Survivor
I could not wait to read this book. Rushdie has written 22 books in his 77 or 78 years of life, and of those, only 2 have been non-fiction – Joseph Anton, and now Knife. These are the only 2 books...
South Asian
Secrets and Lies in a Crumbling Kolkata Mansion
Nayantara Roy’s debut novel is a nicely complex addition to the Indo-American fiction genre. Her protagonist, Lila De, was born in Kolkata and lived there until she was 16, when she moved to America to join her father and stepmother...
Lost in a Blissful Translation
“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...
Love and death in Teetarpur
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...
The Indian immigrant experience – Bollywood esh-tyle!
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...
A bubble poised perfectly for a fleeting moment
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 Life re-made…again and again
~ 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...
A functionary in the Raj
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’ who worked in the teak forests and rubber plantations...
A readable rehashing of stereotypes
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 in Bombay. This novel is fairly conventional, the classic story of...
A Story of New Beginnings
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 Mona Ahmad reflects on her marriage and wonders what, if anything, she should do...
Infidelity, Indian style
n an interview at the end of The Other Woman, a collection of short stories primarily about extramarital affairs, editor Monica Das says she was interested in studying the literary representation of polygamy and bigamy and their adverse socioeconomic impact...
Confluent storylines on a Kerala river
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. However, I was not expecting to enjoy it as much as I...
What does not kill you…
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 knife just after I came out on stage at the...
Looking away from injustice, until it’s one of your own
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 Lives Matter movement. Some parts of the Indian-American community stayed out of...
Just another clichéd arranged marriage
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...
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