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Between the Assasinations by Aravind Adiga

I'm not sure what exactly is going on. Every time you turn around another new and extremely gifted South Asian writer appears on the scene. Aravind Adiga, whose novel The White Tiger won last year's Man Booker Prize in England, offers a theory.

India and China are the nations of the future, he has argued. And so it's important for writers to focus on such emerging nations as material for their art, and for readers to pay attention.

Between the Assassinations stands as powerful evidence for its creator's argument. The book's dozen or so stories take place between the political killings of Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. That's not a broad swath of time, merely from 1984 to 1991.

The setting is not a broad swath of India, either. Adiga focuses on a rather small plot of earth: Kittur, in southwest India. It's a forested town, with Hindu temples and Catholic churches, near the Arabian Sea.

Just six years in a small town. Adiga reduces the time even further with the metaphor of touring the town in six days during that longer period. Six days. It's a relatively short while, yet the length of biblical creation. But the hearts of his characters are where Adiga reveals the greatest depth and breadth, spanning the ages from youth to late maturity.

These characters' caste affiliations and immediate aspirations for their lives range from the highest to the lowest, as well as places in between.

Ziauddin, "small and black, with baby fat in his cheeks, and an elfin grin that exposed big, white rabbity teeth," is a Muslim boy who finds work in Kittur shops but steals from his employers. Abbasi is a businessman trying to deal with corrupt local officials. Xerox, who sells pirated books (including a copy of the banned Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie), is the son of the lowest of the low: waste collectors. Half-Brahmin (his father), half-low caste (his mother), the rich but confused Shankara sets off a bomb at school and suffers the consequences.

Jayamma, the eighth born in a family of nine girls, is sent out to cook for various well-off families.

George D'Souza, who sprays mosquito repellant for a living, comes under the sway of a rich, young, foreign Christian woman and hopes, right up to the moment when he oversteps certain boundaries, to change his life.

Adiga creates these, and other distinctive characters, with the ease of a god, and deftly tells their sometimes comical, often tragic stories against the backdrop of an often corrupt, and sometimes lovely South Asian world. Like Murali, the aging story writer turned political agitator, we are reminded "of that strange mixture of the strikingly beautiful and the filthy which is the nature of every Indian village. ... "

Between these covers, in Adiga's entertaining and illuminating stories, you'll discover such wonders as these.

This review has been written by Alan Cheuse and was first published in the Dallas News

Animal's People by Indra Sinha

Ever since That Night, the residents of Khaufpur have lived a perilous existence.

The water they drink, the ground they walk on and the atmosphere they breathe is poisoned. Nobody has received compensation or help for the chemical leak, least of all Animal, as he is known, whose spine twisted at a young age, leaving him to walk on all fours. His mind is full of foul, insidious thoughts, but the bitterness is mixed with a longing to know human affection and, more urgently, sex. He inhabits a dark kind of half-life.

But Animal still knows what love is. He has harboured feelings for his friend Nisha, the daughter of a local musician as long as he can remember. It’s not that she is particularly good-looking; it’s how she does things. Her smile, the way she moves her hair from her face and how she treats him. There will be no chance for him though, as she is enamoured of his friend Zafar. So he has to watch from a distance, taunted by the insults of others and not allowing himself hope.

When Elli Barber arrives, an ‘Amrikan’ keen to set up a free clinic to help the victims of the disaster, deep suspicion arises amongst the community. Why has she come? Why does she want to help for no money? Is she a saint or an undercover spy for the factory owners? Animal resolves to turn the situation to his advantage and starts to investigate Ellie’s motives. He attempts to get to the bottom of things and help himself along the way. What follows is a web of scams and intrigue which will keep you, the ‘eyes’ gripped from first page to last.

Disturbing, entertaining and full of truths about the human dilemma, Indra Sinha’s second novel is as original as his first.

The Sheikh's Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World

Inspired by a ten-year-old Kazakh’s startlingly enthusiastic reflections on the merits of Borat, rogue journalist Richard Poplak sets out on a two-year odyssey to explore modern Muslims’ appreciation and appropriation of America’s pop cultural fixations. He is curious to see what happens to our pop songs and sitcoms after they’ve been beamed beyond the closed doors of the Islamic world via satellite dishes, pirate radio and the internet. Hopping a flight from the Eurasian hinterlands to Tripoli, he searches in vain for a legendary alleyway where years before, hundreds of children reputedly acted out the scenes of Hello, Lionel Ritchie’s once celebrated MTV clip.

Libya is just the first stop on a globe trotting tour of more than a dozen struggling democracies, autocratic theocracies, failed states and rogue regimes. On the ground, he’s surprised to find thriving creative communities operating under the radar and a myriad of peculiar local obsessions, including Lebanon’s multi-million dollar plastic surgery industry, a bullish Saudi market for customized muscle cars and Indonesia’s thriving DIY hardcore punk scene. Along the way he’s body slammed by WWE enthusiasts in Afghanistan, bowls with the chief of police in small town Kazakhstan and keeps it realer than real with Palestinian hip hop artists amidst the staccato AK-47 fire of the Gaza Strip.

Each encounter is unique, but within the distinct local cultural flavours he finds unity in a generation of artists and enthusiasts keen to re-imagine their nations as places of opportunity, creativity and freedom by reinterpreting and remixing ideas from the west with their own established and emerging traditions. Poplak challenges North American readers to engage with these dispatches from their Eastern brethren, suggesting that a pop cultural dialogue may triumph where a centuries long tradition of terrorism, imperialism, warfare and nation building have failed.

About the Author: Richard Poplak is the author of the acclaimed Ja, No, Man: Growing Up White in Apartheid-Era South Africa. He has written for, among others, The Walrus, THIS Magazine, Toronto Life and the Globe and Mail and has directed numerous short films, music videos and commercials. He lives in Toronto.

True Patriot Love by Michael Ignatieff

In his prize-winning memoir, The Russian Album, Michael Ignatieff chronicled the fortunes of his father's family in Russia and in Canada. Now, in True Patriot Love, Ignatieff turns to his mother's family, the Grants.

Over three generations the Grants conducted a spirited public argument about what Canada was and should be. True Patriot Love is both a tribute to and a reckoning with that inheritance.

In 1872, the author's great-grandfather George Monro Grant, set out with Sandford Fleming to map out the railway line that would link Canada from ocean to ocean. His grandfather William Lawson Grant fought at the Somme in World War I and came home believing that Canada had earned the right to call itself a fully independent nation. His son George Grant, author of Lament for a Nation, believed that Canada had gone from colony to nation and back to colony—of the United States.

Michael Ignatieff retells the history of his ancestors as a story of one family's search for Canada. He has turned a family memoir into a history of their love of country.

KAMA Reading Series is hosting a launch of this new book together with a reading by the author on May 8, 2009.  Click HERE for more details.

Curry is Thicker than Water and other stories..

Join us for an intimate evening with Jasmine D'Costa as we celebrate the launch of her debut book, Curry is Thicker Than Water.
 
The interview will be led by Zenia Wadwani of Desi-Lit, Toronto Chapter and will be followed by Q&A with the audience.

Come enjoy a night of great reading and engaging conversations!

Special offer on book purchases at the event

When: Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Doors Open: 6:30 pm onwards.
Where:The Host, Yorkville, Toronto
 
Tickets:$5 (guestlist) or $15 (entry + signed book). 

To be added to the guestlist, please send an email to Syerah
   
This event is brought to you by MyBindi.com

Click HERE to read book review.

Below are selected snapshots from Jasmine D’Costa’s debut book, Curry Is Thicker Than Water, published by Bookland Press:

The Elephant on the Highway trumpets the author’s giant step into the realm of gripping short story magic. Here’s where memories, sounds and aftertaste blend into a pungent and decidedly unpleasant mix. Ear plugs and nose clamps needed to deal with the jumbo rear action and the elephant droppings…

Eggs carries a dark and foreboding secret, evil and eerie and takes readers to picturesque Goa. Loaded with symbolism, Eggs illustrates the helplessness of the unborn and burden of deformity in those destined to live...handicapped. The tug-of-vengeance and deceit plays out in the relationship between a mother and son as they outdo each other.

In Two Wives and a Doormat, a particularly powerful story of lust and unbridled sexual punishment, the author paints a vivid picture of repeated abuse by a bigamous husband. The tone is equal parts raw and raunchy, with a softer side in the tender emotional ties between the two wives.

She Married a Pumpkin, set in Mumbai and Nagpur in the province of Maharashtra, takes a deep look at the tradition of arranged marriages using the symbolism of a pumpkin. The narrative shows the despised tradition in desperate need for reform, even outright rejection. It’s a practice that has no place in the lives of women of our times or in our relationships.

The Guest at My Grandfather’s House takes readers to a Mangalorean village in the province of Karnataka. Here, a stranger’s yearning for the warmth and the sense of family adds meaning and excitement to a little girl’s life. It is her escape from sheer boredom and his only chance to discover what family really means…

If your bloodstream is rich in turmeric loaded traces of curry, this could be a literary main course, sprinkled with a dash of multicultural dressing – certainly a treat you’ll savour! Or, if you’re planning a voyage of discovery into South Asian literary fare: be warned, it is an acquired taste, and Curry’s going to get you!

About the author:

Dr. Jasmine D’Costa was born in India and moved to Canada in 2004. As an academic and international banker for 25 years, Jasmine was published in many academic journals, business magazines and books on international relations, trade, investment, corporate finance and banking. In Canada, Jasmine D’Costa has pursued a career in writing. She now lives in Toronto and brings to the Canadian writing landscape an arresting new voice and her unique gift of nonpareil multicultural storytelling.

Jasmine D’Costa is currently the President of the Writers and Editors Network and been a judge on the Canadian Aid Literary Contest. Curry is Thicker than Water is her first book.

By Frederick Rocque | First published by Chapter & Verse

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders: Short stories from Pakistan

Reading Daniyal Mueenuddin’s mesmerizing first collection, “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” is like watching a game of blackjack, the shrewd players calculating their way beyond their dealt cards in an attempt to beat the dealer. Some bust, others surrender. But in Mueenuddin’s world, no one wins.

Set in the Pakistani district of Punjab, the eight linked stories in this excellent book follow the lives of the rich and power­ful Harouni family and its employees: man­agers, drivers, gardeners, cooks, servants.

The patriarch, K. K. Harouni, of the feudal landowning class, owns a farm in Dunya­pur and a mansion in Lahore. In the title story, we meet him in the final years of his life, living mostly in Lahore, apart from his estranged wife, having surrendered the management of his farm to the corrupt Chaudrey Jaglani. When Husna, a distant relative whose branch of the family “had not so much fallen into poverty as failed to rise,” shows up at his door, Harouni takes her in, first as a servant, then as his mistress. For the aging paterfamilias, Husna is a distraction whose unrefined speech and manners offer a temporary escape from the infinite politesse of his own class. For her part, Husna, a more hard-boiled Madame Bovary, envious of the glittering, jet-­setting lives of the rich, ingratiates herself to the old man through calculated flirtations, believing sex is her ticket out of her lowly status. And for a while she is right. Until she no longer is.

The women in these stories often use sex to prey on the men, and they do so with abandon at best and rage at worst — in this patriarchal, hierarchical society, it is their sharpest weapon. Women in the lower classes sleep their way up only to be kicked back down, while those in the upper classes use their feminine influence to maneuver their husbands into ever-growing circles of power, until age corrodes their authority.

In the only story in which the main characters are of similar social status, Lily, a girl from a reputable Punjabi family who has spent her youth attending stylish parties and having casual sex, hopes to improve herself morally by marrying a kind, hard-working man of her own class. Like all other attempts at betterment in Mueenuddin’s world, this too fails, as Lily slowly reverts to her old ways. Motion in Pakistani society — be it social or moral — can only be horizontal.

But the women are not alone in their scheming. Manipulation unifies these stories, running through them as consistently as the Indus River flows south of Punjab. A dance of insincere compliments and favors asked at just the right moment — when the supplicant detects a benevolent mood — is performed by every­one. This bewildering pas de deux is familiar to all but the two American characters, whose ignorance causes grief to themselves and others.

Corruption too is ubiquitous here. Nawabdin the electrician cheats the electric company; Chaudrey Jaglani sells Harouni’s vast lands at half price, keeping the best parcels for himself. For a country whose name means “land of purity,” Pakistan is startlingly blemished. Yet Mueenuddin’s talent lets us perceive not just its machinations but also its beauty — the mango orchards, a charpoy laid out in the shade of a mammoth banyan tree, the smoke of a hookah on a spring afternoon, “eucalyptus trees planted by some briefly energetic government.”

In this labyrinth of power games and exploits, Mueenuddin inserts luminous glimmers of longing, loss and, most movingly, unfettered love. But these emotions are often engulfed by the incessant chaos of this complicated country. As Lily tells her eventual husband in a rare moment of quietude: “You know what’s amazing, we’re actually alone here. That never happens in Pakistan.”

Reviewed by Dalia Sofer in the New York Times 

Margaret in search of herself and other plays

A fascinating, enjoyable read, Margaret in Search of Herself and Other Plays takes the reader on a journey inside the mindset of many a conflicted character. From Margaret, a confused and wonderfully defiant woman, to Akbar, a cultured intellectual blinded by the pain of tradition, Goveas manages to create nuanced, believable characters. Goveas‟ strength lies in her insights and observations of human behaviour.

She knows how to provoke her characters, she knows how they would respond to a question, she sees
every expression and gesture.  Each play is strikingly different, and has its own charm. The most complex play is “Margaret in Search of Herself”, which takes an intimate look at a woman‟s relationship with her parents, herself, and the men she loves (and loathes). Sometimes you admire Margaret, sometimes you‟re disgusted by her—but that is what makes her authentic.

“Philomena Across Time” is a disturbing look at spousal abuse and its ramifications. Instead of giving the characters names, Goveas provides us with their ages. This is an interesting and effective technique because it suggests that the victims of abuse are often depicted as statistics, not individuals.

My personal favourite is “Dinner with Akbar”, a poignant exploration of the relationship between a father and daughter. Instead of taking the easy way out or dishing out „happy endings‟, Goveas leaves the reader with questions, and forces us to think more deeply about our own relationships and perceptions. If you want to read a collection of poignant plays, Goveas‟ Margaret in Search of Herself and Other Plays is the collection.

 - - Sheniz Janmohammed

 BOOK LAUNCH ON FRIDAY, APRIL 3RD, 2009, 7 PM TO 8.30 PM
AT THE TORONTO WOMEN’S BOOKSTORE, 73 Harbord Street, Toronto, ON M5S 1G4, Canada

AUTHOR BIO: Janice Goveas works in fiction and playwriting. Her short fiction has been published in The New Quarterly, Pitkin in Progress and Icarus Ascending. Her plays have been staged in the U.S. and Canada. During the 2008-2009 season, she was the Artist in Residence at Rasik Arts in Toronto, which mounted a staged reading of her full-length play, Margaret in Search of Herself , featured in this collection. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College in Vermont and an MA in Spanish Literature from Syracuse University.

Stranger to History by Aatish Taseer

As a child, all Aatish Taseer ever had of his father was his photograph in a browning silver frame. Raised by his Sikh mother in Delhi, his Pakistani father remained a distant figure, almost a figment of his imagination, until Aatish crossed the border when he was twenty-one to finally meet him. In the years that followed, the relationship between father and son revived, then fell apart.

For Aatish, their tension had not just to do with the tensions of a son rediscovering his absent father — they were intensified by the fact that Aatish was Indian, his father Pakistani and Muslim. It had complicated his parents’ relationship; now it complicated his.

The relationship forced Aatish to ask larger questions: Why did being Muslim mean that your allegiances went out to other Muslims before the citizens of your own country? Why did his father, despite claiming to be irreligious, describe himself as a ‘cultural Muslim’? Why did Muslims see modernity as a threat? What made Islam a trump identity?

 Stranger to History is the story of the journey Aatish made to answer these questions — starting from Istanbul, Islam’s once greatest city, to Mecca, its most holy, and then home, through Iran and Pakistan. Ending in Lahore, at his estranged father’s home, on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed, it is also the story of Aatish’s own divided family over the past fifty years.

Part memoir, part travelogue, probing, stylish and troubling, Stranger to History is an outstanding debut.

About the author: Aatish Taseer was born in 1980 and educated at Amherst College in Massachusetts. He worked as a reporter at Time magazine and has written frequently for Time, The Sunday Times, and Prospect Magazine. He speaks five languages and currently lives between London (England) and New Delhi. This is his first book.  

Hersterics: an evening of words, thoughts, lyrics and chai

The creators of the groundbreaking play "Meri Kahani" My Story" bring you their first open mic event...

Hersterics serves as an activist space to speak and listen, featuring self-identified female writers and thinkers from the South Asian Diaspora.

Come share your writing, share your stories, listen and be inspired.

Entrance by Donation, part proceeds will go towards a women's shelter in Toronto.

The Toss of a Lemon by Padma Viswanathan

Marriage at 10, in 1896, then motherhood at 14 and four years later a widow’s white sari — these are the determining events in the life of a Brahmin girl called Sivakami, the main character in Padma Viswanathan’s ambitious first novel. After her husband’s death, Sivakami packs away her silks and takes off the “gold medals of wifehood.” Then her head is shaved to make her as unattractive as possible. She will leave the house at night to bathe in the Kaveri River, but once the light comes she must not touch anyone, even her own children. “From dark to dark,” a Brahmin widow is held to be “so pure as to be an outcaste,” and Sivakami is the most observant of women. She will spend almost every day of the 60 years that remain to her within the rooms and courtyards of her dead husband’s house.

That, in fact, is her one irregular act. She had loved the young man, a landowner named Hanumarathnam, and she has chosen to occupy his house rather than live with her own family; she doesn’t trust her brothers to take care of her young son’s education. Yet, although Sivakami may stay at home, she is hardly isolated; indeed, she remains in intimate contact with the rest of the little world around her. Viswanathan offers an appealing but hardly idyllic picture of the South Indian village of Cholapatti, full of the plotless chatter of daily life. There are ceremonies — weddings and holidays — and gossip, much cooking and many local rivalries.

Sivakami comes to rely on the overseer her husband had hired before his death, a shrewd lower-caste man named Muchami. And then there are her children. The girl, Thangam, is married off too casually. Her husband has the right background — caste, horoscope — but proves dissolute. Sivakami’s boy, Vairum, is, in contrast, skeptical of all orthodoxies. He will arrange his own marriage and eat at the homes of non-Brahmins;he will become, in other words, a confident, successful yet increasingly distant modern man. Much of this novel is his, and much of the rest of it belongs to Thangam’s many children, who will also break custom by coming to live with their maternal grandmother. The years flow on. They aren’t unruffled — Sivakami’s house holds too many people for that — but they go smoothly enough, as does the novel itself.

Viswanathan manages to present a great many characters with some skill. Yet the world she describes isn’t hers (she grew up in Canada and now lives in Arkansas); it’s that of her grandmother, whose stories inspired it, and at times Viswanathan’s supplemental research shows. She assumes a Western audience, and she explains too much. In some places, the details she chooses seem to have an anthropological function rather than a dramatic one (when, for example, she describes how to lay out a meal on a banana leaf). Elsewhere, she clumsily breaks into her narrative to remind us that these people and these times aren’t like our own. (“One of the principles of a superstitious society is: don’t fool with working formulas.”)

Viswanathan’s characters may believe in the gods, but her own narration is firmly realistic, with no magical powers on display. But while her sentences never draw attention to themselves, one stylistic decision does compel our attention: except for the epilogue, the novel is written in the present tense. At first, this often mannered style works to support the novel’s sense of expansive possibility.

The more conventional past tense implies a completed action, something that’s over and therefore has a shape. In contrast, Viswanathan’s narration suggests a story that is unfolding before our eyes, a story that might go anywhere. It allows her to follow loose threads without feeling the need to tie them all back together. Nevertheless, this decision seems also to be a source of weakness, since none of the many stories in “The Toss of a Lemon” take hold long enough to give the novel a sense of direction or coherence, even though it contains some powerful scenes.

After many pages in which she figures barely at all, Sivakami returns to the center of the action for some crucial moments near the end, but they remain just episodes, little more than anecdotes. Vairum’s life could tell us a great deal about 20th-century India. So could that of a village neighbor named Bharati, a girl born into a family of devadasis, courtesans dedicated to a temple, who at mid-century becomes a film star.

Viswanathan will not, however, allow any of her characters’ different stories to hold the stage for long, and in consequence “The Toss of a Lemon” fizzles out at the close. The fact that a first novel runs to roughly 600 pages and tells three generations’ worth of tales derived from the author’s own family history is not, in itself, an argument against it. There is, after all, the admittedly unfair example of “Buddenbrooks.” But, all else aside, Thomas Mann’s first novel had a single-­mindedness that this one lacks. It knew where it was going, and the answer wasn’t simply Canada.

Padma Viswanathan has real talent, but before she can take full advantage of it, she’ll need to find a compass.

Review by Michael Gorra.  This review first appeared in the New York Times.

Michael Gorra’s books include “After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie.” He teaches English at Smith College.