At best, a short story can only approach perfection, never attain it. A novella has to be perfect. A novel has to be a sprawling mess. I am thinking of these things as I walk around my neighborhood in Bombay. The streets are wet from the first monsoon showers, which abated only half an hour back. Growling autorickshaws find their way through puddles, sometimes splashing water, and I hop and skip to avoid being at the receiving end. But this is a futile exercise, so I tell myself to just walk, unmindful of how dirty I get. I am walking because…because after twenty months of separation she has invited me to visit her. In Interlaken. And so I am thinking of Interlaken as well. I resolve to only write novellas. On the street I see seven kids, all around twelve or thirteen years of age, all dressed in spotless white pyjamas. But then I notice that these are not pyjamas. The kids are returning from an evening judo class. They all have yellow silk belts around their waists. I don’t know why but I think of an elite squad of pre-teen assassins, out to execute the enemies of the state. Executing through a judo kick delivered right in the middle of the chest. Then I think of Interlaken. In-ter-la-ken. It sounds like a resort town preferred by high ranking German army officers during the Second World War. German army officers and SS officials and officers of the dreaded Einsatzgruppen. I imagine Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt sitting in a resort in Interlaken, sitting by the window in his second or third floor room, a glass of cognac in one hand and a thick cigar in the other. It is perhaps that point in History when he is thinking of the humiliation he has suffered in the eyes of Hitler (von Rundstedt never thinks of Hitler as Fuhrer, not when he is talking to himself) after the retreat of the divisions under his command in Ukraine. After the debacle, Hitler could do nothing but force von Rundstedt to take a leave, to mull retirement even, but von Rundtedt knows that the bastard will need him again soon. And so here he is, an old general in a resort in Interlaken, with nothing to chew on except his intense wish of surviving the war. Outside the window lie ski plains where skiers—all vacationing members of one or the other pillar of the Third Reich—indulge in their many manoeuvres, like varicoloured flies buzzing over a large white cake. Survival depends on how diligently he can walk the line of neutrality, just as the Swiss do. He should not participate in, or even leave any evidence of being aware of, the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in countries that have fallen to the Reich. At the same time, he should not participate in the subversive plots brewing in Berlin. The plotters have reached out to him on multiple occasions, only to receive a terse refusal each time. But it is not impossible to conceive that rascal Staffenberg having found some support from the others. From Manstein maybe. Or from Guderian. Or from the brash Model. Or even Rommel. What if Hitler is assassinated? It is unlikely that anyone will blame him for either cooperation or non-cooperation. The assassins will have other things to worry about. Whatever the turn of events, it is certain that the best course for him is to cultivate an image of being the steely soldier who executes his orders and fulfils his duties. Hitler cannot prosecute him for defeat in Ukraine or for oncoming defeats elsewhere, for it is not von Rundtedt’s actions but Hitler’s over-ambitious plans that bring defeat. The Allies, if they win, cannot blame him for being a dutiful soldier. Neither can those who plot to kill Hitler, if they were to succeed against the odds. Thinking of such scenarios, the general takes a large puff of the cigar, and his mind drifts slowly to thoughts of his wife, who will join him in Interlaken in two days, and my vision of him dissolves in the smoke that he exhales, or probably in the exhaust of the autorickshaw in front of me, and I, walking as I am on a busy street in a Bombay bedazzled by the season’s first rain, am compelled to leave behind von Rundstedt by the window of that resort in Interlaken. In India the Right has an absolute majority now. And for folks like me, closet Leftists who nevertheless spend five or six days a week serving liberal capitalism, lunch time conversations at work have become unbearably painful. The general hubris, and the alarming ease with which the cult of the rich has come to be celebrated, fills me with disgust. To deflect the political talk I sometimes take to invoking conversations about personal matters. With colleagues who are somewhat closer to me, I talk of her. I tell them tall tales from our togetherness. Of our many vacations in the Himalayas. I tell them of the beauty of trudging a rhododendron forest, of finding a way through the knotty stems of those trees, till all of a sudden the edge of the forest is reached and a majestic meadow or a majestic mountain or a majestic valley unveils itself before the eyes. None of my colleagues have traveled as much and as adventurously as I used to do with her, which I find something to be proud of, but as I tell them these stories I also realize that I am not that person anymore, that since the day she left me twenty months ago I have only traveled once, to Pattaya in Thailand, that too as a sex tourist. Of course I have not told my colleagues about my solitary trip in Pattaya. But I have written a novella inspired from my experiences in that godforsaken place, a novella that I find myself chopping and changing again and again in the desire to make it perfect. Three days back, on her birthday, I sent her an email with the latest version of that manuscript as a gift. It was in the reply to this birthday email that she invited me to visit her in Interlaken, where she will begin a new life in September. She told me she was happy because it will let her ski every other day. She also told me that she was currently reading Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, and that she would begin reading my novella after that. In my reply I congratulated her on getting the job but abstained from answering if I would visit her in Interlaken. I also thought of asking her if Grossman, in his epic book which was—as far as I knew—about the persecution of Jews in Ukraine and Russia after the initial victories of the Germans, I thought of asking her if Grossman had made any mention of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, a figure that I have come to be quite mystified by. If we were together I would have asked this question without giving it a thought, and then we would have taken on independent studies about the lives of the key generals of the Third Reich, just for fun, and for a month or so we would have told each other stories of these generals before going to bed and making love. This would have continued till I took to some other historical fancy, about the gradual but necessary adoption of potatoes as a staple dietary item in pre-revolution France, or about how the losses in the Crusades might have eventually led Europe to the Renaissance, or about the life of Salvador Allende, or something like that. I did not ask her about von Rundstedt in my reply, for that would have looked less like a question and more like a reference to old days. I instead asked her to treat herself to a glass of wine in my name, and promised that I would do the same. It has been three days since her birthday and I haven’t had that glass of wine yet. Maybe I will have it tonight. I realize that I have walked quite far. There is thunder; it is going to rain again. No matter, I tell myself. I will keep on walking. I will keep on walking till my walking becomes a short story. There can be no rules in writing. A short story can be a sprawling mess too. I imagine making love with her on her cozy bed in Interlaken, a grey October light drifting in from the windows. We are making love after having seen a beautiful Chinese movie that I downloaded in India and took to her in Switzerland. Will it be raining like it is now? I am distracted by a street dog following me, who moans miserably and makes me want to kick it in the ribs. Then the dog gives up, just like that. I think of the Chinese movie Still Life, by the acclaimed director Jia Zhangke. In that movie, two lovers (from different love stories) arrive in a town that is about to be submerged because of the construction of a huge dam nearby. They are both looking for their partners. As the rain intensifies I think of the still frames of that movie, of its minimal dialogues and slow action, and I wonder if my time in Interlaken should mimic this Chinese movie’s way of understatement. Two lovers looking for their loves, I think, walking on, finding myself on a road that I can’t quite remember turning to. Perhaps I am looking for a reason to not go to Interlaken. Perhaps I am looking for a reason to go to Interlaken. I am on a broad road which could be a highway. It is a highway. It is raining on the highway and an autorickshaw speeds by me. Shrouded in the rain, the auto is like the head of an arrow of misery shot from the bow of abandonment. I think of von Rundstedt again and I feel like crying. He did survive the war, and he did survive the initial burst of anger from the Allies. He was required to attend the Nuremberg trials only as a witness. But they got him eventually, for a crime against humanity that he overlooked if not abetted. Like the treatment of POWs in his areas during the invasion of USSR, which was very poor when contrasted with Rommel’s North Africa, where greater trouble with food and other supplies must have been experienced. von Rundstedt had to serve prison for some years, I don’t remember how many. After that he died of a congested heart caused by the oedemas he had developed in his lungs from excessive smoking. I leave the highway and walk into a smaller road. I am as wet as I can be and I am craving a cigarette. In the sixteen days I spend in Interlaken I will write a masterpiece that will stand the test of time, a masterpiece about love, about the miseries of love in our century. It is for this that I will go to Interlaken. We will watch Chinese movies together, and then we will probably make love not out of love but out of nostalgia, and after we have spent ourselves we will talk about generals and war criminals, of China and global warming, of the unethicality of making foie gras, et cetera. And I will capture all that in my Interlaken novella, which I will write in the nights, while she sleeps peacefully beside me. A Pattaya novella followed by an Interlaken novella, that’s a plan. But will she retract her invitation after she reads the Pattaya one? I thought then. Will she identify the writer with the protagonist and know the monsters that the two have already become. As I walk on, pensive or maybe distraught, the rain lessens gradually and gradually comes to a stop. I am now scared, not only because the roads are empty. I regret having sent her my Pattaya novella. But I should go to Interlaken even if she cancels the invitation. I should find her there and plead my case. My case of what? My case of immortalizing her, maybe. “Don’t judge me, for it is I who has immortalized you,” I should say. “Love me, because I can write about it,” I should add. I force myself to think of von Rundstedt again. He died a few months after his beloved wife’s death, a wife to whom he wrote letters every day, whether from the battle in Donetsk or from the repose in Interlaken. My walk is a truly global short story, I think stupidly. The little lane that I find myself on now is the lane in which our house of togetherness used to be. I bring myself beneath the building on whose second floor is the apartment where I and my love don’t live anymore. I am thirteen kilometers away from where I live alone these days. I have walked some unlucky kilometers and I am beginning to feel cold. Is this how cold Interlaken will be in October? Is it true that most novellas begin as short stories?
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