(Khyrunnisa A, humourist - author)
I did not know the word ‘cynophobia’ till yesterday though I
had developed it slightly thanks to the strong belief in my ability to
communicate with dogs, especially the strays, got thwarted by an unexpected
reaction from a dog, a couple of weeks back. The word just got materialized
before me when I was reading a book titled ‘Tongue in Cheek- the Funny Side of
Life’ by the Trivandrum based columnist and humourist author, Khyrunnisa A. In
one of the chapters where she speaks about her disliking for dogs, Khyrunnisa
tells the readers that if they have some aversion for the dogs and the over
enthusiasm that they display when you are at a friend’s place who is too fond
of her pets, it is advisable to tell her frankly that you have ‘cynophobia’
though the word might fail to bring about any change of attitude in her for the
sheer opaqueness of the word.
Opaqueness of a word could generate laughter when it is
uttered with serious intent but ekes out a contrary response or causes an
opposite reaction, so is the case of such words that are too transparent but
used in out of context to express dense matters. Humourists use this technique
lavishly in their writings and speeches. I always have a feeling that the
humourist writers have this special knack of performing their words and
statements as they put mostly themselves or their surrogate selves into the
narrator’s skin. And they thrive in flamboyance of expressions, exaggeration of
facts and also unimaginable yet highly convincing understatements. Khyrunnisa
is a master of all these faculties. ‘Tongue in Cheek’ (an absolutely
predictable name for a newspaper column, but a bit stereotypical for a
humourous book) is a compilation her weekly column in the Hindu Metro Plus, a
column with only one brief to the writer from the editors that it should be
witty and definitely, within the space limit (though the author does not say
that in her preface); that explains the almost identical length of all the
essays in the book.
(Tongue in Cheek by Khyrunnisa A)
‘Brevity is the soul of wit’; though Shakespeare means wit
differently, as intelligence, the word has travelled centuries to gain this special
meaning that is humour. However, it has been a reverse journey for another
Shakespearean word, ‘fool’ which once meant a wise one but after centuries of
use got demoted to mean a ‘foolish one’. All that is brief cannot be witty and
humorous; had it been so, the biggest comic interface would have been ‘twitter’
as it demands sheer brevity as a mode of expressing even the voluminous of
ideas. For a humourist, brevity has a different meaning altogether; it is not
just about condensation of ideas or sharp editing of the text or the most
concentrated forms of expressions but the very talent of saying something in
the most indirect or exaggerated fashion in order to reveal the funnier and
sunnier side of it. Humourists have picked up their tricks from the
cartoonists, it seems for most of the humourist-columnists the way of viewing
the world comes from the cartoonists. Visual humourists maintained brevity both
in lines and words and the verbal humourists must have borrowed the eyes and
tongues from them, I should say, subconsciously.
When the British magazine, Punch (estd.1841) had been an
influential pioneer in the world of humour and cartooning, Charles Dickens
developed his dark as well as light humour almost during the same time period (Pickwick
Papers) paving the way for the future humourists including George Bernard Shaw
and PG Wodehouse. In India most of the newspapers today boast humourist columns
written by many established writers including Bacchi Karkaria, Mathrubhootham,
Renuka Narayanan and Khyrunnisa herself. Most of them have a huge liking for
the kind of visual and verbal narratives that Mario Miranda had created around
the Goan people and locations. Khyrunnisa comes from this tradition as she
locates her narratives in the city of Thiruvananthapuram (incidentally, the
starting point of one of the very famous animation movies titled Sita Sings
Blues, written and directed by Nina Paley) and in the lives of the middle and
upper middle class there.
(Khyrunnisa and husband Vijayakumar)
For the Malayalis humour created out of the life of city
people is not a new thing; it has been in their veins since the origin of ‘cities’,
the seats of power, lobbying, bootlicking, betrayals and survival. Pompous,
snobbish and selfish, the urban middle class anywhere in the world (or at least
certain sections of it) provides fodder for the humourists. A few rungs below
the upper class and a few rungs above the lower class, the Trishanku status of
these people makes them behave in extremely funny ways that are captured by the
story writers, film directors, mimicry artists and so on. Khyrunnisa is like a
flaneuse, who has earned her right to stroll in the streets (which have been a
male domain for long) and finds how the city and its people behave. Khyrunnisa anchors
the narrator within the family domain (reaffirming her faith in the very middle
class socio-cultural values that she often pokes fun of), along with her husband
who often goes without a name, her son and his friend, Ajay (who has been
liberally identified as a ‘person’), and takes the freedom to move out of it
with her ‘gaze’ fixed on the society in order to create humour which is
fundamentally different from the male humourists (such as Yesudasan, Toms, VKN,
Sukumar, Chemmana Chacko, Veloor Krishnan Kutty and a whole lot of Malayali
cartoonists). Khyrunnisa is more like Radhika Vaz, the standup comedian, but
with less scathing remarks.
Humourists are not considered to be top grade literary figures.
Especially when it comes to the humourists and columnists they are deemed as
people who write to ‘fill’ the designated spaces; as Khyrunnisa says in her
preface, the only instruction is that it should ‘witty/humorous’. However,
humour could transcend our own gazes about our own people; perhaps humour
functions as a ‘mirror held against the society’. That’s why Khyrunnisa writes
about the Malayali marriages and its aftermath (not they lived happily ever
after types but the rush for the feast that follows the tying knot), the
jewelry that the brides wear and of course the groom’s costumes that he tries
to fit into for the day, changing a deflated tyre and all other DIY stuff in
the domestic front, for example finding a lost rubber band in the curry, a
snake in the pond; use of smartphones, booking the seats using a stinking
handkerchief and so on. Khyrunnisa’s literary flourish comes to the fore when
she speaks about a handkerchief used for booking a seat. She writes: ‘My friend
wondered if the towel was an example of synecdoche, a figure of speech in which
a part if made to represent a whole or metonymy, where a word or a phrase is
used to stand in for another word’. Khyrunnisa makes wonderful observations
when she writes about the ‘autocorrect’ faculties of smartphones, buying tissue
paper from the traffic signals (or not buying it) and so on. The classic is
when she speaks about the name of her husband, Vijayakumar (any Tom, Dick and
Vijay, according to Khyrunnisa). For certain reason she calls out his name in
the street and ‘half of the people on the road turned in answer to the
shortened version, he included.’
(Shashi Tharoor MP releasing the book Tongue in Cheek by Khyrunnisa A)
On the way to the museum garden for my morning walk every
day I see stray dogs in various sizes, shapes and colors and I make it a point
to talk to them if they look at me. Often they wag their tails in appreciation
and follow me for a short distance before they get distracted by other dogs or
birds or by simply losing interest in me. I have never found a stray dog
menacing because of these friendly conversations. Couple of weeks ago, I tried
to talk to a dog and it started grunting and growling. Since then I have been avoiding
that road and once even I crossed the road to come by another zebra crossing to
get into the garden for the fear of that dog. I did not know that it was
cynophobia. I was very sympathetic to the character, Mevlut, the Boza seller in
the streets of Istanbul who was once assaulted by a pack of stray dogs, in the
novel, ‘Strangeness in my Mind’ by Orhan Pamuk. Now I know what had prompted
Mevlut to avoid that particular street. With Khyrunnisa’s book in hand I have a
word for it; cynophobia. I read ‘Tongue in Cheek’ while sitting in a hospital
lobby waiting for the doctor to attend my mother. I thought I could visit
hospitals again and again provided if I have books like ‘Tongue in Cheek’ in my
hand.
-
JohnyML
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