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.

Leela's Book by Alice Albinia

Fiction from Alice
If, for instance, I had read this book without knowing who had written it, I would be mocking its farfetched and giddy-headed plot. Inspired by a complicated story in the Mahabharata, it is strewn with ridiculously astonishing coincidences and overlaid with unlikely science fiction. I particularly disliked the bits where Lord Ganesha himself is the narrator and am frankly not sure whether this happened because of an insidious subliminal Brahmin prejudice at having a mlechha speak on his behalf (er His behalf) – or just annoyance at the mast-masaledar story being interrupted by boring mythological and egoistical asides.
However, I feel a loyalty to Alice Albinia. Her last book, Empires of the Indus, continues to be one of my best books ever and my interaction with her gave me the impression of an extremely smart, thoughtful, level-headed and sincere person.
With this bias, it’s only natural that I should admire the great effort and skill that went into weaving together all the intricate, authentic details and interesting theories that this very well written and engaging book has.
I’m also thinking about Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts and The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall, two books that show how well their authors, who lived in India during phases in their lives, “got it”. Alice Albinia got it just as well, better even, because there were times when I was reading when, if I had stopped to think about it, I would have been convinced that this had been written by an Indian journalist. The part, for example, where a respected rightwing crackpot is actually just a slimy little social climber. And then later when he responds to a moment’s impulse and commits a ghastly crime.
There are others.
On the other hand, though, an Indian journalist would know that Indian movies do not show bridegrooms carrying brides over a threshold – and perhaps also that the jury system was abolished in India circa 1960 after the dramatic Nanavati case.

For quite a while after I finished reading, I was thinking longingly of Urvashi, Raziya and other characters, missing them, wondering where they were and what they were doing now. So I suppose I did rather enjoy this book, even though the blurb on the cover "A wise and lovely novel", attributed to Amit Chaudhuri, had put me off terribly. Although “wise and lovely” could well be a good description of Alice Albinia herself, and possibly even of Amit Chaudhuri himself, I did think it ridiculous to use such inane and open-ended adjectives to describe this many-dimensioned book.
I had bought more than a dozen copies of Empires as presents for friends and family members because I'd enjoyed it so much. Leela's Book has powerful insights into Indian mythology and contemporary life in India. Still, I can't seem to think of anyone I want to get it for.

Cocktail by Vikram Karve

Dahl in the Western Ghats
Vikram Karve is a well-known Pune-based blogger. His descriptions of food, in particular, are evocative and popular. But this wasn't why I bought this book. I bought it because we share an old school tie and I assumed – correctly, as it turned out – that it would be worth reading.
The stories are great fun and flow smoothly. Each one is based on a man-woman relationship, and they are widely varied and inventive. Many have a wicked little twist at the end, and that’s what gave me the Dahl feeling. If I do have a complaint about this book, it’s the editing slips which make the quality of language less than perfect. Also, the stories towards the end are more intense and better constructed and I would have placed them earlier in the book to get the reader impressed earlier on. Instead, the early stories are rather lightweight and in fact two of them have plot inadequacies that should have been repaired or the stories dropped from the collection.
I loved reading about people and situations in familiar places around Pune and Bombay and the next time I visit Vaishali, will certainly take a closer look at the dosa-eaters there and spend a little time wondering which of them Vikram Karve was writing about!
I think this book would make a good gift to people who enjoy light reading, and in particular who would enjoy fiction in these familiar settings, as I did.

Serious Men by Manu Joseph

A video game country
I saved this book to read “later” for such a long time that it’s now nearly a year old. Partly it was because I’ve been a fan of Manu Joseph for many years, knew I would enjoy it, and delayed gratification while dealing stoically with a lot of other sad stuff. There was also a mild worry that it wouldn’t be as good as I expected. Happily, it turned out to be better.
Just because someone writes well doesn’t mean that they are going to produce a good novel. But Serious Men has more than just a writing style that keeps you entertained and marvelling. It has interesting characters and an engaging plot too, and as you move along and the feeling creeps up on you that something big is going to happen for sure, well, you just cannot stop reading till you find out exactly what. The biggest charm, for me, was its originality in every respect – a rare feature in any book.
One of the major themes of Serious Men is the caste divide in India – surprisingly alive and flourishing even in unlikely environments such as the cosmopolitan city of Mumbai and even the intellectually elevated environs of the exalted scientific Institute of Theory and Research. But it’s not just caste that sunders this country. Manhood has been sadly depleted and it’s only among the poor that men continue to be men – in the homes of the privileged they put on aprons and serve dinner to their guests! And free love, our protagonist Ayyan knows in his heart, is an enchanting place haunted by demented women. Here, every day men merely got away. And then, without warning, they were finished. (Ayyan is safe from such a catastrophe however. Luckily, he loves his wife.)
There’s further irony in the manner in which the biggest problems of life are juxtaposed: a neighbour has burned his wife to death; alien life has been found, dropping coolly in to Earth’s atmosphere. A gardener, who somehow did not look naked in just his underwear, stands watering the main lawn. As Arvind Acharya, Ayyan’s boss and big cheese at the Institute drives his wife Lavanya to a doctor’s appointment, taxis broke lanes and crossed his path, singing cyclists almost died under his tyres and gave him self-righteous glares before resuming their songs, buses were at his bumper and pedestrians stood in the middle of the road waiting to cross the other half, but Acharya’s blood pressure did not rise. “This country has become a video game,” he mutters. Lavanya’s most critical ailment, one which Acharya shared, was her towering height. When she was young, urchins would follow her down the streets of Madras shouting, “LIC, LIC!” invoking the fourteen-storeyed Life Insurance Corporation building, the tallest in the city.
My favourite moment in this book is when Ayyan, who has a clerical job, casually announces his IQ. Everything he has done so far, mystifying and sometimes quite revolting, begins to fall into place.
Serious Men was shortlisted for this year’s Wodehouse Prize – and when the prize was awarded three days ago, I was sorry that another book won. On the other hand, Serious Men may have moments of utmost hilarity, but it would be unfair to classify it as comic fiction. It’s a serious, wonderful book.

The Life's Too Short Literary Review

Not a glimpse of home
By a coincidence, I was listening to Coke Studio – lying in bed, willing myself to recover from a mysterious affliction – while I read this book.
Coke Studio is a Pakistani television series that features live music performances. I enjoyed some of the tracks and was struck by the different global influences on indigenous Pakistani music, in particular the specific sounds and rhythms of 1970s Hindi film music and of course a major contribution from Sufi music too.
It provided the perfect setting for these stories which are also distinctively Pakistani with their own set of varied influences. Baby by Mehreen Ajaz, for instance, is about a couple on the verge of pregnancy: he’s twenty and she’s barely nineteen; both are new to sex, both clumsy and awkward. We never learn their names or where they live – but it’s a place with an Andy Warhol exhibit and you can buy pretzels, so probably nowhere near Pakistan. Settling Affairs by Rayika Choudri tells us what happens after Khalida Begum Sahib, who lived till the age of eighty-three, died. Her father was English, a businessman who met her mother in India, married and converted to Islam. She was twelve when they moved from Bangalore to London. At twenty-one she married an Indian and they moved from London to Salzburg at the time when Europe was recovering from the effects of the Second World War. So even though this story does afford peeks into various aspects of Pakistani life, there is a cosmopolitan feel to it. Ruth and Richard by Madiha Sattar is an unabashedly New York story – but this has penetrating glimpses into Pakistan too.
The winning entry, Lucky People by Sadaf Halai, has a traditional middle-class couple alongside a modern one, and could just as well have been set in India. The same could be said of my personal favourite, Mir Sahib’s Hairdo by Danish Islam, which does a great job of juxtaposing slapstick with sophisticated humour while exploring male vanity in a characteristically subcontinental environment. Still, I did feel that the stories in this book transported me to Pakistan – its cities, its countryside and villages. It introduced me to Pakistani people from every socio-economic background and with very varied values and schemes of existence.
As I do with every encounter with anything to do with Pakistan, I looked for echoes of home. One set of my ancestors came from Sindh, and Partition created in their descendants a community without any place they can call home. The awareness that there is indeed a region on this planet where Sindhi is spoken on the streets is one that creates strong and contrasting feelings in me. I’ve never found those echoes I’m looking for before, and, quite predictably, did not find them here either.
All the stories in this volume are exceptionally well written. They are the finalists of a writing competition across Pakistan held in March 2009 by the Zohra & ZZ Ahmed Foundation. There was no entry fee, and a prize of Rs 100,000 was offered for the winning story. The judges were Mohammed Hanif, Daniyal Mueenuddin and Kamila Shamsie. The book itself is artistically designed, and includes a collection of colour photographs depicting some incongruities of life in Pakistan, and a page of early notes from Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist, I suppose in his handwriting. There's a translation of Urdu pulp fiction, Challawa, by Mohammed Hanif, which I enjoyed immensely, and the first chapter of Musharraf Ali and Michelle Farooqi's forthcoming graphic novel Rabbit Rap. So in all, a good dose of glamour too.

the folded earth by Anuradha Roy

Love, hunger and death in an idyllic location
My first feeling as I started reading this book was a rising admiration for the author’s skill as I got drawn into the story. My second was embarrassment, at the memory of having mistaken it after a cursory glance at the author’s name and the pointedly environmental feel of the cover, for yet another tome of screechy pseudo-development ranting by Arundhati Roy, which had caused me to relegate it to the “no thank you” heap for weeks.
This books is set in Ranikhet. The heroine is Maya, a young woman from Andhra Pradesh with a tragedy behind her. She starts a new life here and this is her story and the story of the people she becomes involved with. There’s the Diwan Sahib, her landlord, once Munim of the Nawab of Surajgarh until the princedom acceded to India after Independence – but not before the Diwan himself had been arrested by the Nawab for treason. There’s the lovely young milkmaid Charu with a poignant story of her own. Maya’s parents and her husband feature in the story too, though we never actually meet them. Maya herself, as Anuradha Roy said in answer to a question I asked, is:

A rich, educated man's daughter. She has had a good education herself; she is a highly intelligent, untraditional woman who is a reader of all kinds of books and is in the constant company of man who is learned and cosmopolitan and with whom one of the things she does daily is read the international pages of the newspaper.Maya's mind has a way of wandering and making strange connections. She gets distracted easily, she often doesn’t focus when people are speaking. She thinks a great deal about her past and about other people, and this creates a prismatic sense of time so that her life with her father and then her husband become part of the present time of the narrative.

With the Himalaya in the backdrop, one of the major background themes of this book is trekking and mountain tourism. Hill life is well described and the flavour of a cantonment town, its local politics and loutish politicians enticingly caricatured. By the time I finished it, I felt a bit as if I’d lived ten years in Ranikhet too, as Anuradha Roy told me she has.

The Folded Earth also has stories from the life of Jim Corbett, from the turbulent times soon after India’s Independence, something about the relationship between Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru, and a heart-wrenching twist at the end.
This book is beautifully written and its story both gripping and plausible. I admired the author’s choice of issues to use as background. One of the things that upset me, though, was a cameo appearance by Ramachandra Guha, a real person and a respected historian, without any disclaimer or acknowledgement.
When I asked Anuradha Roy, she replied,

Ram is an old friend and he is an author we have published at Permanent Black. In the novel, Ram Guha is another of the scholars who arrive to meet the Diwan, in this case a scholar genuinely worried about the safety of valuable documents. The novel throughout plays around quite a bit at blurring the lines between fact and fiction and this is another instance. People who know Ranikhet spot many more instances beyond even the Corbett and Mountbatten angles. Plus for me, it's a private joke, of which too there are plenty in the book. As a writer yourself, you know we are entitled to have some fun while writing!

Now the thing I like best about Ramachandra Guha, even more than the quality of his work, is the fact that instead of using all the attention he gets from the media to transform into a rockstar, he has applied his common sense and clarity of thought not just in his writing but also in his personal life and remained a relaxed, unpretentious person. So I suppose to be drawn by a peer as a fictionalised character alongside Jawaharlal Nehru is more than a joke, it’s a compliment.
I then asked Anuradha Roy whether she was often mistaken for Arundhati Roy and how she dealt with it, and she replied,

Yes, particularly foreigners often mistake me for Arundhati Roy. There is a whole review of my first book on Goodreads that reviews it as her second book. Imagine the fate of the novelist Elizabeth Taylor. And there was another novelist called Winston Churchill...

Holiday Reading (by various authors)

When in Rome
For about two weeks before I left home, I was too busy racing against a deadline to make a blog entry, and the growing pile of books I had read waited, but stopped growing. I haven’t read much since I’ve been away. When I left for Paris, I picked up Perfume by Patrick Suskind and found it quite fascinating. Set in the years before the French Revolution, it’s the story of a murderer and moves fast, elegantly describing for the reader a city redolent with the pungent odours of unwashed bodies, choked gutters, tanning leather and rotting substance of every kind. This was of course quite different to the Paris I spent two brief but joyous days in earlier this week, commemorating a visit there with the same friends 29 years ago!
It was too short a time to finish the book – as I’ve grown older it has dawned on me that occasionally there are better things to do than lie about reading.

Back in London I picked up Brick Lane by Monica Ali. This is an engrossing story that moves the reader between Bangladesh and the London of the Bangaldeshi immigrant. It’s a powerful story – and made a celebrity of Monica Ali when it was released in 2003. She has now written Untold Story, a fictional exploration of what might have happened if Princess Diana had only faked her death, and perfectly timed to coincide with the wedding of Diana's elder son Prince William (to the "commoner" Kate Middleton) which, apparently, the whole world has been watching. You can read here an interview where Monica Ali explains that anyone can write about anything they like so please stop accusing her of stooping to tabloid fodder.

I’ve now just completed Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren and enjoyed it very much.
I’ve been curious about Pippi since I posed with her last May in Stockholm – and subsequently came across references to other characters by this author in Stieg Larsson’s cult books.
I don't think I'm the first to have loved Pippi - or to have noticed the resemblance between her and Larsson’s heroine Lisbeth Salander. This slender child is extremely strong, lives life on her own terms, is loved dearly by the few who know her well but generally avoided and considered with wariness by most, and would doubtless be willing, like Salander, to defend her independence with her life. Pippi books are very much for children – but that’s no reason why adults can’t enjoy them too.
I’m now looking forward to reading The perks of being a wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, also a book for younger readers, and won’t have much time for more – perhaps just a quick re-reading of Mrs Harris goes to New York by Paul Gallico, an old favourite, before I head back home.

The Amazing Moustaches of Moochhander the Iron Man and Other Stories by Musharraf Ali Farooqi

Profundus and Snotbog arrive in India
My first reaction to this book was enjoyment – these four stories are well written and great fun. My second, however, was disappointment. With the name Moochander, I was expecting Pakistani stories. Yet these are clearly in the European tradition.
I mailed the author asking about this, and he wrote back (first kindly congratulating me on having won the match - it so happened that yesterday India won the semi-finals against Pakistan for the 2011 Cricket World Cup!) to say,

I wrote these stories for an international audience about eight years ago. I think children do not make distinction between stories as adults do. They are only interested in a good, fun story, regardless of which tradition it comes from.
In my childhood I read a lot of Urdu stories that were published for children, and later learned that some of them were adaptations of well known English language classics such as Oliver Twist, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and others.
I discovered English language children's fiction as an adult, and loved some of the stuff I read. I now feel that there should be more Urdu language story books available for children whose first language is Urdu but in the absence of good Urdu story books, adaptations from English language children's literature, or even direct translation of international children's literature will be more beneficial for the intellectual and creative development of children because it will expose them to new worlds through the magic of stories.
I have plans of publishing the stories in The Amazing Moustaches of Moochhander the Iron Man and Other Stories collection in Urdu translation. They have been translated already. The translator has adapted them for Urdu language which is perfectly fine with me.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi also told me that he wrote these books in a span of six months. His wife Michelle is the illustrator of this book and I found her illustrations attractive too – imagining what I might feel if I was looking at them and having the stories read to me as many children are bound to.
This particular illustration comes from the story Profundus and Madam Snotbog, great fun, scary, and very Brothers Grimm. I felt doubtful about how Indian parents might feel about a story centred around cute pigs! A bit hesitantly, I asked Musharraf how come, since this is really more of a western concept and rather alien in our part of the world where pigs are traditionally considered disgusting. He replied, deadpan,

As these stories were written for an international audience, I felt free to use any animals I could think of. And in the West you will find many toys and children's books in which pigs are indeed depicted as cute. I understand that in the subcontinent we have a different take on the animal.

He also sent me a link to an interview he gave Fiona Fernandez at Mid-day where he says:

Probably, the characters came to the mind first. In the case of Profundus, the idea for the grab-itty-scope came first, I think. Madame Snotbog was modelled on a dear aunt of mine although I am not half as clever as Profundus. However, I'm not above stealing pies and regularly overdose on sweets. There are a lot of autobiographical details here for future researchers, I'm afraid.

Madame Snotbog turned out exactly like my aunt. So I was very pleased with that, although it was uncanny because Michelle has not met her. And now I guess it's best that they don't meet.

Though I would much rather have had a book more culturally appropriate for Indian children, there was one thing I particularly admired here and that is its approach to inclusion. The Giant of the Bakery is not just an adventure story where young readers will enjoy reading about cakes and breads – it’s also about the struggle of an immigrant. And it gives an artless glimpse into the life of a differently abled person. Moochhander, too, is a poignant look at aging.

As a child, I would have loved and treasured this book, reading it or perhaps demanding to have it read to me, over and over again. My children would have done the same. As an adult, what intrigues me most is the versatility of the author.
I have never met Musharraf but have liked and admired him since 2009 when I first read his novel Story of a Widow. It impressed me with an elegant style that grips you as it takes you into people’s lives and leads you, unawares, straight into the heart of a culture. (I can't find a link to the review I wrote for my Sunday Mid-day column but if you like you can read it on Musharraf's website).
I was surprised to read Hoshruba a short while later, a translation of an Urdu epic spun out by court storytellers in Lucknow in the nineteenth century, and to learn that Musharraf intended to translate the entire lot. And this was someone who, as a young man, had spent considerable time consuming books along with tea and omelettes at the canteen of NED University of Engineering and Technology in Karachi instead of attending lectures there till he realised that he was never going to be an engineer and might as well become a writer instead!
Hoshruba itself had a formidable 447 pages, and there were 23 volumes to go. Musharraf was going to be busy for many years, but he was kind enough to spend some time telling me about his journey as a writer.
So now, instead of asking Musharraf how and why these concepts (which would painlessly give children a broader emotional spectrum) wove their way into his book, I am going to guess that it was not done as a strategy but happened subconsciously. I suspect that Musharraf's writing falls into two categories, of which it is only the translating that taxes his left brain. His fiction, I would like to imagine, is simply a product of nothing but a joyful creative process, plucking stories out of thin air with no other intention than to create pleasure in the reader.

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.

One Little Finger by Malini Chib

A glamorous crusader

I saw Malini’s book at a friend’s place in Madras last month, read the first page, and was thoroughly captivated. And I was tickled by the title. I had met Malini in January 2009. She had told me about herself, and one of the things I remember her saying was that she has two separate Masters’ degrees and had typed both theses with just one little finger. So I knew what the title meant: it was a tribute to a certain very special finger, and quite characteristic of Malini’s wry sense of humour.
Malini has Cerebral Palsy. I enjoyed meeting her and found her to be an extremely emotional person – enthusiastic, independent, full of life, very good looking, a little impatient, and irrepressibly eager to try out new things. During the course of the day we spent together, her witty responses had me laughing a number of times. And she had a coy look on her face when her mother, Mithu Alur who founded Spastics Society of India, told me that Malini was presently working on her autobiography. Well – here it was, and I ordered a copy as soon as I got home.
One of the best things about this book is that it is the inside story of a struggle that many face – but very few are gifted with the ability to articulate. And Malini is not just telling us a personal story, she is also able to comment on the difficult situation she has faced all her life and conceptualize and analyze various facets of it. Not only that but she make jokes about it too. For instance, she tells us that as she was growing up, the world viewed disability through what is now known as the “medical model” which means that disabled people were considered as medical cases and isolated accordingly. The prevailing view, however, is the “social model” which applies a “rights-based approach” and considers disability as a social issue; that we are each dependent on others at some level – and that each of us must consider it a simple responsibility to include others of varying ability in our lives. But when her friend Varsha Hooja helps her onto a bus in London and a co-passenger gushes, “You are a wonderful person. God will bless you,” Malini and Varsha secretly laugh and define a new “medical charity model”: anyone helping the disabled will be blessed!

In this book, Malini tells us the story of her life, starting from her birth in Bombay to an educated family, privileged and well connected.
When her parents realize that their child has special needs which will not be satisfactorily met in India, they move to London. Over the years that follow, her life is divided between Bombay and London. Wherever she is, we observe that she has the intelligence to analyze her problems and look for solutions to them. When she joins college at St Xavier’s in Bombay, she agonizes:

Did I have my own personality? Was I just another disabled girl who needed things done for her? I knew that I was different and trapped in a dysfunctional body, but did others realise I had a spirit and a mind separate from this body? My body did not work like others, but did they realise that my mind was normal? Did they consider thinking that my desires were just the same as theirs?

When her classmates plan to go for a movie together, it doesn’t occur to them that Malini wants to go too. But instead of just sitting there feeling sore and left out, she invites herself along and soon enough they learn how to help her along and get used to involving her in their plans.
It struck me that by having the courage to maintain this approach, Malini has always been able to influence people around her towards inclusion, even before she became the activist that she now is. However, the environment was full of barriers. The classrooms at St Xavier’s had a raised strip at the doorway which made it a struggle for a wheelchair to cross. When she got a job at Bombay Times for a short period, the canteen was out of reach so she could never join her colleagues for a cup of coffee or lunch. In India, even toilets for people with disabilities were not accessible.

I liked Malini’s observations – for example her experience of the education system in India as one “which teaches students to be like sausage machines rather than thinkers of the future.”
At the special school she attended in Bombay, children were praised for no reason and not challenged or driven to learn and this proved to be a handicap too. She writes, “My writing was affected. I think one of the fundamental concerns for education for disabled people is the communication output.” This surprised me because it sounded like the most basic, simple common sense. Apparently not!
And she later comments, rather poetically, “To me, communication is like water, the essence of life. What could I do without fluent speech?”
Of her pain and isolation she philosophically remarks: “My experience is that most people cannot deal with other people’s trauma. One’s trauma is one’s own and should not be mentioned unnecessarily to others.”
As she got ready to bid goodbye to her parents as they set out for six weeks in India, leaving her in London, she writes,

‘Bye’, said dad as he kissed me, adding ‘this is what you wanted, so don’t cry’. Men do not understand why women cry.
...
A mixture of emotions passed through them. I was happy to be finally on my own, but sad that my mother and dad had left. We did so much together. We were more like friends.

Her struggle with inclusion and access reduces – though it does continue in different ways – in London where she has a series of happy stints. Here she experiences independence for the first time using technology to make her mobile and able to communicate with the world through different appliances. And at Berkeley, where she meets a large number of disabled people leading normal lives, it opens new worlds to her.

For Malini, a simple outing that most of us would take for granted becomes a grand expedition! We share her excitement and tremendous sense of achievement when she finally goes out all on her own for the first time. And we feel her joy when she travels with friends who enjoy her company. At Notre Dame in Paris, Malini is moved by the atmosphere and writes, “I felt a spiritual presence encircle me. I prayed, and thought about how lucky I had been in life.” And later, when she learns to give lectures using PowerPoint, she comments sardonically, “I absolutely abhor the sound of my monotonous voice. I wish I had a sexy, husky one with a clipped Oxonian accent, but I guess one cannot have everything in life.”

I found this book entertaining; I admired the writing style, enjoyed looking at the photographs and smiling at the humour. I was happy to have from this book the endorsement of the belief, implemented in my own life, that a professional attendant is more conducive to a life of independence and dignity than when the disabled person is cared for just by family members.
But there was something about this book that made me angry and that was its very large number of editing and proofreading mistakes. Malini, being disabled is deserving of more protection than people who have all their functions – and as a talented writer, her creative output deserves better housekeeping. On the very first page of her book she is delivered by a paediatrician! What a novelty! Then, mama is explained on page 29 as a term used for mother’s brother but mashi was used ten pages before and repeatedly through the book – but no one tells us what that means. Why do we have “Bakers” Street instead of Baker Street, “I regaled the incident” (instead of recounted); sooth instead of soothe; a sentence as meaningless as “pasta was considered to be a wholesome, student-friendly of meal”; any number of misplaced apostrophes as in “as other’s often tell me” and bumbling capital letters as in "university Bookshop"? Worse still, towards the end of the book, even the editing gets careless and leaves us with phrases like

As my mother and my aunt were getting older, mashi only suggested that I should have a separate carer

and

… she noticed a considerable amount of bags at the back of my chair.

This book is an excellent production, with good aesthetic values. It has a good story, a beautiful cover, and is well written. To be strewn with careless mistakes – I’ve listed here only a few that I noticed, and I wasn’t even looking – is inexcusable.

Many people would find Malini's book a source of hope and inspiration. But for me, the best thing about this book is what I learnt from it. For the majority of us who have little experience with disability – a situation resulting of course from that unfortunate “medical model” – Malini’s response to the different types of reactions she gets from the different types of people she meets shows us appropriate ways of behaving.

Third Best by Arjun Rao

Lord of the Bogs
Arjun Rao is a schoolmaster at Doon. He himself studied at the Lawrence School, Lovedale. So Third Best is definitely an insider’s version. I was eager to read it because I did time at Lawrence too, and had heard that this book was set in the school.
My initial reaction was a slight distaste at the sex scenes in the first few pages.
Well – I left school a full 22 years before Arjun did, and doubtless the relentless march of technology (to avoid the word “civilisation”) had provoked, um, advances in other spheres of life too. Or perhaps the author had just, um, inserted them to attract young readers.
Now it’s not that they were offensively explicit – in fact they were in the remote background, coy as a schoolboy’s fantasies, and perhaps a book about boarding school life without the hint of preoccupation with sex would be a book without virtue.

Compared with Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s or Mallory Towers books, to which I will admit being devoted as a child – or even with the (yawn) Harry Potter books, this one must be singled out as more than just escapist fiction because it is so firmly rooted in reality and includes ugly facets of boarding school life too.
While my distaste at the hint of sexual freedom lingered, it was eventually overcome by the gripping, well-written stories in this book which I found very relevant and interesting.

Shore Mount is different from Lovedale in geography but I found it emotionally very similar.
The author has drawn on a variety of situations and characters appealing to a young person – a stay in London, a holiday with a friend at his royal home in Rajasthan, a peek into the life of the most privileged person in a boarding school (the headboy) including meals at the headmaster’s house (where they serve pasta, which in my days had not yet been invented) and, for one who has spent years in a dormitory, not just a room of one’s own but the most amazing and desirable living quarters – and more.
But these were peripherals.
The book also has teacher stereotypes – posturing, petty minded, superannuated, socially compromised and other varieties. One teacher even has the maturity to frankly advise his students, “Listen to me. These exams are among the most useless things that you will ever have to do in your life. They do not matter in the greater scheme of things. In five years you’ll laugh that you ever had to do them and that you were even worried about them. But the fact is that the only way to get into a decent college in this country is through those marks.”
There are excellent descriptions of traditions such as the school dances, ceremonial sports rituals such as awarding colours, “Founders” and more. Listen to this:

A colour was Shore Mount’s most prestigious acknowledgement of its sporting heroes. Traditionally, it was awarded to the best player of the year in each sport, decided by the captain of the team and the teacher who was responsible for managing the sport that year. The Headmaster had the power to overrule and even withdraw a particular award, but this had been done so rarely in the history of the school that no one sitting in the Memorial Hall that morning even knew that such a rule existed.

However, these, too, are just background.
The real meat of the story is the constructed world of a particular boarding school steeped in conventions that go back a hundred and fifty years and more.
There are dynastic families which spawn star athletes and great leaders and if you come from one of these – the weight of expectation on you is tremendous. When your father and grandfather were headboys – but the headmaster doesn’t consider you up to the mark – could that be considered trauma that might mark one for life?
We learn that it’s an idyllic world – but isolated, and cut off from modern technology as it always was and doubtless always will be.
And these young kids spin out speeches with articulate passion. Even an un-glamorous sports captain has it in him to say, while listing people to whom he’s grateful:

Nathaniel Gomez who taught us the reason why we play this game: “Not to win but to show everyone we’re the best”.

Because language, to these students, is more than just a medium of expression – it’s a field in which your craft must continue to grow and grow. It was always like that at Lovedale and I enjoyed the propensity for dramatic and sweeping statements in this book that I remember well from my schooldays: “If you don’t switch off the fucking lights, you’ll all see nothing but darkness for the rest of your lives”. (Though I must permit myself a token objection to the easy use of the f word – oh dear.)
There is also insight into an innate childhood response to recognition, evident when you are made a prefect:

No one at Shore Mount knew how it happened but one minute you were just like everyone else, trying to get away with breaking the rules, and the next minute you were standing up for the system. It was as if a switch had been turned on that morning at assembly.

And childhood frustration culminating in violence features here, neatly and easily. You can get caned for misdemeanour, and this can happen in public. But more likely you’ll get beaten up, hit with hockey sticks, your bones will break and perhaps your face will be scarred for life:

No one ever tells you that your butt cheeks should be left loose. Clench hard and you won’t be able to shit for weeks. That, and to ensure you hands are way out in front. You don’t want a broken wrist adding to your pain.

An especially vicious cruelty is administered to teachers’ children.

What I didn’t like about this book (besides the implication of sexual freedom I mean :-)) was the easy assumption that the boy hero had to be much better than his girl. She studies harder but he scores higher. And when some girls begin to cry after seeing their marks, “everyone backed away lest they be blamed for the situation, and this included Mr Baweja, who should have been impervious to tears by now considering that the girls practically wept every time they encountered shares and debentures in his Accounts class."
Now this little bit of stereotyping may well be grounded in reality – but as a smug older woman, and one originally repressed by the very community this book is based in, it’s my duty to object – while praising the accuracy of detail. On the other hand, I did like it that these boys too cry at times – and even hug each other – and when they pull back after a while they say, “oh man – this is so GAY!” and laugh.

This book did a good job of drawing out the essence of singular self-importance that a contrived world is bound to engender. The boys and girls in it came alive for me. I could see them, physical features, personality traits and all – and, like real children, they grew before my eyes. Not just in inches but in maturity too. I admired this. But what I liked best about this book is the strong values it showcases. Nirvan is strong and reliable; he knows right from wrong and has the courage to always stand up for what he believes, regardless of any kind of social pressure. And I particularly liked the strong focus on mentoring and appreciation of it that this book quietly but effectively brings its readers.

On two feet and wings by Abbas Kazerooni

The diary of an unusually courageous child
I was reading another book, one which I had actually been waiting for for several months, when I received this one and happened to pick up and idly flip through it.
Before I knew it, the pages had flown by and when I realised, startled, that I was already on page 50 – well it was time to face the embarrassing reality that, despite any pretension, I’m nothing but a sucker for a fascinating story.

Abbas is nine years old and his family, once among the most prominent in Iran, has been a victim of the Ayatollahs. To save him from being recruited into the army – the age has been lowered to eight – his parents have no option but to take him out of the country.
A series of events leads to little Abbas finding himself living alone in a seedy hotel in Istanbul and proceeding to have a series of fascinating adventures. His goal is to get a British visa and go and live in safety in the very country that his great grandfather funded a guerrilla opposition against when the rulers of Persia would not fight them. Accordingly, this book has three sections which tell us, respectively, about Abbas's early life in Tehran, his struggle in Istanbul, and a little of what happens after he arrives in England.

When I mailed Abbas Kazerooni, the author, to ask him how much of this was actually his own story, he replied, “I would say about 70 to 80 percent. Obviously I have used a lot of artistic license but you would probably be surprised to know that some of the more shocking parts actually happened.”

When I read a book, I try my best to avoid preconceptions. This means not discussing it with anyone beforehand, not reading reviews or opinions, avoiding the publisher’s note and the text on the book jacket, or any supplementary text inside the book which usually tries to impress you with how wonderful the author is and what a great books this is. I’d really rather find out for myself. As I read, I also try my best to remain impervious to opinions formed by previous books by this author, or previous knowledge of the author’s reputation. In this particular case I had never heard of the book or author before, so it wasn’t difficult to form an objective opinion. I enjoyed the book very much and though there were many phrases and words that I felt could have been tweaked for a better flow, I was so engrossed that they didn’t upset me too much.

Going online, I now found that this book had been published in the US in 2008 under the title The Little Man and if you like you can read the first part of that book here though I must say I found this version rather self indulgent compared to the casual style of the Indian edition.
I did feel that Indian readers would enjoy this book more than western ones who might tend to exoticise it more than we would. And when, for instance, a dog called Barfy turns up in the story, we would know it just meant Snowy rather than looking around for a vomit bag.

What I liked best about this book is that it can be read and enjoyed as much by children as by adults. After I finished, I had noticed that the book was dedicated to the loving memory of the author’s mother. Seeing this, and having observed the depth of feeling little Abbas repeatedly expressed for his estranged mother made me very curious to know the circumstances in which he had lost her. But when I asked, the author replied, “This will all be revealed in the sequel!”
Well I was longing to know what happened next, after the book got over, and find out exactly how poor Abbas went on to become someone who worked in successful theatre productions in the West End in London – and now lives in California where he has his own law firm and practices law when he's not writing semi-autobiographical novels – wow! But he would only say, to my dismayed impatience, “I do not want to give away too much and I will only tell you that the story gets more and more interesting and the protagonist is going endure a lot more!”
This of course brought back to me what a very intelligent and clear-thinking person the nine-year old Abbas had been, and I felt happy to think that he had done justice to that early promise.

Not Just Cricket by Vikram Dravid

There's more to life than World Cups
When I reached page 97, I suddenly realized that this was a really good book.
I had been reading slowly, enjoying the story about a typical cricket-playing boy from a middle-class family in Bombay. There had been brief glimpses of a world beyond. At page 97 the world beyond shone through, clear and unmistakable, and I understood how and why this book really wasn’t just about cricket. Cricket is the fabric; it’s also the substance of the plot. However, Not Just Cricket also carries glimpses into rich, deep aspects of life that can be revealed to most of us only through fiction because they are so removed from our scheme of things.
Most of the books I read these days are just too long. They go on and on, invariably repeating themselves, aiming to thrill the reader with flourish after flourish. As you long for them to end, all you can do is stretch your eyebrows in exasperation at that fundamental horror creative people seem to consider themselves entitled to – of having the output of their genius savaged just for the user. So after a long time, I was happy to be reading a book which ended too soon. It simply did not do justice to all that the author has to say.
Vikram Dravid is a doctor. He grew up in Bombay and now lives and works in the US. He certainly has the knack of telling a story and his characters are developed with skill, but there were some things I felt were lacking and I emailed him with my questions.

I found the fake names really annoying. Why Suchen Chembulkar? Especially, why Dalmeinkuchkala?! These names are parodies and more fitted to a comic or satirical genre. I found that in your text, which has a quite serene context, they formed abrupt and jarring interruptions. Was there a reason why you did this? And how much of the Pakistan tour you’ve described is as real and thinly disguised? I’m afraid I don’t know cricket so you will have to tell me in case there was a specific series you were talking about. I did enjoy stepping in and getting glimpses of Pakistan along with the team, though.
I was going to use the real names of current cricketers but was told that using the real name, particularly of a celebrity, in a fictitious scenario required their permission. I wanted to give the cricket an aura of authenticity, and not seem make-believe. Using thinly-disguised versions of current day stars, that most of the readers would likely be familiar with, allowed me to extrapolate their real life characteristics into my book without having to flesh them out.
Interestingly, readers have either been turned off or extremely tickled by the names. Dalmeinkuchkala refers to a previous chairman of the board who had a reputation of many unsavoury deals. I must say there was a little inspiration from Rushdie's use of Rani of Cooch Nahin etc, although I recognize that my book is not of the same genre or calibre. The tour is all made up.

Your style is neat and simple and I also admired your frequent linguistic flourishes. But … I would have been a bit more careful with the editing.
Being a first-time author, I sought a lot of advice regarding this. The manuscript has been edited umpteen times. I do think some of the usage may reflect my own peculiarities of language.
I really believe that I am more of a storyteller than a writer. In fact I am better at narrating verbally and sometimes my prose is gushy and has to be chopped up on the second go around.

What I really would have liked is more details of the glimpses you’ve given us into the fascinating lives of Arjun’s parents. I kept thinking kept thinking that you have the seed of more good books in some of the areas you’ve touched on there – in particular the aspects of rural medicine. Maybe a collection of short stories?
The two stories about Arjun's parents have been liked the most by all readers. They did start off as short stories, but because they fitted in well I used them to add layers and dimensions to those two characters and to tie in the narrative.

How did you find a publisher? And how’s the distribution going?
Being removed from India, with no direct access to publishers, I sent out routine emails to the big publishing houses. They weren't quick to respond. I found Cinnamon Teal on the web. They have been very responsive. However, people have found it difficult to get their hands on the book. I guess distribution could be better. For instance, I would love for it to be available in a chain of stores such as Crosswords. Currently it will be made available in select bookstores, I don't know which ones. I would love to be more involved. However, distance and the lack of wherewithal are stumbling blocks. The book has done very well in North America where it is available on Amazon.

What are you working on next?
I do have a sequel in mind, but am currently working on a string of short stories that tie in together with a common thread.