Raj Das > Recent Status Updates

I read Proust’s 6-page-long account of waking up and finding yourself grasping, in the groggy semi-morning, for the contours and associations of all the bedrooms you’ve ever slept in: stored, somehow, in the negotiation of our limbs with the darkness — while falling asleep myself, after a long day of meetings, in a hotel in a city (Bellevue, WA) I’ve never been to and never imagined I would find myself in

So it begins!

First impressions: the prose is musical to the point of incantation. For example:

“I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as plump and fresh as the cheeks of childhood.” (2)

Reading Proust is an endeavor I’ve been building up to in my head for years, and it’ll take me several years, I imagine, to do it. I’m excited.

Listen to this epic, yet utterly mundane detail:

“Papa stared out at the ruin of the mosque behind the Hauz Khas flat. The buffalo of the Sikh family displaced by riots was grazing at the corner of a municipal park where a leaky tap had turned a patch of the brown grass green.”

And this is just scene-setting for the novel’s character-driven psychodramas. This is a serious artist at work