“The Hanuman Chalisa by Tulsidas is one of the best-known and best-loved poems in the world. Tens of millions of people recite it by heart, and chant it daily, as well as in times singularly joyful or sorrowful—or when they...
In a small village on the ever-growing outskirts of Delhi, an 8-year-old girl is playing by herself in her father’s fields when she sees two adults doing something unusual. A few pages later, one of the adults is dead, and...
In Edison, our hero Prem is challenged to explain “What is good about Hindi movies?” It’s not something he has thought about – to a devotee, they just are. Pondering the question, he comes up with They crammed it all...
In a way, it feels unnecessary to review this novella, because Colm Toibin’s Foreword already did such a good job of reviewing it, very comprehensively and in the most complimentary of terms. The novel’s protagonist is Bombayite Sandeep, 10 years...
~ A History of Burning, by Janika Oza ~ Grand Central Publishing, 2023 He hadn’t seen his family in nearly fifty years. His mother was gone, his middle sister too. These sentences, about 100 pages into Janika Oza’s A History...
~ Burma Sahib, by Paul Theroux ~ Mariner, 2024. In 1920, a young Englishman called Eric Blair sailed out to become a sahib in the Raj. He was stationed in Burma as a policeman, overseeing the Burmese and Indian ‘natives’...
~ The Museum of Failures, by Thrity Umrigar ~ Algonquin, 2023. This is by no means the worst of Umrigar’s novels, but it is not her best either. It is a very readable, pleasant novel, set within a Parsi community...
~ The Story of a Widow, by Musharraf Ali Farooqi ~ Knopf (Canada), 2008. The Story of a Widow is a lovely book by Musharraf Ali Farooqi about a middle-aged woman in Karachi adjusting to widowhood. The story begins as...
~ The Other Woman: 16 tales of Love and Deception, a collection edited by Monica Das ~ HarperCollins, 2009. n an interview at the end of The Other Woman, a collection of short stories primarily about extramarital affairs, editor Monica...
~ The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese ~ Grove Press, 2023. Having read Verghese’s other novels (Cutting for Stone, The Tennis Partner, and My Own Country), I was fairly confident I would enjoy his latest, The Covenant of Water....
~ Knife, by Salman Rushdie ~ Penguin Random House, 2024. At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a...
~ A Great Country, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda ~ Mariner Books, 2024. Over the last few years, many damning reports and videos of police brutality and bias against African-Americans have emerged and been disseminated via the internet, sparking the Black...
It’s not that the storyline lacks plausibility. Some of us are all too familiar with the NRI engineer, MD or MBA grad who goes to India for 3 weeks and comes back married to a virtual stranger, the so-called ‘marriage...
Here are five stories, set in Southeast Asia and on the Indian subcontinent-each one bearing the weight and substance of a short novella-narrated by young women who find themselves, often as expatriates, face to face with the compelling circumstances of...
When I was 30, a well-intentioned, non-Indian adult suggested I write a letter to my mother, let her know how she had made me feel for decades – get it all out. I smiled and said, Indian daughters don’t do...
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