I first read Beckett when I was studying French back home in India,
when we were supposed to read a book in French and present it in class.
Not being as familiar with
Beckett’s ‘absurd’ (geddit geddit?) ways then as I am now, I looked at the slim little copy of
En Attendant Godot I had located among heavy and intimidating-looking volumes of
Œuvres Complètes (
The Complete Works) at the Alliance Française library in Pune and figured reading it would be a piece of cake. Like that time I read
Le Petit Prince
in French for my level 2 class. Which is a children’s book. The
simpleton that I was then, I had no idea of what I had just signed up
for. I hated French, I hated doing French homework, and reading a book
in French that was also available in English seemed like a completely
unnecessary exercise.
Armed with my hardly-ever-borrowed-before-I-came-along copy of
Beckett’s most famous play, I headed home to finish reading it, knowing I
would just read the wikipedia page in French/English to present the
play to my fellow-french haters in class. It’s not that I didn’t like to
read, in fact it’s one of the only things that make life bearable, but
having to do it in French just sucked all the fun out of it and made it a
tad too difficult. Having to look up every other word while reading
just kills a book. However, I thought I knew enough French by that point
to actually be able to read the play. And I was really, really excited
about reading it. The French on the first page seemed easy enough. A
couple of hours of struggling through the first 10 pages later, I was
completely confused and lost. All ideas of presenting it in class in a
couple of days were abandoned. I just presented Voltaire’s
Candide
instead, a book I had already read a long time ago and loved for its
humour. Numerous calls were eventually made to friends all over town,
trying to get hold of the English version. A friend finally lent me his
photocopy of
Waiting For Godot. What followed was a long romance with Beckett and absurdism.
My fascination for Beckett’s work since those early days drove me to choose a class on
Molloy
in the second semester of my first year at the Sorbonne, and to work on
the question of the representation of women in his work for my second
year dissertation under an eccentric professor specializing in 20th
century writers like Bataille, Camus, Sartre and Beckett. I knew that
Beckett had been buried somewhere in Paris, but I hadn’t found his grave
at the famous
Père Lachaise Cemetery,
where the who’s who of the last few centuries lie crowded together
competing for space and attention alike, among hordes of tourists
clicking invasive-seeming pictures of their idles (bad pun, I know),
smiling and posing by their graves. Way to rub it in, guys. Nothing like
being full of life on a beautiful day next to dead people.
The more well-known Père Lachaise cemetery. Please don’t use this image without my permission.
So when I realized that Beckett was actually buried at the
Montparnasse Cemetery,
I resolved to go there immediately. However, a lazy person’s resolve to
do something immediately being about as meaningful as Modi’s promise
that he had nothing to do with the Gujarat riots, it wasn’t until many,
many months and missed opportunities to go there later, on a pleasant
day in June 2012, that I finally kept my appointment with the dead. We
quickly found all the other graves we wanted to visit- Sartre and
Beauvoir, the Ionescos, Baudelaire, Vallejo etc. etc. However, search
as we might, we just could not locate Beckett’s grave. No amount of
map-reading and calling out helped. It soon started raining- it was the
perfect horror-movie scenario. Eventually, it was closing time and we
were forced to abandon my search for another day. And that day didn’t
arrive till last week, when I finally made it back to the cemetery after
over a year.
Accompanied this time by my determined friend Saumya (name unchanged
out of lack of concern for her privacy), we searched low and low (see
what i did there?) for his grave. Given my complete obsession with the
man, was his grave not calling out to me, she chided. We knew there was
something obvious that we were missing. How could it be so hard to find
such an important person’s grave? This time, however, thanks to my
friend, her smart-phone and her determination, the grave was finally
found. And just as we had thought, it was in an extremely obvious and
visible place, we had somehow just managed to not spot it all that time
(HA, no I’m not going to reveal the exact location. Have your own little
adventure, trying to locate his grave!). In a way I was happy to not
have found it the first time round, because it was a special moment for
me, and it was a relief to have shared it with the female equivalent of a
‘bro’ (I’d say ho, but I don’t want to offend anyone).
There lay the tomb, nonchalant and unpretentious, humble and austere
(much like Beckett himself when he was alive), right under our noses.
Waiting for us to notice him, perhaps. No fancy epitaph, nothing,
(unlike the more flamboyant grave of the more stylish
Oscar Wilde,
if I may say so). Just his and his wife’s names and dates of birth and
death. And on it, a little scrap of paper placed by another fan, with ‘
En Attendant Godot‘ scribbled on it. The moment I had been waiting for since that day when I first picked up
En Attendant Godot was finally here.
Again, my personal photograph. Please don’t feel free to use it without my permission.
Since, I have decided to visit his grave more regularly. Not just
because I think that the cemetery is extremely beautiful and that it
would be a good place to meet smart young men who love Beckett and are
thus, by default, attractive to me. Not even because I think hanging out
at a cemetery will make me look edgy and eccentric enough to be
considered an intellectual and/or an artist, but because in a world
where one is painfully aware of the absence of a higher power to turn to
in times of trouble and the living are too imperfect to set an example,
I turn to the dead to show the way. Don’t get me wrong, Beckett was
certainly not perfect, but death brings a sort of consolation in
imperfection, unlike the disappointment you feel when the living prove
themselves to be fallible. I have a personal bond with Beckett because
like him, I am homeless. Having left Ireland and settled down in France
and even switched languages from English to French, Beckett spent his
life in search of a home. So is his work haunted by the themes of
waiting and the quest for Home. Some of us are born at home; some of us
spend our lives in search of it. And all we have to keep us from being
too lonely on our solitary journey is some healthy self-derision and
dry, ironic humour. All we can do is laugh bitterly at ourselves and our
petty dramas. There is no other hope, no other consolation. And most
certainly no resolution.
Eventually, towards the end of his life, Beckett changed back to
writing in English from writing in French. Was he finally at ease with
his heritage and his language? Being an Indian writing in English and
speaking hardly any Marathi even though I really want to (I’ve now even
forgotten to write in Devnagri), and studying in French for the last two
years, I am often consumed by questions of language and heritage. I
never felt at home in Pune, and when I came to Paris, it finally felt
like I had found home. But of course, things are never as simple as
that, and perhaps, like Beckett, it will be many years before I find my
language and home, before I am at ease with my roots, if I even have
any. Meanwhile, I have his grave to keep me company in a strange city
where I live far away from everyone I love and care for. So maybe that
was home,
right under my nose, while I unwittingly looked for it in so many
other places without knowing- that simple tomb of a beloved writer where
I finally felt at harmony with the world.
