The Indus Intercept by Aruna Gill

Fact and fiction overlap 

This book left me with two very strong feelings. One was sadness, tinged with despair, for the people of Balochistan. The second was awe at the amount of information the author had managed to pack into this thriller without weighing it down or reducing its pace. This part of the world has much that is unique and fascinating. It was host to one of the world’s earliest civilizations, which produced a script that has never been deciphered. It has harsh terrain and a location that has made it one of the most politically vulnerable for centuries. The people are highly emotional and the culture produced a precious store of poetry, folktales and music, but today the literacy rate is abysmally low.  In the current context, an area of vast natural resources, it is a region whose people feel betrayed by their government. The author has explored these various aspects minutely. Couched as they are in adventure and drama, the quality of detail and narrative skill serves to make the place vividly authentic in the reader’s eye. The characterization is also strong; the people in this book are still with me.

As a work of spy fiction written by an Indian and based in Pakistan, I was impressed by the neutral tone which allows a balanced portrayal of a number of negative characters. The arch villain, however – a real and rather controversial person (for details, go read the book!) – appears only in silhouette. Other shadowy characters display amusing but lifelike traits, as in this conversation between a CIA agent and his boss:

“Good. Good. Any ideas?”

“It appears to be in the Indus Valley script.”

“The Indus Valley script, huh. So, when can you get me a translation?”

“The Indus Valley script has never been deciphered.” Fred rolled his eyes in exasperation.

“Never been deciphered? You telling me there’s some shithead with a towel wrapped around his head sitting in a cave writing instructions in a language no one else can read? Red Rock’s voice rose till it cracked, an octave above his normal tone. 

I met Aruna Gill earlier this month. It was at the Lawrence School, Lovedale, where we both studied, a few years apart – a school which has produced many well-known writers, including Arundhati Roy. 

Of the four writers displaying their books in this photograph, it’s an odd coincidence that two of us had based our most recent work in neighbouring provinces of Pakistan. Aruna told me that she had never been to Balochistan. It was her fascination for the Indus Valley civilization that led her to read about precursor sites around Mehrgarh. And learning about the troubles in that area prompted her to keep reading and asking, and eventually base her book there instead of writing the story set in an ancient civilization she had originally planned. It also led her to the understanding that insurgencies arising from the grievances of peoples neglected by their governments have similarities across culture and continent. She intends to base her next book in such an area in India.

Incognito by Lata Gwalani

Glamour, vengeance ... resolution
Here’s a murder mystery that draws you in and keeps you engrossed without providing so much as a dead body.
It arrived yesterday, and though I have a number of books waiting for their turn, was so impressed with its cover, perfect binding, and elegantly-laid-out font that once I started turning its crisp pages, I just kept going till I’d come to the end.
There are four separate stories here and as I raced through them, waiting eagerly to find out how they would link together and provide solutions to the burning question each one raised, I must say I enjoyed the easy visualization of its fast-moving pace. I admired these four Indian women, happy to be acquainted with their independent thoughts and lifestyle and the way they inhabited a new world which did not hem them in as Indian women have been in centuries past. I was a bit surprised at how their giddy-headed emotional attractions were so easily categorized as ‘love’ – but I will admit to ‘loving’ the different locales Lata Gwalani has depicted in authentic detail in her book.
As the story comes to a close, it suddenly takes on a different character and I found the transition rather abrupt. Moving from a racy, event-strewn narrative to a complex, theoretical arena cannot be as simple as changing gears – at least not to me. I was expecting to race through to the end but the last thirty pages held me back and if I didn’t particularly enjoy the ending, I should acknowledge that it was my fault for not giving it the time and attention it probably deserved.

Mumbai Dreams by Joygopal Podder

Chatpata Chowpatty Bhel
On my way home on the Deccan Queen (which has more leg room than Business Class, and portly, uniformed waiters courteously dishing out chai-coffee to accompany their spicy, deep-fried snacks), I was transfixed, agog, gobbling kanda bhajias in a daze. When the train pulled in to Karjat, my resurfacing consciousness flashed back to similar trysts with James Hardley Chase on Local commuter trains in decades past. This book is composed of elements of Mumbai masala, including Bollywood and the construction mafia, and how things fall into place for two smart young small-town lads to achieve fabulous success. Each chapter paints a quick, action-packed scene. Sex and drugs shimmer discreetly in the background. Who am I to complain about the numerous factual inaccuracies in this book, or to wish that the author had spent more time getting the language right instead of scurrying recklessly ahead in an effort to be “heralded as the fastest-published Indian author by the Limca Book of Records” (whatever that means)? After all, the racy story certainly had me hooked.

The body in the back seat by Salil Desai

Murder mystery in my backyard
It’s always a pleasure to read a book set in a place you happen to be visiting. So … why did I pack this one in my things for Hampi? I think it was simply because I was so excited to discover a thriller writer who lived in my own city that I couldn’t bear to leave it behind. I had actually been reading a much-acclaimed ‘literary’ novel with a blurb by none other than Amy Tan on the cover! But that soon fell by the wayside. As I confessed to my (disappointed) husband, there’s no use in my pretending to be an intellectual – give me a good murder mystery any day.
And this did turn out to be gripping, well written and very local to Pune, which I particularly loved. I have to admit that I’m tasteless enough that the macabre humour also made me laugh:

“What’s this new technique of custodial death you’ve adopted, Ghorpade?” asked Saralkar cheerfully. “You tow away people in their cars, and then eliminate them?”
PI Ghorpade chuckled. “No, no, it’s our traffic colleagues who’ve decided to start penalising all parking violations with death.”

Our hero, Senior Inspector Saralkar is astute, afflicted by mood swings (though generally of grumpy nature), and a reader’s delight, sarcastic about the Secrets of Living spirituality course the department has deputed him to attend, and astute at popping perfect Catch 22 questions to his longsuffering subordinate (“Are you in a hurry, Motkar?”)
Luckily 'raps' were a thing of the past; he can but pound the table with his fists and hiss with contempt,

Get out, Motkar! You aren’t fit to be a police officer! You ought to be a clerk in one of those fancy companies that give paternity leave!

But Saralkar can be gentle too – surprising even himself – when the need arises. I liked almost everything about him – except perhaps the fact that he didn’t care for some of the many thumb rules and unofficial norms of policing – such as delaying police intervention to let matters sort themselves out – it’s a tactic that the sadly overburdened Pune police really cannot do without.
One of the things I liked best about this book was the author’s sensitive and commonsense approach to life.

• When children lose a parent – there may be no immediate sense of loss. But the loss grows and continues to haunt them long into adulthood.

• On the Mumbai-Pune expressway: Why in the world did people believe that their reflexes would work at such high speeds, and prevent fatal mishaps? Why couldn’t they stick to the recommended eighty kilometres per hour?

• When a child gets out of hand, a little brutality from a normally meek policeman father might just be the solution to the problem.

• When even barber shops keep fresh magazines for their patrons, why do doctors, who earn much more, only leave tattered ones in their waiting rooms?

• The seven deadly sins are called so because they draw you into a world where sin becomes a lifestyle – the new virtue for sustenance and success. And the only way to survive the consequences of deadly sins is to commit still deadlier ones.

By the time the second body appeared, I was concentrating more on the book than the fabulous rocks, foliage, ruins and Israeli food of Hampi. And in the end, why hadn’t I been able to guess the killer?
Looking back through the pages later, I noticed the clever nudges that prevented it.

Fate, Fraud And A Friday Wedding by Bhavna Rai

Neel and Anand
I didn’t like the title of this book but Bhavna Rai emailed me a link to a teaser on her website and it promised a lot of action. So I decided to go ahead, and must say I was very impressed. It wasn’t just the fast-packed action and the well-thought-out and carefully-built-up plot. It was the authentic detail of setting, and its unusually perceptive application of everyday situations, that I felt made this book really stand out.
At one point I worried a little about one of the main characters who has studied at New York University – but is totally disconnected from the letters of credit and purchase orders at her father’s import-export business where she works. Until I realised that the whole point of being an import-export heiress is that you can go abroad to study and get a good education without ever caring a bit about tedious necessities like LCs and POs.
Other people and situations in this book are equally genuine. We get to watch a client presentation by an IT outsourcing firm, see how the team thinks and reacts, and how the client team behaves. And to observe the eccentricities of a call centre floor – but also the dynamics at an ‘exclusive’ golf club in Delhi, and a havan conducted in the hope of resuscitating a failing business. There are possessive and emotionally castrating parents – and I loved the instructions their son gives his long suffering American girlfriend before taking her to meet them.
Bhavna Rai showcases the social changes catalysed by the fast-opening Indian economy well. And her focus on the many different man-woman relationship formats in this book does a really good job of exposing human needs and points of vulnerability.
I enjoyed this book so much that I almost didn’t get irritated by its numerous clichés and clumsy proofreading. I asked Bhavna Rai what she’s working on now and was very disappointed not to hear that there’s another blockbuster on the way soon – instead, she said:

Some ideas have been taking shape, but I haven’t committed to any of them, yet

Hurry, will you, girl!

When I told her I found this title annoying she replied,

My manuscript was initially entitled "What time is it in Delhi?" but then it was suggested to me that I need a more descriptive title which is when I changed it to the alliterative title it now has.

And when I asked her which authors' books hers should be displayed alongside in a store, she said:

I'm part of the new breed of India's contemporary writers, so probably alongside Chetan Bhagat, Karan Bajaj and Advaita Kala.

Well – this I definitely do not agree with.
If it was my store, this book would be next to Jeffrey Archer’s, not Chetan Bhagat’s.

Now … rereading what I just wrote, I suppose I should clarify, for the record: Bhavna Rai didn’t pay me. And I don’t know her at all – in fact, we aren’t even facebook friends (yet). And I’m wondering whether I should be embarrassed about all my lavish praise. But perhaps not – because I know I’m unlikely to be so very effusive while writing about a well-publicised book by a well-known author.

Mumbai Roller Coaster by Rajorshi Chakraborti

Love, education, and saving the world
Mumbai is different things to different people. As I read this book I didn’t really get the sense of the Mumbai I know, which is, in essence, about staying afloat and doing your own thing in the midst of, and despite, overwhelming crowds of others doing their own thing. It was more the kind of Mumbai experienced by people who live in hygienic, isolated homes and spend time mostly with others from similar spaces, interacting with the city primarily through the safely-closed windows of their air-conditioned cars. A very small minority. But it’s this minority that Rahul and Zeenat belong to – and very likely to which readers of this book will also belong.

I liked the fast-paced action in Mumbai Roller Coaster. It starts with a dead body – slowly dripping blood on our hero. Capture and escape follow, a number of times, in quick succession. The plot has intriguing twists and at one point I wondered whether this was science fiction. It wasn’t. Mumbai Roller Coaster is about bourgeois kids and is a fun book that might get bourgeois kids to understand the dangers of a world ruled by giant corporations with brainwashing strategies of the nature of:

Thus in a topsy-turvy world, those who wish to pursue the path of common sense must sometimes resort to such drastic underground measures.

Rahul and Zeenat are at different schools and carry on their romance in an abandoned construction at Khar. Like other parents of kids like them, Zeenat’s

were very strict with her. They had warned her numerous times that her ‘career’ should be the only priority in her life right now, with all the exams and other challenges coming up over the next few yeas, and lost no opportunity to remind her of the sacrifices they were making to be able to afford her various private tuitions, as well as her violin, modern dance, and tennis lesson, so that she would be as well-rounded a candidate as possible for one of the insanely competitive full scholarships she’d be applying for the following year at several top American colleges.

I liked Zeenat’s dad – he watches Simpson’s reruns and honestly does not know which channel MTV is on. But I did worry a little about whether he (and Zeenat’s energetic Ammi) would be ok with a book where the characters are quite so free with the use of f**ker, ch**t, and, er, ‘dickhead’.

One of the things that worried me about this book is the strong class divide.
When they get off to change buses, the stop is

on a narrow, ill-lit sloping side street, which didn’t look like it was served by any major bus routes. On both sides were gates to large blocks of flats: tall buildings hulked above them, making the now-evening sky appear even further away. No one else had got off here: it was the kind of stop that only the domestic help or drivers who worked in these flats would probably ever use.

I tried to remind myself how prevalent it was in the Victorian novels where only the upper class consisted of real people. But in an India, and especially a Bombay, where education is available to most kids and everyone knows its value, where everyone is up and coming and pretty much equal, I didn’t care for the way Rahul and Zeenat patronise Ganesh, the shadow hero of their book, even though this is very likely the way a real Rahul and Zeenat might. I still don't think an author should endorse it.

One of my favourite bits in this book is when Rahul is riding home victorious and notices, while talking animatedly to his father, that everyone at his end of the compartment was openly eavesdropping and staring. He hangs up, and then his copassengers start chatting with him, demanding to know what was going on. I loved the lies Rahul made up – they were really funny. And I enjoyed the descriptions of the other passengers and the different groups and thought processes they constituted.
But Bombay commuters don’t get into conversations like this. Nobody listens; nobody engages. People get off where they are going without noticing anyone in the compartment.
So I went online to check out Rajorshi Chakraborti and found here that he had lived in Bombay as a child, leaving at age 11 for Calcutta, and that explained a lot.

The Litigators by John Grisham

Finally
Finally.
Finally, on page 92, after a long, tense stretch with hope rising warily, my heart began to sing.
After all these years – a real, super-duper John Grisham! Since The Street Lawyer in 1998, he turned out more than a dozen duds. It seemed as if the steam had run out. Eager readers leapt on each new title with anticipation – only to fall away, disillusioned. Had he lost it? Was he holing up (in the Caymans, perhaps), sated, exhausted, and having outsourced his brand and pretty straightforward formula to a team of lesser writers without the ability to cast the spell of the master? One damp squib followed another, managing a slight spike with The Last Juror.
Now, finally, the real Grisham is back. David Zinc, hero of The Litigators, is an overworked lawyer at a plush Chicago law firm. His hourly billing is $500 and, like others of the tribe so familiar to Grisham readers, he’s so overworked that, as his financial assets multiply, his health and family remain neglected.
In another – faraway – section of the city, Oscar Finley and Wally Figg run a ‘boutique’ firm and practice a variety of law best classified by the name of their dog AC – short for Ambulance Chaser.
John Grisham was responsible, long before Ally McBeal, for bringing phrases like ‘ambulance chaser’, ‘probate’, ‘file a motion’, ‘deposition’ and even ‘DUI’ – driving under the influence – into the mainstream consciousness of readers in faraway India. Through his stories, we’ve become familiar with any number of situations which engender hatred, arrogance, greed, revenge and the other emotions that underlay the territory that lawyers deal with. Grisham’s books have introduced us to a range of situations in civil and criminal law, product litigation, the homeless, those awaiting the conclusion of a death sentence, dramatic verdicts overturned by appeals, and many more. The dip in his readability followed his move from the fast-paced legal thrillers he excelled at writing, to books which continued to be based in law but began to focus more on other issues in which he was personally interested, such as baseball, a lifelong passion, and the rural south where he grew up, the second of five children of a construction worker and a homemaker.
Even in his most ‘blockbuster’ book, Grisham was always a bit of a social activist. There’s invariably an underdog – or more than one – whose moments in the sun the reader experiences vicariously. Important characters often present a major real-life-type flaw such as a loved one in prison, a one-night-stand, or some other example of human frailty we need to forgive and live with. Bonds within families, and in particular between couples, are strong and satisfying.
Through the peaks of plot, Grisham’s language is laidback and unselfconscious, with a liberal sprinkling of cute phrases. It may not be high literature – but you won’t find smut or graphic violence either. There’s not much in a Grisham book that you might want to protect your children from. And in 2010, in a superb Marketing move, John Grisham wrote his first book specifically for children, introducing the child lawyer Theodore Boone. Theo is a 13-year-old schoolboy and he knows more about the law than most lawyers in his city. Young Lawyer was great fun and, under guise of a racy plot, covered the basics of court procedure and etiquette as well as some common USA laws and their application. Reading it, more than one Indian pre-teen I know dived straight into the adult Grisham books, devouring them stealthily under the bedcovers instead of preparing for their Unit Tests, having placated their proud parents with the thrilling news that they had decided to study law and become lawyers when they grew up.
Sadly, the next Theodore Boone book, The Abduction, released earlier this year, did not live up to its predecessor. It was good to meet the old familiar characters – but the plot just did not have teeth – a situation Grisham fans had no choice but to resign themselves to while they waited stoically for his next. Classic Grishams, the Theodore Boone books also incorporate human weakness and emotion through different family formats.
David Zinc too is a typical Grisham hero – young, brilliant, handsome, likable. Remember Mitch McDeere in The Firm? Like him, David is also a graduate of Harvard Law School; he’s also married to a warm, supportive, intelligent (and beautiful) woman with whom he shares a loving, passionate relationship. Like Rudy Baylor in The Rainmaker, David has no trial experience whatever – but his performance in court showcases his hard work, ingenuity, and fine legal brain as he takes on a veteran with an impeccable track record who has tried and won the biggest cases of all. Like Clay Carter in The King of Torts, there are moments in his career when you will tremble for him, fearing that all is lost.
David, by a strange turn of events, has joined Finley & Figg just as Wally is preparing to file a suit against Varrick, a pharmaceutical giant. Varrick has survived a $400 million settlement for a denture cream that caused zinc poisoning; a $450 million settlement for a stool softener that backfired and clogged things up; a $700 million settlement for a blood thinner that cooked a bunch of livers; a $1.2 billion settlement for a migraine remedy that allegedly caused high blood pressure. Finley & Figg, on the other hand, is a law firm that a clerk, describing it to the incredulous judge to whom Wally’s case has been assigned, writes, “A 2 man ham and egg operation; advertises for quickie divorces, DUIs, the usual criminal domestic, injury practice; no record of any filings in federal court in the past 10 years; no record of jury trials in state court in past 10 years, no bar association activity; they do occasionally go to court – Figg has either 2 or 3 DUIs in past 12 years; firm was once sued for sexual harassment, settled.”
The Litigators is a story about how the ‘mass tort’ business works. A bad drug is identified. The plaintiffs’ lawyers go into a frenzy rounding up cases. Lawsuits are filed. The big defense firms respond with an endless supply of expensive legal talent. Both sides ‘slug it out’ until the drugmaker gets tired of writing ‘fat checks’ to its lawyers. As things get settled, the plaintiffs’ lawyers ‘rake in huge fees’, and their clients get far less than they expected. When the dust settles, the lawyers on both sides are richer; the company cleans up its balance sheet and develops a replacement drug. ‘Mammoth’ corporations know when to fight, when to settle, how to settle cheap, and how to appeal to the lawyers’ greed while saving their company ‘tons of money’.
The Litigators is pervaded right through with the soothing tones of the underdog singing hallelujah. David rescues himself from the rat race; he somehow resurrects the dubious Finley & Figg; he finds suitable alternative sources of income; he achieves justice for illegal immigrants being exploited by their employers; he wins a handsome settlement for the immigrant parents of a young victim of lead poisoning. He even earns solidarity from a former colleague which enables him to stand up against a hacker who has insulted his wife.
Some Grisham books end abruptly, leaving things to the reader’s imagination – but not this one; all ends are neatly tied up, with realistic and fulfilling outcomes for all
(In case all this sounded awfully familiar to you ... yes ... you read it before ...in the Open magazine issue of 12 December 2011 ...)

The Fatwa Girl by Akbar Agha

Engrossing, informative - and sad
One of the most insistent thoughts in my mind as I read and enjoyed The Fatwa Girl was that a book could actually be a good book even if it doesn’t have a strongly pervasive literary quality.
For the last several years, the books I’ve read coming out of Pakistan have been of a standard of English that easily matched up to the best writing anywhere in the world. Even Moni Mohsin, with her giddy-headed and ungrammatical character Butterfly, has a style that clearly arises from an orthodox, rather elite tradition of English literature. For the first time I was reading a Pakistani English book written in language drawn from a wider section of the bell curve; one that even used ‘flouted’ when it meant to say ‘flaunted’. And never once did it upset me.
I think the main reason for my easy acceptance was that I found the plot very interesting, and revelled in the wealth of detail about Pakistani history and the different aspects of its religion and culture which are easily woven in to it.
The story is told by Omar, a young man from an upper middle class family in Karachi. The Fatwa girl is his neighbour and we learn how, despite being from religious sects that detest each other, they become friends. Amina is a smart, carefree young woman. What is it that turns her into a suicide bomber? The suspense builds up as we find out. And, as Akbar Agha takes us to this final turn in the storyline, we journey through a variety of concepts and landscapes: historical information from the Arab world and the subcontinent which contributed to the fabric of modern-day Pakistan; the myths that arose because of the nature of its people; the contrast between traditional and modern lifestyles and ways of thinking; the economic conditions which have allowed corruption to flourish and created power blocks and an ever-widening rift between socio-economic classes. From Karachi to Lahore to the beautiful but desecrated Swat and even a cameo from the Pakistani effort to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan; from Kipling to Lear to Jung; from comparing the plight of oppressed women in Pakistan and the USA: the fabric of this book arises from this knowledgeable author’s perspective on his country and the world. Says Omar,

I recalled the moment we laid Grandpa into the grave and a strange thought entered my mind. It made me think differently about religion from that day on.
I thought, a billion people can’t be wrong. But a billion people would swear that Grandfather would go to Hell for saying Jesus is the Son of God. Another billion would swear he would go to Heaven for saying Jesus is the Son of God. Which billion would be right?

Reading The Fatwa Girl, I wondered whether the story, too, was drawn from something Akbar Agha had experienced himself, and I emailed him with a few questions. He replied:

Perhaps the only thing I share in common with my protagonist Omar, who eventually, like me, joins the Foreign Service, is the feeling that the sorrow of parting is never sweet. I was a bachelor for many years in the Service and just when you got to really know someone you’d receive orders for transfer to another country. I guess the sadness of parting from someone you’ve become intimate with is reflected in Omar’s story.
If the Shia-Sunni divide is at the core of my story it’s because I’ve felt its presence even as a schoolboy. My best friend at school was someone I’d hang out with most of the day, go to movies and parties and dances together and do all the fun things teenagers do – except during the month of Muharram when we couldn’t meet at all because he was busy attending religious meetings or participating in self-flagellation which as a Sunni I couldn’t understand, and during this entire month my best buddy would become an alien to me. I’ve always felt the divide between the two sects should have been repaired a thousand years, but it’s no better now than when it started and will eventually raise its head even among the best of friends.

I asked Akbar Agha about what he is writing now and he said he has just completed a novel entitled The Moon Belongs to Everyone. Its main character is Alvi, a young Pakistani in America, a barista at a Seattle Starbucks, but his grandmother thinks he’s a barrister, and this results in a comical situation. He described the book in some detail, and it struck me that it would also very likely be filled with interesting information and perceptions, and include an element of rising suspense, both features which I had enjoyed very much in this book too.

The Convert by Deborah Baker

A conversation with Deborah
Open magazine sent me this book to read, saying: “Since both of you write biographies, I thought you might connect!”
I read and enjoyed it very much, finding it an excellent combination of information and entertainment. While I read, I thought about how I might have gone about a similar task, and how I would feel now I held the book in my hands. I had a very interesting interaction with Deborah Baker and here's what I wrote for Open:

Deborah Baker is a biographer and columnist. Her first book, In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding was shortlisted for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Biography and her second, A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, also won critical acclaim. Like the other two, this book is also about an unusual person who lived on the fringe and proceeded to make a considerable impact on the world around her: Maryam Jameelah, who was born Margaret Marcus in 1934 to a family of Reformed Jews, converted to Islam, and went to live in Pakistan when she was 28 years old.
Starting with the fragmented records she found in nine boxes in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of The New York Public Library, Deborah Baker has established chronologies and, “teasing the colour of emotion from taciturn documents,” painted a vivid picture of this woman, the life she led, and the impact her writing had.
The Convert begins with a series of letters between Maryam and her host in Pakistan, Mawlana Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi. Promising adventure and excitement, they set the tone for what follows. Maryam arrives in Pakistan and settles down. However, less than fifty pages later, she is writing her letters from the Paagal Khanaah on Jail Road in central Lahore. I turned the pages agog, urgent questions arising in my mind – only to find each one answered in good time, as the book unfolded.
I had begun with a certain weariness about having to read a sneering treatise against someone’s personal choices, a feeling inspired by blurbs on the book jacket which spoke of “misfit” and “lunacy of conversion”. However, Deborah Baker was detached and objective in describing Maryam Jameelah as well as her own journey of discovery of Maryam’s life. This made me curious to know how she felt about having these judgemental phrases offered out of context to readers even before they started reading.
She explained,

Maryam referred to herself as a misfit on numerous occasions. Perhaps the quote you are referring to says more about Fatima Bhutto than Maryam Jameelah. Anyway, readers will undoubtedly have their own ideas. There are many different forms of lunacy in the book, the war in Iraq providing an excellent example.

True enough, there were other disturbing elements here unrelated to conversion. In December 1956, struggling to make sense of her life, Margaret Marcus complained of discrimination by her male rightwing professors at New York University – while her psychiatrist, Dr Harper, “only wants to talk about my virginity”. Her passion for the wronged Palestinians had her flinging a newspaper on the breakfast table where her parents sat drinking coffee, scattering silverware to the floor and shouting, “The Israelis are no better than the Nazis. They are doing everything the Nazis did! I hope the Egyptians defeat every last one of them.”
Then, the book touches on descriptions of psychiatric treatment in the US in the early 1960s: strapping the patient tightly in icy bandages for hours at a time on a table; insulin and electro shock therapies, lobotomy, tube feeding; psychiatrists who would not look patients in the eye; and hospital staff who survived the Third Reich only to be following the very practices they escaped from.
I asked Deborah Baker why these sensational matters had been tucked away and lay silent inside the pages of the book and she replied,

I constructed the book in such a way so that these developments would come as revelations. But while these were certainly painful and dramatic moments in Margaret Marcus' young life, I don't see them as sensational. The 1950s were a time when the pressure to conform, at least in America, was enormous; those who refused often found themselves in institutions. Allen Ginsberg, the subject of my last book, was institutionalized and endlessly psychoanalyzed. His mother had been lobotomized, his friends had had insulin shock therapies, or they medicated or drank themselves into stupors to evade the pain of their failure to find a recognizable place in a very rigid society.

My own work as low-profile historian and biographer has shown that the piecing together of facts is a long process during which one tends to move along by filling gaps with conjecture while proceeding to seek validation. So I asked Deborah Baker whether she had done this here, and she said,

Initially, all I had were Maryam's letters to her parents. These letters told the story of her journey to Pakistan, her arrival in Mawdudi's household, the warm welcome that his family provided her and her introduction to the work of the Jama'at I Islami. I found these letters completely absorbing and, as is often the case at the outset of a project, I didn't think to question their reliability. When I got to the letter that called into question everything Maryam had led me to believe I was stunned and rather impressed that I had been led so far down the garden path. I wanted to duplicate that experience for the reader. I wanted the reader to be carried along and come upon the same precipice. I didn't want to get to the end of my research, having answered all the major questions about Maryam Jameelah, write up the story from that all-knowing perspective and hand the reader a tidy package of facts. Hence the use of conjecture throughout the book.

Did Deborah Baker always have the qualities of the detective and writer of suspense thrillers – or was it Maryam’s story and the way it unfolded before her that had brought them out? Even the fact that Margaret had been on Compazine, an antipsychotic and tranquilizer, comes as a shock, discovered long after the Paagal Khanaah letters appear.
She told me,

It was partly in the way her story was revealed to me, the removal of one veil after another, but it was also the challenge of making the reader aware of his or her own expectations---those assumptions and stereotypes we all carry in our heads, whether hawked by Islamic ideologues about "The West" or Western ideologues about “Islam." I wanted to unsettle the reader's bearings on these grandiose subjects, just as Maryam has unsettled mine.

After spending years thinking about Maryam Jameelah and researching her life what were her feelings about her now? She had written that Maryam’s letters were “wildly chatty,” and that, “Perusing them, puzzling over them day after day, I soon began to think of Margaret Marcus, with both fondness and slight condescension, as Peggy.” Later, when she finally met Maryam, in the most dramatic moment of this book (which sadly can no longer be enjoyed as such by anyone who has read this article), she experienced a chilly detachment and wanted to be done with the whole thing. “In the course of writing the book, I had many mixed feelings about Maryam Jameelah,” she agreed, “and only now, with the book finished, are they beginning to settle down.”

An interesting aspect of my interaction with Deborah Baker was her initial reaction to my questions. She mistook them to reflect hostility and scepticism about the entire undertaking, and she replied in a surly and increasingly exasperated tone. I was taken aback at first, but it struck me that I was probably not as good as a communicator as I fancied myself. The truth was, even Deborah Baker had experienced a major transformation in her perception of her subject in the course of this project. After all, the ability to respond without emotion and refrain from jumping to conclusions is an essential skill of the historian.
In any case, this did nothing to lessen how impressed I was with the book. It documents historical information about the Qur’an, the Sunnah and Hadith: how they were formed and what they constitute, and Mawdudi’s contribution to them. Equally fascinating are the physical details of the story – for instance the eight months Maryam spent in Pattoki, a tiny provincial town with no telephones and few cars. The narrow lanes between houses were largely reserved for donkeys, water buffalo, and the odd pony cart. Residents walked from one end to the other via rooftops.
For all her fascinating history, we exit with the image of Maryam as simply an old woman alone in an untidy little room in Lahore with little more than her faith, her library, and letters from her grandchildren for comfort – perhaps waiting, now, in eager anticipation of her three copies of this book. We can only wonder how she will feel when she reads it, and what answers she will have for the searing questions Deborah Baker asks her at the end.

Custody by Manju Kapur

Secret formula
The last book I took a day off for was Lost Symbol by Dan Brown – and only because I had a deadline. But every booklover knows the feeling of being drawn into a story and falling, helpless, into its clutches with such intensity that you resent every minute spent away from it and avoid every person or activity that draws your attention from it. As I’ve grown older and developed more restraint it happens less often so this book caught me unawares and I put everything aside, agog till I turned the last page.

This is Manju Kapur’s fourth novel and she has established a reputation for writing gripping stories that deal with the complicated relationships in Indian families. Custody is set in the late 1990s, a period that stands out as a time when India had suddenly begun racing to catch up with the rest of the world in technology and manufacturing capability; when it had been gleefully recognized as a lucrative world market – and when various forces had conjoined to sweep in swift social change too. The last two of these form the setting of this book. Some of its main themes are loneliness in marriage, the plight of children of separated parents, the breach between the realities of society and that of the law courts which are easily manipulated by the unscrupulous, and the wrenching agony of childlessness. As with Manju Kapur's other books, the background here is thick with the oppressive ideas that traditionally abound in Indian families: the necessity to put family obligations above personal happiness; parental manipulation equated with love; subjugation of a woman’s needs; rejection and pain not just from parents-in-law but also “children-in-law” – and more. Yes, this sounds like a grim place to be but I found the story and the way it is told simply irresistible.

One of the things I admire about Manju Kapur’s books is the authenticity of detail. It’s not just joint-family politics and delicate marital relationships that she excels at describing! So when her characters are corporate bosses, as some are here, the text will unobtrusively carry phrases such as “B and C towns”, “out-of-the-box thinking”, easy references to concepts of branding and an insider approach to HR. When they belong to an elite boarding school, the quality of the food, the old-students’ network, the psychological skill of housemasters are all described in a relaxed way, with casual but perfect accuracy.

Manju Kapur also has the skill to give us a detailed understanding of her characters without talking about them but just showing us, in her perceptive way, exactly who they are by the way behave. So the philandering wife is lovely to look at, but instead of feeling sympathy for her isolation I could only feel a condescending disgust for her shallowness and self-absorption – even without a single negative word of description. And even the characters towards whom I felt the author’s craft building an empathy in me turned out to be human heroes and heroines, revealing their weakness and vulnerability when pushed into the kind of corners Manju Kapur’s books abound with.

However, this is a book with a very strong narrator's voice and at times I found this to be sneering, which I did not like. And at times it was brusque and grammarless – but that I quite liked, finding it stylish and suitable to a fast-paced style.
For conversations between two people, the author has employed an idiom rather different from the idiom in which living people like these would, but more appropriate to a book that will doubtless have an international readership. However, there are occasions on which some of the characters – usually one of the old folks – will say something from a traditional Indian-English idiom that pointedly reminds you precisely who they are.
Some of the transitions in this book are just single words, sometimes briefly indicating the month or place and often using that meanwhile, back at the ranch device which English teachers tend to frown upon. It works well when you’re reading fast, gripped with the longing to know what happens next – but can a serious writer who wants to continue being taken seriously really do that? I’m not sure! Maybe it’s a very “today” thing to do – or maybe it only shows that this writer, having made her mark, now assumes that she can get away with being lazy and taking her readers for granted. I wish I knew.

Once I had escaped the clutches of the gripping story I began thinking about what had fascinated me so much and my first thought was that perhaps it was only the type of voyeurism that keeps people glued to saas bahu serials on TV. And since Manju Kapur is so accomplished at getting under the skin of her characters, I had obviously found a lot more to gape and ogle.
A second possibility was that all this lifelike churning had put me in mind of similar intense – if long-ago – experiences of my own with custody and nascent stepmotherhood which had served to transport me into an altered state of consciousness.

Sahyadri Adventure by Deepak Dalal

Excellent children’s books based in India
I’ve been a great fan of Deepak Dalal ever since I read his first book about fifteen years ago.
Deepak writes books for children in the age range ten to fifteen years and that was the interval my children were in when I first came across Lakshwadeep Adventure.
Over the years, we got to know his characters, Vikram, Aditya and Chitra as they raced through their school holidays – much as the dear old Enid Blyton characters did – experiencing one adventure after the other.
Deepak’s books are well written and he has a knack for keeping you on the edge of your seat. Just when you think the trouble has subsided – all of a sudden something happens again. It’s like a sine curve of excitement – irresistible to a young reader.
These books are also set in interesting and remote parts of India and Deepak himself being a trekker and wildlife enthusiast works the rugged environment and ecology factor in very well. So we have been with Vikram and the gang – all agog most of the time – not just in Lakshwadeep but also Ranthambore, Ladakh and the Andamans.

This new set of two books, Koleshwar’s Secret and Anirudh’s Dream, is set in Bombay, Pune, Mahableshwar and the areas around them.
What I liked most about them was that Deepak has used a device to take us into a Bombay that none of us who love the city know – one that existed so many years ago that the Fort that was a central landmark has vanished without a single trace - except for the large area in the city that still goes by the name "Fort".
Sahyadri adventure has high-quality historical detail, including legendary characters from the time. These two books would win my vote for the best reads of the year.

Theodore Boone by John Grisham

Grisham Lite
“Why aren’t you eating?” his mother said, her chopsticks in midair.
“I am eating.”
“You seem preoccupied,” his father said. He used a fork.
“Yes, you do,” his mother agreed. “Something happen at the shelter?”
“No, just thinking about Julio and his family and how difficult it must be for them.”
“You’re such a sweet kid, Teddy.”
If you only knew, Theo thought.

Theodore Boone is thirteen years old and he knows more about the law than most lawyers in Strattenburg, a small city in the USA.
Like other books by John Grisham, this one is centred on suspenseful legal drama. The hero is a cute kid – a bit too cute, some might say. This book addresses a readership of both adults and children.
I've always felt that Grisham is an author that could be read by children. His language is straight, simple and clean, and he tends to avoid smut and graphic violence. And I’ve never missed a Grisham book, always hoping to catch some of the magic of the early ones which I enjoyed very much. To describe them, I would need to resort to clichés (“blockbuster”; “unputdownable”) – but I've been disappointed many times over in the last few years.
This book is a lot better than the last four or five. As a book for children, it covers various different family formats and also explains the basics of court procedure and etiquette as well as some common USA laws and their application. However, as a murder mystery it is a bit too tame and ends by rather craftily promising excitement in the sequel.

Blowback by Mukul Deva

In which Mukul does it again
Mukul Deva's books are set in the background of this country’s military environment. The descriptions are vivid, the plot racy and the detail very convincingly developed. I was particularly struck by the depth of realistic portrayal. How does terrorism emerge? What is the thought process of the ones who mastermind, and on what weaknesses do they prey to seduce vulnerable youngsters to their cause? The religious and emotional background, the essentials of recruitment, training and indoctrination, the logistics of transportation, and the chemistry and physics of a bomb as described here are all very convincing and impressive.
Most spectacular of all, Blowback, which has Pune as a key location, was released literally days before the Pune German Bakery bomb blast.
Before I wrote about this book for Sunday Mid-day (you can see the page with my article on it here), I mailed Mukul Deva to ask him why he’d picked Pune for this book and he replied, “Several reasons. Having spent some of the best years of my life there, I love it. With the large concentration of high (psychological and propaganda) value targets and foreigners, it was just the right target for the terrorists. Things became logically synchronised (from the Pak-LeT point of view) when certain divisive and short-sighted politicians started playing regional politics. What better conditions can we give them on a platter? As things panned out I was not too far from reality – unfortunately.
“If you look back all the way to 1988 you will see that every single tumultuous political, communal and economic incident has been exploited by the ISI to add to the troubles India faces. Am I being simplistic? I leave it to you to look back and judge.”
He also mentioned that he is committed to writing a book a year and each one would be differently formatted, even visually, and that the stories would eventually cover every different aspect of terrorism.
I did find the two books I read to be different from each other, though some characters reappear, adding to the attraction. Terrorism is a background reality that has come to reduce our quality of life in some areas and we might as well make the most of it by enjoying Mukul Deva’s annual releases on the theme.
What did upset me a little was the language: these books have more clichés and old-fashioned and sometimes incongruous expressions than I would use. So I spent a little time explaining patiently to myself that it did quite accurately mirror the spoken and written language used by officers of the Indian Army, and that a lot of well-educated people in the corporate world too would find themselves comfortable in this, um, “milieu”, and that if the English language could be tolerant and accepting of different cultures and usage by different communities, I could too.

Delhi Durbar by Krishan Partap Singh

It's not all throwing chairs about in Parliament, you know
This is the first of a trilogy. It's a crisp, no-nonsense and intelligently-plotted story with the Indian government as a setting. I enjoyed it. here's what I wrote for last Sunday's issue of the Sunday Mid-day:
This book is a political thriller and is based in New Delhi. In common with the author, the hero is a Jat Sikh, and also a banker who gave up banking to do something else.
His father had been a power broker and he, like so many others in the Indian government, clambered easily into a hereditary seat that had been lavishly feathered for his comfort. But now his father has died (in a mysterious helicopter crash) and the Prime Minister has special plans for him, an unofficial but critical portfolio, quite different from his father’s old job because “the second generation needn’t dirty their hands, you must concentrate on larger matters that require vision and energy”.
But, and unlike pretty much everyone he deals with while he’s there – our hero is not one of your slimy politicians, just a regular guy you can relate to because he speaks well, considers himself different from them, isn’t as completely unscrupulous as they are, and would rather not describe his sex life to you because it’s private.
Now we all know we live in a country where government officials and bureaucrats are so busy filling their pockets with ill-gotten gains that they really have no time to do their jobs. We all know that they steal from public funds and horde more money than they could ever, ever actually use. And we all know that every aspect of India, if we’re honest with ourselves, is administrated by what can only be described as an extortion racket. So, when we read a story in this familiar setting with a certain amount of accurate circumstantial detail (such as cocky reporters twisting words to unsettle their subjects and gain themselves sensational stories), all the caricatures start looking like real people and even the far-fetched scenes, such as the one of torture, start looking believable.
In that sense I was reminded of The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Though presented by very different narrators, both books show, in an entertaining way, what a farce Indian democracy is when inspected at certain angles and from certain quarters. They also show how close we are to the brink and how careless we’re being about taking our freedom and privilege for granted.
Now before I get carried away and start awarding the Booker Prize here, let me not forget how many times this book’s turn of phrase annoyed me. His passport was going to be his “umbilical” partner “till death do us part” – two mixed metaphors in one sentence, and that too on page one! And do people ever really speak like this, “You’re being overly suspicious, Papa” or “this kind of frontal assault does not fit his personality”?
However, there is excitement in this story, and romance and suspense and also a completely unselfconscious and uniform usage of language – if you’ll pardon the fair number of clichés – and in that sense it’s a book with an unperturbed international quality to it. And yet, when I ask myself how eagerly I’m waiting for the next two in this trilogy, there’s no great enthusiasm in my response. Worst of all, I can’t for the life of me remember the hero’s name. I know I came across it once or twice when I read the book a few weeks ago. And I’ve now spent several minutes flipping through it back and forth but – alas, will have to live with never knowing.

Daylight Robbery by Surender Mohan Pathak,

A desi thriller with desi values
This book is the translation of a Hindi thriller by India’s master of “pulp” fiction and whose more-than-300 books have reportedly sold more than 25 million copies. It’s a well produced, attractive-looking book and a pleasure to read for one, such as I, who enjoys a racy book. I was impressed with the quality of translation too, and mailed Sudarshan Purohit, the translator, to ask him whether he had worked along with Pathak to get clarification or perhaps to choose suitable phrases. He replied,
I speak to Pathak saheb occasionally to get historical references. This isn't too often, but it helps. Also, Pathak wrote this book in 1980 - so I can speak to any older people who remember the events described in the book - the Billa and Ranga case, for example - to get background. As for choosing suitable phrases, I have to say credit also goes to my editors who work closely with me in refining the text. And all of us have grown up reading thrillers in English, so that experience comes in handy :-)
Sudarshan also said that he is now working on Fortune's Ransom, called Karamjale in Hindi, the sequel to Daylight Robbery. Being a much larger book, it’s more work for Sudarshan - and more fun for the reader. Sudarshan also told me that Pathak's writing has changed with the times:
There are more English phrases in his books today, for example. But he doesn't use too much of high-tech technology in his work - no hidden buttonhole cameras, for example, though mobile phones are used by characters. Perhaps because he uses things known to everyone in India. Or perhaps because he's a little old fashioned himself - he turned 70 recently. He's been writing for nearly 50 years now.
Click here to read my Sunday-Mid-day review which appeared last week – or read on below.
When I was younger, and knew even less than I know now (impossible though that might seem), I loved reading James Hadley Chase. It was a great way to get in at Churchgate and find yourself magically transported, almost instantaneously, to Bandra or Andheri. So this book was like coming home.
I’m not trying to say that Daylight Robbery is a ripped-off Chase, just that it has the same elements of easy readability and a gripping plot with unexpected and thrilling twists.
Pathak is apparently a fan who started his writing career translating Chase, Ian Fleming and Mario Puzo into Hindi. Some of the good stuff obviously rubbed off. But there is actually quite a lot of difference between Pathak and Chase – and not just that this book has characters with names like Gangadhar and Dwarkanath who say things like “Chaubey gaye the chhabbe ban-ne, Dubey ban kar aaye” and who know tonga, samosa and Provident Fund.
In a Chase book, for instance, you never know whether the good guys will win and whether the bad guys are going to get punished. Pathak, in contrast, writes from a more stolid perspective, and promotes a more nutritious morality. If you dream of getting rich fast and easy – forget it. And if you’re going to go and murder someone, no way will Mr. Pathak allow you to get away with it.
The hero of this book and well known to fans of Surender Mohan Pathak is Vimal. He’s described on the back of this book as “a man so desperate for a future that he’s willing to commit … Daylight Robbery”!
Now if that description has you anticipating a lusty, eager desperado you are going to be disappointed. Vimal might be wanted by police all over the country as a dangerous criminal, but in reality … hmm on second thoughts, if you want to hear more about Vimal, go read the book yourself.
Though Daylight Robbery is a translation, I found very few false notes: hardly any sloppy language, and no pretentious airing of lofty phrases or pandering to other cultures with excessive contextualizing. Some Hindi bits (as in the chaubey phrase above) are left in tact, thereby preserving flavour, and explained in a glossary.
I asked Sudarshan Purohit, the skilled translator, why he wasn’t writing thrillers of his own and he said that he does write his own stuff (there’s a historical novel on black magic apparently on the way) but thought that translating a very successful writer, someone known for his economy of phrase and tautness of story, would be good training. Another reason was that he felt it was unfair: he had heard of Pathak for years but never read any of his books because there were so many and he didn’t know anyone who could tell him which ones were good. So he decided to find out for himself – and then share what he learned with others like us, more comfortable reading novels in English than in Hindi.
Racing through this book and knowing there’s another on the way soon, it occurred to me that Chetan Bhagat’s time may have come. The swelling mass of Indian readers he spawned is now ready for something better than what he can do, and here it is, tan-tan-taraaa.

Salim Must Die by Mukul Deva

Long live Mukul!
As I read, the thought that established itself most prominently in my mind was, “What superb propaganda!”
It reminded me of books I read as a teenager – books by writers like Leon Uris and James Michener, books so gripping that one could just not put them down; books that defined the world for one (until, years later, one often learned better).
Mukul Deva was commissioned in December 1981 into the Sikh Light Infantry of the Indian Army and retired after 15 years of service, including a decade of active combat duty in India and overseas, to become India’s first military action thriller writer. This book is the sequel to his first, Lashkar, and is the story of a global terror attack originating in a certain neighbouring country, and how Force 22, an Indian “strike action group”, combats it.
The story is full of action, a thrilling plot and very convincing detail. I wasn’t looking for believable characters, because in a book of this nature the characters are bound to be sketchily-defined (though appealing) stereotypes – but I must say that the events in it are certainly believable (or should I say “uncannily prescient” as a cover blurb says – though before I said it, I would need to first find out how the word “prescient” is pronounced).
It weaves in broad outlines of world politics, boldly defining vested interests without fear or any kind of pretension. I liked that – but did find it disturbing that the word “karma” and the concept it represents were used so frequently.
I don’t object to karma per se – and will admit that my own choices and approach to life are based on the assumption of karma as a natural law. However, it is an esoteric notion and to use the word as one may use “vitamin” or “gravity” is, I think, unfair.
I could complain that a lot of the language in this book is clichéd, but won’t, and will conjecture instead that perhaps the choice of words and phrases used in this book are used and respected by many highly-competent professionals in their daily life.
However, I will list some bits that amused me:
- “Manoj, can you check if the chink called either of these numbers?”
- They came. They saw. They freaked. and, later on the same page, cordon sanitaire
- “As soon as we cut out the heart and chop off the head, the arms will automatically atrophy.”
Many of the uniforms are made with something called Kevlar (a ring of Kevlar-clad bodies always stood between him and harm’s way) and it’s assumed everyone knows what that is (says Wiki: Kevlar is the registered trademark for a para-aramid synthetic fiber, related to other aramids such as Nomex and Technora. Developed at DuPont in 1965, this high strength material was first commercially used in the early 1970s as a replacement for steel in racing tires. Typically it is spun into ropes or fabric sheets that can be used as such or as an ingredient in composite material components.)
Salim Must Die is not just great fun but also a brave warrior of a book that addresses many controversial subjects, including the true heart of Islam, with calm impunity.