Night at the museum

La Rochelle's Lantern Tower

International Museum Day is on Sunday. One of the great things about Museum Day, especially in Europe, is the European Night of Museums. There’s more about it below. So if museums are your thing and you’re in Europe this weekend, check out a museum or two. The French site has a database of all the institutions that are participating this year, from 30-plus countries.

A version of this is in this month’s issue of National Geographic Traveller India.

On a cold and wet spring evening in La Rochelle, a town on France’s Atlantic coast, I set out for a night at the museums. I was not daft to head out on a museum crawl in such disagreeable weather, but I just couldn’t resist the spirit of La Nuit Européenne des Musées (European Night of Museums). It would have been hard to ignore the event for I’d heard about it from friends and also seen an announcement in La Rochelle’s city guide.

Held on the Saturday closest to International Museum Day (May 18), it is a one-night-only event when museums and heritage sites stay open until around 1 a.m. In addition, the entry fee to many institutions is discounted, if not waived altogether. Meant to encourage people, especially youngsters, to visit museums and other cultural sites, the Night of Museums also includes an array of concerts, themed guided tours, installations and other special events at participating institutions.

Created by France’s Ministry of Culture in 2005, the European Night of Museums is now a continent-wide celebration with institutions from Spain, Italy, Belgium, Romania, Moldova, the UK and other countries taking part. In the UK though it’s called Museums at Night and is spread over several days.

Graffiti on the walls of the Lantern Tower

On that evening in La Rochelle, it seemed as if half the town was participating in the event. As I discovered, queues at the more popular museums and monuments can be long. So at the Lantern Tower, once a lighthouse, watchtower and prison, it took me about half an hour to get in. The wait, though, was worth it, particularly for the centuries-old graffiti etched onto the tower’s walls by the Dutch, English and French prisoners who have passed through its dungeons.

At my last stop for the night, the La Rochelle Museum of Protestant History letters, documents and engravings offered me a fascinating glimpse of the town’s past as a 16^th Century Protestant stronghold in Catholic France. And as I explored the museum’s collection, it struck me that Night of Museums is the perfect time to explore the smaller institutions, which are usually less crowded but equally captivating.

This year’s Night of Museums is on 17 May (www.nuitdesmusees.culture.fr). The U.K.’s Museums at Night is from 15-17 May (www.culture24.org.uk/places-to-go/museums-at-night). 

Thriller in the hills

It was a pleasure to encounter Colonel Imtiaz Afridi on pages of The Rataban Betrayal. It was also very personal for me; it was almost like bumping into the many wonderful soldiers who are so much a part of some of my earliest memories. I really do hope we get to see more of the Colonel. 

Slightly different versions of the review are in this month’s The Hindu Literary Review — the version in the print edition is slightly shorter. 

About 50 pages into The Rataban Betrayal, I felt a little lost. I’d encountered over half-a-dozen characters, yet it wasn’t very clear who they were and what they had to do with the plot. It felt a bit like being in the midst of a bunch of threads floating in the wind.
And then, with great mastery, Stephen Alter started weaving those strands in the wind into an interesting story and it all began to make sense. Well, almost; for like all good thrillers, the book saves a twist or two for the end. 
Weaving tales is, of course, what Alter does rather well. He’s the author of 14 books, including five works of non-fiction.
Much of the action in The Rataban Betrayal is in Mussoorie and its satellite neighbourhood Landour. The murder of an American missionary, who’s also a CIA agent, and the killing of a couple of Indian guards on the border with Tibet stir things up in the town. Both the Indian and US intelligence establishments are sufficiently perturbed by these incidents to send undercover operatives to Mussoorie to investigate.  
The Indian and American agents eventually join forces under the direction of the wheelchair-bound Colonel Imtiaz Afridi. Retired army officer, former mountaineer, strategic affairs expert and spy master, Afridi oversees the covert investigation from his high-tech HQ — the shadowy, army-run Himalayan Research Institute. Together, the two agents and Afridi discover that the murders are part of a larger conspiracy with links to the Colonel’s past.
Alter has lived in Mussoorie for years and his insider’s view adds heft to the book. What also comes through is his knowledge of and deep affection for the Garhwal Himalayas and the people who live there. 
The plot moves quickly, like being in a fast car with an expert driver who knows just where he wants to go. The writing flows and is evocative and descriptive for the most, with the occasional dash of humour. I was especially taken by the description of the chauffer-driven, grey Ambassador with James Bond-ish accessories in which ‘Bogart’, a Delhi-based American spook, travels. 
The extent to which a work of fiction reflects reality is flexible. As Alter writes in the ‘author’s note’, while many of the historical and cultural references are based on reality, the narrative is not a factual rendering of events or contextual details. Yet, two things about the plot nagged me.
First, the Himalayan Research Institute comes across as a sort of Indian equivalent of the US National Security Agency, able to keep an electronic eye on India’s northern borders. While it’s safe to assume that India’s electronic intelligence expertise has blossomed in recent years, the institute’s all-seeing capabilities seem a bit much. 
And second, Alter talks about how the Dalai Lama is protected by the SPG. My understanding is that India’s Special Protection Group (SPG) only protects the Prime Minister, former Prime Ministers and their immediate families. 
Of course, these are relatively minor quibbles. More problematic is the characterisation of the Indian and American operatives. While I understand that both agents are primarily supposed to be intelligence analysts, I wondered why they were chosen for field ops given the rather elementary mistakes they made. In fact, during the denouement in the hills, the two almost muck it up. What saves the day is Colonel Afridi’s foresight. 
Afridi is, in fact, the book’s high point, its real hero — wise, decisive, loyal, hard as nails, but with his heart in the right place. He’s so much the hero, that I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a sequel in the works. I know I’d love to read another Afridi adventure and so I suspect, would most readers.

Writing that transcends

‘A community of mortals’: a headline written to snare. The story it led me to, though, is so powerful that I am delighted to have been snared. 
Alexandra Zelman-Doring’s tale of her husband’s heart attack and the hours that followed is the runner-up in the Bodley Head/FT Essay Prize for 2013. It is personal and universal, anecdotal and data-based. Above all, it is moving, but also wise. 
Several sections of the essay stay with me, but none more so than this line: “Borne on the brink of the music, it came to me: human beings endure impossible things.” We certainly do.

PS: Another powerful read is Raghu Karnad’s essay on Indians who served in the British army during the second world war. The essay, which melds the personal with the general, was runner-up in the prize for 2012.

Lord of light

The Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple lit up during the lakshadeepam of 2008

For a long heartbeat it seemed as if all the light in the world had cascaded around me. It was warm, benign light; just the sort of radiance you’d expect from a spiritual experience. And so it was — my first ever lakshadeepam at Thiruvananthapuram’s Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple.
Though I’ve lived in Thiruvananthapuram for 25-plus years, I’ve actually attended only one lakshadeepam, in 1996. And but for that feast of light, there’s little I recall of the occasion.
Celebrated once every six years, the lakshadeepam or lighting of a hundred thousand lamps is among the temple’s most important festivals. Preceded by the murajapam — the ritualistic chanting of prayers in turns by a large group of Brahmins — the lakshadeepam is one of those ‘experiences of a lifetime’.
In A History of Travancore P. Shungoonny Menon writes that the lakshadeepam and murajapam rituals were first performed by Karthaveerarjuna, “one of the Kshatria King(s) of a former age”. The first murajapam and lakshadeepam in more recent times were conducted by Marthanda Varma, possibly Travancore’s mightiest ruler. While the first murajapam was conducted in 1747, it did not end with the lakshadeepam; that happened three years later in 1750. In the 264 years since then, the lakshadeepam and murajapam have continued without a break, every six years.

The eastern approach to the Sri Padmanabhaswamy
temple during the lakshadeepam of 2008

Then as now, the ritual is intended to bring peace and prosperity to the region and its people. The murajapam involves the chanting of three Vedas — the Rig, Yajur and Sama — in a specific cycle and also chanting the Vishnu Sahasranaman or thousand names of Vishnu. The 56-day-long ritual culminates in the lakshadeepam, when a hundred thousand lamps, possibly more, are lit across the temple and its precincts.

Over the past few decades, some aspects of the lakshadeepam have been tweaked to suit changing circumstances. Electric lights have replaced some of the oil lamps used for the lakshadeepam, especially in the outer regions of the temple. Similarly, the temple is now lit not only on the actual day of the lakshadeepam, but also for several days afterwards. And from this year on, there will be another, rather visible, change — high levels of security. For this is the first lakshadeepam to be held after it was publicly revealed that that the temple is the repository of a substantial trove.

What hasn’t changed though is the essence of this unique festival of light. And as dusk falls on January 14, the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple will be enfolded in a very special radiance.

Thriller with a stutter

(A shorter version was in this month's The Hindu Literary Review) 

Saad Shafqat’s Breath of Death is quite the ‘thriller from Pakistan’ it’s positioned as. It’s also a socio-political commentary on Pakistan and an examination of the often fraught, rather complicated relationship between Pakistan and the US. 

And it is this relationship between the US, Pakistan and the larger Islamic world that provides the context for the book’s relatively straightforward plot. Dr Asad Mirza, a talented, youngish neurologist and Nadia Khan, an eager medical student, encounter a mysterious neurological illness in the wards of a Karachi teaching hospital. While attempting to solve the puzzle of this strange infection, the two walk right into the middle of a bio-terrorism plot against the US.

Both Karachi and the intricacies of the human brain are familiar territory to Shafqat, a neurologist who lives in the city. And this knowledge shows. He writes with authority and confidence about things that happen in the hospital and in the city.

The writing, though, is often jerky, with abrupt transitions. Yet, it’s also very descriptive and evocative, painting portraits of people and places. Shafqat has an eye for detail, and the images he builds are so powerful that I could almost see, touch and smell them.

Characterisation is one of Shafqat’s strengths and almost all the characters seem very real. Even the ‘bad guys’ like Hamza Kadri, the scientist who designs the bio-weapon and Malik Feysal, the zealous operative of the terrorist ‘Network’, are portrayed as multi-layered beings. Sample this description of the fussy, irascible, obsessive-compulsive Hamza Kadri: “Noticing a speck of grit on the machine’s shiny Perkin Elmer monogram plate, he flicked it off with a finger. Then he fidgeted with his trousers, adjusting them over his hips again. He stuffed in his shirt. Then, noticing a fold that wasn’t quite right, he pulled it out and stuffed it in again.” 

Shafqat, also deftly captures the love-hate relationship that many people in Pakistan — and South Asia perhaps — seem to have with the US. An equation that’s equal parts fascination and frustration. Even Asad Mirza, the book’s principal protagonist, who’s studied and worked in the US, is not completely free of this sentiment. As Shafqat writes early on in the book: “Deep down, all of them, even Asad, felt aggrieved by America’s overreach around the world although not everyone was willing to acknowledge it so openly.”

Yet, Asad’s disquiet with certain aspects of US policy does not prevent him from doing the right thing. Despite several challenges, he is able to alert the US authorities about the bio-terror plot and all ends well.

My one big grouse with Breath of Death is with the plot’s pace. Like many of the soap operas on television, it chugs along very sedately and then, before you know it, it’s all over. The ending is so hurried that it seems shoehorned into the plot.

In fact, the last few chapters of the book didn’t quite work for me; at least not in the way the early chapters did. For one, I found the whole sub-plot built around Nadia’s trip to the US to intern at a lab in Boston almost contrived. This thread doesn’t quite add to the story, expect, perhaps, to bolster the thesis about Pakistani disquiet with “America’s overreach around the world”.

Also puzzling is a lack of attention to detail that creeps in towards the end of the book. A telling example is how Nadia carries a biological sample in her backpack when she travels to the US. She’s got no clearance from the US authorities to do this and seems surprised when US customs confiscates the specimen. It is hard to imagine how Asad and Nadia’s hosts in the US, both prominent medical researchers, thought she could simply enter the country with a biological specimen in a flask of formalin.

I also do wish that Shafqat had given a bit more detail about how the virus designed by Kadri worked. I know the plot hinges on deploying an aerosol-based delivery system. But what is not clear is just how the virus was tested in Karachi. For instance, how is it that the test subjects alone were infected by the virus, while the people around them were untouched by the ‘breath of death’.

Despite these bumps, I quite enjoyed Breath of Death. It is an interesting and intriguing tale told rather well.

Snapshot: Battle of Colachal

The pillar commemorating the Battle of Colachal

The pillar was not much to look at; a grey column of stone, with a plaque at its base. It stood on a sandy, scrub-filled lot, flanked by a water tank and a crumbling building sprouting a banyan tree. Several hundred metres away, on the other side of a sandy knoll, was the Arabian Sea.

Appearances, though, can be deceptive. Unassuming it certainly is, but the pillar marks a very important event in the history of the erstwhile kingdom of Travancore and, indeed, the Dutch empire — the Battle of Colachal.

Colachal harbour

It was somewhere in this area, in August 1741, that Travancore's army commanded by Marthanda Varma routed Dutch forces led by Eustachius De Lannoy.

For Marthanda Varma, arguably Travancore’s greatest ruler, the victory at Colachal was one large step towards consolidating his rule over southern Kerala. For the Dutch, writes historian A. Sreedhara Menon in A Survey of Kerala History, “… the battle of Colachel shattered for all time to come their dream of the conquest of Kerala.”

Ruins of the chapel in which De Lannoy is buried

The canny statesman that he was, Marthanda Varma was able to charm De Lannoy and some of his Dutch aides into joining Travancore’s army. De Lannoy spent the next 36 years of his life serving Travancore — training local soldiers in European military tactics and shaping the kingdom’s military strategies.

It seems he never returned to the Netherlands and when he died in 1777, was buried within Udayagiri fort not too far from Colachal. The story of De Lannoy’s Travancore years though, is a tale for another day.