Goat Days
In his award-winning novel Goat Days, Malayalam literature’s young star Benyamin tells the story of a young man who, like lakhs of other Malayalis in the 1990s, goes to the Gulf. Najib is barely making a living as a sand-diver in his village when he scrapes together a visa for Saudi Arabia. At Riyadh airport,...
The New Indian Fog
IN THE third of the four sections of The Beautiful and the Damned — The Factory — the author speculates on why a young migrant describes his chronic illness merely as ‘pain’: “Given the lives that migrant workers lived, someone like Pradip had no choice but to abandon the nuances of illness for a broad,...
The ladies have familiar feelings
THE DELHI launch of Granta’s feminism issue — The F Word — took an unprecedented, iconoclastic course. All four panelists including sole contributor from India, Urvashi Butalia, what is the right word now… dissed the book for leaning heavily towards the experiences of the straight, white female. After reading the book, one is inclined to...
The explosion in the poverty lab
OUR GRANARIES are overflowing. Foodgrain stocks have scaled to an alltime high of 65.60 million metric tonnes. This is frustrating news for everyone worried about the nutritional status of the poor in India. With the Food Security Act hanging in the balance, this would be the perfect moment to suggest the poor be given more...
See you in the hot flash club
IN 1984, when Namita Gokhale wrote Paro: Dreams of Passion, she was 27. Her equally youthful heroine Priya lived vicariously through the excesses of Paro, a woman the Victorians would have called an adventuress. Paro revisited reveals itself as something of a genre bender. It’s too cynical to be chick-lit and too familiar to be...
Pirates have feelings, you know
IN ALAN Bennett’s novella The Uncommon Reader, Queen Elizabeth becomes an obsessive reader when her beloved corgis wander by a mobile library near the palace. She’s transformed from a bored, frankly amoral monarch into a sentient being. In one episode, she flummoxes the visiting French president by asking him about Jean Genet. Recently, Bollywood too...
Authenticity can be such a pain
IN THE author’s note, Aamer Hussein says, “My novel is the story of some of the paths I might have taken.” The book does bear the dull, deadening smell of authenticity — as if written in a rush of memory. Like the Urdu and Persian poetry the protagonist, Mehran, is addicted to, this is a...
The mistress of mildness
THE TROUBLE with Manju Kapur, five books down, is not that she isn’t exposing the dark underbelly of the Indian middle class. The trouble is that she is not prodding its fair paunch enough. Let’s get the niceties of Custody’s plot out of the way. Raman, the young corporate executive (ordinary East Delhi origins, IIT,...
Do you know this man?
PROBABLY NOT. Not unless you saw his face in the papers recently when Daylight Robbery — one of his 270 Hindi novels and the second translated into English — was launched. That’s 270 books, a career of 50 years and 2.5 crore copies sold. Even today, when he and other Hindi pulp writers are convinced...
Ruined by reading
AWRITER FRIEND remarked that he had not anticipated how thrilled he would be by his first visit to the Golden Temple in Amritsar. “Imagine all these people milling around, all there to worship a book”. He acknowledged that he was choosing to see it that way. But who can blame his poor book-weakened mind? Particularly...
Anjum Hasan
(A shorter, annoyingly truncated version of the following piece appeared in Tehelka a few weeks ago.) Almost every reviewer calls Anjum Hasan’s novels ‘quiet and well-written’. This is currently a phrase in our literary world that veers between praise, parody and put-down. It is also a description that does disservice to at least one aspect...
Breaking Bed Together
Filmmaker Paromita Vohra’s ‘Tourists’ is one of the most enjoyable pieces in Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories and knits a trio of fantasies. Her perfect reader is intelligent and politically correct: hence unable to enjoy anything, even guilt. Until now. First, Vohra’s suspiciously familiar character Sartaj Khan is a sexy Bollywood star...
