Swimmer Among the Stars: Kanishk Tharoor: book review

Swimmer Among the Stars by Kanishk Tharoor
Reviewed by Divya Dubey

[Published by Hindustan Times: March 26, 2016: http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/kanishk-tharoor-of-storytellers-and-storytelling/story-CPAmqernuwRqQHXy8i4csI.html ]

Kanishk Tharoor

Tongue in cheek, debutant author Kanishk Tharoor begins with the idea of Exotic India in the opening lines of the first story, ‘Elephant at Sea’, in his collection of short stories. Apparently inspired by an incident he heard about in his childhood, the story is centred on the wish of a Moroccan princess to own an Indian elephant. The Indian government – living up to its reputation – takes six years to process her application. Consequently, by the time the elephant is en route to Morocco, the princess is studying Sociology in Paris, and the rest of Morocco is clueless about what must be done with the creature when it arrives.  Foremost among them is the Second Secretary to the Indian embassy to Morocco. The situation is exacerbated by the presence of a dedicated mahout accompanying the pachyderm. Instead of being excited at the prospect of travelling home on a plane, the fellow spends his time making ‘ridiculous demands for an elephant nobody actually wants’.

Given his lineage, expectations from Kanishk Tharoor are naturally high.  Already his name is wedged between ‘ancient and modern masters of fabulist surrealist and magical short stories’ by the book jacket, which mentions veterans such as Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and Angela Carter. A lay reader might take that with a smidgen of salt. Tharoor, however, does not disappoint. In fact, one could perhaps add Geoffrey Chaucer to the list. The author’s distinctive voice shows a storyteller who has spent years perfecting his craft. The refrain or half-refrain in some of the stories (‘Seven days before the Khan’s army razed the city…’) at times hark back to the charm and lyricism found in Arabian Nights or in the likes of Sir Thomas Malory’s La Morte D’Arthur.

The collection straddles a huge expanse both in terms of space and time. For instance, ‘The Teahouse’ or ‘The Mirrors of Iskandar’ transport us to another era in history (though the latter can be a little underwhelming sometimes); stories such as ‘A Lesson in Objects’, ‘The Fall of an Eyelash’ or ‘The Loss of Muzaffar’ are written in the realistic tradition and focus on personal or cultural struggles in Time Present, while some such as ‘A United Nations in Space’ are futuristic in outlook. Well-known writer Amitav Ghosh considers it ‘serendipitous’ that he came across this collection when he was preoccupied with the idea of the Anthropocene (geological epoch when human activities began to impact the earth’s atmosphere). Referring to the collection he points out that the stories skillfully break several literary conventions in that sense.

The title story, ‘Swimmer Among the Stars’ has for its protagonist the last speaker of a language at whose doorstep ethnographers appear with digital recorders. The narrator says, ‘It simply confirms reality to the last speaker, that the old world of her mind is cut adrift from humans and can only be pulped into a computer.’ Later when she begins to regale her audience with songs in her language, she is grateful to them to have allowed her to ‘feel old’ in her language. There is no one to whom she can bequeath this inheritance: ‘She is proud that nether of her children are vulnerable to false nostalgia […] She would not have them bound to her relic. She would never wish that loneliness upon them.’

The themes of estrangement, loss and loneliness run across all the stories. The author is also obsessed with ideas of speech and language and the inadequacy of words. Storytellers and storytelling form a significant thread in the narrative. ‘Portrait with Coal Fire’, for instance, is about a poor miner’s interaction with a magazine reporter/storyteller over Skype, where he fails to comprehend why the writer cannot publish his family’s picture in another issue of the magazine; in ‘The Astrolabe’, a ship’s captain finds himself on an island, in a situation reminiscent of Sindbad or Gulliver, where no one speaks Arabic or Greek, Castilian or Majorcan, and he begins to think of the islanders as ‘tongue-less cannibals’. In ‘The Teahouse’ again, as the city waits to be erased by the Khan’s army, the narrator says, ‘Only the booksellers were out in force, possessed of that blind faith in the text. There will always be books to sell. There will always be people to read.’ In ‘The Mirrors of Iskandar’ Iskandar’s retinue tells stories ‘to escape domestic tedium’ during their waiting period.

In spite of the humour on the surface, most of the stories are deeply philosophical and tinged with a sense of helplessness and melancholy.  The essence of the book is evident in the words the mahout speaks into the elephant’s ears in the first story: ‘Sleep well, my beauty […] If you dream, don’t dream of home and don’t dream of me. Dream of the sea. You and I are now so alone in this world….’

With brilliantly portrayed characters such as the mahout, Muzaffar, the miner and the stranded sailors amongst others, it is a compelling debut collection that simply must not be missed. 

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The Honest Season: Kota Neelima: book review

The Honest Season: Kota Neelima
Review by Divya Dubey

[Published by Hindustan Times: May 21, 2016:  http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/an-engrossing-political-thriller/story-tiV1KB8nCapvydpAbvA3RN.html ]

This is the third book by the author and journalist, Kota Neelima, who has covered politics in Delhi for over two decades. The earlier novels include Shoes of the Dead and Death of a Moneylender. In The Honest Season too she draws a realistic political set-up with its soft underbelly. She creates a strong woman protagonist, Mira Mouli, also a journalist, but with a special super-power: to intuitively ‘know’ the future, besides people’s thoughts and motivations, so that as a ‘know-journalist’ she becomes indispensable to Bidur Munshi’s newspaper that has been struggling to survive for a while. And yet, behind the facade she is a grown-up orphan carrying a heavy baggage from her past.

Mira’s life is suddenly thrown out of gear one day when a tape arrives from Sikander Bansi at the newspaper office, addressed to her. Although he is the son of Mahesh Bansi, the president of the People’s Party and one of the most powerful men in the country, Sikander has always been known to flout his father’s wishes, rules and traditions. He is an MP himself, but ‘He never made political statements, demands or suggestions in the press, and was only rarely ever photographed.’ And now he has chosen to do a disappearing act, which is unsettling for his father, especially since Sikander has decided to make a game out of it. Every week he sends a controversial tape secretly recorded by him within the premises of the parliament, to Munshi’s newspaper. The tapes reveal underhand dealings of several well-known political figures and offer incriminating evidence against them. At the end of every recording there is a clue for Mira Mouli. Sikander believes that she is the ideal person to figure them out and manage to reach his hideout, since both of them have much in common – their brains work alike. Until she does, he will keep sending such tapes and the newspaper must publish them.

As Mira struggles with the clues, she is helped by Salat Vasudev, another ‘know journalist’ at her office, whose appointment she partly resents. At the same time Nalan Malik, the Party’s general secretary, keeps making intermittent and unexpected appearances, ostensibly, to ensure her safety since, as more and more politicians are exposed, the number of enemies baying for her blood keeps burgeoning every week.

Kota Neelima

An engrossing political thriller, this novel moves at a good pace, entertaining and challenging the reader at the same time. It has its twists and turns, some predictable, some not, and it follows the standard pattern of a breezy thriller. Regrettably, most such mystery novels do sound alike. One rarely comes across a narrative voice that sounds distinct or different. This book too falls in the same category. At times the similarities between Sikander and Mira, the instinctive bonding, the yearning and the pain seem a little contrived.

The good part is that the author has succeeded in creating a realistic, likeable, strong protagonist that the reader cares about. However, the downside is that precisely because she is strong and likeable, the reader is left feeling dissatisfied and angry towards the end.

This is precisely the kind of novel that, despite being a prototype commercial thriller, begs literary critique. And it is not quite possible to do that without giving away many of the novel’s secrets. Yet, it is important to comment on the book’s ending. Even though the author has left it open ended (there could be several alternatives), every alternative comes across as equally defeatist.  Perhaps it would have done much better without the Epilogue, which overturns the entire impact. One wonders why Mira is offered the choice she is offered at the end and whether it is a choice at all. What is the author trying to say? Is it really that no matter how strong or gifted a woman may be (or even a superwoman for that matter), eventually she must fall in line and resign herself to her fate because it’s a man’s world? Or is it that strong women must fall victim to their death wish because that is the only option available to them?

Because, eventually, that is the message the reader receives. And the reader would have respected the protagonist much better had she been able to break out of this stereotyping of women. At least in 2016 women journalists have come so far that they can – and do – hold their own even in the toughest situations. Sans the Epilogue, the novel would have been far more appealing.
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Fragments of Riversong: Farah Ghuznavi: book review

Fragments of Riversong: Farah Ghuznavi
--reviewed by Divya Dubey (publisher, Earthen Lamp Journal)
Publisher: Daily Star Books
ISBN: 978-984-90271-9-5
Extent: 140 pp
Price: $ 10

(Published by India Currents magazine, USA)

Bangladesh being well known for a riverine topography and its significance to the life of its people, the title of Farah Ghuznavi’s collection of short stories, Fragments of Riversong, seems ideal.  It creates an instant visual impression in the mind of the reader. The stories echo the simplicity of fellow Bangladeshi writer Mahmud Rahman’s style in his own collection, Killing the Water (2010), to some extent but the writer’s emphatic feminist voice is audible right from the beginning.

Ghuznavi’s characters are predominantly women struggling to cope with their world at various stages of their lives – childhood, adolescence, womanhood, widowhood. Relationships within the family, patriarchy and prejudices, encounters with sexual predators, oppression, violence, cruelty and malice, poverty and discrimination – familiar issues in all South Asian countries – play a crucial role in the plots.  Stories such as ‘Getting There’, ‘Big Mother’, ‘Just One of the Gang’, ‘Escaping the Mirror’ and ‘Waiting for the Storm’ make the heaviest impact for different reasons.

‘Getting There’, the first story, throws Laila and her two young nieces, Aliya and Yasmin (her sister’s daughters) together during a journey from Chittagong to Dhaka by car after her sister’s accident. On the way Laila remembers random episodes from her childhood: the difference in personality between her sister and herself – the former as docile as the latter was rebellious; their father’s Draconian laws and his expectations of his daughters; the vicious destruction of young Laila’s sketchbook by him upon discovery:

 Laila’s defiance inflamed Baba further. If her initial disobedience had not been bad enough, her refusal to recant made matters worse – reinforcing his conviction that girls, whatever their age, should not travel the dangerously seductive route of making their own decisions.
The inevitable flare-up of a temper that was unused to resistance in any form ended in a literal conflagration….

It was this excruciating incident responsible for the permanent rupture in their relationship. Now, years later, driving back home with the girls who are practically strangers to her, Laila makes a significant – and pleasant – discovery that might alter the course of her life yet again.

‘Big Mother’ might have done well as a full-length novel, given its scope and the range of issues it raises through a family saga – from the spitefulness of a domineering childless woman, to a child’s exposure to sexual abuse and guilt, to the status of minorities in the country, to a secret marriage with someone from a different religion with an alien lifestyle, to coping with unexpected widowhood in secret, to hopes of liberation in a foreign land. The longer form would have provided the author greater space for manoeuvre.

At least two of the stories delve deep into the psyche of schoolgirls and the years that shape their later lives. Both ‘Just One of the Gang’ and ‘The Silver Lining’ might be altered versions of incidents from Ghuznavi’s own schooldays. The voice is too personal and potent – jelling well with her little anecdotes and experiences on Facebook – to suggest otherwise, even though the stories themselves establish their universality through their themes and character prototypes. Ideas of class consciousness are sometimes juxtaposed against instances of friendship across race and religion. The innocence and lack of affectation in the narrative endear the narrator to the reader.

‘Escaping the Mirror’ relates the story of the seven-year-old Dia from an affluent family, who falls victim to the unwelcome advances of Minhas, her parents’ trusted chauffeur, suffering the indignity quietly over several years. As in case of most families, her parents fail to detect the sinister happenings under their own roof:

Gradually, her behaviour began to change […] She was more reserved with others around her as well, only ever relaxing in the company of her parents and close friends. The changes were so incremental that nobody noticed; the warning signs were missed by the adults around her.

Farah Ghuznavi

Many years later at home, instigated by a ‘chance remark’ by her father about the ‘crazy’ Westerners, she blurts out the truth about her life and the reality of their own country. The passage about Dia’s discovery of the term for her childhood experiences, however, could have been shorter and less explanatory. This story also resonates with another significant story, ‘Two Four Six Eight’ from the Indian author Lavanya Sankaran’s collection, The Red Carpet (2007), which unveils another ugly facet of child sexual abuse – that is not only men who are always the culprits.

‘Waiting for the Storm’ – the account of a beleaguered wife reaching her saturation point in the company of her overbearing spouse – carries shades of Roald Dahl and Agatha Christie. The reader craves for more.

 The most surprising package is perhaps ‘The Assessment’—a futuristic sci-fi tale centred on the world of ‘artificial intelligents’ or AIs who come with a catch – ‘an underlying possibility for evolutionary adaptation that was not foreseen in the original design’. Pammie, the ‘humanoid robot’ Jai buys against his wife’s wishes, apparently to assist her with childcare, eventually succeeds in turning her redundant in more ways than one. The dystopian view rings even more ominous considering possible scenarios in Time Future.

Perhaps the weakest link in this concatenation of tales is ‘The Mosquito Net Confessions’ – a rather lengthy chronicle of a diffident Diya heading for a field trip ‘a month into her new job at the Grameen Bank’ with three Francophone Africans and a Bangladeshi-American for company, and her experiences that mould her into a different woman capable of weathering all storms. This story fails to capture the reader’s interest as much as the others.

 As an experienced development worker and social activist, Ghuznavi has been keenly involved in politics and social work, especially adult women’s right to education – operating in tandem with the British NGO Christian Aid, Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, and the United Nations.  As she reveals on her website, her fiction was inspired by the various people she came across in the process – people ill-equipped to tell their own stories. Through this collection, therefore, she paints a vivid picture of the present-day Bangladesh and their most pressing concerns.
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Drowning Fish by Swati Chanda: book review

Drowning Fish by Swati Chanda

Reviewed by Divya Dubey 

Publisher: Hachette

Extent: 328 pp

Price: Rs 399

ISBN: 978-93-5009-890-5

(Published by Livemint: April 4, 2015: http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/LuxYcRtq4Ff82Ycyc5i7qL/Book-review-Drowning-Fish.html )

An essay on diasporic literature by Amit Shankar Saha illustrates that ‘despite peculiarities there is an inherent exilic state in all dislocated lives whether it be voluntary or involuntary migration’. Swati Chanda’s debut novel, Drowning Fish, brings this exilic state to the fore – through the story of Nayantara set in East Pakistan in the 1950s – the time of Independence and mass massacres; and next through the story of her granddaughter, Neelanjana, initially a student of English Literature on a scholarship at a university in the United States, who later takes up employment there as a modern expat teacher at various institutes.   

As exiles, experiences of grandmother and granddaughter are completely different. While Nayantara’s exile is forced due to war, that of her granddaughter is self-imposed and welcome.

Amidst a riot-ridden atmosphere Nayantara manages to migrate to Calcutta as a refugee with her two daughters, Sucharita and Niharika, leaving behind her beloved home, Narayanbari in Bangladesh, with her precious teak-wood furniture in it, which is later restored to her. This heavy teakwood Victorian furniture – the massive claw-footed armoire, the spinet, armoires with arabesque doors and intricate carvings – is the legacy Nayantara leaves behind for Neelanjana to claim when she comes of age. Meanwhile, it is left in the custody of Neelanjana’s aunt, Sucharita.  

Sucharita takes her job seriously, not only because Neelanjana is her favourite niece whom she looks upon as her own daughter, but also as a form of atonement for her past sins, her failure to protect and speak up for the girl as a vulnerable teenager brazenly molested by Nirmal Bondhu, her husband, under her very nose. Both aunt and niece share a tacit understanding and guard this secret for personal reasons.

As Neelanjana grows up she overcomes her fear and shame watching her aunt and uncle grow old and shrivelled, but her aunt’s sense of guilt and self-loathing keeps growing stronger – so much so that she eventually begins to lose her mind.    

On the other hand Neelanjana happily embraces the freedom, especially sexual liberty that life in the United States offers her. As she says to Phil, ‘I’m just exploring myself, being myself. Trying to figure things out for myself….’

She makes friends with two Indian boys, Kedar and Ratnam – the latter who makes the mistake of falling in love with her. Though aware of his feelings for her, Neelanjana finds it impossible to reciprocate his sentiments but they remain good friends.

In fact, at this juncture Neelanjana is not prepared for commitment at all. She is satisfied with her flings with Alex, Phil, Dakota and later even Tim, her student, before she receives a rude shock that changes the course of her life on foreign soil.

Ratnam, whom she had snubbed earlier as a lover now reenters her life, though it is out of necessity rather than choice and he knows it. Yet he makes the compromise willingly – and, eventually, pays for it.

Neelanjana does not share the diasporic angst of Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters. Throughout the novel her role vis-à-vis her ancestors and the history of Partition is that of an outsider-observer. She hears the narratives of exile from her parents and relatives, especially her aunt, Sucharita, but she herself has never been and can never be an integral part of that world. Even Jamshedpur, where she spent her life after her grandmother moved to Calcutta, loses its charm for her following her migration to the US.

Swati Chanda

 As Neelanjana becomes accustomed to her adopted country, every visit to India makes her feel more foreign. Finally, while waiting for her flight back to the US on such a visit she understands that she is ready to break away from her past – the stories about the Gangetic plains and the lush green East Bengal, the delta, the alluvial islands and all the geographical and natural delights, apart from tales of border crossings between different cities and refugee camps with their indigence and privation:

Neelanjana no longer wanted any part of it. She was going to free herself from her family’s narratives, the burden of their history. The tragedies of Partition. The trauma of exile. The loss of home The betrayals of family. The nostalgia for desh, her land. When she came here next, she would be sure about which was ‘home’ for her and which ‘back home’. 

By this time Neelanjana also realizes that the ‘idyll of rural East Bengal’ she grew up with had been erected from a position of privilege.

However, it is only after the incident with Tim and Ratnam’s reentry into her own life that she grasps the meaning of ‘drowning fish’ her father had mentioned to her – fish that cannot breathe, that suffocate and drown if there is a depletion in the oxygen level of the surrounding water, if the environment becomes too poisonous for them.

Neelanjana, though, emerges a survivor. Like Gone With the Wind’s Scarlet O’Hara, for Neelanjana too tomorrow is another day.

At times the novel tends to be too repetitive and overuse of the past perfect tense can hinder reading, but these ‘defects’ are rather minor given the merits of the story. 

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Bicycle Dreaming: Mridula Koshy: book review

Bicycle Dreaming: Mridula Koshy
Review by Divya Dubey

[Published by Hindustan times: Aug 20, 2016: http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-a-girl-dreams-of-owning-a-green-bicycle-in-mridula-koshy-s-new-novel/story-x5rfJf5Xfrl0Vqd7QKOykO.html]


After complex works such as If It is Sweet and Not Only the Things That Have Happened, Mridula Koshy returns to simple linear storytelling in Bicycle Dreaming. Rather surprising, since Koshy is a veteran at abstract writing and known to revel in it. Her stories, replete with heavy symbolism, tend to challenge the intellect and imagination of her readers. In this novel, however, she has chosen an easy confluence of form and subject that works pretty well. She told Tishani Doshi in a recent conversation (The Hindu), ‘I wanted to test the theory that I could tell a not-simple story simply.’ And this experiment seems to have succeeded.

Mridula Koshy

The book begins with the thirteenth birthday of Noor (or Nooren), the daughter of a kabaadiwala in Chirag Dilli, who dreams of owning a green bicycle and riding it like her father through the streets as India’s first ‘kabaadiwali’. She shares her hopes and fears with her best friend, Haseena, who, midway through the novel, falls out with her and is immediately swallowed up by her own problems. The girls reunite much later, almost towards the end of the book – and close to Noor’s fourteenth birthday. In the meanwhile Noor develops a crush on her classmate, Ajith, a bright spark in her class who belongs to a Dalit family and is well aware of its significance in a clearly stratified environment. Eventually it is he who teaches her to ride a bicycle. At home Noor is torn between her parents; her mother has a soft corner for her elder brother, Talib, who is an ambitious young man looking to better his prospects in the world, while Mohammad Saidullah, Noor’s father, is incapable of seeing eye-to-eye with him.

A few pages into the novel, one wonders if Koshy is guilty of the kind of writing many Indian writers writing in English are accused of – serving India’s filth and poverty to a mostly Western readership, on a platter (There are long graphic descriptions of muck and grime right at the beginning). But as one treads further, one realizes that the action is as much internal as it is external. We are looking at how heredity and a constantly changing environment impact the protagonist in the course of a year.
Right from the start Noor has been portrayed as a non-heroine, whose own thoughts and feelings find perspective first through Haseena and later through Ajith. And yet, like Erica Jong’s Isadora (Fear of Flying), Noor’s femininity and feminism find expression simultaneously and are often intertwined. Her choices are always her own. She is tentative, yet decisive; fearful yet proactive. She is the one who hounds Haseena until the ice between them is broken. In Haseena’s absence, she is the one who visits her siblings and sets the household straight. She follows Ajith around and realizes her feelings for him much before he begins to comprehend his own; she chooses to stay on with her father to cook and clean for him when her mother follows Talib to his new home; and it is Noor again who decides to visit her brother and her mother at his new house all by herself in the metro when fancy takes her. Often daunted by her own desires, she nevertheless goes right ahead. In many ways this book reminds one of one of Koshy’s earlier short stories, ‘The Large Girl’ with its brilliant portrayal of conflict within oneself and outside.

It is interesting that Koshy, at forty, hadn’t learnt to ride the bicycle. According to her, ‘To move my body at a speed that was not given to it seemed to me to be the freedom to be more than my body.’ The book apparently also owes to P Sainath’s essay ‘on women and bicycles in Everyone Loves a Good Drought’ and ‘Kaveri Gill’s Of Poverty and Plastic’. But most important were the picture book reading sessions Koshy conducted for some teenagers in ‘a weekly after-school club’, from where the idea of the novel actually emerged.

In spite of Mohammad Saidullah’s dying occupation and the humiliation he receives at the hands of corrupt officials, he knows that he is not the lowest of the low. There are people in society worse off than him. Similarly, Ajith knows that his academic scores alone are not enough to pluck him out of his background. Both Noor and Ajith understand why the authorities turn a blind eye to students cheating during exams and why they cannot complain against it even though, in principle, they know it is wrong. Poverty, class and caste divide, gender stereotypes and overturning traditional roles, child labour, politics, corruption, urbanization and modernization, technological advancements and their implications, green initiatives (at government school level) are some of the major themes, apart from the more human and abstract ones such as differences between perception and reality, growing up and the turmoil of adolescence with all its love-hate relationships.

This book is not simply a commentary on social evils, but is also a deeply personal project. Koshy understands the people she is writing about, no matter how different they may be from her on the surface. Simple, sensitive, occasionally humorous, the style endears the characters to the reader.
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Alphabet Soup for Lovers by Anita Nair: review

Alphabet Soup for Lovers by Anita Nair
Reviewed by Divya Dubey

[Publsihed by Hindustan times, March 19, 2016: http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/alphabet-food-for-lovers-review-of-food-a-boring-marriage-and-an-affair/story-I3VejUuSih6bokiiyb0eyK.html]

Alphabet Soup for Lovers, Anita Nair’s most recent novel, was born when her Italian publisher commissioned her to write food-based short fiction. Since she refused to ‘write to order’, the book emerged as a slim novel built on the foundation stone of romance. However, despite its simplicity it is not an ordinary romantic tale. Nair has spiced it up with a character-cum-narrator and a sub-plot that make all the difference.

At the heart we have Lena Abraham married to the very gentlemanly KK. They live peacefully on a tea plantation in the idyll of the Anamalai Hills in south India. Komathi, their cook and Lena’s faithful guardian, begins to learn the English alphabet using the sounds of familiar cooking ingredients to help her remember the letters. As she makes progress with her lessons, she narrates the events at her employers’ home unfolding before her, accompanied by her own views and analyses. More often than not, she comes across as an astute observer. For instance, this is how she describes the relationship between the husband and wife: ‘That’s how they always are. Like two strangers in a doctor’s waiting room […] These two are like store-bought appalam. Seemingly perfect but with neither flavour nor taste.’

Incidentally, Arisi Appalam is the first of the ingredients with which she begins her alphabet journey. However, Komathi shares the space with another narrator throughout the novel – anonymous and omniscient, hence less interesting but equally significant. This voice has a perceptive comment to make on Lena and KK: ‘There’s an absence of messy emotions between them, the sort that can throw people off kilter. They don’t question and judge and this allows them to remain wedded to each other.’

The tedium of their lives is interrupted by the appearance of a well-known actor on the scene. Shoola Pani Dev, an aging actor and south Indian cinema’s ‘heartthrob’, rents the homestay the couple runs, seeking refuge from his own stardom, at the tranquil site. In her first encounter with him Lena finds his behaviour offensive and confronts him with the words, ‘Are you always this rude?’ – to which his response is an apology offered with a boyish grin. This section of the novel comes across as somewhat of a cliché, though not precisely an Elizabeth-Darcy charade, since there is an instant connect between them. 

Even though the lovers cannot yet understand what is transpiring between them, Komathi can read between the lines easily and quickly. When Lena returns from her routine visit to the actor in the cottage, Komathi observes a ‘gleam in her eye’. She says, ‘When she was a child, she often dipped into the honey jar with a large spoon when no one was looking […] My Leema is too old to find joy in the sticky sweetness of honey. What has she been stealing?’

Komathi’s intellectual acuity is evident here. Lena is not particularly fond of Daangar chutney (D is for Daangar chutney), yet she asks her to make it and takes it to Shoola Pani, who apparently tasted it last when his mother was still alive. The making of Daangar chutney also brings back to Komathi memories of her own unfortunate romance – that forms the parallel thread in the book. While on the one hand she is loyal to her charge and even fiercely protective of her, on the other resentment smoulders deep within her because somewhere she holds Lena responsible for the miserable end to her own love story.

Komathi can see and understand the romance blooming between Lena and the stranger, but her loyalties clearly lie with Lena’s husband, KK. Again and again her frustration surfaces at the extent of his blindness to the new developments in his life taking place right under his nose. Nair’s humour is at its best here: ‘And KK, does he see the transformation in her? [ …] But even he can’t be oblivious to the stars in her eyes. Or does he think filter kaapi put it there?’ (F for Filter kaapi, Nair admits, is her personal favourite in the book.)

Even though the actor-ordinary woman romance lies at the centre of the novel, while Komathi and her backstory stand at its periphery, it is actually the old cook, her candid and revealing commentary, besides her personal history that are far more interesting and intriguing than the characters in the foreground.

This book perhaps won’t qualify as one of Nair’s best works or a literary treat, but flavoured with the unique condiments it has, it is certainly a work that can be devoured with pleasure on a leisurely spring weekend.

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A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge: Ambai (trans. By Gita Subramanian): review

A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge: Ambai (trans. By Gita Subramanian)

Review by Divya Dubey

Juggernaut Books
216pp
Rs 299

[Published in Hindustan Times, Jan 7, 2017) http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/introducing-sudha-gupta/story-ELDPmccH9lpnjVCXgstg5O.html ] 

CS Lakshmi or Ambai – as the publishing world knows her – is a celebrated feminist Tamil writer, born in 1944. Some of her works have already been translated into English by Lakshmi Holmstrom: A Purple Sea (1992) and In A Forest, A Deer (2006). The writer and her translator together won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award (Indian language fiction translation) for In a Forest, A Deer in 2006. Ambai also received Iyal Virudhu – the Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to Tamil literature, in 2008, from the Tamil Literary Garden (Canada).

At the age of seventy-two she has come up with something new – crime fiction with a mature woman protagonist, Sudha Gupta, as a private detective working in Mumbai informally with her inspector friend, Govind Shelke. In the background appear Sudha’s scientist husband, Narendra Gupta; her daughter Aruna; her mentor, Vidyasagar Rawte from whom she learnt the tricks of the trade; and a more conspicuous assistant, Stella. A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge is a collection of three longish short stories about Sudha’s cases, published recently by Juggernaut Books. 

In an interview with Mid-day Ambai said, ‘I have been thinking of writing mystery stories for a while; not crime thrillers exactly but more of the mysterious ways in which human beings act under emotional pressure or when forced by circumstances. The mystery stories I wanted to write were not ones where a criminal is finally identified but ones about human vulnerability, obsessions and love which take mysterious turns in life.’

This is probably the USP of Amabai’s crime fiction. The stories are not whodunits with sensational revelations, twists and turns. The three stories present a realistic social milieu that puts the crimes into perspective and establishes incontrovertible causal relationships. Another detective series that accomplished this task so well in terms of the human element was Derrick – a German television crime series (1974-1998) starring Horst Tappert as Detective Chief Inspector Stephan Derrick, and Fritz Wepper as Inspector Harry Klein, broadcast by Doordarshan somewhere in the 1980s.  

In ‘As the Day Darkens’ Sudha Gupta, enjoying her cup of cinnamon tea, is interrupted by a call from Govind Shelke, who asks for her help regarding a young woman’s case. On a family vacation at Madh Island, Archana’s three young daughters disappeared from the beach and the shock led to the hospitalization of her husband. Sudha steps in as a sympathetic friend and puts her brain to work. The non-linear narrative also reveals how she became a detective accidentally, following her closest friend’s movements once.  

In ‘The Paperboat Maker’, Chellemmal, Sudha’s cook and Aruna’s nanny, approaches her to investigate a prospective bridegroom for her daughter, Mallika. Sudha’s sense of humour is apparent in her exchange with the woman as she enquires why she feels the boy is not suitable:

‘… I believe he writes poetry.’ [Chellammmal]
‘You’re saying that as if he has some contagious disease.’
‘And he writes in Tamil.’
‘That is indeed a fatal disease!’

In the title story, ‘A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge’, Sudha runs into an aging woman, Sandhyabai, on platform no. 4 at the Andheri station. Seeing her all by herself at the same place even in the evening Sudha worries about the stranger and manages to persuade her to tell her her story. Once she has all the information she requires, she sets out to right the wrongs she has perceived.  

Speaking from a feminist standpoint, Amabi made her intentions clear in her interview. ‘I thought it may be interesting to create the character of a woman private detective who does routine detective work but occasionally works with an inspector friend. I felt that the city seen from her point of view would present a different perspective of life and living in Mumbai.’

Dr CS Lakshmi

These traits are apparent in the stories, which have pretty simple plots, somewhat like Madhulika Liddle’s Muzaffar Jung series, but like Jung they keep the reader entertained and engaged. The book, however, seems to fall victim to some of the challenges of translation. In regional Indian language texts, quite often long blocks of dialogue replace paragraphs filled with descriptions and settings. While they work well enough in the original version, the absence is much more evident in the English translation. This factor makes these stories come across as lacking at times – like unfinished paintings – especially since the reader is used to well fleshed out narratives.   

But on the whole the lover of cinnamon tea and Bollywood music, Sudha Gupta, is an interesting character and certainly worth making an acquaintance with. 
   
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