The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (Atlantic Monthly Press)

The Inheritance of Loss is a novel written by Kiran Desai. Desai was born in India in 1971 and got her education in India, the U.S. and in England. It is her second novel and was originally published in 2006. It won the Booker Prize the same year, a prize given to the best work written in the English language and published in either the U.K. or Ireland. 

The story is about two main characters - Biju and Sai. Biju is an illegal alien living in the United States and trying to get that one precious item many Indians long for…an American green card. He is the son of the cook who works for Sai’s grandfather. Sai lives in a mountainous region called Kalimpong in the state of West Bengal at a place called Cho Oyu. She is an orphan but lives with her maternal grandfather, the cook that works for him, and a dog named Mutt. 

Sai’s grandfather’s name is Jemubhai Patel. He is a retired judge who despises Indians and their way of life. He hated the lifestyle of Indians. The way they dress, the way they eat  so he would eat chapatis, an Indian-style flatbread, with a fork and knife. 

Away from the prying eyes of the international community, there was a small group of Maoists trying to make a country for themselves in Nepal. During the same era, a small group of rebels are fighting against the Indian goverment to create a nationl called Ghorkaland, an area in West Bengal, for the Nepali-speaking Indians.  The story opens with a couple of young Ghorkas entering Cho Oyu who demand that Sai’s grandfather give them his guns. They vanish as suddenly as they appear and the Judge calls the police the following day. 

The police interview both the Judge, his grand-daughter and the cook but seem to be as inept as the young Ghorkas. The three people who live at Cho Oyu just want to live happy, quiet lives. The Judge is a grumpy old man and reminds one of American sitcom icon Archie Bunker, although the Judge is not quite as bigoted as Archie. Sai is more interested in her flourishing relationship with her tutor Gyan and the judge is waiting for his son to become a success in the United States and perhaps invite him to live with him in the land of milk and honey.

The book might come off as a bit depressive but it does have its comic moments. Desai’s story is about the ever elusive effort of belonging to someone or somewhere. She shows the contrast between Indians who despise their own kind, such as Sai’s grandfather, and yet is not accepted by the British who he tries to mimic. It is also about the anger other Indians have for people like Sai’s grandfather, believing that they are not interested in keeping their traditions. In the end, in Desai’s story, nobody seems to be happy. Not Sai, not her grandfather, and certainly not Biju who has to move from one job to another to escape being caught by agents for the U.S. Immigration Department. 

It’s my belief that life is only as good as you make it, no matter the circumstances. As one of the old cliches goes, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day”. ~Ernie Hoyt

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Counterpoint)

“Shortly after Olivia went away with the Nawab,” her abandoned husband, an English bureaucrat who was “upright and just” met his second wife. She was from a family of “cheerful women with a sensible and modern outlook on life,” ones who became fascinated by Olivia only after they became elderly widows. They told the scandalous story to the second wife’s granddaughter, augmenting them with Olivia’s letters and journals that provided details of this shocking liaison with an Indian prince. The granddaughter, a woman with so little personality of her own that she narrates this novel without once vouchsafing her own name, takes Olivia’s private papers and follows in her footsteps to India forty years afterward.

She’s here to “do research,” she claims but instead she seems eager to lay claim to Olivia’s life. The Raj, however, is a crumbling memory. The Europeans who flock to India in the Sixties are a whole other species from the British who held sway over the country in the 1920’s. While Olivia was surrounded by solid and morally upright bastions of the Empire, her follower finds her fellow countrymen to be “a derelict lot” who congregate in the yard of the local guesthouse, looking like “souls in hell.” 

When she ventures to the palace that became Olivia’s home, she finds an empty shell with bits of discarded furniture. The Nawab’s descendants have abandoned it to live in London, disdaining its 19th Century discomforts in favor of 20th Century plumbing. However, through Olivia’s account of its romantic past, the narrator does her best to find those same influences in her own experience of India.

But Olivia was pretty and charming and silly, while the narrator is homely and passive and imitative. While Olivia was overwhelmed by a dashing aristocrat who was an “irresistible force of nature,” her follower drifts into satisfying the sexual needs of an Englishman who claims to be a holy man. She then becomes pregnant by her Indian landlord. There is no true parallel between Olivia and the woman who struggles to assume her adventurous life in a place where that sort of life no longer exists.

The only similarity is one that was presented by a Major who was a contemporary of Olivia’s. For those who love India, the dangers of the country’s many beauties makes them vulnerable. “India always finds the weak spot and presses on it,” he warned. Olivia would never have listened and her follower ignores them, eager for the immersion that she achieves in the cheapest way possible.

It’s a surprise to many that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was not in fact Indian by birth. The daughter of an affluent Jewish couple who fled to England from Hitler’s Germany, she married an Indian architect and made her home in New Delhi. She lived in India, raising her family and writing novels until 1975 when she and her husband made their home in New York. She is the only writer to receive both the Booker Prize and an Academy Award, earned when she joined the team of Merchant and Ivory as a screenwriter. 

Although her reputation was made by writing about the subcontinent, Jhabvala said her background as a British-educated German-born European made her “ill at ease with India.” That analytical separation is evident in Heat and Dust, making it a scathing examination of cultural appropriation and the people who profit from it.~Janet Brown

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If an Elephant Loses Weight, It is Still an Elephant by Aftab Seth (Keio University Press)

Aftab Seth was the Indian ambassador to Japan from 2000 to 2003. He also spent a year as an exchange student at Keio University from 1962 to 1963 and also served in the Indian Embassy between the years 1970 to 1972. He once again returned to Japan in 2004 to become the director and professor of the Global Security Research Institute. 

After coming to Japan in 2000 as Ambassador to Japan, Seth was inundated with requests for interviews by different magazines and newspapers. He also met a number of editors from different newspapers as well. He was asked to summarize his discussions with various journalists by the Yomiuri Shimbun who later published the article. He was then approached by Shodensha (a publishing house) who asked him if he would consider writing about his experiences in Japan from the time he was an exchange student and to give his opinions on the current state of the nation. 

Seth had a series of interviews with the publisher starting in April or May of 2001 and was completed in October. The notes and manuscripts from those interviews became a book that would be published in the Japanese language in December of 2001. 

The English edition of If an Elephant Loses Weight, It is Still an Elephant was edited and revised as “there were several elements in it which would not be well known to non-Japanese readers and therefore would be of little relevance and even somewhat redundant”. Seth amended the text “keeping in mind a wider non-Japanese audience that may be interested in the English version”. 

Seth based the title of the book on a Hindi proverb - Agar Haathi dubla hoga to kitna dubla hoga to describe the Japan that he saw when he returned to the country as Ambassador. The proverb translates to “If the elephant is lean, how lean will it be?”. The author chose the title for this book because “despite 10 years of flat , or even negative growth in the economy, this is still a country with enormous reserves of wealth”. Seth further elaborates by saying that “while the Japanese elephant may be somewhat slimmer, it is still quite robust” He uses the elephant as a metaphor for Japan’s economy and says, “So while the Japanese elephant may have lost a little weight, it is still unmistakably healthy”. 

Seth arrived in Japan for the first time in 1962, a mere ten years after the Occupation of Japan ended. The country was having an economic boom as Tokyo was chosen as the site for the 1964 Summer Olympics. His second stay in the country was in the seventies when Japan was still experiencing economic growth. The World Exposition was held in Osaka in 1970. Plans for a new international airport were being discussed and Japan was on its way to its Bubble Economy. 

Seth’s third extended stay in Japan was in the 2000. The bubble economy had burst and the country was suffering a long period of recession. However, Seth believes that Japan will recover from any problems it may face. He has seen the change in the country by living here at different times and he always finds the spirit of the Japanese people to be positive for the most part. 

As a long time resident of Japan and someone who has lived here continuously for nearly thirty years, it’s more difficult to see the vast changes that Seth saw. Of course you would expect big changes in ten or twenty years time. For me, the economy seems to be taking another downturn as the yen has lost a lot of its value. There was a time when the exchange rate was 360 yen to the dollar. The current rate is now 147 yen to the dollar. At this rate, I may not be able to enjoy visiting my home country. I can only hope that as the Japanese people have prevailed through many hardships that the yen will become strong again so I won’t lose any money when going home! ~Ernie Hoyt

Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore (UBS Publishers)

Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet, writer, and composer. He was born in Calcutta to a very prominent family and was the youngest of thirteen children The Tagores were known for the contributions to the Bengali Renaissance, a movement that took place in the Bengal region of the British Raj. 

Rabindranath Tagore is also the first non-European and the first Indian national to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his English translation of his book Gitanjali which translates to Song Offerings. He is also known for writing books, short stories, and essays. He wrote his first poem when he was only eight-years-old.

Gitanjali was first published in his native language of Bengali in 1910 and contained one hundred and fifty seven poems. Tagore translated his own poems into English and they were subsequently published by the India Society in England in 1912. The English collection only includes one-hundred and three of the original poems. The “songs” are based on the themes of love, devotion, and the quest to find spiritual enlightenment. 

The book has been translated into almost all the languages spoken in India and many other languages around the world. There is even an edition available in Braille. The new edition of these poems are transposed on beautiful pictures of India and its people.

USB Publishers in association with Visva Bharati University decided to create a special edition of the book including facsimiles of the original lyrics in Bengali and published the book in 2003. The book includes one hundred and three of his poems, plus a message from the Prime Minister of India, and introductions to the book by W.B. Yeats and excerpts from Andre Gide for the French translation, Ivo Stornilol’s prologue to his Portuguese translation and an excerpt from Suko Watanabe’s prologue to his Japanese translation of the book. 

Also included at the end of the book is Tagore’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech he gave on May 26, 1921 in Stockholm, Sweden. The gist of his speech is that not only literature, but education in general should be shared throughout the entire world. The East and West should continue to exchange ideas and learn from each other and should continue to do so in the future.

Even if one is not religious, it is easy to understand Tagore's devotion to a supreme being. The first poem begins: 

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.

This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again.

and fillest it ever with fresh life.

The poems ends with: 

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.

Ages pass, and still thou poorest, and still there is room to fill. 

The only thing a reader may have difficulty with is the English that Tagore uses. The poems are filled with words which sound obsolete today and are often associated with the Bible. Almost all the poems include the words thee, thou, thy, etc, but one has to take into consideration when the poems were written.

The book is also a great introduction to Indian literature. Aside from the biblical-like words, the language is easy to understand and it makes for a pleasurable reading experience. ~Ernie Hoyt

In Search of Amrit Kaur by Livia Manera Sambuy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

When Livia Manera Sambuy wanders into a Mumbai museum, she has no idea that this random excursion will lead to an obsession that would dominate her life for years. Among the photographs of India’s past royalty is a portrait of a stunningly beautiful young woman, Amrit Kaur. Information posted nearby identifies her as the Rani of Mandi, born a Punjabi princess, who lived in Paris during World War II. She sold her jewelry to help Jews escape from the Nazis, was arrested by the Nazis, and, the placard claimed, died in a German prison camp.

Stunned by this brief biography, Sambuy wonders why she had never heard this story before. She remains haunted by it and by the strong and beautiful face that had lived this life--or had she?

When a friend puts Sambuy in touch with Amrit’s daughter, who’s now an old woman of 78, a portion of what would prove to be an elusive truth is revealed. Amrit didn’t die in prison. She was freed within a few months, but her health was weakened, and she died seven years later in London.

“Come and see me,” the daughter says and when Sambuy makes the visit, she’s shocked to discover that “Bubbles,” as the old woman called herself, knows nothing more about her mother. Amrit had abandoned her children when Bubbles was only four years old, and never returned. The Raja of Mandi’s second wife became the woman the little girl thought of as her mother.

Even more intrigued by a woman who left her children and never looked back and by the rewritten history provided by the museum placard, Sambuy begins to delve into Amrit’s history. The daughter of a maharajah, the ruler of the Princely State of Kapurthala, Amrit was born into a world of luxury and hedonism. When the British stripped all responsibilities from the Indian princes, they allowed them to keep their wealth and titles, thereby creating what Gandhi termed “a gigantic autocracy” and the Viceroy Lord Curzon reviled as “frivolous and sometimes vicious spendthrifts and idlers.”

Amrit’s father spoke six different languages, including French, and developed a strong affinity for Paris, where he maintained a residence. Bringing elements of French architecture back to his Indian domain, he dazzled the more than 100 Europeans whom he invited to his oldest son’s wedding. Placing 240 tents in the palace gardens, he created a luxurious community for his guests, complete with a post office and a bank created for the occasion, and hosted a lunch for 800 in the midst of “bejeweled splendor.” When his only daughter was married, Amrit’s wedding was equally drenched in lavish excess.

But the maharajah had made a mistake. He had given Amrit an English education at a British boarding school and she had returned to India with revolutionary thoughts. When she was twenty-three, the beautiful and articulate rani was interviewed by the New York Herald Tribune where she championed the right for women to be educated and changing the minimum marriageable age for Indian girls. (Her own daughter would enter an arranged marriage at the age of seventeen, without complaint. But then Bubble’s father had refused to make his father-in-law’s mistake. Amrit’s daughter received her education in India, not in the West.)

A year after the interview, Amrit led a delegation of women to demand that the Indian Viceroy abolish child marriage altogether. Three years later her husband married his second wife and Amrit left him soon after.

The Raja class was reluctant to give up any of their power. Bubbles, herself the wife of the Raja of Bilkha, told Sambuy, “We printed our own money…We could hang anyone.” And their wealth was devoted to pleasure, in the same manner that once allowed the emperor who had erected the Taj Mahal to have two pairs of eyeglasses made, one with diamond lenses and the other with emerald.

Bubbles was the last of her kind to experience this extravagant life. When Indira Gandhi imposed taxes upon India’s royalty, they melted down their gold and silver furniture to meet the government’s demands. One of Amrit’s grandsons is now an auto mechanic who lives happily in Chicago.

When Sambuy tries to follow Amrit’s life in Paris, she finds it stunningly undocumented, until one day she receives a letter from a burlesque entertainer in the U.S. The woman has come into possession of a monogrammed briefcase filled with letters that were written by an Indian princess. With this some of the questions are answered--and rather shockingly--but not all. The follow-the-dots puzzle of an enigmatic life will never be fully connected.

This book is a history, not a biography, and its details are revealed in piecemeal fashion, in the way that the author discovered them. This adds to the quality of mystery that pervaded the life of Amrit Kaur but also creates a muddled narrative. Blithely skipping from Jacques Cartier learning Hindi so he could sell jewels to Indian potentates to the grisly details of life in a German concentration camp, Sambuy could have used a much more rigorous editor. 

Even so her book is a treasure trove of colorful details that will enchant future historians and enthrall anyone who has a penchant for the days of the Raj. As for Amrit, she undoubtedly rests easy, knowing that many of her secrets remain completely her own.~Janet Brown

The River by Rumer Godden (out of print)

In a family of four children that will soon expand to five, Harriet is alone. Her father is consumed with managing a jute mill, her mother is in the final stages of pregnancy. Bea, the eldest, is lost in a haze of beauty and the admiration that this gift has bestowed upon her. The only son, Bogie, is immersed in the natural world and the youngest daughter, Victoria, is reveling in her final moments as the baby of the family. 

Harriet has learned to find companionship within her thoughts and the words that emerge from them. An ardent observer of the life that swirls about her, she does her best to understand what she sees by chronicling it all in her journal and in her poetry.

What she sees is the extraordinary beauty of India, which is the only home she’s ever known. Growing up on the banks of Bengal’s Lakya river, behind the walls encircling a house that’s fashioned after an English manor and is surrounded by an English garden, Harriet goes beyond that sheltering enclosure to watch the river. 

The river contains “ life in and over its flowing,” crocodiles, porpoises, steamships, barges, fishing boats, under “a blue weight of sky.” In its depths are sunset river pearls, brought up by divers and wafting over it are the smells of incense, ghee, and honey. With the changes that are washing over her family, the river’s constancy comforts Harriet and gives substance to her racing thoughts. As she watches the moving water, ideas take shape and emerge in coherency as poems and stories.

Harriet is enraged at the thought of giving up her childhood and it puzzles her that Bea has relinquished it so thoroughly. At the same time, she feels pangs of jealousy that a young soldier, crippled by the war, ignores her in favor of Bea and she finds she’s unable to quell these feelings by playing with Bogie. In fact, she has unfamiliar feelings of responsibility toward the brother who has been her playmate. When he tells her he’s discovered a snake deep within the garden and is obsessed with watching it, Harriet is torn between telling her parents and keeping Bogie’s secret. Her decision will change her life forever.

A slender novella of less than 200 pages, The River is an extraordinary love letter to India during the final days of the Raj, as seen through the eyes of a thoughtful child. Harriet’s world is “not entirely European…not entirely Indian,” but “a mixture of both.” She lives in a conventionally English house but when Christmas comes, it arrives with the weather of “a cool fresh summer day.” Equally special to the family is Diwali when the river comes alive with thousands of floating lamps and the sky blazes with fireworks.

And yet when Harriet goes beyond the walls of the house, what she sees is a postcard. Walking through neighboring villages after dark, she passes through “a still life of figures and things, lit and quiet.” In love with what surrounds her, Harriet is a tourist, here for a while, then moving on.

Her life is patterned after Rumer Godden’s own Indian childhood. Forced to leave the country where she had lived since she was six months old, Godden returned when she was eighteen after going to school for five years in England. She remained in India until she was forty and her best novels are ones that reflect her life in that country: The River, Kingfishers Catch Fire, Black Narcissus. 

The most poignant of these is The River, steeped in the fresh and untarnished viewpoint of a child. Beauty and tragedy, perception and naivete, all combine to give a picture of the vanished lives of the English, yet Indian, children, like Godden and Kipling before her, who will always be torn between two cultures, two worlds.~Janet Brown

Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga (Knopf)

Aravind Adiga, author of the Booker Prize winning novel, White Tiger (and reviewed by Janet Brown in 2008) third book, Last Man in Tower, was published in 2011. It tells the story of a real estate developer who has his eyes on buying out Vishram Society, an apartment complex which consists of Tower A and Tower B. The buildings are located in the city of Mumbai, in India. 

If you were to ask about Vishram Society, “you will be told it is pucca - absolutely, unimpeachably pucca. It is important for the reader to know because “something is not quite pucca about the neighborhood - the toenail of Santa Cruz called Vakola”. You will infer from the context of the passage that pucca means something solid or permanent. 

Tower B is the newer and younger of the two buildings. It is a seven-story building that was built in the seventies. It houses many young executives who work in the financial district which is located nearby. It is the more desirable building of the two to buy or rent. 

Tower A is what most people think when people talk about Vishram Society. It is a six-story building which was founded in 1959. Many of the residents of Tower A have been living in the same building for thirty years or more. 

Real estate developer Dharmen Shah has made a very generous offer to the residents of Vishram Society, both Tower A and Tower B. Most of the people living there had never seen or held the amount that the wealthy builder is offering. He believes that all the residents will agree to the offer and will move out as soon as possible so he can build his latest and best luxury apartment complex which he has already named Shanghai. 

Shah had the Secretary of Vishram Society post his offer on the complex’s notice board. There was only one stipulation written at the very bottom - “The last date for the acceptance of the offer is the day after Gandhi Jayanti: 3 October. (Non-negotiable.) The offer will not be extended one minute beyond this date”. All residents must agree to the offer. If only one person refuses, then the offer will be withdrawn.

It is a dream-come true for most of the residents, but one man, Yogesh A. Murthy, a 61-year-old retired teacher, known to all as Masterji, is not interested in moving. The apartment is a reminder of the life he shared with his recently deceased wife. The rooms are also full of memories of not only his his daughter as well, who met a tragic end when she was pushed out of the train when she was on her way to school. 

As the deadline approaches, the residents' true colors begin to show. Friends become enemies, rumors are spread, and threats are made. However, Masteri does not budge from his refusal to accept the offer. 

In short, Adiga’s story is how greed and yearning can corrupt even the best of people. When the builder’s left-hand man, the person that does the dirty jobs fails to change Masterji’s mind, the builder relies on the residents’ greed to do what must be done? If you lived in a similar complex, how far would you be willing to get what you want? ~Ernie Hoyt

The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America by Saket Soni (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)

The U.S. Gulf Coast had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A year later, it was “a construction site of postwar proportions.” Over a million houses had been devastated and crippled oil rigs needed repairs or outright rebuilding from scratch. To hire skilled American labor meant paying union wages--welders, pipefitters, plumbers, and electricians didn’t come cheap. But there was a pool of experience that waited to be tapped--workers on Middle Eastern oil rigs who came from India, all of them easily lured by the thought of getting a U.S. green card. Not only would they be a source of cheap labor, they were a way to make some fast money. These men would pay anything to bring wealth and security home to their extended families and to give their children the opportunity to live well in America.

Five hundred Indian workers paid $20,000 each in response to an ad that promised Permanent Lifetime Settlement In USA For Self And Family. In two years or less, they would be given green cards. Their parents borrowed the money, sold their land, mortgaged their lives to give their sons this chance. Almost ten million dollars went to the men who made this swindle a success. 

When the workers arrived in America, they were shunted into labor camps where they paid $245  a week for a bunk in “a sardine-can trailer. They waited in line for their turn to use the toilets and showers in another trailer and then queued up to get breakfast in the cafeteria. The toilets overflowed, the showers leaked water that soaked the walls and floors, the bread was moldy, and the workers fell sick. They complained about the conditions but their main concern was when could they expect to receive their green cards. Nobody had answers for them and their complaints were met with a force of hired goons. They were threatened with deportation if they didn’t submit to the conditions of the camp. Then one of them heard about an Indian in New Orleans whose job was to help workers. He called a number on a business card and reached labor organizer Saket Soni.

A man still in his twenties with immigration difficulties of his own, Soni was a man who wasn’t afraid to take desperate measures. Slowly and carefully, he arranged a solution that deserves to be in a movie. In the two camps that housed the five hundred workers, one located in Mississippi and the other in Texas, the Indian workers walked out of the gates that barred them from the world outside.

Soni made the case that human trafficking had been reinvented in 21st century America. The five hundred men had been recruited through fraudulent means, with the recruiter keeping their passports as insurance that none of them would back out of the arrangement. Once they were on the job site, their impressive debt incurred in hopes of obtaining a green card kept them in involuntary servitude. They had to pay off that debt before they could return home.

When appeals to the Department went unanswered, Soni ventured into deeper drama--a march from New Orleans to Washington DC, a hunger strike to call attention to the workers’ case. But this is America where politics run deep below every surface. When it became known that ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) had been blocking their case from the very beginning, the workers and Soni himself were certain their cause was a hopeless one.

This book is a crash course in immigration policy, labor issues, and the intertwining of business interests with government agencies. Both a human tragedy and an example of how justice can prevail in spite of apparently insurmountable obstacles, The Great Escape rivals any fictional thriller for sheer nail-biting scenarios--but in this case they all happened in real life. Although this group of workers ended up with what they’d been promised, who knows how many more are being defrauded without recourse in this country, every day?~Janet Brown

The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise by Pico Iyer (Riverhead Books)

“What kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of increasing conflict?” This is the question that prompts Pico Iyer to cast his lively mind upon finding a paradise in earth, a location that  many of us would love to find after these past three years of illness, isolation, and death. Iyer, being a tease and iconoclast, explores the spots conventionally agreed upon as paradisiacal and ones that few would think of in those terms. His search begins in a country that attracts few tourists, the place he claims where the idea of paradise began.

Iran is where “paradise” began. “Paradaija” was coined in Iran and made its way to Greece where it was stolen and transmitted to a multiplicity of languages. In the Farsi language of Iran, “garden” and “paradise” share the same word, one that is reflected in Persian gardens, “ravishing visions of paradise,” and is used generously by that country’s poets. Iyer finds a foretaste of paradise when he’s driven down “quiet country roads lined with orchards of cherries and peaches.” When he reaches his destination, the home of the Iranian equivalent to Shakespeare, his driver unexpectedly recites one of the dead poet’s famous works, declaiming “I have made the world through a paradise of words.”

It’s through words that Iyer discovers the underlying puzzle of this beautiful country. Iran, a guide tells him, invented the double-edged sword and Iyer finds that same double purpose in the enigmatic words of the Iranian people whom he talks to. This is, he decides, “a world of suggestions, not certainty.”

Moving on, he chooses North Korea, which calls itself “the people’s paradise.” Examining this, he discovers the “ruthless elimination of imperfection,” beside which the fate of humans is secondary. The urban glories of Pyongyang he dismisses as a “massive stage set,” in which the skyscrapers are “ghost towers,” unused and empty. If paradise is a surreal state, Iyer has found it here.

From there he travels to Kashmir, long acknowledged to be India’s paradise, beloved by travelers, and filled with 600,000 Indian soldiers to quell the threat of Islamic rule; to the most remote Australian town that he can find, Broome, which isn’t paradise at all but shows “a different kind of reality”  to those who aren’t its Aboriginal inhabitants; to Ladakh, where he relives his “video nights” in a mountain paradise that was once a stop on the Silk Road and still absorbs imported foreign influences that change the surface but leave the core intact; to Sri Lanka, a legendary island paradise steeped in Buddhism and racked by suicide bombers, where Hindu Tamil and Buddhist Sinhalese are locked in a bloodbath of warfare.

In the end, Iyer goes to Varanisi, saying “I was unlikely to mistake it for paradise,” even though if one dies there, on the banks of its filthy river, paradise in the form of moksha, the end of reincarnation and all suffering, is guaranteed. Therefore it’s a city where people come to die, with flaming corpses lying upon burning ghats in “twenty-four hour cremations”, where others purify their lives by bathing in the Ganges, a holy river that flows past thirty sewers and is clogged with fecal coliform bacteria. In this place that Iyer calls a “Boschian riddle,” a city of ideas and belief, guided by ancient customs, he remembers a teaching of a Zen master, “The struggle of your life is your paradise.”

Iyer has always been a writer of froth and charm, with brilliant observations and shallow thoughts. In The Half Known Life, he returns to cities he visited in the past and examines them with the intellect he denied his readers in the past. This may well be the closest he will come to a biography, with his hints of his personal life--still a tease in spite of his often dazzling ideas that lurk beneath his cleverness. He’s written an invitation for all of us, to examine the struggle of our lives and discover our own paradise.~Janet Brown

Nine Lives : In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury)

William Dalrymple is a Scottish born writer who has lived on and off in India since 1989. His first book, In Xanadu, he followed the path of Marco Polo starting his journey from The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to the site of Shangdu, which is known more commonly as Xanadu, which is located in Inner Mongolia in China. Since then, he has written a number of travel books focusing mostly on Asia. 

Dalrymple’s books usually focused on what he experienced on his travels. The idea for Nine Lives came to him as he was walking up a mountain leading to the temple of Kedarnath, believed by the Hindus to be one of the homes of Lord Shiva. Dalrymple talked with many people on their pilgrimage to the temple. He met a naked and ash-smeared sadhu, one of India’s holy men. A sadhu is a religious ascetic, mendicant, or any holy person in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions. They have given up the worldly life in order to pursue and attain spiritual enlightenment.

Dalrymple was surprised by the sadhu he met. A man named Ajay Kumar Jha. Dalrymple had always assumed that most of the Holy Men he had seen in India “were from traditional village backgrounds and were motivated by a blind and simple faith”. So we asked Jha to tell him his story. Jha revealed that he had been a sales manager for an electrical company in Bombay, had received his MBA from a university and was highly regarded by his employers. 

Dalrymple met many people like Jha on his travels. With India’s rapidly growing economy and modernism, Dalrymple began to wonder what the effect of modernism had on religion. He believes that most Westerners view Eastern religions as “deep wells of ancient, unchanging wisdom”.  Dalrymple also says, “much of India’s religious identity is closely tied to specific social groups, caste practices and father-to-son lineages, all of which are changing very rapidly as Indian society transforms itself at speed”. 

Dalrymple wanted to know what does it mean to be a Holy man or a Jain nun in modern India. In this book, Dalrymple features nine people with differing religious views. He introduces by writing about how he met them, describes their practices, then asks the interviewee to tell their story in their own words of how they came to be where they’re at in this point of life. 

We are introduced to a Jain nun who is striving to reach moksha, which refers to the freedom from samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth. It is especially hard on her to stick to her vow of detachment while watching her friend slowly die by sallekhana, death by ritual fasting. The nun also decided to follow the path of her friend. 

You will meet Hari Das, a dalit, previously known as an Untouchable, the lowest caste in the caste system of India.  Das works as a manual laborer during the week and a prison warden on the weekends,  but for three months, during the Theyyam season which runs from December to February, he becomes a dancer possessed by a God and is respected by Brahmins, the highest caste in the Indian system. 

Each of the nine individuals' stories is different and eye-opening. As an irreligious person and a skeptic when it comes to the power of faith, I find the stories fascinating and incredulous. However, I’m also respectful of other people's beliefs and practices. Listening to these people tell the stories of how they came to follow their spiritual path may open your eyes to follow your own. 

For me, although I admit to being irreligious, I do follow the “Golden Rule” as said by Luke in the New Testament (Luke 6:31),  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  It sounds like good common sense to me. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Backward Place by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Fireside Book)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Germany. She married an Indian national and moved to New Delhi in 1951. She wrote many novels and several screenplays, including Room with a View which won an Academy Award. She is also the recipient of the Booker Prize for Fiction for her 1975 novel Heat and Dust. 

A Backward Place which was originally published in 1965 is set in India is a comedic look at the life of a group of expats and one Indian national. It is the story of their lives, their hopes and dreams, and is also full of everyday drama which any layperson can relate to. 

Bal, the Indian national and protagonist of the story, is a young and struggling actor, who dreams of making it big in the theater. Although he is dedicated to his profession, he is also married and has two children he must support. 

His wife, Judy, is an Englishwoman who works in a small office for the Cultural Dais and helps support the family. While Bal is a dreamer, Judy is pragmatic and a realist. As Judy works with government officials and other important and wealthy people, Bal tries to convince her to receive support from the Cultural Dais in starting a new theater troupe and production. 

Judy is friends with Etta, a woman originally from Hungary and carries the attitude of a Parisian. She is also not as young as she once used to be and tries desperately to hang on to her youth and continues to use her charm and body to get the men around her to do her bidding. She still retains a colonial attitude and looks down on the natives and speaks her mind as well. 

Then, there is Clarissa. A young woman who left her native Britain because she couldn’t stand the customs and attitudes of her own country. She feels as if she is more Indian than most Indians. For some reason, Clarissa enjoys being friends with the mean and spiteful Etta.

Finally, there are the Hochstadts. They are a German couple who had settled in England many years ago. They often thought of themselves as English but still spoke the language with a thick German accent and looked very central European. Dr. Franz Hochstadt accepted a two year appointment in India teaching economics at the University as an exchange professor. 

The story opens with Etta telling Judy she ought to leave her husband. Judy, who often comes off as timid or naive, was thrilled. Although she has no intention of leaving her husband, hearing Etta say it makes her feel worldly and proud. Judy loved visiting Etta because her home was more elegant than her own. 

Judy’s husband tells her that he must work one particular evening. He tells her, he was called by the great Bollywood actor Kishan Kumar. Judy had met Kumar previously and did not like him. She knew he was a successful film star and had an entourage of hangers on, and Bal was one of them. 

The lives of these six characters take a life on their own. Judy does get the Cultural Dais to support creating a new theater group, mostly at the persistent request of Bal, but when Bal’s dream seems to be coming to fruition, he tells Judy that he doesn’t want any part of it. Kishan Kumar has called him to Bombay with the promise of starting a new movie production office there. Now Bal is trying to convince Judy and the kids to move to Bombay. 

The story will make you laugh, will make you cry and at times will even make you angry. If a story can make you feel all these emotions, you know you are in for a good ride and no matter what the outcome, you can’t help but support all the characters in their endeavors. 

Bal will certainly want to make you follow your dream! ~Ernie Hoyt

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff (Ballantine Books)

Nobody in her village is precisely sure of how to categorize Geeta. Is she a widow? Is she a witch? Is she a murderer? Or perhaps she’s all three possibilities rolled into one. 

The only true fact that everyone can agree upon is that several years ago, Geeta’s abusive husband Ramesh disappeared without a trace, never to be seen again.  Finding--or creating--an explanation for this has kept the village gossips busy ever since and Geeta’s tarnished reputation has kept her old friends at a distance. 

That Geeta doesn’t seem to miss her husband allows the stories about her to take on an even darker shadow. She has developed her own jewelry business and appears to be more than happy to live alone. Some of her neighbors call her a churel, possessed by a demon that eats children and makes both men and women unable to come up with replacement offspring. Others speculate that she must be “mixed with dirt,” abandoned because she had betrayed Ramesh with other men. However many women secretly envy her. Geeta has no husband to drink up her earnings, to beat her, or to make any demands upon her at all. At last one of the unhappy wives comes to her, begging that she “remove my nose ring,” a veiled plea to get rid of the woman’s husband the way Geeta is rumored to have disposed of her own. Suddenly a woman who was happy to have been abandoned becomes a reluctant murderer, not once but twice, at the behest of women who are trapped in miserable marriages.

With two murders to her credit, Geeta loses the pariah status bestowed upon her with her supposed killing of Ramesh. She even acquires a male admirer. In spite of her pangs of guilt and the threat of imprisonment, her life is good--until Ramesh shows up, alive and repentant, eager to resume his marital privileges and take his share of his wife’s financial success.

This is a promising beginning to a novel that’s quickly burdened with too many characters all talking at once and far too many social issues. Domestic violence, the injustices of the caste system, the preference for light skin over dark, the dangers of adulterated booze sold at a profit, the history of the Bandit Queen Phoolan who became an outlaw to wreak revenge after she had been gang-raped, even the intricacies of village council politics are all tossed into what at first seemed to be a pleasant little black comedy with feminist undertones. 

If that weren’t enough to sink the story, it quickly becomes burdened with a surfeit of unnecessary dialogue and an overdose of slapstick plot twists, giving the impression that Parini Shroff might have originally intended this to be a movie script or a television situation comedy. Even its dramatic ending falls prey to a never-ending conversation between almost all of the leading characters. What should have been suspenseful and maybe even thrilling goes on for an interminable thirty-five pages of threats and quips until at last someone mercifully takes action.

It’s tempting to tell San Francisco attorney Shroff not to quit her day job, but that would be cruel. Instead let’s hope that she concentrates on what she seems to do best, creating entertainment content where her crowd of characters and their jumbled lives will find themselves perfectly at home.~Janet Brown

The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara (W.W. Norton & Company)

Born with his eyes wide open to a mother who died soon after his birth and a father who is disliked even by his own family, the ugly new baby needs an advantage and his stepmother provides it. Raj, she calls him, and his educated uncle gives the name its English translation, King.

King Rao is “a big name for a little runt,” his family says, but within a matter of years the child lives up to it. Through cleverness and chicanery his grandfather became owner of a coconut farm, even though he is a Dalit, one of the Untouchables. King Rao is the smartest of the grandchildren and he’s told often that someday Rao’s Garden will belong to him. 

This never happens. King Rao is sent to school, moves on to University, and is sent to the U.S. for graduate school. Out of a village that is “a hot wet nothing,” comes a man who will change the world and ultimately preside over it. 

Already known as a programming genius in India, in the U.S. King Rao becomes a software programmer who makes personal computers a staple in every household. He learns how to collect and use data in a way that gives him unprecedented power. When nationalism threatens to destroy the world, he presents his plan, Shareholder Government that unites every country and is guided by the Master Algorithm. “Algo” makes decisions based on the data provided by Social Profiles that every Shareholder, as in every person on earth, has from birth. The most successful Shareholders sit on the Board of Corporations and the chairman of the board is King Rao, a man who has taken on the status of a god but who is human enough to fall.

It’s his own mind that’s to blame for his ouster. King Rao has developed a means to connect human brains to the Internet but fails to realize that old brains no longer have the plasticity to make this happen. People die, King Rao evades responsibility, and a revolution is averted only by his voluntary exile.

Although this may sound like a run of the mill dystopian novel, Vauhini Vara isn’t the sort of writer to follow that path. She’s braided together three separate strands that take their turns in forming an intricate and diabolically clever plot. Life on the coconut farm with its traditions and inevitable dissolution continually alternates with King Rao’s rise, success, and eventual dethronement in the outside world, and then lapses into the idyllic life he shares with his young daughter on a lonely island. 

Once again hubris gets in the way. King Rao has given his daughter the Internet connection that once led to his downfall but even more dangerously, he has devised a way to filter his mind into hers. Not only is Athena constantly deluged with the Internet, she’s also a receptacle for her father’s brain--his thoughts, his memories, his consciousness. As all this flows into her,  King Rao quite literally begins to lose his mind.

Athena escapes, but with a terrible and inescapable knowledge. Like the system it toppled, Shareholder Government is based on consumption which has brought the planet to Hothouse Earth. Ever-increasing temperatures will destroy the world in a few generations unless corporate greed is stopped. She’s also the only one who knows that King Rao is not immortal.

Vara has constructed a heart-wrenching tragedy that has nothing to do with her human characters. It’s the beauty of the world, in Rao’s Garden and on the dreamlike island that demands our love and grief. “The sun, spraying its sweet, glittering light;” the intricate white lace that covers the world and enchanted an astronaut when he viewed the earth’s clouds from outer space; the beauty of an island that has been reclaimed by forests and fields of ferns that reach shoulder-high, where racoons and deer have no reason to be afraid; a Garden with a thousand trees, each one of them a source of food. 

The Immortal King Rao holds too many facets of contemporary life to be seen only as a novel. Vara, who was once a technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal and then business editor of The New Yorker, isn’t just an astute observer. She’s put the pieces together in a way that feels uncomfortably like a prophecy--and a tragedy. This is a book that will keep you awake at night, staring into the dark and looking for answers.~Janet Brown

The Windfall by Diksha Basu (Crown)

What happens when a middle-class Indian family  becomes extremely wealthy overnight? That is the question Diksha Basu answers in her debut novel, The Windfall. She doesn’t specifically ask this question but she has created a situation that is plausible as it is hilarious. 

Mr. Jha and his wife live in a small complex called Mayur Pallin in East Delhi. The atmosphere of the place reminds one of the bar on the American sitcom “Cheers”, “where everyone knows your name”. It is not a slum but a community where everyone knows everyone else’s business. The complex is filled with neighbors who like to gossip, where people still hang laundry on ropes from their balconies, and where you can hear the clatter of dishes as the neighbors prepare for dinner. 

The Jhas had lived in the complex for almost twenty-five years. He was fifty-two and his wife forty-three and their twenty-three year son Rupak is studying for his MBA at a university in the U.S. He has asked his closest neighbors and friends to gather in his living room so he can make an announcement before the gossiping could start. The Jhas were “moving out, and not just moving out, but moving to Gurgaon, one of the richest new neighborhoods in Delhi”. 

Mr. Jha had created a website which became quite successful and he managed to sell it for twenty million dollars. He overheard one of his neighbors saying the sale of the website and his newly acquired wealth was “a lucky windfall”. However, Mr. Jha knows that it was no “lucky windfall”. He had worked hard on the website for four years before selling it.

The Jhas were moving into a two-story bungalow with front and back yards. The house was located in a quiet area of Gurgaon, “away from the traffic and chaos of the rest of Delhi”. It was a place “that hawkers and beggars avoided”. The houses in Gurgaon were widely spaced apart and interaction with the neighbors was minimal. “Mr. Jha knew he was supposed to want that - that was how rich people’s tastes were supposed to be.”

Now that Mr. Jha is rich, he wants to fit in with his new neighbors. He recently bought a new car, a Mercedes, which was embarrassingly delivered to his home in Mayur Palli. After he meets his new neighbor, Mr. Chopra, he feels the need to one-up Mr. Chopra on everything, much to the chagrin of his wife.

Meanwhile, his son in America is failing his classes. He is currently on academic probation and if his grades don’t improve he will have to return to India, a failure in his parents’ eyes. He also has a white girlfriend named Elizabeth that he knows his parents will not approve of. Elizabeth keeps pressuring Rupak to talk to his parents about them but he uses every excuse he can think of to avoid this particular conversation. 

Rupak’s parents are planning to visit him and he is at his wit’s end as he has no idea how to tell his parents that his real interest is in film, not business. He is afraid to introduce Elizabeth to them, and is having a crisis of his own. 

The Windfall is a satire about wealth. It’s an Indian version of “keeping up with the Joneses”. The comical antics of Mr. Jha will have you shaking your head as he thinks of different ways to let his new neighbor know that he is as good as or better than they are. At times, Mr Jha’s actions will irritate and annoy you, but you can’t help smiling as you try to picture yourself in Mr. Jha’s shoes. 

What it all comes down to is that this is a story about family and belonging. It is also about ambition and failure. Who’s to say what we will do if we unexpectedly become rich beyond our means. I must say, I wouldn’t mind finding out. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Beautiful Lie by Irfan Master (Albert Whitman & Co.)

Irfan Master lives in London but has set A Beautiful Life in Gujarat, India where his family comes from. It is his debut novel. The story centers around the Partition of India. To understand the story, we need to understand the Partition of India. This was the division of British India into independent nations - Hindu dominated India and muslim dominated Pakistan and East Pakistan which later became Bangladesh. Once the British left and the two nations were left on their own, it spawned one of the greatest migrations of people in history. There was also an outbreak of sectarian violence between Hindus and Sikhs on one side fighting against Muslims on the other and an estimated 200,000 to 2,000,000 people were killed. 

The year is 1947, approximately three months before Partition. Thirteen-year old Bilal is a young Muslim boy taking care of his father who is lying on his deathbed. Bilal’s mother had already passed away and his older brother was hardly ever at home. Bilal senses that there is something wrong with the neighborhood he grew up in. He can’t put his finger on it yet but he feels the tension in the air and recognises the changes in the market. Two stallholders who used to be partners, one making daal while the other made rice. Now, they each have their own stalls selling the same item.

Bilal opens the story by making a confession as an adult. “Everybody lies. We all do it. Sometimes we lie because it makes us feel better and sometimes we lie because it makes others feel better.” 

What was the lie that Bilal told? It was something he felt he should not let his Bapuji (father) know as he felt the truth would send his bapuji to his death early. Bapuji is not only Bilal’s father, but he is also his guide and mentor. He was a well-educated man and was well aware of his condition. He told his son that he would need to make arrangements to live with his sister in Jaipur. 

Although Bilal agrees with what his bapuji says, he has no intention of moving or leaving his bapuji to die alone. Bapuji is always asking Bilal for news. Especially on the issue of the government reaching a decision to divide the country. He tells his son, “the soul of India can’t be decided by a few men gathered around a map clucking like chickens about who deserves the largest pile of feed.”

The only thing Bilal wants is for his father to die in peace. So, with the help of his friends Chota, Manjeet, and Saleem, they scheme to keep the news of India’s impending Partition a secret. They also devise ways to intercept potential visitors to Bapuji, even his own doctor. But how long can they keep this a secret? And will Bapuji die knowing his India is still one and the same?

I found the story to be very reminiscent of the 2003 German film [Good-bye Lenin!] which has a similar plot. In the movie, the story follows a family in East Germany. The mother is a dedicated socialist but falls into a coma in October of 1989 before the November Revolution. She awakes eight months later in June of 1990 not knowing about the fall of the Berlin Wall or that East Germany has reunited with West Germany to become the nation of Germany. Her son tries to protect her from the truth as he believes it may kill her. 

A Beautiful Life is about filial duty and having the courage to face inevitable changes…in life, in the environment where you live. It is about trying to understand the hatred between people just because they follow a different religion. The death and violence caused by the Partition of India may have been avoided if the British who were leaving didn’t just arbitrarily assign a line dividing the nation in two. A Beautiful Life is a beautiful and poignant story and although written for a younger generation, the ending will stick with you long after you have finished reading the book. ~Ernie Hoyt

In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Ann Goldstein (Vintage Books)

Native speakers of English are crippled by the belief that learning another language is a matter of choice, something to “take.” French, Spanish, sometimes German--one of these is chosen in high school, flirted with in college, “picked up” in the way one might get a bad cold, and rapidly forgotten. Dimly students understand that fluency will only come with total immersion but few realize how disorienting that process will be. It is, Jhumpa Lahiri explains, a matter of risk and discipline, an abandonment of one culture for another, a kind of baptism that holds the threat of drowning.

Lahiri had two languages as a child, the Bengali that was spoken at home and the English that she needed for the world outside, once she had turned four. Her parents resisted English, clinging to the language of their native culture. Lahiri became a double exile in a linguistic quandary. Her imperfect Bengali failed to connect her to a place she had never lived in and her perfect English failed to give her a place of belonging in either her birthplace (London) or her country of residence (the U.S.). It was a precarious place for a child to stand in and Lahiri found her refuge in reading and writing English words. “I belonged only to my words…to no country, no specific culture.” “Writing,” she says, “makes me feel present on earth.”

Then she falls in love with Italian, a language that seems to have chosen her rather than the other way around. Dizzied by the notion of choice, she takes lessons that will allow her to speak. She chooses to read only books written in Italian. She moves to Rome and becomes “a word hunter,” with her vocabulary notebook slowly measuring her progress. But this isn’t enough. To feel present in Italy, Lahiri begins to write in Italian. 

At first this is like “writing with my left hand,” she admits, an activity “so arduous it seems sadistic.” For the first time in her life, she has found a language that gives her the “freedom to be imperfect,” but as a writer, she refuses to take comfort in that freedom. She begins to show her Italian writing to those who will correct and guide her, Slowly she turns away from her “dominant language,” the one in which she had won a Pulitzer Prize and a Presidential medal conferred upon her by Barack Obama. She abandons English to the point that when she wrote this book, it was originally published as In altre parole. When it appeared as In Other Words, Lahiri insisted that it would be published in both Italian and English, with the translation done by someone other than herself. She knew that as a writer who had an expert command of English, she would be compelled to improve what she had written in Italian. Instead her translator kept the raw and unpolished thoughts that Italian had conveyed upon Lahiri, with the Italian text on one page and the English translation facing it.

The translated sentences are like ungainly pieces of furniture. They aren’t smooth--in fact they come in fragments, carrying splinters. They lack grace and are often clunky. They hold immeasurable courage, written by a woman who has stepped away from her literary fame, embraced imperfection and found a different way to be alive. . “I remain, in Italian, an ignorant writer,” Lahiri says, but she’s one that’s discovered the art of metamorphosis, a transformation that can be terrifying but is an act of rebellion and release. Through another language, Lahiri has left exile and chosen a new form, one that she exercises with freedom and generosity.~Janet Brown

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga (Free Press)

Between the Assassinations is Aravind Adiga’s second published novel, although he wrote it before the acclaimed book, The White Tiger. The title of the book refers to the time between the assassination of India’s then-Prime Minister, Indira Ghandi in 1984 and the assassination of her son Rajiv Ghandi who became India’s Prime Minister that same year. It is a collection of short stories set in the fictional city of Kittur which is modeled on Adiga’s hometown of Mangalore which is located in the state of Karnataka.

Kittur is located on the southwestern coast of India, between Goa and Calicut. It is bordered by the Arabian Sea on the west, and by the Kaliamma River to the south and east. The monsoon season starts in June and lasts until September. After that, the weather becomes dry and cool and is suggested as the best time to visit. 

Before each story, we are given a little history of the city and how the town is laid out. In the middle of the town is a pornographic theater called the Angel Talkies. Unfortunately for the town, people give directions by using Angel Talkies as a reference point. We learn that the official language of the city is Kannada, but many of the residents also speak Tulu which no longer has a written script, and Konkani which is used by the upper-caste Brahmins. The city has a population of 193, 432 and “only 89 declare themselves to be without caste or religion”. 

The story takes place over a week in the city starting with a visitor’s arrival at the train station. We are first introduced to a twelve-year-old Muslim boy named Ziauddin. He is hired by a man named Ramanna Shetty who runs a tea and samosa place near the railway station. The man tells Ziauddin “it was okay for him to stay. Provided he promised to work hard. And keep away from all hanky-panky”. However, Ziauddin begins to work for a Muslim man who pays him for counting trains and the number of Indian soldiers in them. It isn’t until Ziauddin asks why the man has him counting trains that he understands that the man is not as kind as he thought.

We meet a man named Abassi who has a case of conscience. He is a shirt factory owner whose employees are going blind by the poor working conditions. He must decide if he should close the factory to save his workers from doing further damage to their eyes while having to deal with corrupt government officials. 

Ramakrishna, known to the locals as Xerox, sells counterfeit copies of books. He has been arrested a number of times and has been told to stop what he’s doing but he lives to make books and sell them. His latest goal after getting out of jail is to only sell copies of The Satanic Verses by Salmon Rushdie. 

Adiga’s stories are full of characters who deal with an array of problems still affecting India today. Class struggles and religious persecution, poverty, the caste system, and political corruption are just some of the topics covered. The story reads as a satire on Indian life and is filled with humor and angst. Although, his description of Kittur makes it seem like a dirty, crowded and dangerous city, you can’t help but want to go and visit it to see it for yourself. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Prince, the Demon King, and the Monkey Warrior retold by Janet Brown (ThingsAsian Press)

The Prince, the Demon King, and the Monkey Warrior is the retelling of a Hindu epic called Ramanaya which is attributed to a fifth century B.C.E. poet named Valmiki. It tells the story of the life of Prince Rama, the first-born son of King Dasarat in the country of Ayodhya. The story opens with King Dasarat speaking to one of his advisors. 

King Dasarat is a wealthy man without any enemies and has four wives and yet says to his advisor, “I am sadder than the poorest peasant in my country”. He believes the peasants are richer than he is. They may be poor and have no possessions of their own and they live grueling lives but they have one thing that King Dasarat doesn’t have - a son. 

The wise man helped the king and his four queens each had a son within a year. The oldest was Rama, who “from the day he was born, made everyone feel happy.” Barat was the second son, a righteous individual who supported those around him. The third son was Satrugan and the youngest was Lakshaman who was always very loyal to his eldest brother Rama. 

The King informed his sons that the land was being torn apart by two demons and that the wise men of the forest had told him that only his oldest son would be able to defeat them, yet he did not want to burden his child with this news. 

Rama was a dutiful son and did not hesitate to take up the challenge. His youngest brother said he would join Rama on his quest. The two sons traveled far and wide and defeated the demons without any problems. On their way home, they set foot in another kingdom whose king was said to be as wise as their father. 

Rama meets his soon to be wife, Sita in the kingdom. The two marry and live a happy, peaceful life for many years. Rama’s aging father tells his son that he is going to abdicate and Rama will be King the following day. However, the mother of Barat, Kaikeyi, was fooled by her evil maidservant Mantara. The distressed Kaikeyi went to her husband and pleaded with him to fulfill one of her wishes that he had yet to grant her. 

So it comes to pass that Rama is exiled from his home for four fourteen years while Barat is crowned King. Lakshaman follows his brother and his wife into exile. They settle in a land surrounded by evil demons. A She-Demon that has the power to transform herself into anybody she wishes tries to trick Rama into making him believe she is his wife, he tells her he already has a wife. She then shows her true form but is disfigured by Lakshaman and runs back to her home. 

One of the She-Demons brothers is Ravan, the Demon King. He sends an army of demons to kill Rama but they all end up dead except for one. It is this demon that convinces King Ravan that the best way to defeat Rama is to kidnap his wife and make her his own. 

The King of the Demons manages to kidnap Sita and now Rama finds himself on a quest to save his wife. With the help of Hanuman, the Monkey Warrior, Rama defies all odds to save the love of his life. 

This modern retelling will appeal to everyone, young and old alike. The full color illustrations by Vladimir Verano bring life to the story. It is a beautiful introduction to the culture of India as seen through one of its most popular stories. ~Ernie Hoyt

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville by Akash Kapur (Scribner)

History puts Utopia in a bad light. The concept has never worked very well, drenched as it is in failure, death, and tragedy. But what if the effort to achieve the ideal community simply has never been given the time it needs to evolve? The process isn’t pretty, as Akash Kapur shows in his story of “the quest for Utopia” in a barren region of India, but the end result is a town with an international population that thrives in a setting of “vibrant forest.” What was once “a moonscape” is now “a global model of environmental conservation.” But are the results worth the human sacrifice that this achievement demanded?

The “intentional community” of Auroville was born because of the unlikely meeting of three very different people: Sri Aurobindo, a Cambridge-educated Indian mystic, a wealthy French matron, Blanche Alfassa who believes in visions made incarnate, and a young Frenchman who spent his youth in concentration camps. Madame Alfassa recognizes Sri Aurobindo as the Indian seer who came to her in her dreams. She becomes his leading disciple and is known by the name he gives her, The Mother. Bernard, weighted to the breaking point by his years in the death camps, meets The Mother just before Sri Aurobindo dies, putting her at the forefront of the seer’s following. She gives Bernard a new name and, as Satprem, he becomes her primary henchman, propelled by the belief that The Mother is divine.

The Mother has a dream and at the age of 87, she reveals it to the world. She buys 90 acres of barren ground and announces this will become a “Tower of Babel in reverse,” an international community” that will belong “to humanity as a whole.” Three years later, the first settlers arrive, finding an empty desert.

Others join them, from India, Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States. They become obsessed with finding shelter, water, and food; they dig wells and build huts with their bare hands. They gather seeds that they find within animal droppings and nurture crops of native plants. An administrative group formed by The Mother raises funds and disburses money to Auroville’s inhabitants, who espouse a subsistence economy that has reduced them to peasants. Then The Mother dies and the money begins to trickle away. 

Political schisms crack through the utopian surface of Auroville and a form of cultural revolution blazes through the hearts and minds of the residents. Satprem has convinced most of them that The Mother is a divinity and the prevailing belief is She will provide them with what they need. She will heal the sick and bring up the children while the healthy adults work to venerate her memory. Medicine and education are regarded as unnecessary and the energy of Auroville is spent in building a multi-storied  edifice that will house The Mother’s spirit. 

Within this maelstrom of belief and chaos, two people become the poster children for disaster. A devout member of Auroville, a young Belgian beauty, falls from the heights of the construction project and is permanently paralyzed. The man who loves her, a wealthy patrician from New York who devotes his fortune to Auroville, becomes ill. Both of them refuse the medical help that would save them and they die young, with one survivor.

The woman’s daughter, Auroalice, has known no other world but Auroville. At fourteen she’s semi-educated and semi-feral, having grown up in a tribe of free-range children. She’s adopted by the sister of the wealthy patrician, is taken to live in The Dakota where Lennon and Yoko are her neighbors, and by chance meets a man who had been a childhood friend in Auroville, Akash Kapur. They marry.

Well educated and well off, the two of them live happily in Brooklyn until their pasts begin to claim them. Returning to Auroville with their young sons, they find it’s become a place where they can raise their children safely and happily, as well as a place where their own childhood histories have found peace.

Unsettling and uncomfortable, Better to Have Gone raises troubling questions. Kapur turns to Mao and Robespierre: “Revolution is not a dinner party.” “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” To create this ecological triumph, people died and children were sacrificed. 

Kapur says, “Children of utopias, “I’ve come to understand, are like exiles.” He and Auroalice were each rescued in different ways. Kapur’s parents never truly espoused the demands of Auroville; Auroalice became an orphan who was whisked into the wealth of Manhattan after fourteen years of a helter-skelter upbringing. Other children weren’t so fortunate and their stories go untold, “mere expedients on the journey to a new world.”~Janet Brown

Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia edited by Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas (University of California Press)

Curry has become such an international dish that it’s hard to remember it originated in India. Yet when people think of Indian cuisine, this is the first menu choice that usually comes to mind. How did this dish become both the culinary symbol of a country and a popular meal across the globe? Japan, Thailand, Great Britain, the United States all have their own version of curry—Campbell’s Mushroom Soup with curry powder, anyone?

In Curried Cultures, a group of academic writers look at the history, proliferation, and perhaps the decline of curry, in a series of essays that painstakingly comb through every detail of the dish. 

When the princely states of the Subcontinent became Great Britain’s Jewel in the Crown, culinary matters sharply divided the colonized from the conquerors. The British occupiers, believing that the local diet led to weakness and poor health, clung fiercely to their slabs of animal flesh washed down with beer. The people of the Subcontinent prided themselves on vegetable dishes that were spiced with a sophisticated flavor that had yet to reach the West. Each side shuddered at the barbarity of the other; it took the common soldiery of England to find a meeting ground with their subcontinental counterparts through meals of curry. Although canteen cooks probably adopted curry because of its ease and economy, the dish became popular with British troops and traveled with them to Japan and other corners of the world.

Today in Great Britain curry shops are as numerous as fish and chip stands. “Going out for a curry” is a popular way to end a night of serious drinking. In the U.S., fast food curry houses are spreading across the country, becoming almost as ubiquitous as Chinese or Thai restaurants—and equally Americanized. The Indian princes of the Raj would be horrified by what America calls curry and most citizens of modern-day India would find it inedible.

Even within India, the concept of curry is changing fast. Traditional curry dishes take time and attention which is difficult to find in a high-tech, high-speed world. Even the least sophisticated curries, the ones found in the roadside hostelries called Udupi hotels, have changed in the drive for efficiency. In India and abroad, supermarket shelves are filled with small, flat, red and white boxes that are sold under the MTR label. They contain a foil envelope filled with curry that’s quickly reheated in boiling water.

These ready-to-eat meals are cheap, flavorful, and based upon an ancient culinary tradition. In a temple in southern India, five thousand pilgrims are fed daily with fifty different selections, including curry. Legend has it that this is where the famous Mavalli Tiffin Rooms (MTR) garnered their recipes, giving their restaurant customers silver utensils with which to eat the adopted temple curries. Nowadays a version of that food can be ordered online or bought in overseas grocery stores; boxes of MTR meals feed foreign consumers who have no idea of the history behind the packaging, as well as families in India who demand flavor as much as convenience in their fast food.

Although it’s an interesting look at the way global popularity changes traditional food, Curried Cultures suffers from this kind of sentence: “I think studies of immigration demand a dose of corporeality.” Readers who hack their way through the jungles of jargon will find a lively history waiting for them—and probably a strong yearning for a plate of curry.