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The Taste of Water by Franky Dias

Exuberant and irreverent, The Taste of Water is about adventurous men whose morals are suspect and strong women who are the anchors of their homes.- F. Escalona, author of A Proposition

Victor and Shambu, two young boys mesmerized by a performing cyclist in their sleepy village of Uppal, South India, hatch a mischievous plan to prevent his macabre live burial finale - the first of many collaborations in their lifelong struggles with ambition and success, lust and love, power and impotence, and sin and redemption.

Victor achieves success as a telecom analyst in Toronto and New York City during the dot-com boom. His spectacular rise to fortune is matched only by his painful fall into excess and depravity. Shambu becomes a feared man in the underworld, selling cheap government booze. But his success, too, comes at a price.

Along the way we meet Rama Rao, a Brahmin storyteller and exorcist who plays chess with malevolent demons; Meena Rai, whose husband kills her lover then remains locked up in their house for decades until convinced to leave his room to murder again; the Alvares sisters, devout spinster twins who strip naked to scare away ghosts and later engage in nocturnal activities with one; Girija Bhandari, a young mother who cures inflamed eyes with jets of fresh milk from her breasts; and Zuao Manuel De Souza, famous for vanquishing a demon with the power of his rosary.

A different India, a surprising India, and a refreshing India. Utterly original. A rare and authentic slice of life in the villages around Mangalore - one that should be preserved in a time capsule. - Richard Crasta, author of The Revised Kama Sutra

By turns magical and mystical, tragic and triumphant, The Taste of Water tells an unforgettable tale weaving history, folklore, humour, irreverence and adventure on two continents in a sweeping story spanning three generations set against the backdrop of Indian mythology and Western philosophy.

Author Biography

Franky Dias grew up in a small village near Mangalore, India. At the age of twenty-one, he moved to Mumbai and worked as a bank officer. Later posted to Goa for five years, he wrote and produced a musical, then moved to Dubai where he worked in international banking and wrote a column for the local newspaper. He is fluent in Konkani, Kannada, Tulu, Hindi and English.

In 1990, he and his wife, along with their daughter and son, then three and six years old, moved to Toronto, Canada. Franky Dias spends his time composing music and writing, and lives between Canada, India and the south of France.

The Taste of Water by Franky Dias is available in a limited premium edition at Life Rattle Press for $25, paperback addition at Amazon.com for $12.99 and in electronic edition at Kindle ebooks for $6.99.

Celebrate the book launch of The Taste of Water by Franky Dias Sunday, December 2, 2012 at The Supermarket Restaurant in Toronto at 4pm. Event also features a concert by "The Nandita Dias Band."

DSC Prize 2013 shortlist announced

The shortlist for the 2013 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, announced in London on Tuesday night, includes this year’s Booker Prize-nominated Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil, as well as Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon, winner of the 2011 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize.

Six novels by South Asian writers were chosen from a longlist of 16, announced in October. Apart from Ahmad and Thayil’s novels, the shortlist includes Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim, Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke, Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, and Jason Grunebaum’s English translation of three Hindi stories by the legendary writer Uday Prakash, The Walls of Delhi.

Most of these novels have already found a wide readership in South Asia. Prakash’s work may be the least well-known among audiences of popular English fiction here—published in March by UWA Publishing (Uwap), The University of Western Australia press, it brings together three stories (described as “stinging and comic” by Uwap) about, respectively, a sweeper who chances upon a cache of black money, a man trying to reclaim his identity stolen by an upper-caste thief, and the head of a slum-born baby growing bigger as he grows smarter.

The DSC Prize longlist, selected by a jury chaired by poet K. Satchidanandan, includes several other well-praised novels, like Jerry Pinto’s Em And the Big Hoom, Rahul Bhattacharya’s The Sly Company of People Who Care, and Anuradha Roy’s The Folded Earth. A statement from Satchidanandan said, “The six shortlisted books from different countries represent the diversity of South Asian fiction in terms of theme as well as idiom. We were looking for works which are thematically fresh, stylistically innovative and are a definitive contribution to novel as a genre.”

According to a press statement from the DSC Prize publicity office released early on Wednesday, 81 books were entered for consideration for the $50,000 (around Rs.28 lakh) prize. Previous winners of the prize include Karachi-based novelist H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy, and Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew.

The prize was instituted in 2011. Its eligibility criteria admit any novel predominantly concerned with South Asian themes; this year, its window for publication stretched from 1 January 2011 to 30 April 2012. The winner is announced every year in a ceremony at the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Both Naqvi and Karunatilaka are debutant novelists; as it happens, both Thayil’s Narcopolis and Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon are first novels. Thayil is also a well-published contemporary poet; Ahmad is a retired Pakistani civil servant, born in 1933, who once said that The Wandering Falcon, a novel of interlinked narratives set in the border areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, had been completed in 1973, but left to “hibernate” for 40 years.

In another coincidence, both Anam and Ghosh’s works are second novels of projected trilogies. Anam’s The Good Muslim follows the story of the children of the protagonist of her 2007 novel A Golden Age, part of her proposed Bengal trilogy, set in Bangladesh around and during the 1971 war of independence. Ghosh’s River of Smoke is the sequel to his 2008 novel Sea of Poppies, and unfolds on the vast historical waterways of the British empire in the Indian Ocean and neighbouring seas.

The DSC Prize 2013 shortlist in full:

• Jamil Ahmad: The Wandering Falcon (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India)
• Tahmima Anam: The Good Muslim (Penguin Books)
• Amitav Ghosh: River of Smoke (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India)
• Mohammed Hanif: Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (Random House India)
• Uday Prakash: The Walls of Delhi (translated by Jason Grunebaum; Uwap, Western Australia)
• Jeet Thayil: Narcopolis (Faber and Faber)

This article first appeared HERE.

Interview: Ayesha Chatterjee confers 'clarity' on her latest book of poetry

Written in spare language and often using metaphors drawn from both Eastern and Western sources, the poems in The Clarity of Distance by Ayesha Chatterjee pare down the complexity of existence in today’s global world into simple moments of truth.

Born and raised in Kolkata, Chatterjee has lived in England, the USA and Germany, and currently lives in Toronto. She graduated from Smith College, Massachussetts, where one of her most vividly remembered courses was a lyric poetry class taught by Joseph Brodsky. Her work gained notice when one of her poems was shortlisted in the Guardian Unlimited Poetry Workshop in October 2004. Her poems have appeared in nth position, BluSlate and Autumn Sky Poetry. The Clarity of Distance is her first collection.

MyBindi.com's Ashna Singh gets to know Chatterjee as she provides insight on The Clarity of Distance.

What inspired you to write this book of poetry?

I knew I wanted to have my poems published and I wrote steadily until I had enough decent poems together to form a collection—and I was extremely fortunate that Bayeux Arts liked them enough to publish them.

Your poetry contains metaphors drawn from both Eastern and Western sources. How has living in Asia, Europe and North America influenced your writing?

The most visible influence is the setting of each poem. My poetry is very visual and so you can see how the German poems have a lot of nature in them, the Toronto poems are much more urban and the ones about India are clearly Asian. On the other hand, although my literary influences have all been Western, I express myself best by drawing from everything I know, from wherever I’ve lived. Living in Germany for so long gave me a kind of freedom to write without automatically using every day English terms and phrases. Sometimes I felt as though I had to work a little harder at keeping the language of the poems “pure”, and yet I could be more creative in how I formulated my thoughts.

What was your objective behind including “a soft thread of violence” in this collection?

It’s like life, I think. There’s always a little bit of danger lurking somewhere around the corner.

Describe one of your most memorable poems from the collection.

The poem that took the most courage for me to write is “The Last Generation”. And here also, voice, language, identity and, yes, distance plays a role.

Why is it important for you to get your readers to view the world ‘differently’? And, what do you mean by ‘differently’?

All art forms at their best have the ability to change people in some way. My favourite poems and poets have done that for me all my life; woken me up to new possibilities, cleared away cobwebs…made me think. I’d like more than anything for my poetry to do the same for others. How, is up to them.

Have you ever considered publishing works in the narrative form? Why or why not?

I actually have written a novel. It took me six years to write and it’s since been gathering dust in a drawer, which is where it belongs! I found it very hard to write and realized somewhere along the line that the reason it was taking me so long to finish it, was that I was approaching it as if it were poetry. I’m no good with dialogue or plot, I’m afraid. I’m much more comfortable writing poetry; I have better instinct for it.

Who are your favourite authors/poets? What book/poem do you read time and time again?

Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson and Salman Rushdie. I read Dickinson’s poems over and over and never get tired of them. And reading Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie is a winter ritual for me. 

To purchase The Clarity of Distance, click HERE.

For more information on Ayesha Chatterjee, click HERE.