During my early teens, about three decades ago, I was quarantined with chicken-pox for a few weeks. The little spots gave me no respite for a while. But after the first week, they stopped itching savagely, and I spent the next couple of weeks lying in bed and chain-reading all the Asterix comic-books. It was a delicious convalescence. But what I remember most vividly about that time is my sense of the feel of Obelix’s upper arm. Many of us have grown up with lovely, large grandmothers who had cool, fleshy, dimpled upper arms that were wonderful to play with as one fell slowly asleep listening to their stories. I imagined that Obelix’s upper arms would feel exactly like that. He had become a flesh-and-blood presence in my imagination, with a life of his own that ultimately had little to do with what his creators had intended. But it never occurred to me to wonder if there was something odd about his sleeping over at Asterix’s rather a lot.

Yet, this is precisely what a recent piece in the London Times draws attention to. The context to this observation is the writer’s firm conviction that Tintin was gay — a tongue-in-cheek claim that is supported by a detailed reading of the Tintin books and of Hergé’s life. The article is a mix of queeny table-talk and bio -critical parody, and it would be silly to take it too seriously. But it does make us think about why some characters step out of the fictions they were originally part of and become real people with real lives. We compulsively imagine their lives, which become more than mere speculation and take on the concreteness of facts (Coetzee calls them “ficto-facts”). These people begin to live in us and among us, allowing themselves to be used as screens on which we project the habits and preoccupations of our own lives and times.

A serious literary critic once argued that it was pointless to ask how many children Lady Macbeth had. But isn’t it the greatness of what the question-papers call Shakespeare’s “art of characterization” that compels us to ask precisely these pointless questions? The reason why we insist on asking them is that we know we will never find the answers. But the writer is generous enough to let us create the answers for ourselves. This generosity is thus inseparable from a certain reticence, and the two together make us swallow the bait of the ‘real’. It is also significant that some characters provoke such imaginings while others do not, and this is not so much a question of quality as of how writers choose to align themselves with our sense of the real. In fact, for someone directing Macbeth, playing Lady Macbeth or designing the sets and costumes for the production, such seemingly pointless questions could well be the best places to start from.

And apart from Shakespeare, think of our favourite detectives: Holmes and Watson, Poirot, Miss Marple, Pheluda and Topshe. At one level, their inner lives or sexual histories are perfectly irrelevant. Yet, part of the fun of re-reading them as adults is to set aside, occasionally, the innocence with which we suspended our curiosity when we first read them, and to wonder perversely about exactly these irrelevancies. It is somehow difficult to believe that their canny, sharp, far-from-innocent creators would have disapproved of such fantasizing.

What sort of a man would Christopher Robin grow up to be? How would Alice behave on her wedding night? What was Shakespeare like at table, or in bed?

Aveek Sen

Bedtime stories

I really don’t care if Tintin is “gay”. Often, after a long day at work, his “adventures” bring me a truly gay respite: a few moments of bedtime reading when I indulge in idle fantasies. (If only my journalistic career were as exciting as that of the fearless investigative reporter!) As a child, after a dismal day at school, or a particularly trying math tuition, I used to go to bed wishing for nice dreams. Some children do not have a talent for facing real life — and I was one of them. On those evenings, a healthy dose of Tintin before bed kept my mind pleasantly occupied with exciting thoughts. From Red Rackham’s treasures under the sea to Bianca Castafiore’s lost emerald, bits and pieces of image, music and text would seep into my boy-dreams. By the following morning, though I’d wait for the school-bus with a long face, the “adventures” of the night before would have become a part of my secret life. My imaginary friend was not a figment of my imagination; he came out of someone else’s mind.

After the dreams of innocence, one must go over to the nightmares of experience. The one character who has never failed to wake me up in a cold sweat is Gregor Samsa: Kafka’s thinly disguised alter-ego in The Metamorphosis. Samsa, to say nothing of his creator, is a real queer fish. (Or should one say a real queer vermin?) Whatever he might be, he should never be allowed to crawl inside anyone’s head, not even into the horror show that goes on in the mind of someone whose self-esteem “is a notch below Kafka’s” (Woody Allen’s famous words) — and least of all into the minds of high-school boys with precocious reading habits. No one wants to wake up to find oneself transformed into a “monstrous vermin”. But still, Gregor did learn the truth the hard way. And I’m convinced he is not alone in his hardship, though we may not hear of young men turning into insects every other day. Didn’t Kafka say, “It was no dream”?

And truly, there are mornings when I wake up feeling as if I am lying on my back grown “as hard as armor plate”. Then there are days when depressed by the colour of the sky I wish, like poor Gregor, to turn over and sleep it all away. On gloomy Sundays and blue Mondays, I am no longer surprised that silly old Gregor, even after he had turned into a bug, had the nerve to go on complaining about his work. For me, he remains the spirit of the age: to borrow Auden’s words, Gregor’s predicament “is the predicament of the modern man”.

Somak Ghoshal

Adam’s dream

My childhood was peopled with dream children. They stepped out of their stories from an illustrated book of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, and became my companions. So dreaming or waking, I was surrounded by the Little Match Girl with her frost-bitten face and doleful eyes, Hialmar with his drooping head of pale blonde curls or by the family of snails that lived among the burdock leaves.

Their destinies were mine, and so I was by turns the Steadfast Tin Soldier who longed hopelessly for the delicate ballerina in her enchanted castle, or Thumbelina, who found herself threatened with marriage to a foolish toad, or the orphaned Match Girl whom nobody loved. I found Hialmar’s scowling Great Grandfather, whose old portrait on the wall reprimanded the Dustman for filling the little boy’s mind with fancy tales, quite familiar. Quite unreasonably, I identified him with my grandfather although that old man was benign in the extreme. I had villainized him probably because he had once confessed that he loved my cousin more than me.

But the person I liked the most was the Dustman — that pale androgynous figure in a sleeping suit, which changed colour constantly. He had two umbrellas, one with fascinating pictures that he held over good children so that they had delightful dreams, and the other dark, to be used for the naughty ones. Since there were plenty of black umbrellas in our house and none with pictures on it, I was convinced early that the Dustman had judged me, found me wicked, and left the black umbrellas as signs of censure. But this made me adore him all the more since it meant that he had recognized me for what I really was.

One opened that magic casement of a book with the story, “Little Ida’s Flowers”. It was a story about a garden, and happiness, and death, and a promise. I dwelt for hours in the first two facing pages of the story with their picture of Ida’s flowers, which danced all night and faded in the morning. I once saw the pink cosmoses in our terrace garden gently swaying to the swishy sound of falling rain and instantly felt how Adam must have done when he woke up from his dream to find it true. The moment passed, but its memory still haunts me like the tale that occasioned it. After all, Ida’s withered flowers had assured her that they would grow up more beautiful next year if she gave them a decent burial.

Anusua Mukherjee