Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian (Penguin Press, April 2021)

Although the publishing world seems to believe that light reading takes place only in summer, along with a tropical cocktail sipped under a beach umbrella, that’s not really when readers need something clever and diverting. We hunger for froth and frivolity when the days are short and dark, when everyone seems on their way to a holiday party to which we are not invited, Never has the need for smart fluff been more acute than during this December when none of us are invited to a holiday party and all of us are close to climbing the walls that we’ve been encouraged to remain within.

Still we want something that’s as smart as it is amusing, maybe holding a subtle sting while leaving no permanent scars, not quite as vicious as Evelyn Waugh but with more bite than Candice Bushnell. Bonus points are given for any book that delivers this as a delightful surprise, with a stiletto, not a sledge hammer.

Welcome to Gold Diggers, whose title gives subterranean clues to its subtlety. What begins as a high school romantic farce involving middle-class Indian American teenagers in a quiet suburb suddenly is alchemized into a fantasy in which a mother pilfers gold that’s brewed into a liquid that will give her daughter success. When the boy next door becomes involved, things get out of hand. Success is accompanied by tragedy, as King Midas once discovered, and the teenagers who have benefited from the magical potion drift apart.

But this is only a hook designed to pull readers into a world of satire that unexpectedly emerges from what at first promises to be Teen Angst, Bollywood Style.  Suddenly Miss Teenage India and the high school debate champion are adults in the world of Bay Area high tech wizards; their friends work “for a Sherman Act-violating behemoth...always nursing side start-ups,” “helping robotic men build robots,” their incomes “supplemented with Bitcoin investments.” One of them is “a rarity in San Francisco, in that he had read a book  not ghostwritten on behalf of an investor or a CEO.” They search for prospective mates on an Indian marriage app and buy houses in the “sunny small towns of the Bay Area, “the upper-middle-class Indian American promised land,” homes “full of smart thermostats and smart fridges.” 

Sanjena Sathian cleverly dissects the difference between immigrants who are “fresh off a private jet,” rather than “off the boat,” the phenomenon of massive bridal expos held in regional convention centers, high school parties with a buffet table laden with chaat, pitchers of mango lassi and mini cheese pizzas in an  “emptied three-car garage” the overwhelming need for “posh private school” graduates “to waltz into Harvard and Princeton and Vanderbilt and Georgetown.” But underpinning the satire and keeping it from turning into cruelty is a world of myth and history, a comic caper that threatens to end badly, and a love story that seems fated for disaster. Although Sathian seems to take a scalpel to the lives of a “model minority,” she actually directs it squarely into the heart of the exclusionary yet alluring American Dream, the one based on a Gold Rush and is still racing in that frenzied direction.~Janet Brown

The Fire Sacrifice by Susham Bedi (Heinemann)

The Fire Sacrifice is one of the first of six books selected by Heinemann Publishers for the introduction to their Asian Writers Series. The purpose is “to introduce English language readers to some of the interesting fiction written in languages that most will neither know nor study.”  The book was first published in Hindi in 1989 by Susham Bedi. It is also her first book. 

Guddo has left her native India and has spent the last ten years living in New York City. It is New Year’s Day. Guddo was brought up to believe that if the first day of the year is a happy one, there would be no major problems for the rest of the year, so she plans to perform the havan in her living room. The havan is “a ritual fire sacrifice, performed on auspicious occasions and for purification.” 

Guddo has invited a number of close relatives to her home - her two daughters and a son-in-law, her two sisters along with their children, and the husband of one of the sisters. This is the first time Guddo has had a chance to perform this sacrifice in the U.S. She feels as if this is the first time in ten years where she can sit and relax and not be concerned about anyone else’s trouble. 

As she reflects back on her life, she wonders if she made the right choices. She had a nice comfortable life in India. She and her husband had good jobs, servants to help around the house and friendly neighbors and relations. This idyllic life was shattered when her husband succumbs to a disease and the pharmacies in India do not have the medicine that will help him. Guddo becomes a widower and her life changes dramatically. 

Guddo’s two daughters are still in school and her son has not yet graduated high school. It is Guddo’s belief that she must continue to work and marry off her daughters and find her son a nice bride before she can give any thought to her own life. Her beliefs are steeped in the tradition of putting the family and children first. 

One of her sisters had emigrated to the U.S. seventeen years prior and suggested Guddo and her son should come and live here as well. For the average Indian family, the U.S. is looked upon as a land of wealth and opportunity. They believe that once they find a place to settle, life would be easy and carefree and getting a job would be a breeze. However, the reality is far from what Guddo imagines. 

The Fire Sacrifice gives a voice to the immigrant story of Indians as they seek success and fortune in a new world in the hopes of giving their children a better life while trying to keep a balance with their traditional Indian values. Those same children grow up more American than Indian and many of them reject or resent those Indian traditions. 

Leaving a life you know to live and work in a foreign country is not an easy task. There may be the language barrier, culture shock, and misunderstandings of certain cultural values. Bedi brings to light all the problems that face an immigrant in a new country. What you imagine and what is real can be painfully different. ~Ernie Hoyt

Original Letters from India by Eliza Fay (New York Review of Books)

Eliza Fay was twenty-three years old and a newlywed woman when she and her feckless husband set off to improve their fortunes in India. In 1779, England was still embroiled in the Revolutionary War, in which France had joined forces with the American colonists. None of this turmoil enters Mrs. Fay’s sprightly piece of early travel literature. Instead she concentrates upon seeing Marie Antoinette at the theater, deciding that the ill-fated queen had “the sweetest blue eyes that ever were seen,” the joy of drinking a pint of Burgundy at every meal, remarking “I always preferred wine to beer,” and the disgusting spectacle of asparagus in Lyon “covered with a thick sauce of eggs, butter, oil and vinegar.” 

Having nearly reduced a French cook to tears by demanding her asparagus be “simply boiled with melted butter,” Mrs. Fay crosses the Alps, which she’s surprised to learn consists of more than one mountain, and is delighted to discover the inhabitants make “excellent butter and cheese.” Clearly this is a lady who travels on her stomach.

Once aboard the ship that’s bound for Calcutta, Mrs. Fay turns her attention from the pleasures of the table to the dissection of her fellow passengers. The only other Englishwoman on the voyage is “one of the very lowest taken off the streets of London” and another passenger “has the most odious pair of little white eyes mine have ever beheld.” Bereft of decent food and company, she retreats to her cabin where she makes a dozen shirts for her husband and persuades him to teach her shorthand. 

Her ship reaches the Indian port of Calicut (called Calcutta by the British) at a time when the city was under the rule of a Muslim rebel with no love for the English. Mrs. Fay, her husband, and other passengers are placed in captivity for fifteen weeks but this grisly interlude does nothing to quench her spirits. When released at last and safely in Madras, she’s enchanted by its “Asiatic splendor combined with European taste,” its buildings painted with chunam, a powder made from crushed shells that’s applied like whitewash and glows like marble. She finally arrives in Calcutta after a journey of twelve months and eighteen days and immediately approves of its colonial elegance and beauty. Although it is here that her husband’s “imprudent behaviour,” which results in his fathering a “natural child,” puts an end to her marriage, Mrs. Fay finds that India “interests me exceedingly.” She left only to return three more times over the course of her life, dying penniless in Calcutta at the age of sixty.

Her observations are piercing and evocative, with an amazing adaptability for a woman of her time and place. She resigns herself to living in “a house of thieves” with servants who skim a profit from every domestic transaction in exchange for living in a “land of luxury.” She casts a scathing eye upon her fellow expatriates “languishing under various complaints” which they blame on the climate while their lifestyle would “produce the same effects even in the hardy regions of the North.” She winces at the “luxurious indulgence” of the lengthy dinners which begin at two in the afternoon and end with a repose between four and five. She finds something about the “Hindoos that interests me exceedingly” while writing graphic descriptions of local customs that she calls abhorrent. She travels about the countryside in a silk net hammock carried by two men or on a donkey while seated on “a sort of armchair with cushions and a footstool.” 

Mrs. Fay claimed to be happiest when she had a pen in her hand and it’s quite possible that these letters were written with a goal of future publication. She was far from the first Englishwoman to embark upon epistolary travel literature; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters from Turkey had become a publishing sensation sixteen years before Eliza Fay set off for India. But it’s Mrs. Fay’s letters, with their indiscretions and vitality, unpolished and irresistible, that are still read for pleasure centuries after they were written, setting a standard for modern-day travel writers who would find her travels difficult to emulate, assuming that any of us could survive them.~Janet Brown

Kingfishers Catch Fire by Rumer Godden (Viking, out of print)

“When Sophie had an idea, her child Teresa trembled.”

Sophie is a young British widow in India, with a very small pension and two equally small children. She is adventurous, sentimental, and in love with the Vale of Kashmir. Brought up as a sheltered English girl of good breeding, she is insouciant, viewing the world around her with “superficial eyes.” To Sophie the place she chooses to make her home is a haven surrounded by mountains, perched above a lake, picturesque as are the peasants who live nearby. 

“We shall live a poor and simple life. We shall toil...we shall grow our own vegetables and keep hens and bees, “ she tells Teresa, who has unfortunately been born with common sense and the gift of realism. Teresa observes and puts puzzle pieces together while Sophie is in love with beauty and crippled by her idea of what is necessary to live a basic life.

Her passion for lovely objects leads her to Profit David, a man who deals in beautiful expensive things and Sophie soon goes into debt buying a lamp with a shade that blazes painted kingfishers into light, a gleaming carpet, a Kashmir shawl. The villagers take note of her extravagance and deem her rich. Even the furnishings that Sophie’s upbringing leads her to regard as essentials are thoroughly luxurious to her neighbors: “A bed each. Even for  the children...Aie! She is rich!”

And she is inexplicable. Sophie and her children wear shoes in the house--”dirty!” and she has no husband. In India ladies do not live alone, unless they are “saints or sinners.” Sophie, living with only two servants and her little children, is neither and to her neighbors she seems mad.

Every community has its own politics and in the village near Sophie’s house the two leading families are wrapped in bitter competition. The village children are almost feral, spending their waking hours in the mountain fields, herding cattle. Sophie urges Teresa to make friends with them but Teresa knows better. For her and her little brother Moo, the herd children are dangerous.

Sophie moves in a graceful world of her own, unsettled only by the shape of a compass carved into the floor of her new house. While she works at settling in, blindly and blithely, the compass calls to her with its promise of places still to be seen. Her ignorance of the world around her is a path to disaster and when it hits, it focuses upon Teresa--and, less violently but with equal danger, upon Sophie.

British author Rumer Godden was taken to India when she was an infant, grew up there, and returned to it after completing her education in England. She embarked upon an unsuccessful marriage and when it disintegrated she moved with her two children to the Dal Lake in Kashmir at the start of World War Two. She stayed there for three years, starting an herb farm and “living, thinking and perhaps dreaming.” She left, as Sophie did, because of a disaster that was directed at her and her daughters. But before that occurred, she “wrote endlessly,” and like Sophie, she was obsessed with the beauty that surrounded her.

Godden’s love for India and her knowledge of it lifts Kingfishers Catch Fire well above the customary expat fiction, while gently excoriating the point of view of the customary expat. She presents a classic dissection of the dangers of romanticism and selective blindness, wrapping it in a mixture of the passion and unvarnished realism with which she saw the country she loved and eventually had to leave.~Janet Brown

Quest for Kim : In Search of Kipling's Great Game by Peter Hopkirk (John Murray)

Quest for Kim is author Peter Hopkirk’s attempt to follow in the footsteps of Kim from Rudyard Kipling’s novel of the same name. However, it is not a travelogue but more of a literary detective novel. The days of the Raj’s India are long past so Hopkirk’s journey takes him through the countries of Pakistan and India. He couldn’t have chosen a worse time to partake in this endeavor as the two countries were on the brink of war. 

Hopkirk does his best to leave the politics aside and focuses on his own journey. He wants to see how much of Kim’s India still remains. The trail has him starting from Lahore, Pakistan. He will continue on to Simla, Umballa, Delhi, and travel along the Grand Trunk Road. Hopkirk also sets out to show that the characters in Kim were based on or inspired by real people. 

You do not have to read Kim in order to enjoy this book as Hopkirk provides the necessary passages related to his quest. He admits that there are parts of the story that he would not be able to do justice to and advises the reader that it would be best to read the actions in Kipling’s own words. 

Hopkirk’s first order of business is to determine and argue if Kim was based on a true person and who that might have been. Hopkirk suggests that Kipling would also have been familiar with the story of two likely candidates. The first being a man named Durie who was the son of a British soldier and an Indian woman who traveled through Afghanistan “dressed as a Muslim”. 

The other likely person is a man named Tom Doolan, the son of an Irish sergeant and a Tibetan woman. The story goes that the Irishman deserted his post and ran away with the woman to Tibet, never to be heard from again. Then, years later, a young boy is seen in a market in Darjeeling with “fair hair and blue eyes, but who spoke no English”. “Around his neck, however, was hung an amulet-case containing papers which showed him to be the son of the missing soldier.”  This is the exact same way the chaplain of Kim’s father’s regiment discovers the identity of Kim.

Quest for Kim is a fascinating journey as we follow Hopkirk trace Kim’s journey and gives us the truth behind the real people the characters in the novel are based on. In his research, Hopkirk finds there really was an Afghan horse dealer who he surmises was the model for Mahbug Ali. Hopkirk makes a convincing argument that Colonel Craighton was based on the actions of Thomas Montgomerie who trained locals to “gather topographical and other intelligence in areas where it was far too dangerous for Europeans to travel.” 

This book is definitely not your ordinary travel journal. It is a tribute to Rudyard Kipling’s novel, Kim, whom Hopkirk says first introduced him to the “Great Game” and became obsessed with the story. Once you read this, you may be inclined to read Kipling’s masterpiece or return to it if you have read it before. Perhaps it will inspire you to make your own literary journey of one of your favorite novels. ~Ernie Hoyt

One Last Look by Susanna Moore (Knopf)

“No matter how loud I scream, no one can hear me,” Lady Eleanor Oliphant writes in her journal. Wracked with seasickness in a cramped and dirty ship’s cabin, she’s two months away from England and faces another month at sea before her journey ends at Calcutta. A half-century after England lost its American colonies, it’s turned its attention to India, where Eleanor’s brother Henry has been named Governor-General.

Accompanied by his sisters Eleanor and Harriet, Henry travels in squalor that’s just marginally different from what his company of soldiers and 84 hunting hounds experience below deck. He weathers it with stolid aplomb, Eleanor is almost incapacitated with misery and disgust, and Harriet is “having a lovely time.”

All three are greeted with a heady mixture of luxury and the unknown, which they face in the same way they endured their 100-day voyage. In “rooms as spare as a gibbet...a trifle less fiery than a kiln,” even their lapdog has its own servant and five men are employed in the simple task of Eleanor washing her hands. Their meals are heavy and British, and the sisters’ daily schedules are dominated by periods of rest. “There are no locks on the doors,” Eleanor observes, “indeed there are seldom doors,” and the floors outside of the bedrooms are covered with servants, sleeping.

Eleanor becomes lethargic and relies upon a sedan chair; her chief activity is observing what surrounds her and writing about it all in her journal. Harriet hurls herself into her new life with enthusiasm, collecting a lemur and a gazelle as pets, and “making a life for herself,” always in the company of her jemadur who serves as a butler and interpreter. Both sisters learn to deny themselves nothing,as they take on the privilege and richness of the lives led by Indian royalty. 

Henry discovers that the commercial ventures of the East Indian Company are possibly more important than political concerns. His colonial government rests upon financial success. When he discovers that the government in Kabul threatens the four million pounds a year that flows to England from the subcontinent, he decides to overthrow the current leader and replace him with someone more acquiescent, someone “Indian in skin, but English in thought, English in morals.”

Meanwhile Harriet returns from a tiger hunt with the habit of smoking a hookah filled with sweet grass, tobacco, and cardamom. Eleanor, plagued with savage headaches, is introduced to opium by the mother of a raja. For Christmas that year, Harriet gives her an ivory opium pipe. Eleanof’s gift to her sister is a bejeweled lotus-shaped mouthpiece for her hookah.

When Russia threatens England’s presence in Afghanistan and the Crown’s hold upon India, Henry makes a disastrous move. British women and other civilians are captured and imprisoned, while 700 soldiers are slaughtered in a surprise attack. The Great Game is imperiled and Henry is recalled from his post.

He returns to England as a marquis, his sisters come back indelibly transformed. While Henry was absorbed in matters of strategy and empire, Eleanor and Harriet discovered India’s secrets as best they could and are now “most unprepared for London,” where there are “no pearls, no monkeys, no betel...no color...no smell.” Neither of them is able to escape the changes that India has cast upon them.

Susanna Moore has mined the letters and diaries of Englishwomen living in India during the Raj. Her research is staggering and her details of daily life in 19th century India, along with the debacle of British foreign policy in that country, is told with the assured voice of someone who experienced this time and place herself. Through the words of Lady Eleanor, Moore takes the convention of the historical novel, twists it viciously and veils it with enormous subtlety. The result is a book that is decadent but never sensational, a story that’s sensuous, languid, and illuminating.~Janet Brown

Kim by Rudyard Kipling (Everyman's Library)

Kim is one of Rudyard Kipling’s best known characters in one of his best known novels. It was first published as a serial in McClure’s Magazine and in Cassell’s Magazine. It was published in book form for the first time by McMillan & Co. in 1901. It is the story of a young boy’s coming of age and his recruitment into the Indian secret service to take part in the Great Game in British India during the late 19th century.

“Though he was burned black as any native, though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white.”  Kim is the orphaned son of an Irish soldier and a poor Irish mother and was raised by a half-caste Indian woman. He wanders the streets of Lahore and treats everybody equally and has garnered the nickname “Friend of All the World”. 

Kim befriends a Tibetan lama and becomes the man’s chela or disciple. They travel together, each having their own quest. Before Kim sets off on the pilgrimage, he visits Mahbub Ali, an Aghan horse-trader, who he has done odd jobs for in the past.

In exchange for a bit of money, Ali gives Kim the task of carrying a mysterious message to an officer named Colonel Creighton in Umballa, a town located between Lahore and Benares. Kim is to say to the Englishman, “The pedigree of the white stallion is fully established” and to pass on a folded piece of paper with a coded message. Kim deduces that there is more to Ali than just being a horse-trader and is determined to solve the mystery. 

On their journey, Kim and the lama come across a British regiment. Their flag depicts a red bull on a green field, an image Kim was told about in his childhood. His father said to him if he ever sees this image, the people it represents would help him. The chaplain of the regiment discovers that Kim is the son of one of the regiment’s former soldiers and takes Kim away from the lama and sends him to an English school to be properly educated. 

Kim spends three years other than tutelage of the British but yearns to return to the lama and help him complete his quest. However, the British have other plans for him. Kim is appointed to a government job and is trained to join the Great Game. A term given to the political game played out by the British Empire against the Russian Empire in seizing control of Afghanistan and other surrounding Central Asia countries. It is the 19th century version of the Cold War.

Kipling brings to life the intrigue of international espionage in the Raj’s however, the most compelling thing about Kim is India itself - the people, the customs, the interactions among races and religions, all under the rule of a foreign power. The story is written in prose that can be described as poetry in motion. Kim may not be James Bond and Kipling certainly isn’t an Ian Fleming, but the spy story that emerges will make you want to read the book over and over again. ~Ernie Hoyt

Slumdog Millionaire by Vikas Swarup (Penguin)

“I have been arrested. For winning a quiz show.” says Ram Mohammad Thomas, the hero of Vikas Swarup’s novel Slumdog Millionaire. This book was originally published as “Q&A” but was given a new title after the success of the movie adaptation. Ram Mohammad Thomas has successfully answered twelve questions correctly on India’s popular quiz show, “Who Will Win a Billion?” but the producers of the show think the only way he could have won is by cheating. 

Ram lives in Dharavi, one of the largest slums in the poorest area of Mumbai. The authorities come for him in the middle of the night. Arrests here are “as common as pickpockets on the local train.” This is an area where people are often carted off without any explanation. As Ram is led away, he hears a voice in the neighborhood say, “There goes another one”. 

Neil Johnson and Billy Nanda, two people involved with the quiz program come to the police station to talk to Ram. Johnson asks the show’s producer, Nanda if Ram even understands English to which he replies “How can you expect him to speak English? He’s just a dumb waiter in some godforsaken restaurant, for Chrissake!”

Johnson pleads with the police commissioner to help prove that Ram cheated on the quiz show. They do not take any notice of Ram who is still in the room because he is just a waiter and “waiters don’t understand English”. The commissioner asks what’s in it for him and Ram hears two words - “ten percent”. 

Ram is then taken away and is beaten and tortured for hours on end. Ram knows he will sign a confession statement if the beatings continue, however, before Ram can sign any statement, he is saved from the police by a woman who claims to be his lawyer and is immediately released from police custody.

The lawyer says she wants to help Ram prove he did not cheat on the show. She tells him she has a copy of the entire quiz show broadcast and says “If you didn’t cheat, I must know how you knew”. Ram tells her what he told the police, that he just knew the answers. He then begins to tell his story of how each question on the quiz show was related to an episode in his life. 

The life of Ram Mohammed Thomas reads like a Shakespearean tragedy blended with the comedy of the absurd. Fortune and misfortune rules his life. An orphan who has to use his brain and wits to survive and succeed in a very seedy world.

The story is humorous at times and can also be read as an indictment against India’s class system that still seems to be prevalent today. You cannot help but root for Ram in his case against the injustices of a highly corrupt system. You will laugh and you will cry and you may wish your life was just as lucky as Ram’s without having to deal with the misfortunes.. ~Ernie Hoyt

All the Way to the Tigers by Mary Morris (Doubleday, release date June 6, 2020)

When Mary Morris shatters her ankle in seven places, she asks her surgeon, “Will I be able to go to Morocco in six weeks?” Instead she spends a year immobile and after another year she knows she’s unable to hike as much as a mile--she can’t even walk on a beach.

A travel writer and adventurer, Morris has been stuck at home far too long, suffering from travel envy. “I covet journeys,” she confesses. Turning to her husband, she says, “I have to get away”—and she knows where. During her motionless time, she read Death in Venice and was struck by the passage, “He would go on a journey. Not far. Not all the way to the tigers.” Reading these words over and over, Morris knows what she will do when she can walk again. She’s going all the way to the tigers.

To Morris, all the way doesn’t mean the heavily touristed area of Rajasthan. “Not Rajasthan, not Jaipur, no Taj Mahal,” she firmly tells her travel agent. Instead she heads for Madhya Pradesh in central India to the Pench Tiger Reserve, a place so cold “the bananas have frozen on their stems.” There’s no heat in her hotel except for the hot water bottle that Morris tossed into her suitcase instead of the warm clothing she was certain she wouldn’t need. Her throat hurts, her head aches, her cough is inexorable, and she has a six a.m. appointment with a car and driver that will take her off in search of the tigers. 

This could easily become a tiresome account of a white lady’s buffered travels to satisfy a whim but Morris is far too skilled a writer to let this happen. Her strength is in describing what she sees and everything she sees is interesting to her. “Real travelers, like real writers, move through the world like a child. With a child’s sense of wonder and surprise.” Although the sight of a tiger becomes more improbable with every tigerless day, Morris begins not to care. Instead she  marvels at the jackals and monkeys, the white-spotted and sambar deer, the birds with turquoise and black feathers and the ones with purple plumes. With lush and lyrical language, she makes the lushness that surrounds her palpable and thoroughly intoxicating.

In the same way, she intertwines stories of her life with her quest for the tigers in a quilt that is almost seamless, with colors that never jar. Her mother throwing her strings of pearls into the Mediterranean sea, laughing as she says. “I’ve been wearing them too long,” mirrors Morris’s release of her idealized tiger as she meanders, lost yet still observant, through a Mumbai slum.

“I am shaken by this fragile world,” she says while realizing that she will always carry the curse God gave to Cain: “You will be a restless wanderer.” Morris has turned that curse into the gift of “waking up each day afresh,” reaching for her passport, and heading off into a world that for her will always be new.~Janet Brown

Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language by Katherine Russell Rich (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

“India will change you forever,” a friend once told Katherine Russell Rich and after recovering from cancer and losing her job, that change was just what Russell wanted. “I no longer had the language to describe my own life,” she explains. “So I decided to borrow someone else’s.” She decides to study Hindi for a year in Rajasthan.

Adult language learning isn’t for the fainthearted. The optimum period for language acquisition begins at eighteen months and peaks at seven. The ability to pick up vocabulary lasts forever but learning intonation and sound patterns becomes progressively harder with age. However Russell is intrigued by the idea that speaking another language opens up another world, wondering if learning Hindi will double the size of the world she was born into.

What she discovers is her new world expands with its new language and her old one begins to vanish. While she learns words that have no equivalent in English, vocabulary she’s used all of her life fades into the back of her mind. “Hindi pollutes my English,” as she absorbs the formal address of her new language and transfers new rules of pronunciation into her native language where they don’t belong. She begins to say “we” instead of “I,” as Hindi blurs the distinction between the individual and the group for her. Even her face begins to change. When she looks in a mirror, she judges her features by the standards that exist in her new culture, described by her new language. She learns that in Hindi yesterday and tomorrow are the same word, that Indian time is circular, not linear. “in India, in Hindi, it’s always right now.”

Russell practices total immersion, living in “the incurably medieval” city of Udaipur with an extended family who ensure that she’s surrounded by Hindi, “a monsoon of words.” She takes long walks alone, looking at unfamiliar sights that she has no names for. Without language, she falls back into the wonder of childhood, where nothing appears ordinary.

Then on a bright day in September, the world shakes when the Twin Towers fall. Language becomes political with words like “terrorism,” “fanaticism,” “war.” The deep and murderous divide between Indian Hindus and Muslims becomes horribly evident to Russell. She learns that Hindi is seen by many as a right-wing nationalistic tool, intended to supplant the nation’s eighteen official languages and to remove all lingering traces of Persian words that came with the former Mughal rulers.

Linking Muslims and Christians as undesirable foreign outsiders, right-wing Hindu terrorists attack and kill an Australian doctor and his two sons because they believe the man has been proselytizing. Russell is attacked three times in public, punched and knocked down. Her host family, one of her teachers tells her, has been spreading rumors about her and, unnerved, she thinks this is true. She leaves the house that’s been her refuge, moves to a hotel, and becomes “lost in India.”

Four hours from Udaipur, Hindu pilgrims burn to death in a train car conflagration. “Muslims had done this thing” is the popular verdict, reinforced by nationalist leaders, and Muslims are killed with impunity as a result. The official death toll is nine hundred. Russell’s friendships are shaken when she hears people she’s close to spew hatred against Muslims. When her year is up, India and Pakistan are “teetering on the edge.” And yet India becomes part of her, her second world, along with her imperfect but passionate grasp on Hindi.

Dreaming in Hindi is more than a memoir. It’s a deep and piercing examination of what’s gained and what’s lost by submitting to another language, another culture. ~Janet Brown

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (John Murray)

Sea of Poppies by Amitov Ghosh is truly a story of epic proportions. It is the first volume in the Ibis trilogy and was published in 2008. The story continues in River of Smoke, published in 2011 and concludes in Flood of Fire published in 2015. The initial story is set prior to the First Opium War between the Great Britain and China in a time when Britain’s East India Company was trading opium made in Bengal, a part of the Indian sub continent (currently Bangladesh),  to China.

The trilogy is named after a ship called the Ibis. A former slave-ship which was being refitted in Calcutta to accommodate the coolies who were to be transported to Mauritius, coolies being indentured laborers.  The ship’s new owner is Benjamin Burnham, an evangelist and a prominent player in the opium trade. Aside from Burnham, he main characters who wind up on the Ibis are an ordinary Indian woman and the man who saves her from certain death, an american sailor with a secret, a disgraced Rajah, and a Chinese opium addict.

Deeti is a housewife and mother. She is married to a crippled husband who works at the local opium factory. Deeti discovers that she was drugged with opium by her mother-in-law on her wedding night and was raped by her husband’s brother. She never tells her daughter, Kabutri, the truth about who her real father is. Deeti’s husband dies and fearing what her husband’s family will do to her daughter, she sends Kabutri to live with her relatives. The brother who raped her says demands Deeti to marry him but she refuses and chooses sati (ritual of self immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre) before succumbing to her brother-in-law’s wishes. On the day she is to perform the sati, she is saved by a lower caste man named Kulua. They both escape and find passage on the Ibis.

Zachary Reid is an American who is the son of a white father and a quadroon mother. He had joined the crew of the Ibis on its first journey from Baltimore to Calcutta. In a series of mishaps on the sea, many of the senior crew are lost and Reid finds himself quickly rising in rank. Once he sets foot in Calcutta, he is treated as gentry and is offered the job of second mate on the Ibis’s next voyage, transporting coolies to Mauritius!

Neel Rattan Halder is the rajah of Raskhali and also the ruler of the zamindars (Indian property owners). Halder has run up a huge debt and is unable to pay it back. Burnham says he can settle his debts by giving up his zamindary (property owned and governed by the rajah) but Halder refuses. Halder is then accused of forgery and is sent to trial, loses his case and is sentenced to spend seven years in Mauritius.

Paulette is a French orphan who grew up with her unconventional father and feels more comfortable in a sari than western clothes. Mr. Burnham had taken Paulette in after the death of her father and frowns on her love Indian culture. As Paulette gets older, Burnham is pressuring her to marry his friend, an older man named Kendalbushe. We also discover that Burnham has a perversion of his own which he as Paulette satisfy.  Fearing for her future, Paulette decides to run away and manages to gain passage on the Ibis. 

Finally, we meet Nob Kissin Baboo, a man who is the catalyst that will set many actions in motion aboard the Ibis. He works for Mr. Burnham as an overseer and believes that Zachary Reid is the incarnation of Krishna.

The prose flows smoothly although you may have to look up some terms which may be unfamiliar if your knowledge of colonial British India is limited. You will be exposed to words such as zamindar, zamindary, rajahs, sepoys, and lascars which you may have to look up on your own, but it does not effect the story. This book has everything you can hope for in an epic - high adventure, love, romance, and betrayal, loyalty and trust and the pursuit of a happier life. ~Ernie Hoyt

Mumbai Noir (Akashic Books)

If you want to know the innermost core of a city, its hopes, dreams, and fears, read its crime fiction. If you want to explore every facet of that core, revealed by different points of view, read Akashic Books’ noir series, where a number of writers, all well familiar with their city (or in some volumes their state or country), each write a crime story about it.

The latest in this series, Mumbai Noir, is a collection of “all-new” stories by fifteen writers, most of them living, or having once lived, in Mumbai. And that is what makes these stories so compelling—each selection is steeped in a knowledgeable sense of place, and aknowledge of the often grisly criminal acts that occur in that place.

“Between 1993 and 20ll,” the introduction states, “Mumbai has weathered eight terror attacks.” Its over twelve million residents “have become unwitting authorities on all the ways that an ordinary day in the city can turn out to be one’s last.” Small wonder that the opening stories in this book involve bomb blasts, the need to be alert to possible terrorists, the caution and vigilance that turned “the Mumbai evening…into a night that was no longer Bombay.”

The stories that follow argue with that assertion. Going from the shadowed world of the transgendered hijira, to the dance halls where beautiful women command a price perhaps too high, to the streets where an alluring body may not be what it seems, Mumbai certainly still seems to have what one man calls “The Juice.” Within this city, the crimes range from one that will make strong men turn pallid to an almost novelistic story of obsessive attraction told by both the stalker and the stalked, with an ambiguous ending that skillfully teases, puzzles, and evokes arguments.

An affluent woman hides from the world in her apartment that is housed in an “an all-vegetarian building” where her secret fear comes knocking on her door; gothic horror and perhaps the secret of eternal youth lurk in a traveler’s oasis that “disowned chaos” in a city that seemingly embodies it. Murder strikes in a fitness center as efficiently as it does within a motorized rickshaw, and as befits a collection of noir fiction, there are hard-boiled detectives and cynical cops to assess—if not solve —mysterious cases.

The writers of Mumbai Noir are male and female—including a pair of surgeons who write collaboratively to form one author. Contributors to this anthology lead IT firms, make films, take photographs, work at non-governmental organizations. The diversity of their interests leads to the diversity found within this collection, offering a tantalizing glimpse of their city beneath the darkness of their stories.

The wide-ranging ethnic differences found in Mumbai are reflected in the glossary at the back of the book, defining words from Hindi, Urdu, Maharathi, Punjabi, and Gujarati. A few of the terms are obscenities, still more have to do with food, which says quite a bit about this city.

Only the most hardened crime aficionados will read this in one sitting; the rest of us will come back to it again and again, drawn by the stories, the details, Mumbai.--Janet Brown

Tigers in Red Weather: A Quest for the Last Wild Tigers by Ruth Padel (Walker)

When the man she has loved for five years inexplicably bows out of her life, Ruth Padel takes her badly bruised heart on a long journey. Traveling from the Indian subcontinent to Siberia to Southeast Asia, she immerses herself in the world of tigers, exploring their habitat, their habits, and their tenuous grip on survival.

Padel begins her quest with a literary love of tigers, a few facts, and a longing to learn more about an animal that is often seen through a veil of mythology and misconception. In her first journey to a tiger forest in Kerala, she sees no trace of the creatures that she seeks, but she leaves with the understanding that tigers are an essential part of Asia's environment. Tigers survive only in healthy forests, and these forests, Padel says, "hold Asia together." It says in the Mahabharata (5th century BCE), "The tiger perishes without the forest and the forest perishes without its tigers." This truth resonates with Padel in the twenty-first century and is the underlying theme of her travel through countries that are the homes of wild tigers.

TigersinRedWeather

Wherever she goes, Padel finds forests that are for sale, that become diminished as the worldwide hunger for logs increases. The animals and people living among the trees become adversaries, competitors for shrinking territory: tigers kill livestock when natural prey dwindles and people safeguard their property by killing tigers. The argument of how to balance the needs of both groups divides people within nations and within families, including Padel and her own brother.

Tigers also fall prey to the myths and legends that surround them. Their bones, flesh, blood and skin are all valuable commodities in the global marketplace, sold to people who hope to gain a portion of the tiger's strength or beauty. Tiger balm, Padel points out, is a substance based on camphor and eucalyptus that can be safely used by the most fervent environmentalist, but its universal appeal is based "on what people want." In Nepal she is told, "Real tiger balm... cures arthritis, joints, knees, rheumatism. It is here, for those who know."

People are not always the enemies of tigers, and Padel's narrative is filled with stories of men and women who respect (and work to preserve) the natural world. Debby, a British environmental adviser in Indonesia who is "kept sane through black humour and a taste for lunacy"; Yevgeny, a Siberian tiger biologist who writes poetry but has "never dared write one about a tiger"; Ullas in Bangalore, a writer and tiger conservationist whose work "is a beacon" to some and has led others to set fire to his office; and the dukun, the Sumatran shaman, who gives Padel a "guardian spirit-tiger" as a protector—these are only a few who illuminate and give hope in this book.

A poet and a scholar, this descendant of Charles Darwin employs both of these disciplines to enchant and inform her readers. She places facts and images side by side as skillfully as she blends her personal memories with her observations of the tigers' world, a world that, she convincingly argues, must be saved in order to preserve our own. The book ends with a generous collection of poems that Padel has quoted throughout her travels, the names of people who helped her along her way, and the addresses of organizations that accept financial contributions to support the protection of wild tigers.~by Janet Brown (published originally by Waterbridge Review)

An Indian Attachment by Sarah Lloyd (Eland Books)

This title has that crisp, acerbic ring that characterizes the novels of Anita Brookner, and at first seems an odd choice of name for a book about a young Englishwoman who spends two years with the Punjabi villager with whom she falls in lust, if not love. The title's restraint particularly resonates when readers consider that this adventure took place at the end of that emotionally extravagant decade, the '70s. Sarah Lloyd is easily seduced by beauty and the glory of a Sikh warrior's unleashed mane  of hair is too much for her. She cuts her Indian pilgrimage short, finds the village of the man who intrigues her, and moves into his family's home. It's an unlikely venue for a woman who loves the "chaos and electric energy" of the Calcutta streets but then there is "that hair," plus the opportunity to enter "rural life, the real India, the one I had come to find."

This woman knows how to travel hard and that skill serves her well in her new home. Sarah Lloyd is the kind of traveler who is happiest when staying in a gurdwara, "a large communal hall with windows all around" that is open to anyone, feeding and sheltering all who enter it without charge. If this is your idea of hell on earth, keep reading--this state of overcrowded, public bliss is where Sarah Lloyd lives for the next two years.

She is an artist and the one image of Jungli, the man whom she lives with, is a drawing she has done of his profile. This is perhaps the only clue the reader is given about the feelings Lloyd has for Jungli--he is gorgeous and her drawing of him is very reminiscent of the drawings of desert nomads  done by T.E. Lawrence to embellish his Arabian classic. Like Lawrence of  Arabia, Sarah Lloyd is enchanted with her idea of the country that has taken her in, and by extension with the man who has made it possible for her to live there in the way she feels is most authentic.

The beauty that nourishes Sarah is hard to pinpoint in the surroundings she has chosen but she is quite lyrical when she finds it. Delighted by a profusion of "English wildflowers" she discovers in Amritsar, she catalogs them in a tumble of poetry that evokes Midsummer Night's Dream. "Everything was so perfect," she writes of Jungli's village, "the clear early morning, the smell of damp wheat, the flowers in the verges, and the sky flecked with birds."

But Eden does not come without flaws and Lloyd is smart enough--and observant enough--to notice them and chronicle them with the same exactitude that she uses for the unexpected splashes of beauty. The lack of privacy, the dearth of sympathy, the realization that village life has no place for individuality is all noted and explained without whining or sentimentality. Understanding that she is "a guest" who during her visit  "remained an outsider," Lloyd watches without judgment and--even more impressively--without self-consciousness. Never in her chronicle of her two years in rural India does she indulge in the wild paranoia that frequently strikes expats in Asia. What people think of her, she seems to have sensibly concluded, is none of her business. Instead, she decides, when it comes to this new life, she has "a lot to unlearn."

As she unlearns, she describes it all on paper. She acquires language so she can have her questions answered, and when she and Jungli leave his family's village to enter a religious community presided over by an enigmatic saint, her questions proliferate. She has a household to run, provisions to buy, dung to collect. Even though she shares a hut with another couple, she is forced to become house-proud. And she is given a new identity. Without the buffer of foster-parents and their defined place in their community, Sarah Lloyd is known by Jungli's name--when her new neighbors talk about her,  they call her "Pritam Singh's."

But truly this is who she never becomes--if anything or anyone possesses this woman, it is India,  not the man who gave her a life there. At the end of their time together, it is Jungli who receives the reader's sympathy as Lloyd  dismisses him in the book's final sentence, "I knew with absolute certainty that Jungli would love me until his death."

Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes by Shoba Narayan (Random House)

What we eat is at the heart of who we are. It shapes our stories as completely as it shapes our bodies and defines our cultural worlds. In the United States, a certain post-war generation is bound together by the memory of canned creamed corn and Campbell's chicken noodle soup, as firmly as those a few years older are by the mention of powdered eggs. It is an unfortunate truth that none of these iconic culinary emblems are more than marginally edible.

And then there is the food that pervades the life of Shoba Naryan: flavorful, enticing, sumptuous dishes that are not just part of her existence. They are the substance and heart of her life. From the moment that she was taken to a Hindu temple for the rice-eating ceremony that marked her first meal, where she spat out the initial morsel because the clarified butter that had been stirred into the rice was burnt, food envelopes the milestones of her life and gives them a dimension of voluptuous, succulent, and bountiful pleasure.

When Shoba's mother becomes pregnant with her second child, she and her small daughter move back to her parents' home for the final stages of gestation. Shoba's mother takes to her bed where she is given "milk spiked with saffron, ground almonds and jaggery or cane sugar" rather than the calcium and iron tablets that serve the same function, and her favorite foods are brought by friends and relatives,who believe that "feeding a pregnant woman was akin to feeding God." It's impossible--if you're female-- to read about this incredibly civilized form of prenatal care without feeling overwhelming waves of envy and a longing to be born Tamil Brahmin in the next life.

After Shoba starts school, every lunch hour becomes a wildly exciting picnic, with little girls sharing bite-sized pieces of their biriyanis, appams dipped into stews of vegetables, cashews and coconut milk,mango pickles, idlis, with the girls with the best lunches reigning over everyone else.

Trips on the night train take on the same feast-like quality, with passengers sharing their food with nearby strangers: roti stuffed with spiced potatoes, sweet-and-sour buttermilk soup, spiced kidney beans. Vendors at stations along the way sell mangoes, milk sweets, and "thick yogurt in tiny terra-cotta pots." Travel is one long delightful culinary adventure.

Although food is the predominant feature of her daily landscape, Shoba cooks her first full meal only when a successfully prepared vegetarian feast will allow her to accept a fellowship to a U.S. university. While her family is confident that she will never be able to pull this off, Shoba has grown up eating, marketing, and watching her mother cook. She prepares food so luscious that reading about it causes an immediate trip to the closest South Indian restaurant and eating it guaranteed that Shoba's family will permit her to leave for America.

The stories in this memoir are as irresistible as the food that underpins it. Murdering New York goldfish leads to a frenzied taxi ride to replace them and an instant friendship and a fabulous meal with a taxi driver from Kerala. An eccentric sculpture professor opens up an undreamed of world of experimental art, lesbian friends and a wasp-nest of outraged Southern academics. And who would ever dream that an unconventional, outspoken artist who has lived for five years in the States would return home and find true romance in an arranged marriage?

You may not wish you were Indian as you gulp down this delicious memoir, but you certainly at times will wish you were Shoba Narayan, if only so you can eat the way that she does. Since twenty-one recipes garnish her anecdotes, this is easy to accomplish. But to have her sense of humor, flair for description, and adventurous spirit? Maybe in the next life!

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (Atlantic Books)

"These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies."

Balram Halwai is a boy from a family of men with small bellies, who is singled out by a school inspector as a white tiger, "the creature that comes along only once in a generation." What is taken up as a jeer by his classmates becomes a cruel joke to Balram when he is forced to leave school to crawl around a teashop, cleaning up spots and spills--and listening.

This is Balram's gift. He listens, he absorbs, and then he acts. Learning that drivers are in high demand, he takes driving lessons and sets off for Delhi, where he quickly lies his way into a job driving for a man whom he comes to idolize. "Eight months later, I slit Mr. Ashok's throat."

This is the first forty pages of a novel that explodes into tiny fragments the myth that globalization means the world will be as one. Balram is not a John Lennon aficionado, and imagination is not a quality that intrudes upon his consciousness. His background music is Sting, Enya, Eminem, and if he has any belief in anything, it is in the power of observation and pragmatism.

This is why he tells his story. After hearing that the Premier of China is coming to visit Bangalore "to know the truth...to meet some Indian entrepreneurs and hear the story of their success from their own lips", Balram begins a long letter to Wen Jiabao to explain his own entrepreneurial success.

At first, his saga seems a triumph of black humor, the shaggy dog story of the unreliable narrator. His fate is as much cast in stone as it has been for any man spawned from what Balram terms "the Darkness." His devotion to Mr. Ashok is unwavering; his feeling that Ashok's Western education has changed his employer's feudal background to one that is guided by justice and integrity threatens to change his own cynicism. But upbringing and family history prove to be a strong force, Ashok becomes corrupted, and Balram puts a stranglehold on his moment of opportunity.

"Speak to me of civil war, I told Delhi.

I will, she said.

Speak to me of blood on the streets, I told Delhi.

I will, she said."

Asok achieves his dream by slitting one man's throat. He gains the luxury of writing his own story; it is not, as his father's was, "written on his body, in a sharp pen." His laughter is loud and bitter and pointed. His life, as he reveals it, is a prophecy for those who choose to listen and a sentence--perhaps--for everyone, whether they listen or not.

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra (HarperCollins)

Nobody knows why Ganesh Gaitonde, a man who controls at least half of the underworld in Bombay, would choose to give himself up to a lowly police inspector like Sartaj Singh--least of all Sartaj himself. Nobody knows why Gaitonde has sequestered himself in a concrete building that resembles a cube, why he tells Sartaj the story of his criminal beginnings while the police lay siege to the bunker, and why the body of a woman lies beside Gaitonde's corpse when Sartaj reaches the heart of the stronghold. And nobody knows why agents from India's foreign intelligence agency, RAW, take charge of the post-mortem scene and order Sartaj to ferret out the details that will explain the inexplicable.

Sartaj, a man who was once chosen by a women's magazine as one of "The City's Best-Looking Bachelors," is in the throes of a full-blown midlife crisis, "past forty, a divorced police inspector with middling professional prospects…just pedaling along, doing his job." He's lost his youthful belief that he could "hold the whole city in his heart." When he begins to investigate the life and death of one of the most powerful men in India, his own life starts to expand as he uncovers other people's secrets.

Bombay is a city filled with people who have moved there to recreate themselves, and secrets are perhaps its most valuable currency, upon which power rests. Everyone—the beautiful movie star whose photographs fuel magazine sales, the woman who was Gaitonde's best friend for years without ever meeting him face-to-face, Sartaj's professional mentor who has known him since childhood, Sartaj's mother—has an untold history that forms the base of their visible lives.

As Sartaj explores the mysteries that surround the death of Gaitonde, he is led deep into the heart of Bombay, into his own heart, and into a world beyond, where corruption and greed can lead to annihilation. The mythic life of Gaitonde becomes smaller and more human, while other forces stretch beyond India's borders, and the terror of 9/11 presages the end of the Kaliyug period.

While Sartaj's investigation takes shape, so does the city that he lives in. Vikram Chandra has a Dickensian skill for bringing life to a multitude of characters who at first seem to be a random cluster, but who fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. When all of their stories fall into place, piece by piece Bombay is brought into being—its dark corners, its blaze of vitality, "the jammed jumble of cars, and the thickets of slums, and the long loops of rails, and the swarms of people, and the radio music in the bazaars." This book is far more than a subcontintental version of The Godfather, or the middle-aged love story of Sartaj, a wounded romantic who learns that "to be rescued from one’s foolishness was the greatest tenderness." It’s a portrait of Bombay, of Mumbai, and to read it is to "hold the whole city" in your hands and perhaps in your heart.