In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Ann Goldstein (Vintage Books)

Native speakers of English are crippled by the belief that learning another language is a matter of choice, something to “take.” French, Spanish, sometimes German--one of these is chosen in high school, flirted with in college, “picked up” in the way one might get a bad cold, and rapidly forgotten. Dimly students understand that fluency will only come with total immersion but few realize how disorienting that process will be. It is, Jhumpa Lahiri explains, a matter of risk and discipline, an abandonment of one culture for another, a kind of baptism that holds the threat of drowning.

Lahiri had two languages as a child, the Bengali that was spoken at home and the English that she needed for the world outside, once she had turned four. Her parents resisted English, clinging to the language of their native culture. Lahiri became a double exile in a linguistic quandary. Her imperfect Bengali failed to connect her to a place she had never lived in and her perfect English failed to give her a place of belonging in either her birthplace (London) or her country of residence (the U.S.). It was a precarious place for a child to stand in and Lahiri found her refuge in reading and writing English words. “I belonged only to my words…to no country, no specific culture.” “Writing,” she says, “makes me feel present on earth.”

Then she falls in love with Italian, a language that seems to have chosen her rather than the other way around. Dizzied by the notion of choice, she takes lessons that will allow her to speak. She chooses to read only books written in Italian. She moves to Rome and becomes “a word hunter,” with her vocabulary notebook slowly measuring her progress. But this isn’t enough. To feel present in Italy, Lahiri begins to write in Italian. 

At first this is like “writing with my left hand,” she admits, an activity “so arduous it seems sadistic.” For the first time in her life, she has found a language that gives her the “freedom to be imperfect,” but as a writer, she refuses to take comfort in that freedom. She begins to show her Italian writing to those who will correct and guide her, Slowly she turns away from her “dominant language,” the one in which she had won a Pulitzer Prize and a Presidential medal conferred upon her by Barack Obama. She abandons English to the point that when she wrote this book, it was originally published as In altre parole. When it appeared as In Other Words, Lahiri insisted that it would be published in both Italian and English, with the translation done by someone other than herself. She knew that as a writer who had an expert command of English, she would be compelled to improve what she had written in Italian. Instead her translator kept the raw and unpolished thoughts that Italian had conveyed upon Lahiri, with the Italian text on one page and the English translation facing it.

The translated sentences are like ungainly pieces of furniture. They aren’t smooth--in fact they come in fragments, carrying splinters. They lack grace and are often clunky. They hold immeasurable courage, written by a woman who has stepped away from her literary fame, embraced imperfection and found a different way to be alive. . “I remain, in Italian, an ignorant writer,” Lahiri says, but she’s one that’s discovered the art of metamorphosis, a transformation that can be terrifying but is an act of rebellion and release. Through another language, Lahiri has left exile and chosen a new form, one that she exercises with freedom and generosity.~Janet Brown

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga (Free Press)

Between the Assassinations is Aravind Adiga’s second published novel, although he wrote it before the acclaimed book, The White Tiger. The title of the book refers to the time between the assassination of India’s then-Prime Minister, Indira Ghandi in 1984 and the assassination of her son Rajiv Ghandi who became India’s Prime Minister that same year. It is a collection of short stories set in the fictional city of Kittur which is modeled on Adiga’s hometown of Mangalore which is located in the state of Karnataka.

Kittur is located on the southwestern coast of India, between Goa and Calicut. It is bordered by the Arabian Sea on the west, and by the Kaliamma River to the south and east. The monsoon season starts in June and lasts until September. After that, the weather becomes dry and cool and is suggested as the best time to visit. 

Before each story, we are given a little history of the city and how the town is laid out. In the middle of the town is a pornographic theater called the Angel Talkies. Unfortunately for the town, people give directions by using Angel Talkies as a reference point. We learn that the official language of the city is Kannada, but many of the residents also speak Tulu which no longer has a written script, and Konkani which is used by the upper-caste Brahmins. The city has a population of 193, 432 and “only 89 declare themselves to be without caste or religion”. 

The story takes place over a week in the city starting with a visitor’s arrival at the train station. We are first introduced to a twelve-year-old Muslim boy named Ziauddin. He is hired by a man named Ramanna Shetty who runs a tea and samosa place near the railway station. The man tells Ziauddin “it was okay for him to stay. Provided he promised to work hard. And keep away from all hanky-panky”. However, Ziauddin begins to work for a Muslim man who pays him for counting trains and the number of Indian soldiers in them. It isn’t until Ziauddin asks why the man has him counting trains that he understands that the man is not as kind as he thought.

We meet a man named Abassi who has a case of conscience. He is a shirt factory owner whose employees are going blind by the poor working conditions. He must decide if he should close the factory to save his workers from doing further damage to their eyes while having to deal with corrupt government officials. 

Ramakrishna, known to the locals as Xerox, sells counterfeit copies of books. He has been arrested a number of times and has been told to stop what he’s doing but he lives to make books and sell them. His latest goal after getting out of jail is to only sell copies of The Satanic Verses by Salmon Rushdie. 

Adiga’s stories are full of characters who deal with an array of problems still affecting India today. Class struggles and religious persecution, poverty, the caste system, and political corruption are just some of the topics covered. The story reads as a satire on Indian life and is filled with humor and angst. Although, his description of Kittur makes it seem like a dirty, crowded and dangerous city, you can’t help but want to go and visit it to see it for yourself. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Prince, the Demon King, and the Monkey Warrior retold by Janet Brown (ThingsAsian Press)

The Prince, the Demon King, and the Monkey Warrior is the retelling of a Hindu epic called Ramanaya which is attributed to a fifth century B.C.E. poet named Valmiki. It tells the story of the life of Prince Rama, the first-born son of King Dasarat in the country of Ayodhya. The story opens with King Dasarat speaking to one of his advisors. 

King Dasarat is a wealthy man without any enemies and has four wives and yet says to his advisor, “I am sadder than the poorest peasant in my country”. He believes the peasants are richer than he is. They may be poor and have no possessions of their own and they live grueling lives but they have one thing that King Dasarat doesn’t have - a son. 

The wise man helped the king and his four queens each had a son within a year. The oldest was Rama, who “from the day he was born, made everyone feel happy.” Barat was the second son, a righteous individual who supported those around him. The third son was Satrugan and the youngest was Lakshaman who was always very loyal to his eldest brother Rama. 

The King informed his sons that the land was being torn apart by two demons and that the wise men of the forest had told him that only his oldest son would be able to defeat them, yet he did not want to burden his child with this news. 

Rama was a dutiful son and did not hesitate to take up the challenge. His youngest brother said he would join Rama on his quest. The two sons traveled far and wide and defeated the demons without any problems. On their way home, they set foot in another kingdom whose king was said to be as wise as their father. 

Rama meets his soon to be wife, Sita in the kingdom. The two marry and live a happy, peaceful life for many years. Rama’s aging father tells his son that he is going to abdicate and Rama will be King the following day. However, the mother of Barat, Kaikeyi, was fooled by her evil maidservant Mantara. The distressed Kaikeyi went to her husband and pleaded with him to fulfill one of her wishes that he had yet to grant her. 

So it comes to pass that Rama is exiled from his home for four fourteen years while Barat is crowned King. Lakshaman follows his brother and his wife into exile. They settle in a land surrounded by evil demons. A She-Demon that has the power to transform herself into anybody she wishes tries to trick Rama into making him believe she is his wife, he tells her he already has a wife. She then shows her true form but is disfigured by Lakshaman and runs back to her home. 

One of the She-Demons brothers is Ravan, the Demon King. He sends an army of demons to kill Rama but they all end up dead except for one. It is this demon that convinces King Ravan that the best way to defeat Rama is to kidnap his wife and make her his own. 

The King of the Demons manages to kidnap Sita and now Rama finds himself on a quest to save his wife. With the help of Hanuman, the Monkey Warrior, Rama defies all odds to save the love of his life. 

This modern retelling will appeal to everyone, young and old alike. The full color illustrations by Vladimir Verano bring life to the story. It is a beautiful introduction to the culture of India as seen through one of its most popular stories. ~Ernie Hoyt

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville by Akash Kapur (Scribner)

History puts Utopia in a bad light. The concept has never worked very well, drenched as it is in failure, death, and tragedy. But what if the effort to achieve the ideal community simply has never been given the time it needs to evolve? The process isn’t pretty, as Akash Kapur shows in his story of “the quest for Utopia” in a barren region of India, but the end result is a town with an international population that thrives in a setting of “vibrant forest.” What was once “a moonscape” is now “a global model of environmental conservation.” But are the results worth the human sacrifice that this achievement demanded?

The “intentional community” of Auroville was born because of the unlikely meeting of three very different people: Sri Aurobindo, a Cambridge-educated Indian mystic, a wealthy French matron, Blanche Alfassa who believes in visions made incarnate, and a young Frenchman who spent his youth in concentration camps. Madame Alfassa recognizes Sri Aurobindo as the Indian seer who came to her in her dreams. She becomes his leading disciple and is known by the name he gives her, The Mother. Bernard, weighted to the breaking point by his years in the death camps, meets The Mother just before Sri Aurobindo dies, putting her at the forefront of the seer’s following. She gives Bernard a new name and, as Satprem, he becomes her primary henchman, propelled by the belief that The Mother is divine.

The Mother has a dream and at the age of 87, she reveals it to the world. She buys 90 acres of barren ground and announces this will become a “Tower of Babel in reverse,” an international community” that will belong “to humanity as a whole.” Three years later, the first settlers arrive, finding an empty desert.

Others join them, from India, Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States. They become obsessed with finding shelter, water, and food; they dig wells and build huts with their bare hands. They gather seeds that they find within animal droppings and nurture crops of native plants. An administrative group formed by The Mother raises funds and disburses money to Auroville’s inhabitants, who espouse a subsistence economy that has reduced them to peasants. Then The Mother dies and the money begins to trickle away. 

Political schisms crack through the utopian surface of Auroville and a form of cultural revolution blazes through the hearts and minds of the residents. Satprem has convinced most of them that The Mother is a divinity and the prevailing belief is She will provide them with what they need. She will heal the sick and bring up the children while the healthy adults work to venerate her memory. Medicine and education are regarded as unnecessary and the energy of Auroville is spent in building a multi-storied  edifice that will house The Mother’s spirit. 

Within this maelstrom of belief and chaos, two people become the poster children for disaster. A devout member of Auroville, a young Belgian beauty, falls from the heights of the construction project and is permanently paralyzed. The man who loves her, a wealthy patrician from New York who devotes his fortune to Auroville, becomes ill. Both of them refuse the medical help that would save them and they die young, with one survivor.

The woman’s daughter, Auroalice, has known no other world but Auroville. At fourteen she’s semi-educated and semi-feral, having grown up in a tribe of free-range children. She’s adopted by the sister of the wealthy patrician, is taken to live in The Dakota where Lennon and Yoko are her neighbors, and by chance meets a man who had been a childhood friend in Auroville, Akash Kapur. They marry.

Well educated and well off, the two of them live happily in Brooklyn until their pasts begin to claim them. Returning to Auroville with their young sons, they find it’s become a place where they can raise their children safely and happily, as well as a place where their own childhood histories have found peace.

Unsettling and uncomfortable, Better to Have Gone raises troubling questions. Kapur turns to Mao and Robespierre: “Revolution is not a dinner party.” “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” To create this ecological triumph, people died and children were sacrificed. 

Kapur says, “Children of utopias, “I’ve come to understand, are like exiles.” He and Auroalice were each rescued in different ways. Kapur’s parents never truly espoused the demands of Auroville; Auroalice became an orphan who was whisked into the wealth of Manhattan after fourteen years of a helter-skelter upbringing. Other children weren’t so fortunate and their stories go untold, “mere expedients on the journey to a new world.”~Janet Brown

Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia edited by Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas (University of California Press)

Curry has become such an international dish that it’s hard to remember it originated in India. Yet when people think of Indian cuisine, this is the first menu choice that usually comes to mind. How did this dish become both the culinary symbol of a country and a popular meal across the globe? Japan, Thailand, Great Britain, the United States all have their own version of curry—Campbell’s Mushroom Soup with a dash of curry powder, anyone?

In Curried Cultures, a group of academic writers look at the history, proliferation, and perhaps the decline of curry, in a series of essays that painstakingly comb through every detail of the dish. 

When the princely states of the Subcontinent became Great Britain’s Jewel in the Crown, culinary matters sharply divided the colonized from the conquerors. The British occupiers, believing that the local diet led to weakness and poor health, clung fiercely to their slabs of animal flesh washed down with beer. The people of the Subcontinent prided themselves on vegetable dishes that were spiced with a sophisticated flavor that had yet to reach the West. Each side shuddered at the barbarity of the other; it took the common soldiery of England to find a meeting ground with their subcontinental counterparts through meals of curry. Although canteen cooks probably adopted curry because of its ease and economy, the dish became popular with British troops and traveled with them to Japan and other corners of the world.

Today in Great Britain curry shops are as numerous as fish and chip stands. “Going out for a curry” is a popular way to end a night of serious drinking. In the U.S., fast food curry houses are spreading across the country, becoming almost as ubiquitous as Chinese or Thai restaurants—and equally Americanized. The Indian princes of the Raj would be horrified by what America calls curry and most citizens of modern-day India would find it inedible.

Even within India, the concept of curry is changing fast. Traditional curry dishes take time and attention which is difficult to find in a high-tech, high-speed world. Even the least sophisticated curries, the ones found in the roadside hostelries called Udupi hotels, have changed in the drive for efficiency. In India and abroad, supermarket shelves are filled with small, flat, red and white boxes that are sold under the MTR label. They contain a foil envelope filled with curry that’s quickly reheated in boiling water.

These ready-to-eat meals are cheap, flavorful, and based upon an ancient culinary tradition. In a temple in southern India, five thousand pilgrims are fed daily with fifty different selections, including curry. Legend has it that this is where the famous Mavalli Tiffin Rooms (MTR) garnered their recipes, giving their restaurant customers silver utensils with which to eat the adopted temple curries. Nowadays a version of that food can be ordered online or bought in overseas grocery stores; boxes of MTR meals feed foreign consumers who have no idea of the history behind the packaging, as well as families in India who demand flavor as much as convenience in their fast food.

Although it’s an interesting look at the way global popularity changes traditional food, Curried Cultures suffers from this kind of sentence: “I think studies of immigration demand a dose of corporeality.” Readers who hack their way through the jungles of jargon will find a lively history waiting for them—and probably a strong yearning for a plate of curry.

The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri (Harper)

Manil Suri’s comic novel The Death of Vishnu was inspired by a real person named Vishnu who lived on the steps of the apartment where the author grew up. Vishnu died on the landing after living there for many years. 

In the novel, Vishnu is a man who does odd jobs for an apartment block in Bombay, now known as Mumbai. He was named after the Hindu God Vishnu, the Deity of Preservation. The God Vishnu creates, protects, and transforms the universe. He currently lies dying on the staircase landing where he lives. He has been living there for the past eleven years. Mrs. Asrani, a resident of the apartment has been bringing Vishnu a cup of tea everyday for those eleven years, however, she doesn’t think he will drink it today as during the night he has thrown up and soiled himself. 

Vishnu was a drunk but managed to make a contract with the previous occupier of the landing, named Tall Ganga, to be her replacement as a ganga, a servant who does domestic chores for a number of households. The apartment dwellers found to their dismay that Vishnu was not up to doing a ganga’s duty. They thought of various ways to dislodge him from the landing but the cigarettewallas (walla being a suffix for “one associated with”), one who sells cigarettes and the paanwalla were aware that Vishnu made a deal with Tall Ganga to take her place and “since nobody actually owned landing, it was clear that all inhabitation rights to it now belonged to Vishnu.”

Vishnu isn’t quite dead yet and as the lives of the people in the apartment go on about their business, Vishnu reminisces about Padmini, the love of his life. All the residents have their own stories to tell and their relationship with each other is often confrontational, especially between the two married women Mrs. Asrani and Mrs. Pathak. The two families share a communal kitchen and often accuse each other of using more than their share of the apartment’s water supply.

The Jalals are the only Muslim family living in an apartment whose residents are mostly Hindu. Mr. Jalal is seeking to find a higher meaning in life and doesn’t understand the concept of faith. He often tried debating with his religious wife trying to persuade her that her faith has no logic or reasoning to be of any use. The Jalals have a son who is in love with Asrani’s daughter, Kavita. They are love-struck teenagers who plan to elope and neither family believes they are suitable for each other. 

And on the top floor of the apartment is Vinod Tanej, a man who lost his wife to cancer and has become a recluse himself as he continues to long for his wife. He only has contact with Small Ganga who still does various chores for him. 

It is when Mr. Jalal decides to sleep next to Vishnu on the landing where he has a vision and believes that Vishnu is not just a sick man, but the God Vishnu and he has been chosen to spread the word that people should worship Vishnu and treat him as a God. The dying Vishnu thinks maybe he is the incarnation of Vishnu the God and is in the process of changing the universe. 

Suri’s story blends Hindu mythology within a contemporary setting in present day India and we are left to ponder. Was Vishnu just a man or was he Vishnu the God? It is really left up to the reader to decide. ~Ernie Hoyt

Around India in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh (Nicholas Brealey Publishers, Hachette UK)

“London had never looked so grey,” as it did on the day Monisha Rajesh decides to travel through India by train--on 80 of them, in honor of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. More than 20 million passengers travel that way in India every day, along routes that stretch for 64,000 kilometres, so she figures her dream is possible. 

Rajesh’s parents both came to England from India as doctors. “Two children and fifteen years later,” her family tried to resettle in Madras but when her father discovered that the hospital he worked in did a flourishing business in selling the hearts of dead patients, he decided this wasn’t a place where he wanted his children to grow up. That two-year stint was all Rajesh had experienced of India. Now she prudently decides that if she’s going to explore the country the way she plans, she needs a traveling companion and settles on a young Norwegian photographer who (for reasons of discretion) she refers to as Passepartout (the name Verne gave Phileas Fogg’s comrade in the 80-day journey).

Although they miss their first train in Chennai, Rajesh has an uncle who assures her “Leave it to me, my dear,” and finds them seats on what she calls The Insomnia Express. This is only the first of many sleepless nights enhanced by snores from neighboring bunks and itchy blankets that come in a paper bag wrapping. Passepartout quickly discovers the black coffee that he requires every morning is hard to come by in the land of chai and makes the mistake of cooling a prized cup of his favorite brew with a dribble of tap water. Rajesh learns that her basic Hindi leaves her prey to questions of whether she and her comrade are married and why her father allows her to travel as she does. “To be honest, “ she says, “the only place where I feel like a foreigner is in India,” where she’s immediately pegged as an NRI, non-resident Indian.

Part of that foreign identity is probably because she’s traveling with Passepartout. When a bitter skirmish over Indian temples and belief causes them to go in separate directions, Rajesh becomes accepted by her fellow passengers and the solitary journey she feared is essentially nonexistent. “On the rare occasions you find yourself alone in India, it is never for long.” In a compartment with three strange men for 28 hours, by the time the first meal appears, it’s “like eating with family.” “You haven’t eaten very much,” the men chide her in tones reminiscent of her mother, “By Indian standards, you are very underweight.”

By the end of her four-month journey of 40,000 kilometers on 80 trains, (all listed at the beginning of her book), she disembarks at her starting point, back in Chennai, and happily allows the crowd “to sweep me into its embrace.”

Rajesh’s crisply written descriptions range from the unsparing to the lyrical. From the “worst hotel in India,” which gives a new dimension to squalor, to the grand luxury of the Indian Maharajah-Deccan Odyssey, “a five-star cruise on wheels” that whisks passengers through India at night like “a luxury Tardis,” her experiences are recounted in a lively and humorous fashion that never falters. Whether she wakes to find a hand groping her, which she circumvents by swiftly changing bunks with Passepartout, gleefully imagining that hand fondling “a tired and grumpy Norwegian” or hears the familiar voices of her best friend’s Cambridge parents soon after she begins her first solitary train trip in tears, Rajesh takes it all in stride. 

Her conversations with strangers are illuminating and delightful, even when a man tells her without rancor that she’s a very selfish person, adding “Why are you caring if I am telling such a thing,” and then presents her with a translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. Another one scolds her, “You have traveled on 64 trains and you still don’t know how to make a bed.” After doing that for her in the proper fashion, he gives her a tutorial on the meaning of the numbers painted on each car that gives the age of the carriage. “It was like learning a secret handshake.”

India comes alive under her skillful writing--rain that’s “the kind that lacerates human skin” and mixes “mud and stone into a paste of Rocky Road ice cream,” “halos of light from candles in doorways,” a train that looks like a “metallic version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, “mynahs muttering quietly to themselves as the sky took on an eerie orange glow” at dusk. 

Rajesh is the perfect traveling companion. Even if it’s impossible to accompany her while eating chicken lollipops, drinking Thums Up, and discussing the palanquin carriers’ strike, buying an IndRail pass and carrying her book as a guide seem to be the only sane response to this absorbing work of travel literature. Reaching its end prompts the sentiment voiced by a New Delhi ticket agent, “Oh God…where are you going now?” To discover the answer, a quest for Rajesh’s Around the World in 80 Trains is the next step--I can’t wait to find it and go off with her on another journey.~Janet Brown 

Mother Land by Leah Franqui (HarperCollins)

When Rachel Meyer opens the door of her apartment, she expects to find the vegetable seller, bringing produce and a bout of linguistic frustration.  Instead she sees her husband’s mother with a suitcase, waiting to enter and stay, and she knows disaster has arrived.

Newly married to a Kolkata man who has chosen to return to India, Rachel is a New York woman who’s thoroughly befuddled by Mumbai. Her Hindi phrasebook is almost useless because the people she interacts with speak Marathi. When she ventures out to buy food in the local market, she’s assailed with embarrassment and incompetence. When she goes out to explore the city, she’s faced with inexplicable chaos on every sidewalk. Her apartment is her only refuge and now that’s been invaded by a woman she barely knows, one who says she’s left her own home and intends to stay forever.

Floundering in a new country that baffles her, Rachel has ceded all decisions to her husband but this is too much. Suddenly the culture that’s thoroughly shocked her is in her bedroom, taking over, and her husband is acquiescent. After all, this is his mother and this is India. Blithely he takes off on an extended business trip, leaving Rachel with a problem that’s apparently her own.

Sometimes all that’s expected of a book is comfortable entertainment. Mother Land is the perfect antidote to winter’s darkness and the mind-boggling, apocalyptic speculative fiction of The Three-Body Problem trilogy. While it would be unfair to characterize the story of Rachel and her mother-in-law as chick lit; it’s definitely a warm-bath book, with a delightful twist at its end. Yet it’s more than that. It’s an insightful examination of culture shock in different forms--Rachel’s, her mother-in-law’s, and that of other Mumbai transplants with varying nationalities.  

Leah Franqui knows her fictional territory. Her home is Mumbai where she, like Rachel, is  married to a man from Kolkata. A self-proclaimed Puerto Rican-Jewish Philadelphia native and Yale graduate, she undoubtedly endured much of what Rachel suffers, but, as Franqui makes clear in her acknowledgments, without the intrusive mother-in-law. Her life in Mumbai gives depth and richness to Rachel’s, making this novel an illuminating, realistic, and occasionally satirical view of expat life in that city.

Rachel makes the classic rookie mistake by withdrawing from her new city and taking refuge in a world she can control, within her own apartment. Outside she spends “long afternoons, lost, aching with heat,” discovering that “the business she was trying to find had moved, or she had passed it twelve times, or that it had never existed at all.” “The crushing, bustling masses” and the cacophony of horns, bicycle bells, and cries from vendors that assail her on the streets lead her to conclude that New York “was a ghost town compared to Mumbai.” She stays home and amuses herself by cooking, until her privacy is invaded by the culture she’s hiding from.

As Rachel is forced out of her sanctuary, her tolerance for noise and crowds increases. At one of those ubiquitous gatherings of expat wives, the kind that lapses swiftly into criticisms of “them” as opposed to “us,” Rachel’s back goes up and her perspective takes on a new cast. Gradually she and her mother-in-law both begin to examine the concept of “home,” with startling results.

Anyone who has ever lived in another country, or who’s dreamed of doing that, needs to read Mother Land. While its setting is specific and stunningly descriptive, its stumbling blocks go beyond India’s boundaries. Entertaining? By all means, but it also provides a realistic guide to expat life anywhere in the world while presenting smart and seductive insights into one of the world’s great cities. ~Janet Brown

The Weary Generations by Abdullah Hussein (Peter Owen)

The Weary Generations by Abdullah Hussein was first published in Urdu in 1963. The English edition, translated by the author, was published in 1999. It follows the story of two Muslim families living under the British Raj up until Partition in 1947 when British India was separated into two nations - Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. 

Mirza Mohammed Beg, had two children. The elder son is Niaz Beg. His second son is Ayaz Beg. Niaz took after his father and had a love for metalworks and started his own workshop building many things.

Ayaz had a love for books. He studied at a madrasa, a school for higher learning. He found that he did not like it and helped his brother in the workshop but got bored with village life and left. He taught himself to read English and became a mechanic. “He did not return home”.

A major incident occurred which prompted Ayaz to return to the village. His brother Niaz was arrested “on the charge of having committed a grossly illegal act”. Niaz was sentenced to twelve years in prison. The government didn’t stop there. They also confiscated most of his lands which were in the names of both brothers, leaving just enough land for Niaz Beg’s two wives to get by on. 

Ayaz did not stay in the village. He came and took his brother’s son with to Calcutta. Although he was not formally educated, Ayaz rose to a good position as an engineer. He remained single throughout his life but felt he now had a purpose in life - to educate his nephew, Naim.

The main focus of the story centers on Naim and his relationship with those around him. He marries a woman whose father was a very prominent man who willingly works for the British. Azra, the woman, falls in love with Naim but her family does not approve of the relationship. After a long while, Azra’s father reluctantly gives his assent for the two to get married.

Naim was the son of a peasant who lived in a rural part of India. He marries Azra, the daughter of a rich landowner. Their relationship is strained from the start as Azra’s family was not supportive of the marriage, deeming themselves to be a higher caste of people. Their union reflects the relationship between the people of India and the rule of the British Crown. 

Shortly after Naim gets married, he is drafted into the military and is sent to Europe and Africa where he is wounded and loses his left arm. After he returns home, he is treated as a hero and is awarded lands for his bravery. However, it is what he witnesses that makes him question the validity and the oppression of his people under British rule and becomes involved in politics opposing the Raj. 

Naim’s marriage to Azra can be seen as a metaphor for the relationship between India and the British Empire as well. Naim is the underdog, the oppressed, he can be seen as the face of India while his wife Azra, who is from an upper caste represents the Raj. The class differences are hard to ignore. 

What makes Naim’s life more complicated is the Partition of the British Raj in 1947 when the British Crown arbitrarily set a boundary separating the mostly Hindu province of Bengal and the mostly Muslim area of the Punjab, setting off a vast migration of Hindus and Sikhs to India and Muslims to the newly created country of Pakistan. 

Hussein tells the story of Partition and the violence that followed in a way that creates a fear in the reader for Naim and his family. It is a story that opens the readers eyes to the dangers of colonialism and the arrogance of the British Empire. It’s a shame that the world still cannot live in harmony without conflict. We are supposed to learn the mistakes from history but as the old adage goes, “History tends to repeat itself”. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck by Rory Nugent (Open Road)

Rory Nugent’s amusing account of his search for a rare bird started with a talk among five friends about lost treasures. They were talking about what is left to find in the world. One of his friends said, “India is the place”. He continued by saying, “One of us should go after the pink-headed duck. It hasn’t been sighted in years. Extremely rare…the most elusive bird in the world.” 

The next day, Nugent did some research and discovered that the last sighting of the bird was some fifty years ago in India. The more research he did on the duck, the more interested he became in finding it. Most scientists believe the duck to be extinct but from time to time, sightings of the bird have been reported. Nugent comes to believe that the bird may just be hiding. Then, two months later, he sold his apartment and put the rest of his stuff in storage, took a taxi to JFK airport and flew to India. 

The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck chronicles Nugent’s search for the rarest of birds as he begins his journey by looking for the Fowl Market in Calcutta. When people learn what it is he’s looking for, he is accosted by a number of people claiming to have the pink-headed duck although it is obvious even to the most casual of observers that the ducks presented to him have had their heads dyed pink. Not finding any luck in Calcutta, Nugent decides to go to New Delhi, the capital of India. 

Nugent spends the first few days riding the buses to give himself an introduction to the city. He buys a city map and a relief map of India where he discovers two areas that are unmarked and unnamed. “One is a narrow section near the giant rhododendron forest of Northeastern Sikkim; the other, triangular in shape, lies in the upper Brahmaputra River Valley, near the conjunction of Burma, China, and India. Rory decided then and there where next to start his search. 

As Sikkim is near the border of Tibet and Bhutan, permission has never been given to a foreigner to explore those areas. Nugent is also informed that it is only the federal government that can grant permits to those restricted areas. And so begins Nugent’s ordeal dealing with government red tape. One of the natives who befriends him suggests offering the officials some baksheesh, commonly known in English as a bribe. to the official but Nugent sticks to doing things the proper and legal way. 

His persistence pays off as he does get approval to visit Sikkim and can continue his search for the pink-headed duck. In Sikkim he meets smugglers who help him step inside Tibet even though his permit doesn’t allow him to visit that particular area. He checks into a hotel of questionable repute. He hangs out with the Gurkhas who want to claim land for themselves and establish Gurkhaland, but the pink-headed duck is nowhere to be found in the area. 

As the search was fruitless in Sikkim, Nugent decided to check out the other unexplored area on the map he bought in New Delhi. Once again, he subjects himself to government red tape in order to get permission to sail down the Brahmaputra River. As with getting permission to visit Sikkim, Nugent refrains from bribing any officials and his persistence and perseverance pays off. 

Nugent meets a man at a bookstore on his return to New Delhi and cannot believe his good fortune as the man had once attempted to paddle down the Bramhaputra himself. The two join forces and travel down the river from Saikhoa Ghat located in the east of the State of Assam, and paddle all the way down to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.  

At the time of Nugent’s journey, there was unrest in Bangladesh. Rioting had occurred in the capital city of Dhaka. Martial law was declared and the borders were closed. The two rivergoers decided to end their journey in Dhubri, the last town in India on the Brahmaputra. 

Did Nugent ever find the pink-head duck? Is it really extinct? Or is it just good at not being found? Whatever the results, Nugent’s narrative in the Himalayas and down the Brahmaputra River will keep readers glued to his exploits and may find themselves rooting for his success. His story is not only exciting, it’s also inspiring as we follow one man’s dream to rediscover a lost avian. In the process, you may find yourself wanting to pursue your own impossible dreams! ~Ernie Hoyt

The Householder by Ruth Pravwer Jhabvala (Penguin)

The Householder by Ruth Pravwer Jhabvala was first published in 1960. It is the story of Prem, a teacher at a local college. Until recently, Prem was a student at university. His marriage to Indu was arranged by his parents and now he is a “householder” with a wife who is pregnant with their first child. 

Indu’s pregnancy is an embarrassment to Prem as “now everybody would know what he did with her at night in the dark.” Prem’s current salary at the college is 175 rupees a month. His rent is 45 rupees. Aside from becoming a new father, his new worry is the increase in expenses that would occur. What he needs is a better paying job. 

It finally occurs to him to look through the classified ads in the newspaper. However, Prem could not find any jobs he was qualified for. It appeared that nobody wanted a Hindi teacher, “or if they did, they wanted him to be a first-class M.A. with three years’ teaching experience, not a second-class B.A. with only four months’ teaching experience, such as he was.” His only option was to ask his boss for a raise. 

Asking his boss for a raise is not something he would like to do but he took his father’s advice to heart. His father had told him, “Put all your strength into the things you don’t like to do.” Prem tries to find the courage to talk to his boss but instead of coming straight to the point, he talks about his colleague, Sohan Lal. The more he talks about his colleague, his boss comes to the conclusion that Sohan Lal had sent Prem to ask for a raise in salary.

Prem is also having trouble at home with his wife who says she is going to her parents, due to her condition. At the same time, Prem has received a letter from his mother who says she will be coming to help her only son to prepare for the child’s birth. Prem is having a hard time establishing his authority as the head of the household and seems to have crossed an invisible line when he tells his wife that he forbids her to go home. 

As much as you like to support Prem, he sometimes comes off as being a Charlie Brown-like character. He has a very wishy-washy personality and doesn’t assert himself. He’s taken advantage of by his only friend in New Delhi who he grew up with. There are times when you may want to smack him and say, “Grow up!”, which is what he is trying his best to do. Still, the humor in Jhabvala’s writing makes you forgive Prem his wishy-washyness.

Jhabvala’s story has the universal theme of what it is to become an adult and all the responsibilities that come with adulthood. It is filled with humor and drama  and readers of all ages may identify with Prem as he goes from being a student to getting married and then becoming a father. Family ties can also be a very delicate matter as one tries to find a fine balance in pleasing your partner and keeping other relatives happy. 

Prem is no different from any of us who have dreams of making more money and living a comfortable life. However, being rich and famous doesn’t doesn’t guarantee comfort or happiness. One must do their best with what life has to offer them. ~Ernie Hoyt

Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda (Harper)

Canadian author Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s debut novel Secret Daughter is the story of two women who live worlds apart but have an unseen bond that will affect both of their lives. 

Somer has everything she could want in life - a good marriage, a nice and caring husband who is also a doctor. His name is Krishnan and he is originally from India. She also has a great career as a physician in San Francisco. However, the only thing that eludes her is the ability to bear any children of her own. 

In the same year, across the globe, in a rural town in India, Kavita gave birth to her second daughter. Her first one was taken soon after it was born and was never seen or heard from again. Kavita refuses to give up her second child without a fight and in order to save her life, she makes the decision to give her up for adoption.

Asha is an Indian child adopted from an orphanage in Mumbai. It is this girl that connects the two women who do not have anything in common. We follow the lives of both families over a span of more than twenty years. It is Asha’s search for her own identity that leads her to India to find a part of herself that she feels has been missing. 

One of Somer’s wishes is to be a mother. She’s had one previous miscarriage so she knows the symptoms. Her husband has taken her to the hospital and she has woken up to see an IV stand next to her bed. The next thing she hears is a doctor telling her “she’s clean”. This upsets her more than the doctors, nurses, or her husband can imagine. She feels “they just see her as a patient to be doctored, a piece of human equipment to be repaired. Just another body to be cleaned up.”

In a small town called Dahanu in India, Kavita feels as strongly about saving her daughter. She knows her husband and his family are all disappointed in her giving birth to another girl. The first one was taken away quickly so Kavita vowed that the same fate would not await her second child. With the help of her sister and a vast amount of courage, she and her sister walk from Dahanu to an orphanage in Bombay. Kavita names her daughter Usha. “Usha is Kavita’s choice alone. A secret name for her secret daughter.”

As we follow the lives of both families, we see Asha growing up and the older she gets, the more curious she becomes about her biological parents. This issue puts a strain on the relationship between her and her mother. They drift even further apart when Asha wins a scholarship and tells her mother she will be staying in India for a year to work on a project about children living in poverty. Her daughter’s decision not only affects their relationship but it also affects Somer’s relationship with her husband. 

I imagine many adoptees go through a crisis of identity at one time or another. Especially if they have been adopted from a third world country and brought up in the U.S., Australia, or the U.K. They grow up to find that they look nothing like their parents and begin to question who they are and where they are really from. However, most people do not give thought to the adoptee’s parents and how the children’s actions will affect them as well. In this emotional roller-coaster of a story, one learns about the power of love and the true meaning of family. ~Ernie Hoyt

In Beautiful Disguises by Rajeev Balasubramanyam (Bloomsbury)

Fashion and beauty magazine Marie Claire describes Rajeev Balasubramanyam’s novel In Beautiful Disguises as “Holly Golightly meets Arudnhati Roy in an elegantly written novel about a girl who is desperate to escape from her life.” This is Balasubramanyam’s debut novel. The book was the winner of the Betty Trask Prize in 1999 even before it was published. 

The story is narrated by an unnamed sixteen year old girl living in South India. She begins her story by saying, “I was born a girl and remained so until I became a woman”. She was the youngest of the three children, having an elder sister and her much older brother, Ravi. Their father was an office clerk and their mother was a housewife and most of the time was treated like a domestic servant. 

The narrator had a passion for movies. She didn’t have any friends and spent most of her time at the local cinema called Majick Movie House. She came home one day and was informed that her sister was to be married. She was still fifteen and did not know how to react. 

She was seventeen when her sister had her first child. This was also the year when she saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s four times at the Majick Movie House. Holly Golightly became her role model. It was also the year she learned she was to be married. 

She meets the man she is to marry and doesn’t like him one bit. She didn’t like the tone of his voice, the look in his eyes, the way he was looking at her as “his look went way beyond visual autopsy”. It was also his six-year old sister, Savitri, pointing at something and asking, “What’s that thing?” The man could not hide his obvious erection. 

The father said the meeting was a success but the protagonist definitely did not want to marry the man. No, she was not going to marry the man, but if she didn’t, her father would be angry and would take out his anger on Ravi or her mother. For some reason, he has never hit her and she doesn’t know why. 

The narrator makes a life-changing decision. She decides to run away. She receives help from her sister’s husband’s grandfather who has found her a job in the City, a place she’s never been before. She was to start working as a maid for Mr. Aziz and his wife, Mrs. Marceau, a mean-spirited French woman who looks down on all the workers and Indians in general. She works for the couple for about a year and has many new life experiences. 

She meets a host of interesting characters at the house. Raju, a friend of her sister’s husband’s grandfather and the person that helps her settle into her new life. Ishaq, the person who was helping Raju in the kitchen. Manu, the driver. Arun, the gardener who often gets drunk after work and tries to take advantage of the younger women servants. She meets the other maids - Ambika, an old lady with a bad back who cleans the first floor and the kitchen and Maneka, one of the younger women who seems to be a bit promiscuous. Her job is to clean the top two floors of the house. And there is Armand, the son of Mr. Azia and Mrs. Marceau, who she begins to develop feelings for. 

This is a story of a girl who goes against traditions, defies her father’s wishes and sets out a new life in The City, where she gains new life experiences. However, she also comes to realize that she cannot go on living life as a fantasy, pretending that “she is a movie star in disguise as a maid”. She finally finds the courage to return home and to confront her greatest fear - her father. 

Balasubramanyam writes the story in such a way that you can’t help wanting the narrator to achieve her dreams of becoming the next Holly Golightly. Her actions may give other women in similar circumstances to question outdated traditions and to make their own life decisions no matter how difficult it may be. ~Ernie Hoyt

Storywallah by Neelesh Misra's Mandali (Penguin)

Neelesh Misra is an Indian journalist, musician, writer, and the founder and editor of Gaon Connection, “India’s biggest rural media platform”. He is also the founder and CEO of Content Project Pvt. Ltd, a company that is “home to some of India’s best emerging writers, collectively called the Mandali”. 

Storywallah is a collection of short stories written by the Mandali. All of the writers originally wrote their stories in Hindi. The stories are as varied as the writers who come from all across India. In this collection, Misra features twenty writers including bloggers, teachers, a university professor and journalists. 

Kanchan Pat’s Wildflower is about an Indian daughter named Nemat who was brought up in Scotland by her mother. The mother left Nemat a letter after she died and in the letter asks Nemat to read it “not as a daughter but as a woman”. Now Nemat finds herself going to India, to a small town called Kosi in the mountains. She was going to seek help from the person she most hated - her mother’s lover. Her mother’s letter had caused her anguish but found that she couldn’t hate her mother nor forgive her. She was going to meet Anirudh Thakur which will help her decide “whether she would love Ma or hate her for the rest of her life.”

In Letters by Analuta Raj Nair, the protagonist is a sixty-year old man who is retiring from government service after working for thirty-five years. He had been working on his autobiography when he chanced upon a bundle of letters from a girl named Anamika - his first love. He has never told his wife about her and has never shown her any of the letters. The man wants to include his one and only love story in his autobiography “as if to make a dishonest relationship honest, legitimate” but is afraid to tell his wife of thirty some years. 

Nails by Umesh Pant centers around a girl named Simmi who’s about to get married and questions if she’s doing the right thing when on the day of their engagement, her fiance, Sumit,  says to her, “Yaar, the least you could have done was cut your nails. You know I don’t like these long nails.” Simmi tried to make light of the situation but noticed that her fiance looked more upset than he looked. But his response, “It’s not just a matter of a nail, Simmi” would not leave her mind.

The above are just a taste of the stories you will encounter. The other seventeen stories are all about everyday people living everyday lives. They all share a universal appeal as they focus on family relationships, love and betrayal, doing what’s best for the family or having the family and others decide what’s best for the person in question. Many of the stories are about finding who you really are. Each story is so different yet they all share a common quality, one in which anybody can see themselves as the main character in the stories. ~Ernie Hoyt

BPO-Sutra : True Stories from India's BPO & Call Centres edited by Sudhindra Mokhasi (Rupa & Co.)

BPO-Sutra is a book best described by its sub-title, “True stories from India’s BPO & Call Centres”. The book is a compilation of stories told by ordinary people who work in the BPO and call center industry. Editor Sudhindra Mokhasi highly recommends reading the glossary first to acquaint the reader with all the jargon associated with BPOs. What’s a BPO? BPO stands for Business Process Outsourcing. It is a method of subcontracting various business-related operations such as tech support and payroll to third-party vendors. 

Aside from BPO, in order to truly appreciate the stories, the reader should familiarize themselves with the meanings of the acronyms ISP, AHT, COPC certified, SME, NCNS as well as some other terms used in the industry such as cold calling, call escalation, call monitoring, captive center, offshoring, etc. 

The meanings of the acronyms are as follows: ISP (Internet Service Provider), AHT (Average Handling Time), COPC certified (Customer Operations Performance Center) which is an organization the evaluates and certifies BPO companies that meet and maintain certain standards), SME (Subject Matter Expert), NCNS (No Call No Show) - a term used for employees who don’t call or show up for work. 

Cold calling refers to the practice of making random calls to people to promote a product or service. Perhaps one of the most hated aspects of the business as cold calling refers to telemarketers. 

Call escalation is when the call exceeds the amount of time allotted to the agent to deal with the customer to resolve issues. If the call goes beyond the allotted time, the call is then transferred to a supervisor or manager. 

Call monitoring is a practice where calls made or received by agents are monitored by quality analysts and managers to assess the quality of their call agents. 

A captive center is not a prison, it is a company-owned offshore operation where the work is also done offshore by the people hired by the company. The practice of offshoring is when one country has their work done in another country where labor costs are usually cheaper, saving the parent company hundreds, thousands or millions of dollars. 

In the early years of the 2000s, many U.S. companies were offshoring to India. Major corporations such as General Electric and British Airways proved that offshoring office work to India was a viable option. “More importantly, the world had suddenly discovered that there were millions of English speaking smart Indians. It couldn’t have been a better time.”

The stories are separated into six self-explanatory categories related to BPO life - Calls, Work, Travel, Home, Scams, and Parties and Weekends. The book invites the reader to “join us as we party One Night in Every Call Center.”

It’s almost a given that most Americans hate telemarketers and do not like dealing with call centers, however, this book gives the reader an insight to how the call centers work and by whom they are run. It is a highly informative introduction to the common practice of Business Process Outsourcing. 

One of earliest BPOs to be established were the call centers and this book gives the reader an indepth look as to what goes on inside such a place. The editor reiterates how call centers are numbers obsessed. “Everything in operations is converted to a metric, metric and monitored. Take Average Holding Time (AHT) for example. AHT is used as a measure for effectiveness of an agent. Tough luck if you get a dim customer.”

The stories range from the hilarious to the absurd. There are some pieces that are moving and some pieces that will just make you shake your head. You will laugh, you will cry and you definitely will not be bored. Remember, the next time you receive a call from a telemarketer saying his name is Sean, chances are he’s an Indian speaking with an American accent to try to sell you products or services for a multi-national corporation. ~Ernie Hoyt

Animal's People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

“I used to be human once. So I’m told. I don’t remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being.”

Animal’s People is set against the backdrop of one of the world’s worst industrial accidents as a model that took place in Bhopal, India in 1984 and was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize. 

On the night of December 2 and 3, 1984 at the U.S. owned Union Carbide pesticide plant, over thirty tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC), a highly toxic gas used in the production of a pesticide called Sevin which is Union Carbide’s brand name for carbaryl, which spread over the town of Bhopal, immediately killing thousands of citizens and continues to haunt the populace today as the company was never forced to clean up their mess. 

The story is narrated by a nineteen year old Indian boy, only known as Animal, whose faithful companion is a dog named Jara and lives in the fictional city of Khaufpur. He was born a few days before that night “which no one in Khaufpur wants to remember, but nobody can forget.”

Animal is an orphan as the gas killed his parents. He was brought up in an orphanage run by a French nun known as Ma Franci. The nun used to be able to speak Hindi and English but after the incident, she has forgotten all languages except her own. 

Animal makes his living by doing all sorts of scams throughout the city. The factory gases have affected his body so he can only walk on all fours, as an Animal. He spots three college-aged girls and practices one of his routines by having Jara play dead while he goes on a spiel about suffering from starvation to which one of the girls does something he does not foresee. 

She asks, “Did you teach him?” Animal says that for five rupees he can get the dog to sing the national anthem. She counters with, “Is begging fun?” Animal replies, “Is it fun to be hungry? No, so then don’t mock me.” This is where he meets Nisha who changes his life. It is Nisha who teaches Animal how to read. He also learns to speak the language of Ma Francie. 

Animal becomes infatuated with Nisha but he feels a bit of jealousy when he’s introduced to Zafar, an activist who has been leading the fight against the Amrikan Kampani (American company) . At the same time, a young American woman named Dr. Elli appears in Khaufpur and announces that she is going to open a clinic and it will be free to anyone who wishes to come. 

After spending her own fortune and going through a lot of government red tape, the idealist Dr. Elli opens her clinic only to be puzzled why nobody shows up. Unfortunately, Zafar believes the clinic is another one of the Kampany’s plans to divert being held responsible for an incident that happened almost twenty years ago. Dr. Elli realizes that people want treatment but they all refuse to come to the clinic. She expresses her exasperation to Animal, “These people have nothing. Why do they turn down a genuine and good offer of help? I don’t get it.”

Animal says he understands because they’re his people - Animal’s people. The story explores government corruption and multinational corporations exploitation of labor and resources. It is a novel that sheds light on the injustices of the world and how it affects the life of the ordinary everyday citizens who have no money or power to fight back. In this day and age of for profit enterprises, it takes a book like this to point out that there are more important things than money. ~Ernie Hoyt

Life isn't all ha ha hee hee by Meera Syal (Anchor Books)

Meera Syal is a British actor and writer whose parents came from India. She was born in Wolverhampton and grew up in the small town of Essington in Staffordshire. Her family was the only Asian family in the area and she uses this experience as a backdrop to her 1999 novel Life isn’t all ha ha hee hee which was also adapted into a three-part television mini-series in 2005. 

The story centers around three childhood friends who continue to have a strong bond as adults in their thirties living in London. They are Chila, Sunita, and Tania. Sunita is the oldest of the three. She dropped out of university and married her psychotherapist Akash and has two kids. Tania is an ambitious career woman working in television who speaks her mind and doesn’t think much of her Punjabi roots and currently lives with her Caucasion boyfriend, Martin. Chila is the youngest of the three and is just getting married to one of the most eligible bachelors and the man of her dreams - Deepak Sharma. 

Deepak used to be a ladie’s man and has a long history of having many girlfriends, including Tania. His family is happy that he has chosen a nice Punjabi girl and not one of the blondes he used to flaunt when he was younger, however, things get complicated when Tania makes a film about the love lives of ordinary Indian people, mostly using her friends and not exactly showing them in the best light. The premiere is a success but has unforeseen consequences. 

The bonds of friendship are rattled when Tania and Deepak share a passionate kiss after having an argument at the film’s premiere. They are seen by Chila, Sunita, and Martin. Martin soon leaves Tania. Chila and Sunita no longer speak to Tania but Chila refuses to bring up the matter with Deepak and Deepak takes no responsibility for his actions.

Although Tania’s film was successful and critically acclaimed, it’s consequences were not just relegated to her close friends but to the Indian community as well. The new production company which hired her wants her to make similar films but Tania no longer wants to make movies about “her people”. In order to appease her colleagues, she tries to get an interview with Jasbinder Singh, a woman whose husband wouldn’t grant her a divorce and doused himself and their children with gasoline and lit himself on fire in front of her. 

Chila gives birth to a son but refuses to let her husband see him. By chance, Tania meets  up with her two friends in the hospital and the three reform their bond as Deepak makes a surprise appearance and Chila’s son is nowhere to be found!

Syal gives us an interesting insight into the immigrant experience of how three modern day Indian women live with one foot in London while the other remains in the tradition of their Punjabi roots. All three women want to live independent and happy lives but they try their hardest to find a balance between where they want to be and where their husbands and relatives think they should be. 

The lives of these three women may be the same for a number of women who find themselves in the same situation where the man believes he is the head of the household and what he says is law as they all try to find a balance in pleasing their husbands and boyfriends but not at the cost of their own happiness. Men should take notes and learn to respect women and not treat their wives or girlfriends like second-class citizens. ~Ernie Hoyt

Born Into Brothels by Zana Briski (Umbrage)

“The most stigmatized people in Calcutta’s red light district, are not the prostitutes, but their children. In the face of abject poverty, abuse, and despair, these kids have little possibility of escaping their mother’s fate or for creating another type of life.”  ~Diane Weyerman

Zana Briski is a British photographer who went to India in 1995 and wasn’t sure what direction her life was going to take. She was taking pictures of the “harsh realities of women’s lives - female infanticide, child marriage, dowry deaths, and widowhood”. It wasn’t until a friend took her to the red light district in Calcutta where she finally found her reason for being. 

It took months for Briski to penetrate the tight-knit community of prostitutes and even longer for the workers to open up to her. Her persistence and patience paid off, although it was the children of the prostitutes that took to her right away. They were fascinated by the foreign woman and her cameras. She showed them how to use the cameras and let the kids take the pictures. That gives her an idea for her next trip to India. 

Briski spends the next few years fund-raising and generating support for her project. She asks for help from one of her colleagues who at first refuses but after she sends him video footage that she took and explained her idea, he was on the next plane to India. 

Briski returns to India with ten easy-to-use cameras and begins teaching a photography class for the kids. This then gives her the idea of recording the kids progress. Together with Ross Kaufman, they make a documentary film titled Born Into Brothels which is also the title to this companion book. The book includes the subtitle Photographs by the Children of Calcutta. The film was shown at the annual Sundance Film Festival and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2005. 

The pictures in this book “are taken by children of prostitutes, children who have grown up surrounded by violence and clouded by a social stigma that denies them a right to an education”. The cameras “become windows to a new world” and for some, “a door to a new life”. 

We are introduced to eight of Briski’s brightest students - Avijit, Gour, Kochi, Manik, Puja, Shanti, Suchitra, and Tapasi. They range in age from ten to fourteen. Briski gives these children an opportunity to improve their lives through the use of photography and cameras. The vivid portraits compiled in this book are by these children and are the vision of India. It gives us a glimpse into the “real” India. 

Some of the kids are afraid of leaving their homes so their pictures are limited to their family, friends, and living accommodations. Others are more adventurous as they go out into the city to take pictures of whatever interests them. 

Thanks to the success of the film and support from people around the world, Briski sets up a non-profit organization named Kids with Cameras. The organization continues to teach impoverished and marginalized children the art of photography. It “builds platforms for the children to exhibit their work, telling us their stories and transforming the children and their audience through the processes of instruction, creation, and experience.” 

The pictures you see may change any bias you may have had about India and its people. The young photographers and many of their subjects are seen smiling. These images provoke one of the strongest human emotions - hope! ~Ernie Hoyt

Lanterns on Their Horns by Radhika Jha (Beautiful Books)

“Gau'' is the Sanskrit word for cow. It is also the word for the first ray of light, the eldest child of dawn. The nature of light is to move. That may be how the cow got included in the family of words rooted in the verb “gam”, for “gam” means to go. Like its ancestor, the first ray of light, the nature of the cow was to move and therefore it had to go somewhere. But the “somewhere” is what it forgot and in time there grew to be a difference between simply “going” and “going somewhere”.

So begins the introduction of Lanterns on Their Horns. The second novel by Indian writer Radhika Jha. It is the story of four main characters whose lives are intertwined because of a solitary cow. 

The story is set in the fictitious rural town of Nandgaon, a place that is cut off from most modern conveniences. There is no road leading to the town, there is no electricity, and the community must rely on one another to survive. It is located near the real town of Khandwa in Madhya Pradesh which is located in central India. The bond keeping the village together is their patel or Headman. He has authority over every aspect of village life. One of the rules of the village is, if you leave, you are not allowed to return.

A cow is found in the forest by Ramu, a poor farmer, who believes the cow is a gift from the gods. It also makes him happy as he will be able to give the cow as a gift to his modern and university educated wife, Laxmi. 

Laxmi is an outsider and is shunned by most of the people in the village as they know she is the daughter of a man who committed suicide. They believe that associating with her will only bring bad luck. It is the Headman who gives permission for Ramu to marry Laxmi because he felt Ramu had enough bad luck in his life already. 

The Headman is a strict traditionalist. He is also the proud owner of the town’s herd of cows.It was he who went against the government and blocked them from making a road to the simple town. He is adamant in keeping the status quo of the village. 

The person who brings change to life is Manoj Mishra, an idealist who believes he has the answer to eradicate India’s poverty. His plan is to inseminate cows in rural towns with sperm from a superior breed whose offspring will be able to produce larger volumes of milk and will lead the poor farmers to riches beyond their dreams. 

When Manoj manages to get permission from Laxmi to inseminate her “junglee” cow, it leads to confrontation between tradition and growth. It leads to a modern day conundrum. Should small rural towns and villages stick with tradition and forego modern conveniences or should they embrace growth, development and progress which as Nandgaon’s Headman believes will only lead to greed, theft, jealousy and no sense of community? ~Ernie Hoyt

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)

Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is divided into two sections. The first half takes place in Venice, Italy. The latter half is set in Varanasi, India, considered a holy place by Buddhists and Hindus. It was where Buddha gave his first sermon. In Hindu mythology, the city is believed to have been founded by Shiva, the Supreme Lord who “creates, protects, and transforms the universe.” 

The year is 2003. Jeff Atman, a journalist in his forties, living in London has been commissioned to write an article on the Biennale in Venice which is an art festival held every two years in the “City of Canals” featuring the latest names in art and art installations. This year’s participants included Ed Ruscha, Gilbert & George, Jacob Dalhgren, Fred Wilson just to name a few. 

He was told by the editor of Kulchur Magazine to get an interview with the reclusive Julia Berman, “to persuade her - to beg, plead and generally demean himself - to do an interview that would guarantee even more publicity for her daughter’s forthcoming album and further inflate the bloated reputation of Steven Morison, the dad, the famously overrated artist.”

Everything changes when Atman meets Laura. He becomes obsessed with her and spends more time looking for her than he does gathering information for his article. The two have a mutual attraction and spend most of the rest of their time at the Biennale having sex or getting drunk, or a bit of both but the event has come to an end “when everything was so close to becoming just memory.” “Or the opposite of memory: a longing for something that would soon be impossibly remote.”

The next thing you know, you’re reading about another freelance writer who was asked at the last minute to do a travel piece on Varanasi in India. Dyer leaves it up to the reader to decide if this journalist is the same Jeff Atman that covered the Biennale as the story is told in the first person and not once does the writer’s name appear. 

Venice was full of fun and debauchery to satisfy one’s lust and longing. In contrast, the journalist in Varanasi who was only going to visit the country for a few days stays for months. The first few days he walks around, checks out the ghats, does research for the article he’s supposed to write, but the longer he stays, he forgets about the article and has his own spiritual awakening. His friends become a little worried as he seems to be going native as the days go by reminding one of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. 

In Venice, Jeff Atman loses his inhibitions and follows his desires whereas the unnamed journalist in Varanasi is faced with death, sickness, and poverty. Atman chooses to live life to the fullest. The unnamed writer is at first disgusted by what he sees but the longer he stays, he begins to develop an understanding of the Hindus love for Varanasi. Dyer writes two great stories and makes you wonder if his versions of Venice and Varanasi are two sides of the same coin or are they reflections of the same city? ~Ernie Hoyt