A free man by Aman Sethi

Like a journey to the moon
This book tells the story of Mohammed Ashraf, a day-wage worker at Bara Tooti, a place in Delhi where people go to hire labour for construction work. Written by Aman Sethi over a period of five years during which he spent days at a time with Ashraf and his friends, it is partly a diary of his experiences and observations, and partly descriptive narrative. Like the best biographies, this book gives a strong sense not just of the person, his inner strength and demons, but also his geography, culture, politics, and the fabric of society which he inhabits. And Aman Sethi has pieced together this history like a jigsaw puzzle from a number of conversations, much contradictory information, sudden revelations; he has coloured it with his own feelings, insights, and contextual information.
Some people believe that the life of a mazdoor is equal parts azadi and akelapan: independence and solitude. And sometimes Aman Sethi feels he may have asked too many questions:

It’s bad form to keep asking people about pasts that they are reluctant to confront. At Bara Tooti people come and go all the time. A man could get up from a drinking session, walk down the road for a piss, keep walking till he reached the railway station, hop onto a train, and return after a year without anyone really missing him.

But what about tickets?

‘You don’t need tickets. If the checker doesn’t come, you travel for free. If you get caught, you simply go to jail.’ Jail, according to Ashraf – who has never been to one – is an acceptable way of spending three months of a life in exchange for a short train ride. ‘They don’t make you work if you are in for less than six months,’ he claims. All you do is eat and roam the premises.’

It’s a complicated journey that Aman Sethi takes us on, exploring Mohammed Ashraf’s life. How did he get to be head kasai of Fauji Halal Shop in Malad, Mumbai? Never mind – we learn here fascinating details of why speed is crucial for anyone working there.
As Ashraf goes about finishing his half bottle of Everyday,at the haunt of a successful woman entrepreneur, the memory of an Everyday hangover has prompted Aman Sethi to refuse politely. We learn that new recruits often shun this intoxicating brew, in favour of more bombastic brands like Hulchul that shake the very foundations of a man’s being; Jalwa Spiced Country Liquor that speaks of youth, fire and passion; Toofan, infused with the pent-up vigour and vitality of an impending storm; and Ghadar Desi that is a perfect antidote to colonial oppression.
Sitting at the chowk, trying to look sober and employable, Ashraf and Lalloo are saved by the lucky charm he saves for such situations: his ‘kandome’.

The kandome is a broad, heavy brush with long, thick bristles encrusted with paint. The bright red handle is solid wood and fits just right. It is the most useless brush Ashraf owns: it’s too heavy and soaks up too much paint. ‘I bought it when I was just starting out. It looks like a brush a professional would use.’
A well-stocked bag is a sign of tajurba, experience. A maalik likes a workman with impressive-looking tools. At the chowk, where safediwallahs are arranged like mannequins in a shop window, the maalik is drawn to the one with five, six, seven, brushes in his bag. He thinks this man is a true karigar; he has a different brush for each surface. It’s not a brush, it’s a badge of honour. “It’s just like a kandome, Aman bhai. On TV you may stand next to Shabana Azmi and promise to use it, but you know you never will.’

These are people who live on the fringe. They have come to Bara Tooti from pasts in different places around the country. Their lives are expendable to those around them, even to themselves. Each has a different story. The one that chilled me most was the one told to Aman Sethi by Guddu, a young man of twenty-two, who ended up in Bara Tooti when his first dream ended in disappointment. Tired of working as newspaper boys at Lucknow Railway Station, Guddu and a friend took a train to Jaipur in search of a hospital that bought kidneys for about two lakh rupees. ‘We would spend the money in full masti, and when it finished, buy a ticket to Bombay and become full-time beggars outside one of the mandirs where all the film stars come to pray.’
And Aman Sethi hauls us, agog, to the Beggars Court at Sewa Kutir, the place where designated government employees bring beggars to trial and punishment. Begging in the national capital is a serious offence, and under the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act, 1959, the Department of Welfare can arrest anyone ‘having no visible means of subsistence and wandering about, or remaining in a public place in a condition or manner, [that made] it likely that the person doing so exists by soliciting or receiving alms’. How would these skilled government employees ever know the difference between any of the Bara Tooti majoors and a beggar? Aha – they certainly can, it’s easy, read this book to learn the unmistakable signs.
Unlike the Beggars Court, which has an office with a signboard, the kidney snatchers of Ashraf’s nightmares are harder for Aman Sethi to find. But he did meet and interview some of their victims whose stories are also given here.
Grimmest of all are the wards of RBTB, the Rajan Babu Tuberculosis Hospital where hapless families leave victims of drug-resistant tuberculosis. To get discharged doesn’t mean the person is cured. But it is not an entirely bad thing either – because even if someone is dead, or even if he or she will now carry the infection out to others – it does mean that a bed is vacated for another languishing patient. To visit RBTB is to risk illness and possibly death – but it’s certainly safer than driving an autorickshaw. One of my favourite parts of this book is when Aman Sethi’s sister visits one of the Bara Tooti gang there, to bring him underwear, a mug, a bucket, and some soap.
The writing in this book is exceptional.

The smell of blood is overwhelming; it prowls along the alleyways of Kasaipura like the ghosts of the buffaloes that lie dismembered before me. The floor is sticky – a chip-chip texture that holds my shoe soles just a fraction more than the tarmac road outside, but could as easily turn slick and treacherous. It’s a bit like walking on congealed blood – in fact, that’s exactly what it is.

And here’s a description that felt to me like poetry:

Money: About one hundred rupees.
The half bottles are over. Fifty rupees have been spent on something, but on what exactly? Ashraf isn’t sure. There was some food – boiled eggs, maybe a roti or two? With dal. If there was roti, there must have been dal. Possibly a cup of tea. Six rupees were spent on squishy packets of water – that is certain.
The pauwas, or quarter bottles, are still intact; Ashraf keeps them in his breast pocket. He keeps the money in his shoes. He wraps his shoes in his pants. He puts his pants under his head – like a pillow. He throws a shawl over himself.

Even the translations show the author’s flesh-connection with language. The Urdu word kaafi Aman Sethi describes as, “Enough: not ‘just about enough’ but closer to ‘more than enough’ – enough with an emphasis”.
Towards the end of this book, Aman Sethi becomes involved with Ashraf’s life in a way that builds suspense for the reader and brings an experience of the terrible pain and cruelty of life. I think it unlikely that anyone who reads this book will ever get any closer to someone like Mohammed Ashraf than between these pages.

Desperate in Dubai by Ameera Al Hakawati

Arabian Nights comes to 2011
I’ve never been to Dubai so I dived straight in and this book turned out to be just what I needed to make yesterday, my first Sunday after months without enormous looming deadlines, pleasant and relaxing. The four Dubai women here give a good tour of the city and lifestyle, and though it added character that the book was strewn with phrases like “wudhu for Salaatul Fajr” and infused with the intoxicating scent of “bakhoor”, I did sort of wonder wistfully what they meant.
Dubai is a place teeming with single women on the make – most, but not all, just looking for the financial security of a stable, uncomplicated marriage. (And, depending on the woman, the man could be fat, old, balding, ugly, smelly, obnoxious – even short.) It’s not normal for a decent Arab guy to just leave two girls alone in a club without offering to drive them home, or at the very least, see them to a taxi. And Arabic hospitality is remarkable – they are generous with their time, attention and material possessions. Says one of the characters,

I can’t imagine being invited to join in someone else’s family picnic in Springfield Park. In fact, they’d probably nick our stuff when we weren’t looking.

In hijab, you get labelled as that “Muslim girl” rather than the “Indian girl” or the “short girl” or any other part of your identity. And:

Emirati men are incredibly thick-skinned when chasing their prey, and usually never take no for an answer. They firmly believe that a woman who ignores their attention is simply feigning indifference. They understand a downward gaze to be a prentece of chastity, an open car window an invitation to sinful acts, and a direct look a declaration of lust.

And you know all that stuff about family honour, right?
The bread in Dubai is awful – but it’s a place you don’t have to watch what you eat because all food is halal food. Your salary is linked not to your experience or competence – but to your nationality. And you can get away wearing huge Chanel sunglasses even at nine in the evening.
As this book progressed, I was drawn into the plot, agog as secrets unfolded, suspense built and collision was imminent. Most of the women characters, even the ones painted negatively, were likable and worthy of admiration – or sympathy. And in a book like this, what can you expect but the promise of a happy ending? So I didn’t like the fact that some last links in the elaborate plot had been left dangling. And while the language is racy and flows beautifully, neater editing would have ensured that “impart” was not used instead of “impose”; removed phrases like “amount of men”; and resulted in fewer confusing sentences like

I glance back at the couple and realize that the guy is Daniel, her Daniel, and the way he is looking at her suggests that their relationship isn’t purely platonic.

I didn’t much care for the nicknames of some characters – Lady Luxe, Goldenboy, Mr Delicious and others – though I suppose veils do make a subject more fascinating in a way.
But I did very much enjoy this book’s fabulous – rather Shakespearean – coincidences.
What I liked best about this book is the pervading sense of religion as a means to strengthen and stay in touch with your inner self – rather than something that isolates you from a world that views you with revulsion as violent and unpredictable.

The vague woman's handbook by devapriya roy

Neither here nor there
I started reading this book because a friend passed it on to me saying she had quite enjoyed it.
Why I continued reading till I reached the end I have no idea, but I did.
The Vague Woman’s Handbook is a brilliant and attractive but basically misleading title. It is not a handbook. I looked for, and didn’t find, guidelines for instructional use of how to cope with a woman’s vagueness – your own or others’ – or turn an asset into it, or anything related to instructional use or application of women’s vagueness.
Then, there is a basic dichotomy in the content. It is a contemporary story, with a number of progressive features. The young couple – neither is even 24 yet – are setting up a cosy establishment all their own and are coming to terms with a life of their own choosing. There’s a teeny bit of wish fulfilment here because they have broken away from their parents’ oppressive demands and are experiencing exhilarating, though sometimes painful, independence. I liked the other main character in this book – an endearing woman more than twice the age of our heroine, and the fact that the two became best friends.
However, the other basic fabric of this book is its horribly archaic language. Compressed between the fab title and the trendy author photo is an alarmingly large collection of yesterday phrases and usages. Can anyone in post-1991 India relate to the concept of “church mice”? With qualifiers like “for one” and “not exactly”; expressions like “voila” (used seriously and not as parody); an overdose of coy parentheses, exclamation marks and italics used for emphasis, I felt as if I’d suddenly arrived in Blyton-Wodehouse Wonderland.
There’s something else that rather alarmed me about this book. It’s a story about a young married couple – and for heaven’s sake they never have sex! Not even the slightest hint of it. Perhaps if this book was written specifically for a readership of under-tens, it could work. Otherwise I’m sorry to say this young couple is a very poor role model for the younger generation :-)
This author has the skill to create a plot, weave believable characters, establish a good beginning, middle, and end – and even look glamorous in a jacket photo. I sincerely hope that her language and situations mature to produce more realistic fiction of a higher literary quality in future.

Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga

No Booker for this one
The White Tiger was going to be a hard act to follow. Still, I was disappointed that I didn’t enjoy this book as much. It wasn’t just the story and narrative style that I found less gripping. Aravind Adiga says he loves Bombay more than any other place – but I thought that while he wrote about Delhi and the rural north like an insider, in this book he is an observer, not a participant.
I did like some turns of phrase and descriptions. Mango sellers wait by the station for returning commuters – each mango a heartfelt apology from the city for the state of its trains.
It’s the new India, where construction workers’ children clean their teeth using toothpaste, though still only by the water pump under the tree.
And there’s that shopkeepers’ refrain: a man must want something. Everyone who lives here knows that the islands will shake, and the mortar of the city will dissolve, and Bombay will turn again into seven small stones glistening in the Arabian Sea, if it ever forgets to ask the question: What do you want?
Shah, a ruthless land developer is touring a building site, musing. A worker’s family was spending the nights on the unfinished fourth floor, which one day a technology executive or a businessman would occupy. Shah touched the workers’ washing, which hung in the alcoves where Versace would soon hang; their little bars of soap and detergent did the work that expensive perfumes would soon do.
Folding a twenty-rupee note, he left it near a bar of soap as a surprise for the worker’s wife.

Is this book about an old schoolteacher in Bombay, a lonely man who lives by his principles?
Is it about a “housing society” where people from different backgrounds, different ideas, different values, different aspirations – different ways of speaking the same language – live side by side, because that’s the way things work in Bombay?
Is it about drab lives and what greed can do to them?
A man has to bend his rules a little to enjoy life in Mumbai. Just a little. Now and then. But the law in Mumbai was not blind: far from it, it had two faces and four working eyes and saw every case from both sides and could never make up its mind.
Powerful, wealthy men – dying of lung disease. Ruthless men with complicated relationships devoid of love – but employees so loyal and devoted that they sign cheques for them as part of their job, and go home to their scrupulous single-room shanty dwellings.

On page 301, after three-fourths of the book was over, I finally caught a glimpse of the real hero of this book: a gaunt, middle-aged man in a dirty blue shirt.

He looked Muslim because of his beard. Masterji guessed he was one of those he had just seen pulling carts on the road. The labourer picked a biscuit from the stainless-steel plate and chewed. Done with it, he breathed, picked a second biscuit, and chewed. Each movement of his bony jaws spoke of fatigue; the permanent fatigue of men who have no one to care about them when they work and no one to care about them after they work. The thin body broadcast a raw minimal silence. Middle-aged? No. His hair was greying at the edges, but youth had only recently been exorcised from his face. Twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the most. Masterji watched this young man with sunken, shocked eyes and barely enough strength to lift one milk biscuit at a time. This is his daily life. Pulling that cart and coming here for these biscuits, he thought.
The tired Muslim man returned Masterji’s gaze. Their eyes met like foreign languages, and the labourer, without moving his lips, spoke at last. Have you never before noticed how many are all alone?

Geek nation by Angela Saini

Rich source material, shabby output
This book sets out to investigate the Indian characteristic of geekiness. To write it, Angela Saini explored situations and people engaged in many different and fascinating aspects of science and technology in India: the international science and maths Olympiads; electronic waste dumps; software companies and associations - from the giants to technology startups; advanced technology universities; biotech institutes; Vedic science; forensic laboratories; tuberculosis clinics; nuclear reactors and even the Lavasa Corporation.
There’s a lot of information here, and much of it is interesting.
However, I found the reporting was superficial and strewn with howlers. Here are a few.
Reliance is a mobile phone company. Really?
Once upon a time the shop buildings of Jaipur were painted red, but they have now faded to a "peaceful" pink. Really?
Angela Saini drove down the streets of Mumbai in “a crumpled black Ambassador taxi”. Really? An Ambassador?
India was under British rule for eighty-nine years. Really? And the Great Indian Mutiny (or First War of Indian Independence if you prefer) which happened in 1857, was a mutiny (or war) against whom?
Though these are circumstantial details unrelated to the science information, it left a bad taste and tainted the authenticity of this project.
From this book, I learnt that:

• the Indian system of education encourages dependence and rote learning, and there is little effort to provoke original thought;
• young people in India sacrifice their leisure time, their sanity, and sometimes even their lives, to examination results;
• infrastructure in even our best academic institutions is weak and outdated;
• Indian IT guys have poor general knowledge;
• we have no adequate system of checks in research, and with our tradition of superstition and ignorance, we provide a lush setting for pseudoscience and crackpot ideas to flourish;
• more people in India will one day own mobile phones than can write their own names;
• the emerging environment of awareness and opportunities is likely to enable Indians to contribute new scientific ideas in the future even if they never did before …

Basically, nothing any of us didn’t know before.

The other thing I found distasteful was the way the author mocks her sources. Do we really need to know that Professor Vijay Singh, a former teacher who now runs the country’s International Science Olympiad training centre has a slight lisp and likes to be dramatic? That Ananth Krishnan, the “person in charge of innovation” at Tata Consultancy Services, has a balding crown and enormous head, and a voice “that reminds me of Kermit the Frog from The Muppet Show”? That Yusuf Motiwala, promoter of a technology startup, has a laptop that Angela Saini heard “squealing like a banshee” and that he “presses the computer between his palms and gives it a hard thud” to stop the sound?

With a smashing cover like this, and an author who has a Masters in Engineering from Oxford University, and is an award-winning science journalist – I assumed this was going to be a great book. I was disappointed.

Murder in the Ashram by Kathleen McCaul

Dirty, murdering, holy river
I wouldn’t call this book an enormous success as a murder mystery.
There were no parts of it that had me glued to the pages, turning faster and faster in a tizzy to find out what happens next. To be honest, the fact that there was so little suspense is not the only reason why I’m not sure whether this can be called a murder mystery at all.
But while I wouldn’t call Kathleen McCaul a genius thriller writer, I did feel that this was a brilliant travel book, exploring such matters as the quaint food superstitions of northern India (you’re not really supposed to eat chikki in summer … and it's very, very dangerous to eat yoghurt at night) and local notions of hospitality, portraying them in a very natural way without appearing to poke fun:

“… er … my wife is out of station now you see. She’s not at home so I couldn’t offer you anything good to eat.”
He didn’t sound suspicious, just slightly uncomfortable. He wasn’t the kind of man to revel in having a girl come alone to his home.
“It’s a shame I can’t meet your wife. I would have loved to. But I don’t want anything to eat at all, honestly.”
…
He paused to think. “Ah. Why not. Please come. I’ll send the boy out for crisps and juice at least.”

The scenery is spectacular too:

It wasn’t so hard to find the paan wallah’s house, even without his name. We walked along the lanes into the heart of the slum, picking on a benign-looking man, sitting smoking a bidi cigarette. Shruti asked him if he knew the guy who made paan outside the Hanuman Temple. He thought for a moment, took a drag on his bidi and shouted into a nearby house. A woman ducked out of the door with a ladle in her hand. She thought for a minute before pointing towards a small store, squeezed between two houses, just a counter made from bits of wood. Her husband got up off his haunches and padded over to the shop where he had a chat and bought a pack of biscuits. His wife brought a steel plate out of the house and he placed the biscuits out carefully before sharing them between us all. He told Shruti the shopkeeper knew the guy we wanted, bought paans from him for festival. He lived a few streets down. A small boy scurrying past was hoodwinked into taking us directly to the paanwallah’s home.

I particularly liked the two stereotype Indian journalists that feature in this book. One is a young Delhi wannabe star reporter with a New York accent (she got her degree at Columbia) and the other has neither talent, aptitude nor curiosity but plenty of money to buy expensive high-tech equipment (his father is “in steel”).
This book is a work of fiction, so I was surprised that it featured a few real people and institutions – for example the erstwhile Rajneesh Ashram in Pune, and darling of the Delhi press, Mayor Sheila Dikshit.
The scene I admired most was when the heroine of this book, a journalist herself, is asking what happened to the money she was offered for the article commissioned by Guy Black on the foreign desk at Telegraph, and Guy Black’s slimy responses – so typical of the way freelance writers are treated in every country.
I thought I might mail Kathleen McCaul and ask her if she’d really had something like that happen to her but decided not to because, what the hell, there’s hardly a freelancer I know who hasn’t.

Theodore Boone - The Abduction by John Grisham

The Disappointment
I’m a sucker for John Grisham and was waiting eagerly for this one. When a complimentary copy arrived from the publisher yesterday, well in advance of the one I had “pre-ordered” online the day I saw it advertised, it was a moment of great happiness and I threw everything else aside to enjoy it.
Theo is as cute as ever and his best friend, April, has gone missing. The first half of this book is gripping and plausible and the hunt for April fraught with tension and poignancy.
Other characters you might also remember from the first one, Young Lawyer, make their appearance – notably Theo’s Uncle Ike. And our young lawyer makes a very effective appearance in Animal Court - yes, a place we’ve enjoyed visiting before.
The judges of the Stratten County Courthouse still have endearing nicknames, and Theo’s parents are still as warm, wise, career-focussed, careful to remind him that he's still just a kid and has got to school every day, and generally as appropriate role models as before. Sadly, though, the plot runs thin and though I think this book is meant for kids ten years old and up, I doubt if even a six-year-old, even one who was dropped on its head as a baby, would be engaged with what we have here.
Even Grisham’s adult books can be enjoyed by younger readers. I know that the kids I gave Young Lawyer to read went right on, hooked, to read the older Grisham classics and loved them. They are going to leap at this book and fall away sadly disappointed and disillusioned.

What annoyed me most of all was that the words on the inside of the pages were so close to the binding that to read them you have to make an extra effort to stretch the pages out, and I wondered whether every edition would plague readers thus - or only this one, which is only for sale in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

1/7 Bondel Road by Gautam Benegal

Tutul’s stories
Gautam Benegal added me on facebook, we had many friends in common, and when I saw his paintings, particularly his Mumbai Irani café ones, I was impressed indeed. Last week I saw this book on his wall and ordered it online for just Rs145. It turned out to be good value for money.
1/7 Bondel Road is a collection of short stories set in Calcutta in the 1970s. The cover design, the layout and the paper quality are all excellent. Best of all, this book is well written and I found most of the stories to be of a very high quality. They give a vivid experience of a region of this world in a particular section of time.
In the 1970s, the impressive industrial base developed by the British in and around Calcutta was on its last legs and factories were closing. The city is full of ditches and other depredations of the CMDA, the Calcutta Merry Diggers’ Association, and even the street cleaners have heard about Venice. To cut the cellotape holding a box closed, a smart kid would run and bring a blade, unscrewing his father’s razor to get it out. Keshto is opening a fish plate shop and his clients will be the Bengali taxi drivers who generally stopped to answer “Nature’s call” near the corner of the park in Ballygunge Phari. To install a black-and-white television in your home is a profound ceremony that involves confusion, much passion, and involvement from all in the neighbourhood. Sit and watch and you will see a new Baul (till then just a fake because he was only a Sharma and not a Das) take birth on stage. And also a cyclist who will not stop for three days (food, bath, big job, small job, all on the cycle itself) to raise money to buy medicines for his six-month-old son.

These stories are told by a child, and when I asked Gautam Benegal on facebook chat how much of it came from his own childhood, he replied, “Quite a bit, actually...”
So you might as well know that Tutul’s father is a well-known artist and he has an extremely annoying elder brother who reads the Communist Manifesto at the dinner table and writes “Enjoyed the Cubist undercurrent in your work” in a visitors’ book at of their father’s friend's exhibition.

Two of the stories made me laugh like anything. In one, Tutul is travelling by train and speaks English in a fake accent, pretending to be from Marlinspike Hall in Somerset (his parents are settled there; they sell coal to Newcastle). His copassengers' responses are brilliant.

In the other, Tutul, despairing at ever getting an objective critique of his artistic output, invites a pair of children street singers in to look at his work. “Hahah…,” said Gautam Benegal, “Yeah...that one is 100 per cent genuine...”

Bangalore calling by Brinda S Narayan

Call Centre Tapestry
I picked this book up without much enthusiasm, finding the title and cover unappealing, and the thought, “Yawn, could there be something here that Chetan Bhagat might have missed?”
Even after reading a few pages I was still thinking pompously, “Hm, yes, while that one could be called Great Fun – we’d have to use adjectives like ‘pleasurable’, ‘enjoyable’ or ‘delightful’ for this.”
As I read, a more appropriate comparison struck me: if One Night in a Call Centre was a McDonald’s burger, then Bangalore Calling was a wedding feast by the best caterer in town.
The book opens with Yvette leaning on the trainer’s desk in Room #3 and appraising the agents as they stream in after a tea break.
Yvette is an interesting person – intelligent, self-contained, and with all the attributes of a good narrator. In the next chapter, however, the focus changes and our new protagonist is Panduranga, a driver of one of the call centre’s pick-up cabs - and we get to learn something about his family, his aspirations, and what he thinks about as he drives.
It wasn’t until I had read another two chapters, one giving us a view of the life of Natalie, an American woman who works with the American client of the Bangalore call centre and whom we had met briefly through the eyes of both Yvette and Panduranga; and the other showing us how another young woman, Bitty, copes with her life and her job as an agent at the call centre, that I understood how this book worked. Through a number of very different characters it takes us into different homes and minds and through them gives a good look at different Indian cultures and lifestyles and how each of the people representing it has reacted to the American influence and aspirations introduced by their association with the call centre.
Bangalore Calling is very well written and the story compelling. I wondered why it had not received more fanfare and felt curious to know more about the writer so I mailed her to ask from where the idea to write this book came from. She replied,

I was working as a quality consultant with a global call centre, and like Yvette, the trainer in Bangalore Calling, I was intrigued and disturbed by the identity changes I was witnessing. By then, I had worked for nearly fifteen years in various corporate jobs and I had a gnawing sense that I should be doing something else. So I took a sabbatical and conducted research at three centres. Bangalore Calling is the outcome of my study.

The publishers of this book tell us that its author “has worked for fifteen years in the corporate sector. She holds a BA in Economics from Wellesley College and an MA in Communication from Stanford University. She currently lives in Bangalore.”
After looking into the souls of Brinda S Narayan’s characters, I felt this was just a bit too tame and complained that readers of a book so strewn with anthropology deserved a less clinical description of its author. She said:

I've always been a wide reader and I'm curious about how larger forces act on families and individuals. Having been a working mother for several years, I've also been fascinated by the interactions between life and work. Besides reading, I dabble with paints at a very amateur level. I'm married and have two kids.

I was now curious to hear about Brinda S Narayan’s next book, which I look forward to reading, but all she would tell me was

I'm currently working on a novel, and though it's too early to talk about the theme, I can tell you this: it's not set at a workplace.

Khallas by J Dey

Goodbye, Dey
Jyotirmoy Dey, Editor-Investigations of Mid-Day, had worked in crime reporting and investigation for nearly twenty years when he was shot dead in broad daylight in a crowded Mumbai locality yesterday by four unidentified men on two motorbikes. The newspapers this morning are filled with the shock and horror of the journalistic fraternity, “shock waves” in Bollywood, and calls for the resignation of Maharashtra home minister RR Patil and Mumbai police commissioner Aroop Patnaik.
Dey had received death threats in the past, and the Mid-Day editor Sachin Kalbaug is reported to have said that there had been instances when Dey’s story ideas were considered too dangerous for his own safety and abandoned.
Nobody knows yet who killed J Dey, or why exactly.
I was associated with Sunday Mid-day as a columnist off and on since 1995, but had never met Dey and only knew him through reputation as a rather tall, quiet and popular person, and a meticulous and sincere journalist.
When I read this book three years ago, I had vivid images flashing before my eyes. Through the placid and descriptive but drama-filled text, I could clearly visualise characters who looked and spoke like clichéd Bollywood characters Loin Ajit, bald-headed Shetty, and Inspector Arun Bhosle from Page Three. Amidst loud ha-ha-ha’s, guns rang out in the distance and even Vivek Oberoi reared his cute little head from Shoot Out at Lokhandwala. It struck me that for most of us, images of Mumbai’s underworld of crime come primarily from Bollywood. J Dey, however, was deeply and starkly immersed in its reality. I felt, as I read, that it was a world that did not just provide him material for his reports but was one that fascinated him as a privileged viewer.
Khallas documents some of its unique and peculiar facets. Its alphabetically-listed entries cover all kinds of gangland trivia, slang, and historical information.
To take bus number eleven means to walk. Telling someone to bring their camera means you’re asking them to carry a gun. And don’t forget the capsules – the bullets, that is. Applying cricket code, a four is to scare while a six is to kill. Chabbis (26) refers to a young promiscuous girl, whereas Atthais (28) is an alcoholic.
“Daddy-Mummy” are the dreaded gangster Arun Gawli and his wife Asha. The Arthur Road jail is affectionately termed “Guesthouse”, and we learn here which of the gang lords and their henchmen, while inside, lie on their bunks reading James Hadley Chase only to replicate crimes described in the books when they’re out. The way to the underworld don’s heart is surely through his stomach, claims this book – adding that it’s actually the use of dabba as conduit for messages and contraband that makes the dabbawala so popular.
“Shopping kar le beta” is the crafty technique of paying out little sums of pocket money to lure innocent recruits into the gang. It could get a college boy doing a look-out or passing weapons, and unwittingly becoming trapped into this lifestyle forever.
We also learn from this book that Mumbai don Chhota Rajan’s gang believes they are true patriots and greet one another with “Jai Hind!” Of other gangs, we meet the Golden Gang (all members wore gold ornaments), the Diamond Gang (who presumably wanted to be considered better than their Golden rivals), the Pathan Gang (their stunts would make you smile if there wasn’t murder involved as well), and others. Interestingly, the rolls, besides the stereotype Shettys, Shakeels and Gawdes, include the more white-collar (and upper caste) surnames of Kulkarni, Joshi and Joglekar.
Along with the horror and sorrow at the loss of Dey I feel sad that Khallas is an unfortunate word because it means “finished” and is used as callous slang to indicate that someone is no more.

Priya by Namita Gokhale

Been there, done that
I’d never read anything by Namita Gokhale before, but had always viewed her with respect as a founding director of the wonderful Jaipur Literature Festival. So when I received this book, I was disconcerted to see that the publishers had placed it inside a cover that screamed “Yaah! Chick-lit! So there!”
Still, this did not prepare me for the mediocre idiom that populates this book. I read intently, waiting for it to improve.
Priya is a married woman in her mid- or perhaps late-fifties. Her husband has risen in his profession as a lawyer and is presently a Minister of State for Food Processing, Animal Husbandry, Fisheries and Canneries. This makes him a mighty important person – and also tells us that the book is supposed to be a spoof. They lead a comfortable and privileged life in Delhi, which, Priya occasionally reminds us, sometimes leaves her out of her depth since she grew up a simple middle class girl in a “one BHK” apartment in what was then still Bombay. On the surface she copes well and there’s no doubt that Priya has her moments of wit and intelligence. However, her language is largely uninspired, and my eyebrows rose in cynical disbelief to see it described as “elegant prose” in this review.
The world Priya depicts, of people with an enormous sense of self-importance but skewed priorities, has been done before – most famously (as I thought then) by Shobhaa De. Any number of equally pointless books of dubious entertainment value have done the same.
One of the things I did like about this one were the descriptions of Priya’s interactions with her twin sons, which showed her to be sensitive, self-aware and a very “today” thinker. It’s also quite hilarious in parts. Still – why does anyone have to pretend that this is a good book, and worth reading? Priya made me feel a bit derailed – somewhat like its Mumbai local trains, which the author tries to route from Churchgate to VT.
And it made me rush to read Paro, a book Namita Gokhale wrote in 1984 and to which Priya is linked by having the same characters, 25 years later.
Here lurked another big surprise. Priya is the narrator of this book too, and, 25 years younger, has a much more substantial literary style! Not only that, Paro is a completely unselfconsciously Indian book. I was impressed to see that there was no exoticising or contextualising whatever – in fact, even less than in Priya (which explains "one BHK" but does not bother to clarify "hall".) Commonly-used Indian words were left un-italicised. Even expressions like “kitty party” remained unexplained. And this was 1984 – when Salman Rushdie was the first “Indian” writer to have won a Booker. When every Indian who wrote in Engish was writing for a western audience. And several years before Shobhaa De (then still Shobha; one of the issues this book takes a piss at is the trend of changing the spelling of your name on the advice of a high-profile “numerologist” – possibly a roguish dig at Shobhaa De herself) was somehow awarded the IPR for the subject of chalu lifestyles!
With renewed respect, I picked up Priya again to see whether I had misjudged it. Despite every effort, I still found it rather coarse, and embedded with just a few rare-jewel moments. Priya’s life experience and her perspective had changed, and - rather sadly - so had the way she expressed herself.
And I thought about Philip Roth who, as a young man, wrote about horny young Jewish men and their love problems, and as he aged wrote about cantankerous old Jewish men and their trysts with prostate enlargement. What remained constant were the texture of his prose and the grip of his story-telling prowess.

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.