Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird is related from the point of view of an 8 year old girl, Scout Finch. Scout and her brother, Jem have a pet game, trying to draw out Boo Radley, a ghostly neighbour who never leaves his house. While they are busy with school and play, their little town of Monroeville is rocked by a scandal. A poor white girl has accused a black man of sexually assaulting her.

Now Monroeville is a conservative town during the late 50s and enlightenment has not touched it yet. It is up to Atticus Finch to try his best to serve justice and try and rescue an innocent man from slander and prejudice.

As is with all amazing books, the story is never just what it seems, but has many layers of meanings that is up to the readers to unfold. There are endearing glimpses into parenting, learning, playing, respecting the rights of other individuals, developing sensitivity to others.

"Once I got to know him, I found he wasn't a bad person." Shares Scout with her father. "All people are good, once you get to know them" says Atticus simply. This displays the deep humanitarian message that underlays the novel. Whether it is the misguided, wretched Ewells, or the seemingly fierce Cunninghams, or the overly strict Aunt, or a sick neighbour who seems wicked, but is actually battling a deadly morphine addiction, all these characters are dealt with such a skillful touch that you can't hate them, no matter what their flaws.

The novel comes alive under the magical touch of Harper Lee, and try as you might, you cannot shake its characters from your mind. And forever, Scout playes with Jem and Dill and tries to bring out Boo Radley, while Atticus smokes and reads in a rocking chair inside the house, various neighbours call out, and Calpurnia cooks in the kitchen.

This timeless book continues to enthrall its readers year after year.

Jhumpa Lahiri - The Namesake

Anyone who reads books has heard about The Namesake, written by Jhumpa Lahiri. It won the Pulitzer prize and was on the bestseller list too, the blurbs tell us. Mira Nair even made a successful movie on the book.

A friend of mine who read the book raved about it, and lent it to me. Luckily I had some free time on my hands at the time and read through the book almost at a stretch.

The book started a little jerkily, just before the arrival of Gogol in the world. Ashima Ganguly, displaced from Calcutta to USA, is yearning for taste of home in her pregnancy and has made a bit of chivda (or whatever the Bengalis call it). She suddenly feels the labour pains coming on and is rushed to the hospital. She gives birth to a baby boy. Ashima and her husband Ashoke cannot even think of abandoning the conventions of their culture. Back home, the baby would have been named lovingly by some elder in the family. In fact, the name is on the way, posted by way of a letter. The baby's formal name is put on the hold, and the child is given a pet name, Gogol. Through a series of circumstances, Gogol never acquires a formal name.

The story, of course, is about how easily Ashima and Ashoke balance their Bengali and American way of life, and how hard it is for Gogol/Nikhil to do that. His attitude towards his name reflects his attitude towards the Bengali way of life and also towards the American way of life. He goes through his life, picking up American girlfriends, and an Indian wife. How he finally makes peace with himself when he says at one time "Actually, there is no such thing as a perfect name".

As we live, we learn more about ourselves (at least some of us do). And it is these lessons that are the most valuable.

However, the standout point of the books is not so much the theme, good as it is. The standout point is the style and language. NEVER PRETENTIOUS. So much so, that the first couple of chapters almost sounded humdrum to me. Then the effect kicked in. The author was skillfully picking up sounds inside the heads of various characters and relaying them to us. She knew exactly how much to tell us about the character and at what time. Some facts are held up to whet our curiosity, and when we learn about them, it makes shivers run through us.

I was blown away because the story is so ordinary, and is so well told that it seems extraordinary.

I have always loved the short stories of Nikolai Gogol. He was a favorite of Ashoke Ganguly as well. He was once in a train accident when he was a young man in India, and reading a book by Gogol at the time. This accident and his survival is his most life-altering moment, and is inextricably linked to Gogol. When time comes for him to name his firstborn, he thinks of Gogol. His son does not share his sentiments fully and hates Gogol the writer. At the end of the book, when he is at peace with himself, he picks up a book by Gogol, gifted to him by his father, and starts reading it.

Our names are the legacies bestowed upon us by our parents. Ram Khilawan may get a fancy schooling later and try to mask his downmarket name by calling it RK, or Ram K Prasad. Not being named flamboyantly like Amitabh Bachchan, poor Jatin Khanna calls himself Rajesh Khanna.

Ava wrestles with her unusual name and bears the jibes of her classmates and some insensitive elders. What kind of a name is Ava? ask the philistines who never heard (in those times) of Ava Gardner who inspired her name. But alas, I do not have the writing style of Jhumpa Lahiri and cannot write a book about my ordinary life and make it linger in the minds of readers like the fragrance of fresh jasmine.

Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons

Maggie is a nursing assistant at the geriatric hospital in Baltimore. Her husband runs a framing shop. Maggie's high school friend is facing bereavement and wants them present at the memorial service. Maggie's life is ordinary and unambitious. All she yearns for is that her life be unchanging and full. She wants her children around her. She wants her son's broken marriage patched up again, she wishes she had her granddaughter around her. She wishes her daughter was not going away to college. She is willing to alter the truth and meddle around till her objectives are achieved.

Breathing Lessons is the a day in the lives of the Morans. It starts from their drive from Baltimore to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania, and ends when they are ready to sleep. Throughout the events of the day Maggie re-lives a lifetime. She goes back and forth in time, and acquaints us with the pretty picture of Ira and Maggie, in love and content with each other. Maggie wishes for her world to be fuller and more perfect, to encompass her children and grandchildren too. Ira is content to have just Maggie around him.

The charming ordinariness of their lives comes alive through the magical descriptions of Anne Tyler who crafts her characters with love. She breathes a life into them and makes them come alive for us. She has an uncanny ability to weave a story out of everyday happenings. She knows exactly when to imbue a character with mystery and when to strip it away. In the end, we wind up knowing everything about all the characters, and loving them all the more for it.

We love Ira for his mysterious ways when he is wooing Maggie, and we love him all the more when we realise that he regards Maggie as a huge gift, someone to love when he had no hopes of having anyone. We love Maggie for the scatterbrained way in which she tries to fix things and winds up making them worse. We love Ira and Maggie for loving each other and living their lives and braving the various domestic storms.

"I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things - piano-playing, typing. You're given years of lessons in how to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and rising up a new human being." (from Breathing Lessons, 1988)

Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.

This book of Mark Haddon's is really difficult to write about. I had picked it up out of the library and had no idea about it.

In recent times, I find it hard to read a book at one go. Too many distractions at home, my attention span is getting lesser. But this book I read in one go. I rolled on my stomach, Sat up, lay on my back, my feet up, sat on a chair, kept moving so that my body wouldn't get jammed up. But the book I could not put down. That should describe the grip the book got on me.

What is the book about? Now even describing that will give the story away. So all I will say is that the book is about a young man, a very young man who had trouble dealing with people. He tries to solve a mystery. Someone put a gardening fork right through the neighbour's dog, and Christopher wants to find out who did.

His attempt to unravel this little mystery spills secret out of all corners of his little life.

The novel is about growing up and also parenting. Parents think they are doing a favor to the children when they are trying to shield them from Truth. Not True, in fact they do them a big disservice.

THE BOOK IS A MUST READ..

Neel Kamal Puri - The Patiala Quartet

The Patiala Quartet by Neel Kamal Puri, pages 174

It is easy for me to be overwhelmed by nostalgia while reading this book. It is set during the 80s and 90s when I was living in nearby Chandigarh. These times are my times, this is my language and my culture.

Two sisters of a royal lineage belonging to Patiala marry into different families. Minnie and Monty's mother marries a businessman without any pedigree, Karuna and Micheal's mom marries right Their lives are undone by defunct husbands. One is defunct because his business fails, another because he chooses to while is time away like a rich wastral. Their unhappy life has a bearing on their children. What happens to the children is what forms the story. They go through their lives falling in love, falling into depression, falling from motorcycles. They see happiness, severence, tragedy, accomplishment in the short span of their youth.

The story is plausible and meaty, what undoes it is lengthy digressions that seem to pop up at the wrong spots. You can't write about Punjab in the eighties and nineties without talking about the effect of terrorism on the lives of people who lived there. So it is written about, but again, as I said earlier it does not integrate well with the story and has a choppy effect. The story of the four cousins is touching and you feel for all the characters. They are pretty well etched.

The language, the idiom, the dresses, the ambience of Punjab of the day are well brought out. The peculiar traits of kakas (rich young boys) and their ways are well described. It is pretty funny in parts. That kept me turning the pages. I liked the feel of the book. I wish there was a good editor handy to hand out some good tips that would have enabled the author to refine the tale better.

The language goes from lyrical to okay in a matter of one paragraph.

Now, as I said right in beginning, I am familiar with the language, place, culture and people. I have no idea how a person who does not belong here feel about it. The novel lacks clarity and a lay person could fail to understand what is going on.

Khushwant Singh - Delhi

I knew of Khushwant Singh when he was at the prime of his career. He was editing the Illustrated Weekly of India and wrote some pretty irreverant stuff. He took a lot of flak for being an exhibitionist and mouthing (penning) controversial stuff. His writings seemed to revolve around wine and women and seemed to be deliberately contrary to what people said. That is the image I had of him. His columns were generally trashy and pieces of trivia, laced with jokes and shairi. I read a short story or an excerpt of his novel here and there. The pulled out pieces were usually erotic and simply reinforced the general image of him as a boozing womanising old man. A Dirty Old Man he was called.

Years later he happened to visit my office with his wife. I was surprised to see an old man walk in with his wife. There was no bulb over his head and no glass of whiskey in his hand. About a year or so back I read an interview where he had described his daily routine. Early to rise, he listened to direct telecast of kirtan from Darbar Sahib on the radio, ruminated on some shabd or kirtan, wrote some mandatory pages each day, and generally seemed to lead a very disciplined, sedentary life. Highly commendable from someone who is an nonagenarian.

Then I took out a book called Delhi from my library. I am going to digress a little here. I don't have much fondness for pulp fiction. Sometimes I have picked up Mills and Boon romances, some books that seem like light hearted read to pass time. I have even tried to read some Shobha De but found her insufferable. Her book, Sultry Nights, wasnt pulpy or interesting enough to keep me engrossed. But this book is the mother of pulp fiction. Khushwant Singh turns all the rules on their heads. The hero isnt a handsome rich dude, but a middle-aged, ugly Sikh. His heroine isn't a beautiful woman with a thousand virtues like Tess, she is a hermaphrodite, Bhagmati. He lays bare his soul, his lover's warts, and through them both he lays open the grandeur and the grime of Delhi.

The magnificent, the merciless, the munificent, the marauder, these are the people who uplifted and raped Delhi in quick succession. We are taken from the times of Balban to 1984 when Delhi was shaken by the anti-Sikh riots post Indira Gandhi's murder. Of course not in detail, or it would take a number of books. Rather than relate the history of Delhi to us in a mundane manner, he chooses to let some character of those times tell us the story. Therein lies the beauty of the novel. It is extremely readable, the first requirement of anything that passes through the printing presses.

KS is totally irreverent, liberal with erotic descriptions, and busts many historical myths. He does not fear to call a spade a spade and that is what makes his novel such a great read. I realise now that the fearsome reputation he garnered was probably bestowed upon him by jealous colleagues. He was ahead of his time by decades and stood by whatever he said and believed in.

Of all the pulp fiction I have read, he is the best. He is so good that he threatens to invade into territory usually occupied by Literature.