Category: Books

  • First Darling of the Morning: Selected Memories

    Thrity Umrigar

    Its difficult not to like a book that starts off with a reference to ‘The Sound of Music’. After all, for a generation, there are so many memories attached to that movie. It serves as a good snapshot for what the book holds in store, a ‘Wonder Years’ kind of nostalgic trip, one that I could immediately identify with, and one that supplies many lump-in-the-throat moments. The book is billed as ‘Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood’ and has done an excellent job of it.

    We are with the child when she discovers how the world has different rules for adults and children, when she thinks that she would never grow out of Enid Blyton, only to switch loyalties to Mills & Boon years later. We see her move on to Herman Hesse and becoming obsessed with Van Gogh. We are with her as she grows up and realises that the people around her existed long before her, and are part of stories she never knew.

    Though the story is primarily about her growing up, the author manages to cover a lot of other ground and link it very well with her life. The story of a city that was united across classes by cricket, the story of a middle class that is mostly in denial of the poor that surround them, but also makes unwritten rules for transactions with them. The story of the various strings that pull us, some visible, some not so.

    As she looks back on her life after finishing college and realises the paradoxical importance and unimportance of her relationships with the various people and things in her life – music, books, politics, parents, teachers, relatives and friends, and slowly tries to put them in perspective, I saw a story that could in many ways describe most of humankind and the lives we create for ourselves. And that perhaps would explain why I consider this a must-read.

  • Dreams For The Dying

    C K Meena

    The book is an interesting statement on gender and sexuality. Its also quite a compelling murder mystery, and even though it might turn into a ‘what is the connection’ than a whodunit in the second half, it retains its intrigue till the end.

    The author also manages to create a series of well etched out characters, and devotes enough prose for us to figure out their motivations and notions about the events and circumstances in their life. They remain very ‘slice of life’ but when we peer into their lives, they get interesting.

    The story is set in Chennai, Bangalore, Coimbatore and the Indian Railways, and centers around the murder of Uma, the ‘weekend wife’. Right from her purchase of Hrudayam during a journey, a magazine whose USP is forbidden love, and her figuring out that people would hesitate to initiate a conversation or borrow the magazine, her character promises to be interesting.

    A promise that is delivered, as it is with another prime character, ‘Magnum’ Mahesh, the investigating officer. I quite liked the connection made with Parvathyamma, an older character who adds to the intrigue. You might get overwhelmed with the repeated influx of characters, but it’ll pass. 🙂

    Though the book is studded with some excellent wit in the first half, it morphs into a layered seriousness in the second. The detailing is excellent, not just of characters, but of places, and events, and even the working of a person’s mind. The author manages to leap from descriptions of external phenomena to internal ones with amazing ease. It is difficult to say which is the backdrop – the murder mystery or the statement, such is the intertwining. This also means that you have to watch out for the subtext of both in the narration. All that, and the switching between time-frames and character viewpoints makes it a very gripping read.

  • Lunatic in My Head

    Anjum Hasan

    Though this is the author’s debut, I happened to read it after I read the second work – Neti Neti, which can arguably be seen as a sequel of sorts to this book, not just because its protagonist happens to be Sophie Das, a character introduced in this book, but also because both the books seem to have a common theme of a search for belonging.

    ‘Lunatic In My Head’ has four principal characters. Firdaus Ansari, who teaches English literature to an apathetic class, pursues an elusive PhD, finds it diffuclt to connect to the authors she’s dealing with, fights staff room battles, suffers from near OCD and tries desperately to remain in love, as she lives with her grandfather, both of them conscious of a fragile balance that allows them to endure each other.

    Aman Moondy, Civil Services aspirant, obsessed with Pink Floyd with a bunch of friends, each fighting their own battles with parents, siblings, lovers and representing the life of youth stuck in a small town.

    Sophie Das, eight year old daughter of an English professor who refuses to be realistic and his wife who feels her husband has stopped caring for the family.

    And Shillong, for this book is also about the place, its people, its gossip, its idiosyncrasies, and its clearly visible lines of separation between the natives and dkhar (Khasi word for non tribal person)

    Each of them also live in their own fantasy world too- Sophie, who cooks up a story of being adopted, and Aman, who thinks Roger Waters makes songs based on the letters he sent him. The smallness of the town is perhaps emphasised by the degrees of connection between the characters, how their paths cross, and how intertwined their lives are.

    Divided into chapters such as ‘Wonder’, ‘Sadness’, ‘Love’, ‘Courage’, ‘Disgust’, ‘Fear’, ‘Anger’, ‘Joy’ and finally ‘Peace’, the book passes through what can be seen as a cycle, and uses the mundane occurrences in a small town to reflect mindset and the paradoxical static and dynamic nature of the place and the people there. What takes it to a higher level is the moodiness that seems to reflect rainy and misty Shillong itself.

  • Deaf Heaven

    Pinki Virani

    I’m quite a fan of Pinki Virani’s earlier work – Once was Bombay, so there might be a bit of a bias here. 🙂

    ‘Deaf heaven’ is billed as her first work of fiction, but is perhaps as close to non-fiction as it can get. The characters are clearly based on the contemporary personalities – from movie stars to politicians, and the descriptions are such that a little knowledge can easily help you identify them – the ‘caterpillar -eyebrows’ actress to the leader of the saffron army, to the famous film star and his wannabe famous son and the lesbian maker of daily soaps. See? 🙂

    The narrator is the cleft lipped and recently dead Saraswati, librarian by profession and collector of facts. Over a weekend, with an eclipse that serves as a climax for the multiple narratives, she traces the lives of the characters, a mixture of the famous and the ordinary, connected to each other by varying degrees of separation.

    The book is a commentary on modern India and its mixture of contradictions, with representatives from different geographies, strata in life, age, and religion. Though primarily a woman’s perspective, the author manages to tackle the paradoxes of the emerging superpower – from female infanticide (and an ingenious way of communicating the unborn child’s gender – an illegal act), and tribal exploitation, to the mechanics of religion-politics, the effect of chemicals on vultures and the ‘death by railway track’ on Mumbai’s famed local trains, all interconnected, just like the characters.

    Though a preachy tone does dominate the last part of the book, it is definitely a must read, not just for the pertinent and fundamental questions the author makes us think about, but also for her razor sharp wit.

  • Marathon Baba

    Disclosure: Fingerprint! Publishing sent me the book for review.

    Girish Kohli hasn’t passed out of the IITs or IIMs, does not have a day job and cannot be found on Facebook or Twitter. He is also the author of the only book in the world based on a pair of unused running shoes. Just as the author has broken the template of the typical Indian author, his book also manages to be completely out of the regular trajectory of Indian fiction.

    There are indeed characters that one might encounter in other works, in fact, the author has pretty much used all the stereotypes that have been abused in Indian popular culture – the strict dad, the mother waiting for her son to return home, the first love who remains evergreen in memories, the corrupt cop, the spirituality cult, and so on, but it’s the sheer verve and trippy narration that makes this book totally unique. It even includes poetry, or at least rhyme.

    The tale puts a twist to the perspective people have towards running away from problems. The story is about a man who runs across the country for seven years, turns red (no, literally), starts an ashram and gets stuck in a plot (literally and figuratively) of his own making. The author takes routine mundane occurrences and objects and converts them into surreal text or throws them against bizarre yet believable props. (the shoes, the Naxalite kidnapping) The humour that lends sanity and insanity to the proceedings is also not on a single track – it moves from wordplay to satire (the City of Slums, Suryakant the Mega Star) to even campy on a couple of occasions. In fact the entire theme of the book seems to be irreverence. Just as you begin to wonder if you’re going to completely lose it, the author injects a dose of real explanation to the happenings. IMO, the best part of the book are the character descriptions. Characters include the shoes too.

    My advice would be to read the book at a single go. At 255 pages, it’s not really a marathon, but you have to keep running to be on the same page as the author. There is always a feeling that some subtext is slyly watching you turn the page. Not a run of the mill offering, this one will give your brains a run for their money. 😉