Author Amitava Kumar firmly believes that one should keep a diary. “This is the cardinal rule for artists and writers,” he says in a piece titled, ‘How to Stop Time’, from his latest—a collection of diary entries and drawings—The Yellow Book: A Traveller’s Journey.
In the introduction, he shares that the “title for anything I am writing has almost always appeared accidentally” to make a point that “art involves waiting. It requires a practice that cultivates an openness to possibility.” One such waiting—an invitation to speak on creativity—allowed Kumar to discover this book’s title. While revelling in the accidental is one thing, the act of writing is no accident: it’s anything but easy. And more so the essay form—whose “purview is partial” as author Brian Dillon writes in Essayism, yet aims at a larger commentary about life around us.
Sample the essay, titled ‘They Came Like Swallows’, where Kumar recollects being informed about the death of an uncle in 2021 in the middle of the pandemic. He writes, “I painted in order to feel less helpless. And hiding in this despair was an even greater fear: that those in power, who had organised election rallies and religious gatherings and helped spread the virus were, in the future, going to spin this story of loss into a victory song.” As the author would know, despite not being in India, what he feared would materialise soon. Each of the dead bodies he had heard of being disposed in the Ganges shall be exhumed to cast votes in the upcoming polls.
For a book of its size, Yellow Book isn’t easy to sift through because of multiple reasons. First, it is peppered with evocative drawings—the microworlds he creates, making one pause every now and then to admire their beauty. It’s for nothing that a quote by English painter David Hockney is the epigraph of this book: “What does the world look like?
I don’t think it looks like photographs. You have to find out for yourself, you have to draw it.”
Second is Kumar’s distinct achievement as a meticulous anthologist of fellow travellers and writers to attempt a meditation on the common human condition. His chronicling of the everyday reminds one of the genre-defying Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me by American writer Bill Hayes. His lover, neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks used to make copious notes, and after his death, Hayes curates a select few in the book. Here’s one: “Are you conscious of your thoughts before language embodies them?” Perhaps Kumar’s recollections too are directed towards understanding this or, more so, “how is art to respond to politics?”.
What else is the job of an artist than to investigate this for themselves first, and offer it as a reward to others? And that’s precisely what Kumar does; he reimagines a world in its entirety and tries to locate one’s place in it.
A failure to do the latter is to grieve what’s lost—a land, a home, a country, a father.
Kumar is shocked to find “white beard” on his comatose father, and of his newfound inclination towards right-wing politics. And then, he loses him. It’s powerful—both the confession and making sense of loss, metastasising into a “portal”, which Arundhati Roy had labelled “pandemic” in an essay on totalitarianism and an artist’s duty in such a time. Yellow Book, thus, becomes a multidirectional time-travelling tunnel. As you turn the pages, you become part of Kumar’s journey, traversing from the painful blue (his previous was The Blue Book) to the yellow, spring-like, an epitome of grace and all things human and real.
The Yellow Book: A Traveller’s Diary
By: Amitava Kumar
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 183
Price: Rs 699