Lines in Books

Sometimes a door will open unexpectedly. A door through which we enter an unimaginable past – a past that is enmeshed with our present. There was once a thriving Chinese-Assamese community in Assam with many of its members being the descendants of tea garden workers who had been brought to India by the British in slave-like conditions. That community, as an author learns, rarely knew of any home but India. Nonetheless, it was torn asunder by the 1962 Indo-Chinese war and, in uncovering the story of the community, the author learns his own tale.

He had strived so hard after something that was still elusive. Perhaps the answer lay not in striving but in being. In simply accepting that the loneliness would never be eliminated fully, but that one could deal with it by learning to treat it like a companion and no longer an adversary. It had been many years now since he had thought of the girl he had loved, Seno. Some days he could not remember her face. It became a blur to him and he had stopped trying to put features to the blur. So it was not a hankering after her that brought on this loneliness. It was just a part of being human. A lone hunter, haunted by a dream, goes in search of a heart stone which he'll pluck from the depths of a sleeping river far away. Along the way, he encounters the natural and the supernatural, hospitality and brutality, guilt and redemption. Life is fragile and fraught with danger, and many of those alive and well on his outward journey are dead by the time he returns.

The places we are born come back. They disguise themselves as migraines, stomach aches, insomnia. They are the way we sometimes wake falling, fumbling for the bed-side lamp, certain everything we've built has gone in the night. We become strangers to the places we are born. They would not recognise us but we will always recognise them. They are marrow to us; they are bred into us. If we were turned inside out there would be maps cut into the wrong side of our skin. Just so we could find our way back. Except, cut wrong side into my skin are not canals and train tracks and a boat, but always: you. [....] But the telling is involuntary and won't stop even when I slip sleeping tablets into your tea or try and distract you with old black and white films on my laptop or talk to you about the history of lexicography or spread jigsaws on the floor for you. Your mouth gapes open and they repeat and repeat. [....] The places we are born come back to us. They disguise themselves as wor...

"I'll let myself out," he said, heading for the door with a slight limp. "Nobody likes cockroaches in their own house, right?" Anjali clenched the letter tightly as Captain Brent hobbled out. Inspired by her great-grandmother, Anasuyabai Kale’s experiences, a woman writes of a family's participation in the freedom struggle, and of fighting on two fronts: against British colonialism and against the caste system, sometimes making mistakes along the way but always doing the best they can. Along the way, she critiques unthinking loyalty to the rule of law, and describes a British officer's change of heart upon his experiencing the power of Ahimsa, a conscious choice not to employ violence.

I have to find a solution to it. Perhaps you, in your remoteness, will be my solution. Maybe it is a kind of redemption to speak, freely and truly, to a total stranger? Maybe there is no other redemption? I will find out. I hope to find out. What happens when you're forced to deal with what noone should have to?   When the world of the real as we know it overlaps with the world as it could be unbeknownst to us? What do you do when you're drawn into another's life? When the most horrific scene you've seen isn't in a film but in your own life? Whom do you tell? Is it easiest, and possibly most sensible, to leave your words to strangers?

'I don't really know Serena that well so I wouldn't like to comment.'   'Oh please.'   'I have been to a party at her brother's house in Kasauli, though.'   'And?'   'The garden was full of dahlias in the most vulgar colours.' A slice of contemporary Delhi so realistically described that one can't help but feel one knows each of the characters, their scandals, and the glee they take in each others' misfortunes. "Once these matters were unearthed, it was common practice in Delhi to raise a beautifully threaded eyebrow and inquire in bafflement: 'Didn't you know?'," as the author points out. 

Love and hatred were the witch’s currency. Her garden was an aphrodisiac garden and a poison garden. Roses and myrtle and passionflowers grew entwined with hemlock and foxgloves, mandrake and nightshade, the heavy-headed, bell-shaped flowers of dark purplish-red from which was distilled the belladonna eye-drops that had killed my mother. A book about women's lives, somehow filled with magical realism and grounded in reality. A retelling of Rapunzel, the tale of the witch who imprisoned her, a tale (largely imagined, of course) of Charlotte-Rose de la France, granddaughter of a Marshal of France, the tale of Athenaïs, the Sun King's mistress, the stories of their mothers, rivals, sisters, mentors . All women who played the cards they were dealt as well as they could, who could be kind, who turned to sorcery, who were trapped in worlds made by men sometimes considerate, often capricious. 

When I read poems new to me, I have to read them slowly and carefully, and, if it is a poem I particularly like, several times. Then at last it may become one of those I know so well I only have to let the book fall open at the page as I walk past, between washing line and ironing board, and in the length of time it takes to switch the basket of washing from one hip to the other, I will have taken in the sense and beauty of a line or two and it will sustain me. An exchange of letters between a middle-aged woman and the curator of a museum which houses the preserved remains of a prehistoric man which she has thought of visiting since childhood, never making trip to the museum herself. She has, all her life, tended to take the path of least resistance saying, early on: "It is hard for us to say, isn’t it, that nothing is so fixed it cannot be altered? The seasons do not linger, waiting for it to be convenient for the sowing and the harvesting. The artefacts you study are what th...

You are my bastard son. A father makes provision for his illegitimate son reminding him that he is his father, a man makes allowances for his unworldly brother, a wrestler becomes a servant in a businessman's house and attempts to have his son continue what he claims is tradition, a self-indulgent writer laments having ignored his duties towards his now-dead son... Set primarily at the end of the Raj, this novel talks of the ties which bind families and the passions which tear them apart. 

Time played curious tricks too: expanding, contracting, burrowing back into itself in the form of memories that were more vivid than daily life. Particular moments -like the few minutes I'd spent staring at the stone- expanded till they felt like years, but that would be followed by whole days that drifted by in a haze of shock and grief. I couldn't tell you a single thing that happened on any one of those days. Gradually, though, a routine began to emerge.  The tale of the Trojan war told by a woman whose nearby city was conquered and who became Achilles' slave. A contemporary story overlain over an older tale, sometimes clumsy, almost always honest, the effects of trauma are laid bare in its telling.

A Goanese survivor recounts her brother's experiences: 'One day he saw beautiful butterflies in a certain spot. He looked around expecting to see a lot of flowers in this area but what he saw horrified him. The butterflies were covering a bloated corpse and they must have been feasting off the juices that oozed from the decaying body.' Painting such terrifying images of of death and decrepitude, Jangam's narrator says that these butterflies had exclusive sovereignty (xamarajyo) in this realm of death. A study in contrasts, glimpsed at in this line from its introduction, as the tale of an Indian peasant's family and their neighbours making their way back to India in the wake of WWII and the rise of Burmese nationalism unfolds. Their flight is facilitated by a nationalist to whom they've been family, a nationalist who later pays dearly for aiding them but who had wanted them gone. The Indians themselves struggle to retain their humanity on their arduous journe...

IT WAS A sacred place, an ancient place. Here was the confluence of river and bay, of sky and forest, salt marsh and slough, the water stretching its fingers far into the land as if it meant always to reclaim it. Here was a presence that gave weight to the fog and the rain, that lingered in the swollen air, even in sunlight, especially in moonlight. By the side of a river where spirits seem to speak to her, a woman learns how easily a man's protection of her can mean his control of her, and how the appearance of his love (whether he's her father or her husband or someone else entirely) may mean nothing. In fact, it is so easily put on to gain cooperation and keep its subject willingly tethered to him that he himself may believe in his lies. And, yet, despite all that, she also learns that she can come into her own, and that there are those both in the world of the living and that of the dead who will stands by her even if they are not perfect themselves. 

I swallow cooling coffee again and taste the coarse ambiguous sweetness of not being dead. .... I thought on the child we never had. For months or years after a death you carry a weight till in time you learn a different and harder sorrow. You learn that you live on, and in time find yourself sleeping again, then smiling once in a while, noticing a fine day or a good face. And the knowledge that you can and do go on living when people you love do not, that is a grown-up sorrow at last. After a brush with death, a middle-aged man explores his father's life as a young doctor in bustling Penang at a time when he himself has shifted to a sparsely-inhabited island in Scotland. One is a Presbyterian atheist with a strong work ethic while the other is relatively laid back but, for both of them, the consequences of their actions are determined by the times they live in. Both father and son learn that neither life nor love are easy, and that death is always around the corner. Generation...

Minutes dragged by as if mired in mud and whole days vanished as if struck from the calendar. …. During the week, even if one hated one’s job, one went to work because one had to, because there was no choice in the matter. People congregated in their work places with a sense of communal resignation. It was relatively easy to give the appearance of being a normal member of society. Weekends were different. A great deal and happen even in the sleepiest towns, evil can be an accident, the open spaces which the rich enjoy can make activity invisible but, even so, what is done lives on in memory and colours perception and, ultimately, there is always a price to be paid for all that's done even if no reparation is possible.

I suspect that the world would be a better place if all of us wore our damage proudly on the outside, but we’ll never know, will we? Life makes us who we are, Edith – deformities and all – and how we react to the cards we’re dealt is what makes us unique individuals. In the end, it is our differences that define our humanity.’ No it wasn’t: it was humanity that defined the deformities. Memory, often of our worst moments, is the aid by which we construct the tale of our lives, by which we define who we are and develop a sense of ourselves. Sometimes, memory or the acquisition of knowledge of our own past becomes too much for us, and the professionals meant to support us are far from perfect themselves. A tale of how we shape our own reputations, of how the quest for fame possibly in the guise of scientific enquiry can override basic decency, of how identities are constructed for us to cope with the realities thrust on to us, of how we construct identities to cope with the realities whi...

Never had much time for patriotism myself. It was Das Kapital on my mind as a young man, not thistles. An internationalist, right? Tear doun the borders and lets have the international brotherhood of man! We got it in the end, except the global economy is not exactly what we had in mind. History, eh? A stone which is associated with Scottish nationhood has been lost for centuries; the English (incorrectly, in this telling) once imagined that they had appropriated it in 1296. A nationalist seeks it, hiring a murderous contractor to aid him in his quest. An exploration of how thin the lines between good and evil are, of the dynamics of friendship, of how old loyalties can sometimes hold down the generations. "Yet kindness may outlast our thinning hair and fading senses. As the world grows dark, we're surely going to need it," as the author unfailingly reminds us. 

She studies the even contours of his face. He wishes to appear reasonable, and has allowed his expression to soften slightly. When he continues, the softness vanishes. It is smooth and complete, like the erasure of chalk marks. ‘You must know, little one, that this is une arme à double tranchant. You know this expression, yes? If you do not behave with courtesy, then there will be difficulties.  "The river, in the evening light, is a dull skein of rust." A book best read slowly filled as it is with beautiful imagery that would be too much of it were not slowly savoured. It examines the nature of creativity, the value of art & its importance being associated with memory, the power of language, and the loss of a person's innocence as time goes by. All this in a work which reads like a musical composition that repeatedly returns to the theme of a child who, with words, crosses the threshold between human creativity and nature's inviobility.

The sky takes on a pearly, almost azure hue; a kind of peace descends from it. You might mistake it for hope. …. They thought they had gone far enough into the inclement North to be forgotten. They were only half right, but what could they do? However far you flee, your grandchildren will have to flee one day in their turn. An exploration of the value of community and the inevitability of community in one form or the other when repression is a form of politics, silence doesn't necessarily ensure survival, the civil services are co-opted to realise totalitarianism, and consensual communalism can be subverted by a snitch. All this against the background of nature,  relatively constant, while humans are doomed to repeat their mistakes. 

...to tell yourself this also: that if you had been there, you would have kept your kindness, kept your faith, kept your hope alive. That you would not be silent, that you would be strong, resistant. .... But you were not there and this is not your story. I thank the Lord that not everyone is a victim. But I ask forgiveness, too. Because I was there and I know that not every victim is innocent. The lies we tell ourselves to survive are explored in this fictional autobiography in which a woman, almost the sole survivor in her family, tells her daughter of being shipwrecked, and of then being stranded along with her fellow passengers on an island with a leader intent on stealing the wealth carried by the ship. So intent on doing so that he would kill many of those on the island.

Bade Pasha like the mothers of brides from other elite Muslim houses of that time would send two women along with the bride. One of them, Khaiser Bee was elderly and in charge of looking after the bride's needs …. The other, Champa, was young, frisky and ugly. She would serve, amongst other duties, as stand-in for her mistress on days she was not available to the master. It was the usual arrangement. .... As Khalajaan often said, “She never betrayed me to the very end and nor did Champa. I wondered what there was to betray but did not deem it important enough to ask her." Champa never had to stand in for Khalajaan as her husband had no need of her, or his wife for that matter. Her life is almost entirely unremarked on beyond her mistress' appreciation of her loyalty. The book provides a fascinating insight into the lives of the Muslim aristocracy of the erstwhile state of Hyderabad, of how they coped (or didn't) after the state became a part of India.