Books with Buzz!

Ready for some summer reading?  Here are two suggestions (courtesy of Zenia from Desi-Lit Toronto):

The Jadu House by Laura Roychowdhury

Kharagpur is a Raj railway colony in West Bengal. The mock-Tudor bungalows, well-appointed gardens, red-brick churches and Railway Institute were built a hundred years ago for Anglo-Indians and engine drivers exported from Britain. Holed up for the night in the old railway inspectors' guest house, the author, a married British academic, has come here to hunt down the untold colonial history of the Anglo-Indian community, the fruit of illicit liaisons between the lower classes of the British Raj and Indian women. Her companion, Subhrasheel, is a young Bengali student she has recently befriended in Calcutta who is curious to find out more about a mixed-race community that his friends and relatives hold in contempt.

In the darkness of a power cut, veiled behind mosquito nets and with the jarring scents of diesel and jasmine rising from the damp monsoon earth, they tell each other stories of Anglo-India. Surrounded by the ghosts of the past, they conjure up the voices of Anglo-Indians they have met in Kharagpur and Calcutta or read about in moldering, forgotten files, throwing a very different light on the Raj experience as it is usually told. Whether it is the tale of Colt Campbell, a cowboy from the Wild East, or Harendra Krishna De, who was driven mad by the rules of the railway until he imagined himself to be Prince Albert, or Mahkin, the concubine who remained faithful to her fickle British lover, their stories unsettle our ideas about race, culture and nationality and show that the taint of outcast status still remains.

 

Love Marriage by V. V. Ganeshananthan

In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak of only two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first toward the second. [p. 3]

The daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants who left their collapsing country and married in America, Yalini finds herself caught between the traditions of her ancestors and the lure of her own modern world. But when she is summoned to Toronto to help care for her dying uncle, Kumaran, a former member of the militant Tamil Tigers, Yalini is forced to see that violence is not a relic of the Sri Lankan past, but very much a part of her Western present.

While Kumaran’s loved ones gather around him to say goodbye, Yalini traces her family’s roots–and the conflicts facing them as ethnic Tamils–through a series of marriages. Now, as Kumaran’s death and his daughter’s politically motivated nuptials edge closer, Yalini must decide where she stands.

Enjoy and let us know what you think of it!

- - Syerah