racing to the window to see what miracle the day would bring.

These days in the cabin, my sister is up early. Some vestigial part of me is still on India time, my sister is on East coast time, and the place we are at is mountain time. She has made coffee in a French Press with a tea towel wrapped around it to keep it warm, has left half a cut up apple on the chopping board and is reading a book. We seem to have experienced all four seasons in five days. Snow and rain, intense heat and glorious spring. Blossoms everywhere— wild plum and lilacs and some kind of yellow-flowering tree that drips over the sides of winding roads like blazing golden lanterns. We drive and stop, drive and stop, get out to perch on the edge of all this uncapturable beauty, hurry back to our rented cabin in time for sunset, climb into the hot tub that overlooks the sage brush through which the occasional black-tailed jackrabbit darts, and then climb into twin La-Z-Boys with giant glasses of red wine to watch a ‘bonnet film’. Cue: Jane Austen.

In the beginning we talk so much. Because I am the one who lives close to our parents, who sees them in the day to day, I relay all the small changes to my sister, so when she makes her annual visit to India, she may be prepared. Having made her life in Pittsburgh, a 20-hour plane ride away from Madras, her remembrances seem to have a protective chrysalis around them, are impervious to the erosion of ageing and ongoing. She can stretch further back, see further back, remembers how our mother would take us to Fountain Plaza to choose materials for our school wraparound skirts, how our father used to read a novel a week. Our father, who barely reads the newspaper now. I goad her to talk about these times because I want to be close to childhood, to the people we were back then.

My sister once told me that she’d found it difficult to read my first novel, The Pleasure Seekers, because I’d written so much about our childhood in Madras and she feared my words would overwrite her memories. Strange, that you can spend the first 16 years of your life with someone in the same house with the same parents and develop an entirely different set of memories. In Taos, we talked about our childhood house. The layout of each room, the skinny path from the back gate that led to the Okay Stores, where we would buy chocobars. How both of us still dream about this house that has been converted into an architect’s office. The gulmohar tree, in whose branches, we sat like sentries, watching the comings and goings of Shafee Mohammed Road.

I DON’T KNOW what it is about this landscape that seems to unearth a hankering for the past. Is it simply being with my sister, with whom I have not travelled alone with in over 25 years? So much life in between. So much build­ing and unravelling.

Or is it because I’m reading the letters of Georgia O’Keeffe to her husband Alfred Stieglitz when she comes to Taos in the summer of 1929 to stay at Mabel Dodge’s ‘Los Gallos,’ HQ for artists in the southwest. Reams and reams of missives to him in New York about how she’s having “such a time,” “such days,” in this “life-expanding” place. With each letter home you can hear the gears of transfor­mation turn—camping and riding into the sunset and watching Indian dances and painting churches and sleeping when she wants and walking across fields of alfalfa and how she feels like the rocks in the bottom of the stream outside her door. “I don’t know why this country gets me the way it does – but I just get a feeling of being drunk with it—and I like it so that I feel I will die.” And even though she keeps saying how she wishes Alfred were there to share all this shapeshifting with her, this reader thinks, no—she needed to experience this alone. The landscape was doing something to her insides. “Things go on in me that are rather difficult to tell about, a curious sort of rearranging of myself…. I seem to be hunting for some­thing of myself out there—something in myself that will give me a symbol for all this.” By the end of that summer, poor philandering Alfred is a wreck.

Once you begin to unearth the liter­ary archives, a curious web of backbit­ing, love affairs, and betrayals emerges, stirring up the past as a never-ending tail-chomping ouroboros. Each person asserting their version of how things really were. Mabel on Lawrence: “his vituperation is magnificent.” Lawrence complaining to a friend about Mabel, “I don’t choose to be anybody’s protégé.” Lawrence directly to Mabel, “Don’t be so terribly energetic…. all this poking and prying into the Indians is a form of inde­cency.” Aside from creating art and cook­ing dinner and soaking in hot springs, it seems they were maniacally writing letters to one another. Not just to their beloveds, but to everyone. (Interestingly, Alfred Stieglitz’s lover, Dorothy Norman, struck up a three-and-a-half-decade cor­respondence with Indira Gandhi after they met in New York in 1949).

These letters reveal some essential nature of our private-public selfhood, as though they were conscious they might be found by another for whom they were not intended, or shared with another on purpose. Lawrence gleefully tells Mabel that he let Frieda read her letters, and O’Keeffe sometimes read Alfred’s letters aloud to her friend Beck. Reading them in this digital age, where we see some of this private-public consciousness play out on social media platforms, it’s hard not to feel how much thinner our experiences have become. Flattened out, lacking that tangible sensual aliveness to the outside world. Instead, it is all simulacrum. Portrait mode or landscape mode? Some cheap imitation of what life is meant to be.

The person who emerges most interestingly from all these letters and memoirs is someone who left no written account of himself: Tony Lujan—Mabel’s fourth husband, a Taos Pueblo Indian. Described by at least two guests as bronze (a bronze Pharaoh and bronze equestrian statue), Tony was the one who taught Lawrence to ride a horse, and O’Keeffe to drive Mabel’s Ford Model A. Ansel Adams’s portrait of Tony vouches for his bronzy magnetic charisma, and a casual reading between the lines, between O’Keeffe’s incessant Tony this, Tony that, and Alfred petulantly writing back, “I have no Tony to teach me anything,” indi­cate that for all his smouldering restraint, Tony was a big part of the drama.

Part of the reason why Mabel felt the need to lure Lawrence to New Mexico to understand the invisible but powerful spirit that hovered over the Taos Valley, as Frances Wilson astutely puts it in her book, Burning Man, was because her Indian husband Tony wouldn’t do it for her. “Tony was nobody’s poodle.” To Mabel’s many questions, such as why Manuel changed his hair from braids to a knot, Tony’s response was “Secret.” If she found Tony leaving for the mountain in the middle of the night and asked why, he’d say, “Secret.” All this desperate need to uncover things, despite Mabel writing in her own memoir, Lorenzo in Taos, “The Indians believe that utterance is loss and that the closed and unrevealed holds power.” Inquisitive Mabel couldn’t help it. She knew there was an inherent value in what was unrevealed. Still, she wanted to decipher and hold this power.

A few weeks after returning from New Mexico I got into a spirited debate with my husband about DH Lawrence. Something to the effect of why are you still reading that antagonistic windbag. No, I wasn’t one of those women pilgrims who stood by DH’s shrine imagining what it would have been like to sleep with him, but there remains something about the combination of his crankiness and deep attention to the nodal that speaks to me. There was also the uncanny sensation of driving through the same southwestern landscape O’Keeffe so beau­tifully captured in the summer of 1929, a few months before the great stock market crash, that my sister and I were discover­ing almost a hundred years later, as global markets quivered under Trump’s trade tariffs. It was almost hopeful. To think that no matter what the cycles of history, the land’s resilience was supreme, and somehow, these words from the past helped enter the landscape now.

Behind their words though, was Tony Lujan’s silence, and the larger histori­cal context of indigenous silencing—how all this is inextricably tied to who owns the land, and what languages you’re al­lowed to speak. Kiowa writer, N Scott Momaday, wrote about how one of the most perplexing ironies of American history is the fact that the Indian has been effectively silenced by the intricacies of his own speech, by their sheer linguistic diversity. It made me think of what it means to live in Tamil Nadu, where there has been a continuous (and turbulent) relationship of language to land for thousands of years. How sometimes, as I’m driving from the hills of Kodaikanal down through the luminous paddy fields of the plains and out to the beautiful forlorn coast, I feel as though I’m inside a Kuruntokai poem, those proto eco-love poems that sprang from a shared under­standing of Tamil country by a commu­nity of Tamil poets, linking the innerness of the self to the exterior world.

IN THE INTERCONNECTED web of Native languages too, there is an environmental frame where the land is a living, speaking presence in active dialogue with the people who live on it. So much so, that the absence of tra­ditional land can be cause for emotional wounds. In Hopi and Zuni stories, there’s a restriction about when certain stories can be told: between the first frost and the first thunder of spring. I think about how there’s an embeddedness to this experience of language and landscape. Of literary traditions that centre the “we”—like Sangam and Tang poets, where a collec­tive of voices seem to swell from the land and ecologi­cal memories get passed down over generations. And traditions that centre the “I”—like the Romantics, for whom landscape is a catalyst for per­sonal transformations, and the poet goes at it alone, perhaps more comfortable standing on the outside, looking in.

Simon J Ortiz, in his introduction to Woven Stone, a poetic history and chronicle of Native resistance, writes about growing up with the Acoma lan­guage, and then, after learning English in school, feeling that he was objectify­ing his native language whenever he tried to translate it. There’s a story he relates, which his sister told him. It might well be an origin tale. There was a four-year-old boy in their clan who could not, or would not speak. The boy is taken to a grandfather-healer by his concerned sisters. Maybe the boy has nothing to say, the healer tells them, but the sisters persist. The healer talks to the boy, tells him that language is how you come to know about yourself, draws a big brass key from out of his pocket and puts it into the boy’s mouth. Ever since this unlocking, Ortiz quips, we haven’t been able to keep his mouth shut.

I’m thinking of a summer in Kodai, when my sister and our circle of friends tormented me by repeating everything I said back to me. How in frustration I’d yell, “Just shup up, okay,” and they’d par­rot back, “Just shup up, okay.” How this shrieking went on and on until I ran off in despair, usually over the garden wall, to sit in the mud with a diary, writing all my grievances down. How writing for me has always been a refusal to shut up, a kind of power. Which is why I can forgive Lawrence all his faults, all his raging against his own silencing, claim­ing he didn’t care about the censorship and trials of The Rainbow and Lady Chatter­ley’s Lover, when of course, he did. And as much as the beauty of collective voices singing across time has this granular power to sweep me off my feet, I am equally enamoured with the singu­lar voice, who can say, “Go to Taos pueblo on some brilliant snowy morning, and see the white figures on the roof: or come riding through at dusk on some windy evening… and you will feel the old, old root of human conscious­ness still reaching down to depths we know nothing of… ” The writer who was there, and dared to say how it was for them.

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