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February 28, 2022
Manini Nayar's Playlist for Her Story Collection "Being Here"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
The stories in Manini Nayar's collection Being Here lyrically interconnect over time and space to share worlds transformed by everyday interactions.
Elizabeth Nunez wrote of the book:
"Original, bright, refreshing, with terse sentences and many passages of lyrical prose."
In her own words, here is Manini Nayar's Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Being Here:
I wrote my collection of stories Being Here over a span of years, tracking a loop between beginnings and endings in the early surges of the Indian diaspora. These stories mostly center on the lives of girls and women who step outside the comfortable but often confining restraints of cultural identity-building, and of stereotypes even if pleasant or affirming. I wrote from the need for immigrant voices to create their own truths and mark their own spaces.
Music was memory when I wrote these stories, drifts of song evoking times and locales. Music was imagination, evoking the intangible to make it possible. Through this mix I followed the arcs of narratives, remembering and exploring, as if words were their own limitless country.
The stories in my collection spin out from a central point, Dehradun, a once-sleepy town in the Himalayan foothills. While the town is really a starting point and not a setting for the stories, Dehradun helps anchor the characters before they disperse into the immigrant diaspora. So, it seemed fitting to include this little-known riff by George Harrison celebrating Dehradun, which was written during the months when The Beatles were in Rishikesh at the invitation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. While I was too young to have then been a member of The Beatles’ robust local fan club, this lighthearted ditty remains with me to invoke a sweeter, gentler time. I tried to capture this sense of place in two of the stories in my collection, “The Bonny Hills of Scotland” and “Temporary Shelters."
Lata Mangeshkar and Mukesh “Dil Tadap Tadap Ke” (Film Madhumati 1958)
I was never a Bollywood movie aficionado, but the initial post-Independence films held a kind of charm reflecting a collective faith in India’s burgeoning nationhood. These old black-and-white films with their pastoral song-and-dance routines were dreamworlds, both hokey and endearing in their sunny lack of irony. These are moments of pure delight, when all rationality and critical inquiry must be fully suspended, and the immersion into sensation whole and complete. I felt moments of such exhilaration while writing some of the stories and trace them back to seemingly unrelated snatches of Bollywood songs.
Huddie Leadbetter “Goodnight, Irene”
This song, first recorded by Blues legend Huddie Ledbetter and later popularized by The Weavers, brings back a memory of an apartment complex on a Calcutta street. It’s late night, and a man is serenading his love from the depths of a dark alleyway (Was she named Irene? Part of a mystery that remains unsolved). His voice rises, plaintive and full of longing. All of seven years old, I’m leaning out of the balcony, enchanted by the sheer poetry of his efforts. Suddenly another voice rings out of an upper-level apartment window. SHUT UP! it thunders. JUST SHUT UP, YOU BASTARD! There’s a silence from below that seems temporary but becomes permanent. Did he sing badly? Was the grumpus awakened from sleep? Was the woman a bone of contention between these two men? What a fascinating, horrifying, delightful moment! A caesura that demands resolution, a pause that asks What next? Aborted moments of narrative promise like these stir the waters. Never consciously through memory, but unexpectedly, when I least expect them to surface.
R.E.M. “Don’t Go Back to Rockville”
This song is fun to listen to because the bouncy tune seems at odds with the mystery of Rockville. Why shouldn’t you go back there? Why is the bus so late? Who is the singer waiting for? Why are you off to a place "where nobody says hello”? While writing the collection, I listened to this song, among so many other R.E.M classics, for its multipurpose directions and genres—part-folk, part-pop, part dirge, and wholly R.E.M. Their music never fails to take me into places that need uncovering and reconstruction, something like fiction-writing itself.
Jagjit Singh “Baat Niklegi to Phir”
When I left India, this ghazal by Jagjit Singh was among the best-loved songs in the country and listening to it years later brought back the tensions of study halls and examination papers leavened by his voice and soothed into a gauzy haze. I often thought of this version of India as a reference point for the imagination, romance without exotica.
Leonard Cohen “You Want it Darker”
This song, Leonard Cohen’s leave-taking (at least this is how I see it) stills the heart with its stoicism and unsentimental faith. Human frailty, despair, readiness. Reading the final paragraphs of “Simulacra,” the story rounding off my collection, I saw my character Nina gather herself inwards after a similar point of stasis and imagined how she might be comforted by the austere beauty of this song.
Cranberries “Dreams”
Dolores O’Riordan’s soaring wail is an ache that cuts to the bone. This song was a distraction, but a needed one from the welter of words that at times flow faster in my head than from my fingers on a keyboard. This song allowed for a restful moment to breathe in O’Riordan’s fierce vulnerability, her fist of feathers raised against the world.
Max Richter “Dream 13”
The swell and ebb of waves of sound in this selection, as in so many of Max Richter’s ethereal arrangements, reflect levels of consciousness intersecting, combining, then floating free. Richter’s music takes listeners to the edge of what is known, a vast brimming place where sounds, like words, grow rich in implications and are absorbed into silence where meaning unfolds.
Rachika Nayar “Marigolds and Tulsi”
Max Richter’s compositions lead me to Brooklyn-based musician Rachika Nayar’s haunting “electroacoustic sculpting and dense synthesis” (SLUG magazine), which suggests a synesthetic resonance to how fiction might be re-imagined. In an interview with Audrey Lockie of SLUG, my daughter Rachika Nayar mentions the inadequacy of “single stories or frameworks or tidy conclusions,” and in experimenting with process as discovery and nuance, she “recalls the specific influence of Brian Eno’s electronic realization of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D,” where the former composer expands the metronomic droll of the original piece through time warps and tape-loop layering.”
This effect Nayar describes as “‘an “explosion” past the piece’s conventional limits. ‘That’s how I think of mutating my guitar lines and sending it through these layers of recombination,’ she says. ‘It’s like putting it through a prism; exploring a single idea through all these multiplying perspectives [and] seeing one thing in hundreds of its different facets and selves.’” What better way to express my own experience of writing a collection of stories: narrative lines mutated through layers of imaginative recombination, a prism exploring an idea through a multiplicity of selves. Her music, for me, is where stories come from.
Manini Nayar is Associate Teaching Professor of English and Women's Studies at Penn State, University Park, PA. Her award-winning stories have been broadcasted by the BBC World Service, and are published in Boston Review, Shenandoah, The Bellevue Literary Review, London Magazine, Stand, The Malahat Review, and The Alaska Quarterly Review.
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