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.

Sonia Falerio, Kavya Vishwanathan, Samit Basu

If you are an avid reader of fiction chances are you have heard about The Girl, Opal and Kirin. Ok so maybe hardly anyone has read about the The Girl, some know about Kirin and everyone knows about Opal. These are the literary offspring of Sonia Faleiro, Kavya Vishwanathan and Samit Basu. They are on my list together just to present the different faces of contemporary fiction by young Indians, I don’t intend to compare them with one another.

Sonia Faleiro’s book, The Girl, was the slimmest and the most difficult to read. The fault could be mine. She has been published by Penguin and quite likely has a niche readership for fiction of her kind. It is a soulful, dark, existential kind of literature. Not my cup of anything. The plot is slimmer than the book There is this girl (always referred to as the Girl in a very Rebecca-ish way) who is coping with loss in a small village in Goa called Azul. Her mother and grandma just died. Her uncle decamped with the all that was worth owning in their house, sold the house, dumped the grandfather in an old age home and abandoned the Girl to her devices. Cruel ! The Girl's mom left her a house in Azul so that’s where she lands up. She is kind of passing time, in a haze of depression from the recent events, when a foreign tourist, Luke, enters her life. After a while, maybe bored or restless, he leaves. The girl finds herself pregnant, and unable to cope with the rejection and a baby on the way, she commits suicide. But don’t expect the story to told to you in a straightforward manner. Most time the novel meanders around some small details. The young (and pretty) author does not flesh out her characters and they float through her narrative like ghosts. I found the novel quite tedious to read and the story hard to extract. There are some loose ends, what did happen to the priest who disappeared? Was Luke just lurking around somewhere? Why does he return to Azul after the girl dies? Simon is supposed to love the girl, but he is just on the border of the story, hanging around.

Kavya has been written about extensively, thanks to the passages worked into two books simultaneously by the creative agency that helped both the authors write the books. Okay, that is a categorical statement, but that is what I have deduced as the truth behind the whole scam. Poor Kavya fell between two stools of trying to fulfill her own creativity and trying to live up to the expectations of her publishers. Moral of the story is, write only to fulfill your creativity. How Opal Mehta … has been classified as Chick Lit for young women. The writing is perky, full of interesting incidents that carry the story forward. The plot is simple: Opal is asked what she likes to do for fun during her admission interview for Harvard. All she has to say is that she likes to solve an unproven physics theory for fun. But she is a child of rote education. Her parents have taken over her brain and think for her. Hence she is freaked out by this question she has not prepared for and thinks (a wish that lies latent in her heart?) that she needs to get a life. Get a life means getting drunk, kissing boys, getting into trouble etc. Her parents are determined to make her succeed and lay plans for her get a life. This is how a studious, plain Opal is transformed into a teenager who drops famous brands from the tips of her eyelashes (MAC) to her Jimmy Choos (good thing her parents were loaded). She takes further wrong steps and lands into a mess. Until she realizes that she has to think for herself, and tell her parents, please people, stay out of my life. She does get into Harvard, but only when she lets out accidentally, (she never does understand his question) to her interviewer that she solved the unproven physics theory for fun.

Samit Basu writes a comic SFF. In India we are inundated with fantasy fiction. We have jataka tales, fables, epics, folklore, ghost stories strewn around us. On top of that if you are an avid reader of comic books starring some kind of a superhero, and SFF fiction of all kinds and varieties, you have a merry grist for your mill. But still, you need a rare kind of a talent to spin a yarn. Samit Basu, thankfully for us, has that talent. So far he has unleashed two books upon us, Simoqin Prophecies and The Manticore’s Secret. He brings out this unique story of an alternate world (the center of which is KOL -Calcutta?). It is a story of demons and superheroes, bad and good people, secret agents and assassins, dwarves, magical devices, magic people. He uses all the cliches of the super-world and then turns them on their heads. His James Bond is an ugly dwarf who happens to be a natty dresser. His heroine keeps a Bridget Jones like diary, his hero is a villain, and you aren’t sure whether he intends to destroy or save the world. He manages to weave the story skillfully, keep our interest alive and by golly, we are salivating for the third and conclusive book! (Replace we with I in case you don’t like this genre)