A home for homeless women
~ Song of the Cuckoo Bird, by Amulya Malladi ~ In 1961, an 11-year-old girl called Kokila arrived at an ashram in a small town in Andhra Pradesh. Girls were married young in those days, but only moved into their...
Books
Community Secrets
~ Breaking the Silence: Domestic Violence in the South Asian American Community. Edited by Sandhya Nankani ~ Domestic violence is a dirty secret in the South Asian-American community but in the last decade or so it has become less hidden....
Caustic Comedy
~ No Onions Nor Garlic, by Srividya Natarajan ~ This insouciant first novel starts with a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Chennai University. Sundar, Amandeep, Murugesh and Rufus audition for parts, convinced from a brief scan of the...
Nomads in Changing Times
~ Desert Places, by Robyn Davidson ~ Robyn Davidson is an Australian woman with a fondness for and familiarity with camels. Some years ago she travelled the Australian desert with 3 camels, occasionally in company with Aborigine groups, and chronicled...
Clinical Investigations
~ Stillborn, by Rohini Nilekani ~ This medical thriller set in Bangalore has a plot involving vaccine development, clinical trials and medical research. Being tangentially involved in those fields, and having connections to Bangalore, I picked it up immediately. The...
Intersectionality
~ Out on Main Street, by Shani Mootoo ~ I was favourably inclined towards this book before I opened it: I’d read Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, and had heard good things about Out on Main Street already. Still,...
Contraception through the ages
~ Taking Precautions: An Intimate History of Birth Control, by Shyama Perera ~ Luridly coloured condoms and a pack of birth control pills adorn the front page of this history of contraception. (The back cover also features colourful condoms.) This...
Duty vs. individualism in a Muslim-American family
~ The Writing on my Forehead, by Nafisa Haji ~ Haji’s first novel has a beautifully evocative title; the first chapter tells of the protagonist’s childhood memories of her mother tracing Quranic verses on her forehead with a finger, to...
Culture Clash Cliches
~ The Bride Wore Red, by Robbie Clipper Sethi ~ The author is an American woman who married a Sikh man, and the book is a collection of short stories about American women who married Sikh men. Most first-time authors...
Punjabi Women of flesh and blood
~ English Lessons and Other Stories, by Shauna Singh Baldwin ~ Women from the Indian subcontinent are often portrayed in film and novel as strong but feminine, conservative in many ways, deeply devoted to family, silent sufferers, subject to the...
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