Where Nothing Happens By Padmanabh Vijai Pillai, Seagull, Rs 495

The black-and-white photograph of Padmanabh Vijai Pillai on the inside flap of the book’s dust jacket shows a man caught mid-speech. He is not looking at the camera but presumably at his interlocutor(s) outside the frame. He might also be talking to himself. The placid face speaks of a man who has long ceased to be disturbed either by the audience or by the onlooker. While staring out, his eyes also look inward, and so pre-empt the gaze of the camera. The hint of a smile on his face seems to be a genial concession made to the listeners and the photographer.

The reader of Where Nothing Happens would find himself in much the same position as that of Pillai’s cameraman or audience outside the photograph. The reader’s presence is acknowledged but not regarded as indispensable. While introducing the author, Manjulika Dubey writes that the book was “not written for any eyes but those of Vijai Pillai and his intimate friends, and...its publication was posthumous”. It begins as a letter to his dead mother and then becomes part-memoir, part-philosophical discourse. If it seems confusing or fragmented at times, that is because it becomes solipsistic in places. Living in solitude, suffering from cancer, waiting patiently for the end, Pillai had obviously reached that supreme stage where one learns “to care and not to care”. He could think of the reader less in terms of the market and more as mon semblable, mon frère.

Pillai had a doctorate in history from the University of Michigan and an MPhil in library science. After returning from the United States of America, he worked as an academic in Delhi, pursuing his interests in phenomenology and development studies. The decisions to return and to forgo his career later were deeply pondered choices caused by and resulting in major changes in his life. Pillai’s marriage had fallen apart, and then his parents died in succession. He lived in retirement from 1997 onwards. Where Nothing Happens is, in a sense, the chronicle of a death foretold. Death becomes a reassuring presence in the work. As its approach allows him to sweep away the “detritus of…thought”, he can at last put his life in perspective, find meaning where none existed previously, and accept nothingness without regrets.

The details of Pillai’s life are alluded to occasionally here. They, and the here-and-now of his life in retirement, become the pivots around which his philosophical musings are arranged. The facticity of the world attracts him as much as it repels — “The leaking tap, the gadget to be repaired, this writing to be finished. Do I live for these? Absurd, but their call is not to be denied.” Shorn of the past, which has ceased to exist in time, and of the future, which has not yet come into being, the author suspends himself in an eternal present. Meditation on reality gives him the equanimity of a Buddhist monk and the readers some of the most lyrical lines in the memoir. He observes the “stubby little flies” — the “squalid angels of decay”, and discovers in the cobwebs “the billowed drop of Chinese nets over the backwaters near Cochin”. The undisputed triumph of the being-in-itself over consciousness moves him to nausea at times but also encourages him to welcome the world into himself.

In fact, Pillai finds his vocation in the thankless task of housekeeping, of keeping the inevitable signs of the world’s decay at bay. When the “fathomless cornucopia of significance” that is the world beckons to him, challenges him at every turn, he cannot delimit himself by writing, which, after all, “must be about something and to someone”. Thus, he repudiates the very act by which this book comes into being. Ars vivendi must win over all other arts.

The philosophies of Kant or Heidegger merge seamlessly into those of Nisargadatta or Ramana in this book. Ramana’s question — “Who is it that is thinking, feeling, wanting... Who am I?” finds echo in Brentano’s thesis of the subject-object duality implicit in awareness. The paths of both Western and Indian philosophy lead Pillai to his own inchoate thought processes and to a wholeness that continues to elude him. It is only in the magical moment of death that the ‘I’ of the consciousness becomes identified with the facticity of the world. Pillai’s journey towards that nullity inevitably takes him to the silence, which signals the cessation of this work as well.

It is easy to misjudge Pillai’s work. The constant allusions to myriad philosophers might seem arcane at one level. There is also the difficulty posed by the arguments that are never finished, that lose track midway or are abandoned suddenly. Yet, it would be unfair to dismiss the work on these counts. In all that he writes, the honesty of the writer is unmistakable. Here is a man who is bringing in all the resources of his knowledge to make sense of a world that stubbornly refuses to be explained away. In recognizing the opacity of the world and in submitting himself to it, Pillai is also accepting the limits of knowledge, and of writing as a way of sharing it.

In a way, Where Nothing Happens could only have been a posthumous work. It is premised on death — that of Pillai’s mother, and it anticipates another — his own. The author’s withdrawal into himself, his questioning of the paradigms that shape any act of speaking, perception or writing can only culminate in the “dialogue of solitude” that presupposes death. Pillai’s death, as it were, gives his work a perfection that had been promised, but withheld in life.