Stranger than Fiction
~ Stealing Green Mangoes, by Sunil Dutta ~ Two brothers, of whom one grows up to be a cop and one to be a criminal. It sounds like a Hindi film script, indeed. But this dichotomy is just one of...
South Asian
No Place Like
~ A House for Mr Misra, by Jaishree Misra ~ Buying or building a house is a fraught exercise for any couple. Peculiar aesthetic preferences are discovered, behaviour under stress is tested, disagreements about location, style and price develop, and...
From Mayur Palli to Gurgaon: Delhi’s Different Worlds
~ The Windfall, by Diksha Basu ~ Diksha Basu’s The Windfall is not as light and flaky as many contemporary ‘society’ novels on the Indian-Writings-in-English literary scene. In fact, it is quite an astute and well observed novel under the...
Empowerment through Erotica
~ Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, by Balli Kaur Jaswal ~ The Punjabi widows of the title live in London, perhaps not one’s first guess at a location for women living heavily circumscribed lives. But these women live in Southall,...
The Post Office
For decades our local Bangalore post office remained unchanged, growing more and more decrepit. By 2017 the whitewash had long since faded, there were holes in the roof, and the lighting inside was provided by a few faint bulbs. Most...
Pondicherry Bikers
Pondi is full of women on scooters and cycles. In other Indian cities too there are plenty of women drivers, but in Pondi it seemed like a quarter to a third of the two-wheelers were driven by women. There are...
Anglo-Indians and ‘Home’
~ Mulligatawny Soup, by Manorama Mathai ~ A young woman decides to discover more about the Indian father who abandoned her English mother to return to Calcutta. Superficially this might sound like a teenage finding-onself tale, but this is really...
Social Realism: Divorce
~ Custody, by Manju Kapur ~ This novel contains Manju Kapur’s most radical protagonist to date. If one regards Kapur’s five novels as a series in her ouevre, Custody challenges Indian tradition and Indian middle class gender roles in a...
Gentle charm with a Sinhalese flavour
~ A Disobedient Girl, by Ru Freeman ~ “She loved fine things and she had no doubt she deserved them.” This is the opening sentence of this debut novel, and one which made me smile. A good, provocative opening sentence...
Intersecting lives in a fluid history
~ A God in Every Stone, by Kamila Shamsie ~ For those of us who are avid Shamsie-readers, this sixth novel is an eagerly awaited one. Kamila Shamsie’s first four novels (In the City By the Sea, Salt and Saffron,...
Love and Deception
~ In the Country of Deceit, by Shashi Deshpande ~ In the Country of Deceit is an entirely and distinctively Deshpande novel; the texture, the characters, all typically and instantly recognisably of Deshpande’s voice and style. For admirers of Deshpande’s...
Important theme, but unconvincing harvest
~ Foreign, by Sonora Jha ~ The context of this novel contains many interesting elements: the protagonist is an Indian woman who after rejection by her son’s father, migrated to the US and had not been back to visit India...
Disconcerting Social Satire
~ How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, by Mohsin Hamid ~ I am left curiously pleased and yet discontented by Mohsin Hamid’s third novel. Hamid seems to have come to fame as a result of his 2nd novel. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which...
Ten elegant pieces
~ Video, by Meera Nair ~ It’s hard to browse a bookstore these days without coming across a book of short stories from India or the diaspora. Some such collections may therefore not get all the attention they deserve, and...
Surfeit of melodrama
~ Madras on Rainy Days, by Samina Ali ~ In her first novel, Samina Ali has fallen prey to that common problem of first-time novelists: the temptation to stuff every possible ‘issue’ into a single story. Which is a pity;...
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