Maus- A review

I just finished reading Maus, a two part graphic novel that will haunt me for a long time. Maus is as much a story about how Vladek Spiegelman survived the holocaust as it is about Art Spiegelman's troubled (and at times bordering on the Abe Simpson/Homer Simpson dynamic humour) relationship with his father.

Vladek Spiegelman was a miser to such an absurd degree that if he did not have an unpleasant history, he would make for a great comic character.

Of course, Vladek IS a comic character. Graphic novels ARE costly, deep, dark 'mature' comic books.

The terrible beauty of Maus lies in its powerful imagery, it's tender and frank portrayal of life in those ill-fated times. Believe me, no book or movie captures the desolate picture of a heap of dead bodies than that of a comic book artiste wearing a Maus mask and sitting atop a pile of dead mice.

In the book, the Jews are Mice, the Germans are Cats, the Americans Dogs and the Polish are Pigs. Perhaps one of the reasons Spiegelman chose to portray Jews as mice was that one of the most enduring cartoon characters of the past century is a Mouse drawn by a jew cartoonist (the present day Vladek hopes Art becomes as famous as that cartoonist). Art Spiegelman chronicles in parallel how Vladek Spiegelman survived the holocaust and how he had to coax out the story from his father bit by bit. It starts with Vladek becoming the son-in-law of an affluent businessman and thus becoming a rich Jewish businessman himself. He is then lead through a series of multiple arrests, escapes, survivals and betrayals. The Nazi are not to be trusted, not once do they come through with their fake promises, except to kill and plunder. He survived somehow. He had luck and he used every skill he knew to his advantage. He didn't end up as smoke through the chimney of Auschwitz, but he wasn't spared the horror either.

His wife Anja, his constant companion until they got separated in Auschwitz wasn't as strong as him, but had great faith in his ability to bring sporadic flashes of light in the darkness. The couple lost their first son in the war, he was poisoned bu his aunt who thought it better to commit suicide than to be taken to the gas chambers.

The present day Vladek complains of how the companies that helped build Germans their holocaust machines still flourish (It's a commonly known fact that a well established cell-phone company of today used to build gas chambers for Herr Hitler). He also fetters about every morsel of food left over, when Art was a kid he was force fed everything on his plate, never allowed to leave any food. Vladek saves everything, even things he finds in the garbage like a cut telephone wire.

Living with the old Vladek Spiegelman is a comic nightmare.

Being a good businessman, Vladek trades everything from cigarettes to his ability to speak in english in exchange for small pieces of life, he escapes death every time, and not always by skill.

Ironically at the end of the story we see Vladek being suspicious of a black man, a lot like the way the Nazi were wary of the Jews. HE gives no justification, no explanation for this behaviour. Vladek Spiegelman too was a racist.

The story ends with Vladek gently falling asleep while finishing his tale, telling Art of his reunion with Anja after the war. He says, And they lived happily ever after...now let me sleep. Enough stories.

For him, perhaps there was no happily ever after. The holocaust scarred him forever and turned him into an obsessive paranoid miser.

Anja committed suicide in 1968. She didn't leave a suicide note.

Vladek Spiegelman suffered multiple heart attacks, he died in 1982.

Maus won the Pulitzer prize in literature in 1992.

All I want Is You (Possibly Creep-2)

I’d just finished watching Juno so I messaged her asking if she had seen the flick and then I added a line about how girls look very pretty while playing the guitar.
Her reply was small and carefully worded.
“I Hate You.”
I stared at the cell phone screen for some time. Non sequiters were not her forte. I didn’t know where this sprang up from. I considered asking her if she had sent this message to me by mistake, perhaps (hopefully) she wanted to send it to her boy friend. Or maybe it was because of her boy friend that she had sent it.
My mobile screen flashed again with another SMS. I was hoping this would be one of those ‘sorry not meant for you’ messages that I had always heard about but never received myself.
The second message was ‘Don’t ask me why, cause I won’t be able to tell you.’
Well that dashed all my plans of asking her why she hated me. Still against all the rules and regulations that she had set just now I asked her, “Why?”
She replied, “I told you, don’t ask me.”
This time I decided to go along with what she had said. Loads of replies came to my mind, ‘But we’re still friends right’, ‘Is this because of Shantanu?’, ‘There’s a thin line between hate and love’, ‘Say it isn’t so, I love you.’
I rejected each one of them, considering them to be risky if not out right suicidal. Instead I waited for her to say something.
She messaged me again, “Aren’t you gonna say something?”
I wanted to reply, “Well you yourself have told me not to ask you why you hate me, hence I am not asking you and so forth.”
And then I waited for some sort of long and descriptive message explaining why she thought so. I did get a slightly long message. “Don’t you get it? I told you not ask me.”
Ah, then I guess she meant talk of something else. Since she had decided not to tell me I started thinking on my own of the past twenty four hours and all the things that I might have done to invoke her ire.
In fact, everything was normal before I started watching Juno. We were chatting normally, there were no ‘I hate you’ messages flying unidirectional. Everything was peaceful on heaven and earth.
My thought process was blocked by the sms alert of my phone. The message was “And I don’t ‘think’ I hate you, I really do ‘hate’ you.” Including the inverted commas and everything.
I became slightly irritated, and then I used my talent for being long and drawn out and wrote her a long missive, circumventing on the general theme of friendship and how close we were as friends. I told her (thinking this would do the trick) that I did not demand but I deserved an explanation.
There, I thought, that ought to melt her.
Her reply was, “Well if we are so close, in that case you should have called me up as soon as you received that sms.”
Oh, ah.
I called her up that very instant, she let the phone ring for a few bells and then she rejected the call.
I called her up again, and she cut the phone. She messaged me saying “This is not what I meant.”
Not deterred by this sms I continued my routine of calling her, she too reciprocated by rejecting each call.
I messaged her giving my reason for not calling her before by saying that when I received that ‘I hate you’ message I was confused and confounded etc. I pleaded with her to pick up my call.
After a few minutes I called her up again, this time she picked it up.
“Hi!” I said.
“Hey…”
Then there was (for want of a different word) a very pregnant pause.
“So…what?”
“What?”
“What about it?”
“What about what?”
“You know…what!”
She got angry, “Don’t irritate me. Come to the point.”
And presently I did, “Well, what about that message you had sent me? Why do you think you hate me dear?”
“Cant you talk of something else?” She replied in a very cold voice.
Ah well I could, but you know for some reason it was something that was clouding my mind.
“Please, I want to know. I need to know.”
“Why? Why do you ‘really’ need to go?”
Because I love you, I wanted to say, and break into some Lionel Ritchie song at the same point. Instead I said, “Because you are one of my closest friends and I can’t stand you being angry with me.”
She took a deep breath (or probably exhaled, or did both) and said, “I am not angry with you.”
Now this was a revelation, “Are you sure?” I asked, and then cursed myself for asking.
“I meant, I am not ‘that’ angry with you.”
Oh, okay. And then like the idiot I am I decided to make sure the hate part too. “But you do hate me, don’t you?” As if it was a good thing.
“Yes, no…I don’t know.”
Of course ‘I don’t know’ was her defense/way of stopping conversation/not answering/answering stuff that she didn’t want me to know. (I’d get to know this later.)
I repeated one of my earlier questions again. “So why exactly do you hate me?”
“Look, we have already gone over that!”
“But that’s the whole point! We haven’t! You’ve told me nothing yet.”
“I’ve got a class test tomorrow and I really gotta study. Can we talk about this later please?”
I was irritated by now, she told me she hated me, and she wouldn’t tell me why, and she wouldn’t tell me now.
“Come on!” I said, “You can’t leave me hanging like this. I’ll keep on thinking about why you hate me and won’t be able to do anything else. Please! This is important, you are important to me.”
She took a long pause and said, “Right now I really got to study. But I promise later I’ll talk about it…and don’t think of it too much. It isn’t a big deal.”
Well to me it was.
“You promise?”
“Yeah, I promise.”
“So how about we discuss this at dinner tomorrow night?” I said, trying to be smooth.
“Sure! Whatever, now I really gotta study, bye!” And she cut the phone.
I was surprised by two things. Firstly that she hung up on me, and secondly that she agreed to dinner so easily. It was the second thing that made me reach for my wallet which was gathering dust under a corner of my keyboard. I opened it and turned it upside down, a twp rupee coin and a small spider fell out apart from my ATM card, my college ID and used train tickets. The spider cursed me in arachnid tongue and went to make another home for itself in my CPU cabinet.
A couple of hours later she resumed messaging me. She didn’t mention anything about hating me that night. I put it to her reserving the talk of it to dinner the next day.

The next morning I woke up to her sms wishing me GoodMorning and all that. I wondered whether she’d completely forgotten that hate message or something. I decided that I would not be the one to bring it up, at least not until dinner.
Er, did she remember agreeing to dinner with me?
I did not bring dinner up in the conversation until lunch time. We were both lamenting the food sitting in our separate messes when I reminded her of our dinner date.
It took her a few moments to recall who or what I was talking about. Then she remembered it and said, “Yeah, its fine with me.”
Her hostel had a nine PM deadline and we had to rely on public transport so it had to be someplace nearby. There was a good Chinese restaurant nearby that would tax a bit on my pocket, but the food was good and they had a ten percent student discount.
I grabbed Vinay (possibly the thinnest man in the world) and we rushed to the ATM. Standing in line I explained to him why and how much money I intended to withdraw from the ATM.
“I am taking Khushi out for dinner tonight.” I said, hoping there would be a distant roll of drums with this announcement.
“Yeah o could tell something was up, since you are pretty much skipping on the ground.”
“Well, I am looking forward to it. And don’t tell Driganshu or the rest of the guys. At least not the fact that I am treating her.”
“Ha ha, for keeping this information secure I need a treat too.”
After withdrawing money on the bike ride back to the hostel Vinay asked me, “Wouldn’t Shantanu have a problem with it?”
Shantanu? The name seemed to ring a bell.
“Why would he have a problem with me taking Khushi out for dinner?”
“Well for starters, he is her boyfriend.”
Oh, ‘that’ Shantanu. I hadn’t really thought about how he would feel about me taking Khushi out.
“It doesn’t matter to me. And remember, its Khushi that I am taking out, not him.”
I did not let thoughts of a boyfriend spoil the evening for me.

I put on my favourite black shirt and strutted towards her hostel. Fortunately I caught a rickshaw on the way and stood outside her hotel with the rickshaw like some prize ride.
She stepped out of the gates of her hostel and I was stunned. She’d kept her hair open and was wearing a long blue kurti and to sum it up was looking mesmerizing etc.
She looked at me and stifled a laugh.
I told her that she was looking nice but didn’t dare ask about my own appearance.

Dinner was great with her, firstly it gave me a chance to constantly gaze at her for more than an hour. Stealing food from her plate, fighting over the dessert brownie and talking about nothing in particular I found myself falling deeply.
On the ride back I hardly spoke a word. She kept on asking what it was that I was thinking about and I couldn’t tell her that I was thinking about her and even though she was sitting next to me there were things that I couldn’t say to her.

I came back to the hostel and stood in front of the wash basin washing my face (or trying to). I looked at myself in the mirror and the thought came to me ‘She has a boyfriend.’
I let the thought slip away and at midnight wrote her a long message telling her all the things that I liked about her but not telling her that I loved her.
And I got no reply to that message cause she had fallen asleep by then.
When I lay tp sleep that night I suddenly remembered there had been no mention of the ‘I hate you’ message through out dinner. It now seemed to me to be one of those unexplained mysteries of life that remain so.
A week passed which I can’t say was uneventful because it wasn’t but exactly seven days later at ten in the night I got an sms from her which said ‘sent you a mail.’
Now this sms would certainly not mean that she had sent me a chain letter of some sort of some song. It meant this email had something urgent and important.
I rushed to my room and saw Vinay lazing around in front of the computer. I politely shoved him to one side and logged into my account to check my mail.
She had written about how much our friendship meant to her and how much her relationship with Shantanu was hurting her and that she couldn’t continue with him any longer. She had written a lot about how close we had become and what she had started to feel for me.
In the end she said that she loved me.
And she was strong enough for whatever my reply would be.
Time slowed down.
I read the mail again and again, I saw that she was online and wished that she wasn’t.
I logged out and logged in again.
In the end I knew what I had to say. My reply to her was small and carefully worded.
“But…I thought…what about…oh hell…nevermind..I LOVE YOU!”