JLF DAIRY 2013 in BOOKLINK

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A Book Review in The Hindu

Just a yarn

ABDULLAH KHAN

Special ArrangementThe Teller of Tales, Bhaskar Ghose, Penguin Books India, Rs.299.

TOPICS

books and literaturefiction

The reader’s perception is constantly challenged by one story after another.

As I flipped through The Teller of Tales, it reminded me of English August, a hugely successful novel by civil servant-turned writer Upamanyu Chatterjee. Bhaskar Ghose, like Upamanyu Chatterjee, also has been an IAS officer. So, I expected yet another humour-filled take on the dreariness of life of a bureaucrat in the Indian hinterland. But as I prodded through a couple of pages, I could realise that it was a different kind of book.

It is about two IAS officers and through this book we also get to know how the bureaucratic set up of our country functions and how the officers learn to survive when they are made to live in godforsaken places as the government’s representative. The tone of the novel, unlikeEnglish August, is not satirical and the story has been told in a matter of fact way except at some places where the narrative becomes surrealistic. The readers may at times feel lost when facts acquire the colour of fiction and fiction crosses the boundaries drawn by the facts. What is real and what is unreal keep challenging your perception.

The novel has a sluggish start but the speed picks up and you are sucked into the story after 10 to 12 pages. The narrator of this novel is Tapan Biswas, an IAS officer, who seeks refuge in theatre to escape the boredom of bureaucratic life. Another favourite pastime for him is listening to tales told by his friend Arunava, a fellow IAS officer. So, Arunava is “the teller of tales”. Arunava tells stories which are sometimes unbelievable and at times quite credible. You suspect that the story he has told can’t be believed but then he convinces you about the veracity of it. The irony is that the story that sounds real or credible turns out to be fiction or a figment of Arunava’s imagination.

As a reader you begin to suspect every move, but Arunava comes up with a story and again you believe him and then you come to know that you have been duped. This keeps happening till the end when Tapan discovers some disconcerting truth about his friend.

The denouement is heart-breaking, poignant and powerful, and you are made to think about Arunava long after you have finished the book.

Bhaskar Ghose writes with flair and fluency and is successful in capturing the essence of a bureaucratic life in a small town of eastern India. What I did not like about the book was that at many places the English translation was written in the parentheses next to Indian language words and they looked jarring. I think that was not required for the Indian edition and if it was necessary to have English translation of Indian words they could have been included at the end of the book as a glossary.

The Teller of Tales, Bhaskar Ghose, Penguin Books India, Rs.299.
CLICK HERE to read this review on the HINDU's website..

A Panel discussion at World Book Fair,2013

WITH Noor Zaheer ( Author of My God is A Woman)

and Mariam Karim-Ahlawat (Author of  My Little Boat)

My Review of The Selector of Souls

Murder in the womb

ABDULLAH KHAN

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The dark gloomy corners of our country, rife with female foeticide, are illuminated in this insightful novel. ABDULLAH KHAN

The eye-catching blue cover of this intriguingly titled novel makes you take notice of it. The book reminds you of Kishwar Desai’s Witness the Night because it also has female foeticide as its theme. But unlike Kishwar’s book, there are many more issues on which the book focuses; we continually hear the reverberations of historical tragedies like the partition and the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. There is also a subtle reference to the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in 1990s.

The opening scene is, undoubtedly, the strongest part of the book. The author describes the brutal killing of an infant girl by her maternal grandmother, Damini, who wants to save her daughter from future distress for having so many daughters. Damini also finds justifications in religious scriptures for her heinous crime.

The cruelties shown by the father when he refuses to name his newly born third daughter and the mother who doesn’t breast-feed her child are as disconcerting as the final act of Damini.

Damini is one of two major characters of this novel. The other one is Anu, a woman stuck in a bad marriage. Anu has accepted Christianity but also follows the religion of her ancestors, i.e. Hinduism, and doesn’t find any contradiction between these two religions. Her only daughter, who is an outcome of marital rape, has been sent to Canada where she lives with Anu’s kind hearted and caring cousin. Here, in India, Anu decides to dedicate her life to social service and lands in Gurkot, a small village in the northern part of India, to work in a health clinic.

In this village, Anu aka Sister Anu comes across Damini, whom she has met once in Delhi. Damini joins Anu in her work. As a health worker Damini is involved in helping willing parents in sex selection of children. And here too she finds excuses to justify her ethically wrong actions. For her, killing a foetus is less brutal than killing an infant girl.

Through these two perfectly imagined characters, Shauna Singh Baldwin offers commentaries on the socio-political issues of contemporary India and you are made to see the dark gloomy corners of this largest democracy of the world that exist beyond the hype of “shining India”.

Culturally insightful and beautifully written, the novel covers many social and political matters that affected India during the last 65 years but, of course, the focus is on female foeticide and the status of women in Indian society.

The negative aspect of this book is its length as the pace of narrative is marred by the unnecessary use of expositions and too much cultural detail. The dialogues are also stretched beyond the desirable limits.

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-literaryreview/murder-in-the-womb/article4278330.ece

A New Ghazal

ग़ज़ल 

ख्वाबों के  सलेट पे हसरतों के निशान कितने हैं 

एक है दिल, उस   दिल के अरमान कितने हैं 

हर गली हर कुचे में आदमी ही आदमी 

ये बताओ इस शहर में   इंसान कितने हैं 

चाँद तारों तक महदूद नही  मजिल अपनी 

क्योंकि सितारों के आगे भी  जहान कितने हैं 

मंदिरों और मस्जिदों में तुझ को  तलाशाते हैं 

या खुदा, इस बस्ती के लोग  नादान  कितने हैं 

जीना दुश्वार हो गया  इस  दौर-ए -जदीद में 

लेकिन  मरने के तरीक़े  आसान कितने हैं 

 --abdullah khan 'abd'

EK GHAZAL

ये अंधेरों का सफ़र तो  गुज़र जायेगा 

 पर न जाने कब  उजालों का शहर आयेगा 

जब ख़त्म  होंगे तारीकियों के सिलसिले 

तब रात जायेगी  और फिर सहर आयेगा  

वहशत-ए -इश्क़ को न कमतर समझना 

इस जुनूं  में न जाने वो क्या कर जायेगा 

पीछे  आग का दरिया, सामने  दश्त-ए -तन्हाई  

ऐसे में  वो शख्स जायेगा तो किधर जायेगा 

छुपा रखे थे  कई ख़्वाब  हमने  आँखों में 

लगता है वो ख्वाब अब बिखर जायेगा 

आज सातवाँ दिन है इस कर्फ्यू का 'अब्द' 

वो ग़रीब तो अब भूखे ही मर जायेगा 

  

अब्दुल्लाह खान 'अब्द '

Review of MUMBAI NOIR

 

About the Noir fiction, the well-known American publisher and editor, Otto Penzler says, 'Look, noir is about losers. The characters in these existential, nihilistic tales are doomed. They may not die, but they probably should, as the life that awaits them is certain to be so ugly, so lost and lonely, that they'd be better off just curling up and getting it over with.' In other words, noir fiction can be defined as a subgenre of crime fiction which is characterized by its cynical characters, the unsentimental depiction of violence and sex and the bleak denouements. In the recent years, Brooklyn based Akashic Books has popularized this genre by bringing out the series of noir short stories. Each anthology in this series is based in a particular city and explores the dark underside of that city. Earlier we had Brooklyn Noir, London Noir, LA Noir, Chicago Noir, Paris Noir, etc. And the accent of India on the horizon of the global economy inspired the publishers to add the Indian cities to their list and Delhi Noir was published in 2009. And, now, it is the turn of Mumbai. 

Edited by author Altaf Tyrewala, the opening story of this anthology, 'Justice', is about a man called Ashagar Khan, who has been convicted by the court for his involvement in a bomb blast. He has committed that crime to seek some sort of revenge for losing almost everything in a communal riot. The author has weaved the narrative quite credibly telling us how a single act of violence can start the chain reactions of violence and counter violence. But, he is not able to carry the story till the end and the denouement appears to be hurriedly made up. It also breaks the basic principle of noir fiction by having a sentimental ending. Then, there is a story of twin brothers, both auto drivers, titled 'By Two'. The brothers suffer for being Muslims (at that poor Muslims) in this post 9/11 and post 26/7 world. The twins are tortured by the police each time a terrorist act happens in the city. The author, Devashish Makhija, has been able to invoke the sense of horror in readers: What if I were in their places? The descriptions of police brutality and helplessness of the main characters are heart -rending. True to the noir genre, the protagonists of this story have no chance. This is a though-provoking and probably the best story of the collection which raises questions about the way we are fighting terrorism. There are a handful of extremists who perpetuate this kind of atrocities on the masses and then there are innocent victims of these attacks. But there are even larger numbers of people who are neither involved in terrorism nor are direct victims of terrorist attacks but have been suffering more than the victims. They are the scapegoats. It has become customary on part of the police and intelligence agencies to pick up and torture Muslim youths (tribal youths in case of Maoist extremism) when terror strikes the country. The twins in this story, in short, are the victims of the shortcuts taken by the biased law enforcing agencies.

Later, two interesting stories take us to the darker alleys of the ‘Maximum City’ where we are told about the hijra culture, transvestite groups and their involvements in a different kind of flesh trades. The first one, Corpse in the Gali by Smita Harish Jain, is so stark in its description of the process of a man being initiated into Hijra community that it might induce nausea in the readers.  Here the writing is very powerful and Smita is a talent to watch out for. Another tale about the Mumbai Hijra Culture, Lucky 501, by Sonia Faleiro is equally impressive.

In The Watchman by Altaf Tyrewala , a guard has an intuition that somebody in the housing society he guards, is going to die. And that troubles him so much that he begins to behave irrationally. This simple but fascinating story has grave and serious underlying meanings. It symbolises the restlessness and uncertainty of the megapolis life. On the other hand, Chachu at Dusk by Abbas Tyrewala is a sentimental journey of a former Mafiosi in to the old world of smugglers and bhais. The protagonist in this story reminisces about his golden days when even underworld had some semblance of ethics and principles. Though beautifully written, it hardly fits into the category of the genre of noir stories.

Besides all these, there are many more stories, each of them confiding some dark secrets about Mumbai to their readers. Some stories, four to be exact, disappoint but the rest are decent offerings. The editor could have been a bit more discriminnating while selecting the stories for this anthology.

http://www.thebookreviewindia.org/articles/archives-1127/2012/DECEMBER/12/of-noir-fiction-and-the-lonely-woman.html

My Review of Namita Gokhale's Book in December issue of The Book Review

The planet called earth has been a lonely place for the women. You move across the continents and across the societies and can see that the fair sex is treated more as some sort of asset than as normal human being. Some societies, we feel, places the women on a higher pedestal but that too is a ploy of the male-centric society to control the feminine power. In India, it must be remembered, the Ganika and Devdasi systems were also an acceptable part of the same society which refers to women as Devi. In some societies, especially in the Middle East, women are supposed to be the gifts of God, so they should always be kept gift wrapped. The various kinds of burqas and veils were invented to keep them covered.

The sound of women’s loneliness and the eagerness to break free from the manacles of the male-centric social norms reverberate in many of the stories of this collection of short stories by the seasoned author Namita Gokhale.

 ‘Life in Mars’, the opening story, tells us about the aloneness of Madhu Sinha, a widow and a mother of three ‘duplicitous sons’ who have virtually abandoned her. As she is fighting with her solitude and a debilitating illness, the arrival of Udit Narain, a young man who feels chasing a girl or a job is sheer waste of time, suddenly ignites a desire to live her life again. The author describes the dilemma as well as the eagerness of a middle aged woman while planning to enter in to a new relationship. The title story, The Habit of Love, also has a widow as the protagonist. But unlike Madhu, the main character of this story is not alone and has her daughters by her side but that doesn’t stop her from grieving perpetually for the loss of her long dead husband. When she goes on a vacation with her daughters to Nepal, one of her daughters, after seeing the mountain peaks, asks her: how does a mountain know it is a mountain?’ Discomfited by the question she travels back to her happy days and thinks of her husband who might have given a perfect answer to this question. And there she realises how she has internalised the pain she had received by losing her husband and how ‘the habit of grief’ has created walls between her and her daughters. The opening sentence of this story is very thought-provoking and it reads: The habit of grief can be as insidious as the habit of love.

There is another outstanding story that comments upon the position of a woman in our society. In ‘Love’s Mausoleum’, Malika is deserted by her husband for not bearing any child for him. She visits Taj Mahal and discovers that Shahjahan had built Taj Mahal for his favourite wife Mumtaz.  And , she is  outraged when the guide explains to her about the tombs built outside the Taj Mahal by emperor Shahjahan for his two other wives because (unlike Mumtaz) they were childless. Time has changed, but not the attitude of male chauvinistic society, she angrily thinks.

There are two stories which have two famous female characters from Mahabharata as their protagonists. In one story, Kunti tells us about her dilemma to reveal that Karna is her son. Kunti as mother craves to hug her first born but the fear of social stigma is so huge that she let her son go. What if Kunti were a man?  In the other story a maid servant of Qandhari, wife of king Dhrutrashtra, tells us about her queen’s struggle as a woman, as a wife and as a mother. In both the stories, Kunti and Qandhari are not portrayed as the larger than life mythological characters but as the regular women who have their own set of dreams and insecurities.

Each of the thirteen stories is written in Namita’s signature style.

A GHAZAL

ایک غزل 

اشاروں سے تم نے کچھ تو کہا ہے

یا اٹھلانے کی یہ تیری  ادا ہے

نگاہیں تو  میری سب کہہ رہی تھی

 تم نے نہ سمجھا  تو کس کی خطا ہے

جو میں بے وفا ہوں یہ تم کہہ رہے ہو

  کہ تم بے وفا ہو یہ سب کو پتہ ہے

جو تیرے لب پہ ہے  وہ ٹھیک ہے

 یہ بھی بتا دو جو دل میں چھپا ہے

  قاتل ہے منشف اور مظلوم ملذم

یہ  کیسی عدالت یہ کیسی سزا ہے

نمرود فرون سب کےسب  مٹ گئے

سونچا ہے کیا  تو کی  کوئ  خدا ہے

عبدللہ خان ---

एक ग़ज़ल 

इशारों से तुमने कुछ तो कहा है 

या इठलाने  की ये  तेरी  अदा है

निगाहें  तो मेरी   सब कह रही थी 

तुमने न समझा  तो किसकी खता  है 

जो  मैं बेवफा हूँ ये तुम कह रहे हो

 कि  तुम बेवफा हो ये सबको  पता है

जो तेरे लब पे है  वो  ठीक है  

ये भी बता दो जो  दिल में छुपा है

 क़ातिल है  मुन्शिफ़  और मज़लूम  मुल्ज़िम  

ये  कैसी अदालत  ये कैसी सज़ा  है

निमरूद फ़िरौन  सब के सब  मिट गए 

सोंचा है क्या  की तू कोई  खुदा है  

---अब्दुल्लाह खान 

BOOK REVIEWS

TOKE by JUGAL MODY (Originally published in The Book Review, November 2012)

Toke means puffing a pipe or pot filled with Marijuana. And true to its title, you get high with the novel’s surreal plot. The story is set in motion as you are introduced to Nikhil the protagonist who is fighting to come out of ganja-induced hallucinatory dreams. He is a regular guy with a regular job and suffers from regular bouts of insecurity, jealousy and disillusionment. Toking is his only escape from his not-so-interesting quotidian life. One day when he is in the middle of a cannabis induced hallucination, Lord Vishnu, the preserver God from the Hindu trinity, makes an appearance and joins Nikhil and his friends in a session of pot smoking. In between, He tells Nikhil the world is going to end in next 72 hours and Lord Vishnu has no time for another incarnation to save the world. So, He entrusts Nikhil with the responsibility of saving the humanity from total destruction. He warns Nikhil if Lord Shiva, the destroyer and reproducer of the trinity, comes to know about the imminent extinction of the human race, He will be more than  happy to destroy this world Himself and then to rebuild it. Nikhil who first thinks it is some sort of joke from that strange person who is wearing a dress like the gods from the mythological serials. But, soon he realises that the person is real Lord Vishnu and the demons have already unleashed mysterious maggots to transform every single human being into zombies. He accepts the challenge and set out with his friends to save the humanity.

The special about this book is the inventiveness of its narrative structure. Plus, the cleaver use of language makes this book highly readable. The dialogues sound real and give you an insight into the lingo of the generation X. At times, the story becomes confusing but the things get cleared once you progress further. Jugal Mody might not be applauded for the literary merits of his debut book by the critics but will certainly get thumbs up from his readers for writing such a fantastical and fun filled book.

http://www.thebookreviewindia.org/articles/archives-1093/2012/november/11/.html

India’s Olympic Story 

(The review published in The Book Review, November 2012 issue)

An outcome of three-way collaboration between British Council, Abhinav Bindra Foundation and Tulika Publishers, India’s Olympic Story is a slim book targeted to teenagers but can also be useful to anybody interested in a quick read about the Olympic Games and the Indian achievements at this greatest sporting extravaganza.  

Divided in to two sections, the first part of the book gives us the historical details about the Olympics. It delineates the mythology behind the beginning of the ancient Olympic Games which dates back to 776 BCE. The saga of the modern Olympics started in 1896 when its first edition was organised in Athens, Greece. The first section also has information about the Indian association with the Olympic movement.  In 1900, Norman Pritchard, an Indian of British decent, who had entered the Paris Olympic Games casually, became first Indian to win a medal. Later, in 1927, Indian Olympic Association was formed and  the very next year a contingent of 22 players was formally sent to participate in the Amsterdam Olympics. The team returned with gold in hockey. After that the country has participated in every edition of the Summer Olympics. In the Winter Olympics, Indian participation has been occasional. The most delightful inclusion in this section is the information about the Paralympic, the special version of the Olympics that is organised for the physically challenged people. There is also a chapter on traditional Indian games and rural Olympics.

The second half of the book  profiles some of all-time great Indian Olympians. Noteworthy among them are Dhyanchand, the magician of field hockey, Milkha Singh, the flying Sikh, Abhinav Bindra , the gold medalist shooter and K D Jadhav. Out of these four,  Jadhav remains an unsung Olympic hero despite being the first individual medal winner of independent India. A big achievement by any yardstick. It was K D Jadhav who ‘paved the way for future Olympic athletes with his determination to excel, unflinching dedication, single-minded focus and never-say-die spirit. He achieved the impossible without having access to state-of-the-art training facilities and money’

Aesthetically produced and beautifully illustrated, the book is also replete with interesting anecdotal stories, games trivia and witty cartoons. 

http://www.thebookreviewindia.org/articles/archives-1082/2012/november/11/.html