Speaking Volumes: 2011 and 2012 in books

(Published in the Business Standard, January 2, 2012)

South Asian fiction in 2011 was alive and thriving, despite premature reports of its demise. To be fair, Chetan Bhagat and the authors of bestsellers such as The Saga of Love Via Telephone Tring Tring made it ridiculously easy for even the marginally talented to look like writers of staggering genius.

Debuts of the year: Shehan Karunatilake’s Sri Lankan novel about cricket (Chinaman), Rahul Bhattacharya’s dark romp through Guyana (The Sly Company of People Who Care), Jamil Ahmad’s understated tales of the frontier (The Wandering Falcon) and Mirza Waheed’s searing chronicle of Kashmir’s faultlines (The Collaborator).

Second novels: Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim was a disquieting look at Bangladesh and the righteous rigidities of both the faithful and the liberal, while Mohammed Hanif set a love story in a lunatic asylum to heart-rending effect in Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. One of the quieter and lovelier surprises of 2011 was Anuradha Roy’s The Folded Earth, set in Ranikhet, which updated the “plain tales of the hills” genre for our times.

Three of the best: Amitav Ghosh’s very cinematic River of Smoke took his ambitious Ibis trilogy forward into the murk and confusion of the Opium War. He also endeared himself to his readers by sharing journals, photographs and anecdotes on his blog.

Jeet Thayil, once the bad boy of Bombay’s thriving poetry scene, might have a cult classic in Narcopolis, a novel that circumvents the usual Bombay tropes of the underworld and Bollywood. Its characters are all extreme outsiders, from hijras to opium addicts, and this may be the closest India will get to a version of William Burroughs’ Junkie.

The Artist of Disappearance is a delicate reminder by Anita Desai that there are subjects and lives to explore outside of Delhi and Bombay. The three novellas in The Artist of Disappearance are all richly satisfying, but the pick of them might be “Translator Translated”, where a college lecturer discovers the antidote to a life that stretches out before her like “an empty, unlit road” when she begins translating the work of an Oriya writer. “Beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary,” the author Marilynne Robinson said in an interview, and this is Anita Desai’s real gift, to make us stop and look at the ordinary again, whether it’s beautiful or filled with unbearable but commonplace loss.

Page versus screen: The other big shift of the year was the slow, but implacable, movement from the page to the screen. For most people who made the shift from the physical book to Kindles, iPads, Galaxy Tabs and other devices, the initial resistance was stronger than the actual transition.

But India often seemed ill-prepared for this shift, despite the clear and growing appetite for ebooks within the country. Many Indian publishers haven’t put their recent releases, let alone their backlists, into an acceptable ebook format. That’s shortsighted, given how ebook readers seem to be shifting from devices like the Kindle and the Sony e-Reader to reading on their tablets. A report in this paper estimates that India will see sales of 0.7-1 million tablets by end-2012 —that’s a huge base of potential readers, for publishers willing to make an effort.

With Amazon entering the Indian market, the expectation is also that ebook pricing in the country will come down drastically from its present and deeply usurious levels. (This could potentially explode piracy, but since more Indian books are now available for free and illegal download on Torrent than are available legally on Amazon, it’s really up to the publishers to treat this as an opportunity – free publicity – rather than a threat.)

In just the last year, the potential of reading on screens rather than the page showed unexpected possibilities, not just for publishers but for authors. Amazon’s Kindle Singles – short pieces, stories, news articles and poems – were wildly successful, hinting at an appetite for good literary writing that could be read in short bursts. Sites like Longread and Byliner drove an apparent revival of long-form journalism, and long-form journalism itself became the new novel — the thing every young writer aspired to be doing, often with no real understanding of what this alluring and ancient form might actually require.

In 2009, Rick Moody’s attempt to write a Twitter short story ran into technical trouble — his connected tweets, spun out over three days, were retweeted randomly. This created the kind of disconnect you’d get if you physically cut up a Nabokov short story and handed it out to readers in random paragraphs.

But all through 2011, the Nigerian writer Teju Cole pulled off a miracle with his “Small Fates”: 140-character tweets drawn from the newspapers, each poetically, crisply written, telling a self-contained story. For Twitter users inundated with too much white noise, “Small Fates” became an oasis of sorts, a resting place in the middle of Babel.

It seems unlikely that the physical book will die just yet, but the growing and worldwide shift from page to screen may be unexpectedly beneficial. There hasn’t been a really new writing form since the novel, now several centuries old. Perhaps the screens will deliver where hypertext failed.

Speaking Volumes: 2011's best S Asian non-fiction

(Published in the Business Standard, December 27, 2011)



From the biography of a killer disease to a tale of three lovers and one murder, the Opium Wars to the life of a woman who found madness instead of God, this year’s non-fiction by Indians or set in Asia took a wide view of the world. What follows is a highly eclectic selection.





The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (Deborah Baker, Penguin): The author photo of Maryam Jameelah, writes Baker, was that of “a shapeless black ghost: not even her eyes could be seen behind the dark folds of her veil”. Under the careful scrutiny of Baker, the convert came into sharper focus: Maryam Jameelah was born to a Jewish family, fled her home and faith in search of a truer religion, became a disciple of the fiery Islamic preacher Mawdoodi and stumbled between apparent schizophrenia and a state of temporary belonging.

The Convert is one of the most searching biographies of recent times, in the uncomfortable questions it asks about faith and the certainties of both West and East, and in Baker’s final, disconcerting encounters with the real Jameelah, born Margaret Marcus, who lives in Pakistan today.

The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Julia Lovell, Picador): Lovell is one of the few historians of the 19th century Opium Wars who has an understanding of the two competing views of the battles between China and Britain. Her lucid, complex account is finely detailed — and for added enjoyment, it should be read alongside Amitav Ghosh’s fictional trilogy, the Ibis saga, set against the same background and period.

The Emperor of All Maladies (Siddhartha Mukherjee, Simon & Schuster): The jubilant acclaim Mukherjee received in India for his monumental biography of cancer belied the fact that there is little Indian about the book itself. Mukherjee’s research into the history of cancer was all developed and conducted in the US.

But this minor quibble shouldn’t detract from his achievement: this is one of the most illuminating and moving books of the year. The quotations from Herodotus and the personal stories from patients give this already impressive biography even more intimacy.

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (Abhijit Banerji/Esther Duflo, Random House): Why would a kilo of dal be enough incentive for families in Udaipur to complete an immunisation programme? How complex are the choices made by really poor families, and how can that decision-making be improved? Duflo and Banerji offer a new way to think about and address poverty. Constantly updated with new research from India, China and elsewhere, their website has grown into a resource that complements but goes beyond the book.

A Free Man (Aman Sethi, Random House): For five years, Aman Sethi followed the life of Mohammed Ashraf, a mazdoor in Delhi, and attempted successive interviews, often abortive. What began as a promising research project grew into this biography of a labourer, one of the millions of migrants who flock to the capital in search of work. Ashraf, with his philosophical bent and a Chekhovian approach to life, opens up another city for Sethi and his readers, one where you can live a life of azaadi (freedom) and akelapan (loneliness).

The Red Market (Scott Carney, William Morrow): The hair shorn from devotees at the Tirupati temple forms the centre of a brisk trade in wigs; less well known is the red market in human wombs, tissues and remains. His investigation of the vampiric harvesting of blood in parts of India was grimly shocking; the ins and outs of the skeleton business are equally unsettling. But what raises this book above ordinary journalism is Carney’s ability to ask the darker and more uncomfortable moral questions, about the ethics of the surrogacy business as well as more obvious crimes.

Death in Mumbai (Meenal Baghel, Random House): Instead of treating the murder of Neeraj Grover as a sensational crime of passion, Baghel asks a simple question: what would make an aspiring model, Maria Susairaj, and her naval officer boyfriend kill her former lover, hack his corpse into pieces, and look for a cold-blooded cover-up?

It’s the normal, small-town backbeat to the lives and aspirations of Grover and Susairaj that makes the murder doubly chilling, and Baghel quietly draws a picture of a generation growing up in Mumbai, unmoored but easily seduced by the city’s promise of making it big. As with Sonia Faleiro’s 2010 Beautiful Thing, Death in Mumbai is another small indicator that Indian writers are finding their voices outside of the enclaves of fiction.

Taj Mahal Foxtrot (Naresh Fernandes, Roli Books): It was about 15 years ago that Naresh Fernandes began wondering about the backstories to the musicians who lit up Bombay’s jazz age. For years afterwards, friends and acquaintances would receive unexpected presents: MP3s of Lorna’s sinuously honeyed voice singing Goan anthems to love and drunkards, for instance. It seems unfair for Bombay to have two unforgettable city biographies coming out in the same year, but Fernandes’ homage to the city’s jazz age captures Bombay in swing time. The men and women who lit up the city, the era of “music without birth control”, the clubs and the small tragedies — all of these are captured perfectly. Get the book, and the soundtrack.

Speaking Volumes: 2011's best S Asian non-fiction

(Published in the Business Standard, December 27, 2011)

From the biography of a killer disease to a tale of three lovers and one murder, the Opium Wars to the life of a woman who found madness instead of God, this year’s non-fiction by Indians or set in Asia took a wide view of the world. What follows is a highly eclectic selection.

The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (Deborah Baker, Penguin): The author photo of Maryam Jameelah, writes Baker, was that of “a shapeless black ghost: not even her eyes could be seen behind the dark folds of her veil”. Under the careful scrutiny of Baker, the convert came into sharper focus: Maryam Jameelah was born to a Jewish family, fled her home and faith in search of a truer religion, became a disciple of the fiery Islamic preacher Mawdoodi and stumbled between apparent schizophrenia and a state of temporary belonging.

The Convert is one of the most searching biographies of recent times, in the uncomfortable questions it asks about faith and the certainties of both West and East, and in Baker’s final, disconcerting encounters with the real Jameelah, born Margaret Marcus, who lives in Pakistan today.

The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Julia Lovell, Picador): Lovell is one of the few historians of the 19th century Opium Wars who has an understanding of the two competing views of the battles between China and Britain. Her lucid, complex account is finely detailed — and for added enjoyment, it should be read alongside Amitav Ghosh’s fictional trilogy, the Ibis saga, set against the same background and period.

The Emperor of All Maladies (Siddhartha Mukherjee, Simon & Schuster): The jubilant acclaim Mukherjee received in India for his monumental biography of cancer belied the fact that there is little Indian about the book itself. Mukherjee’s research into the history of cancer was all developed and conducted in the US.

But this minor quibble shouldn’t detract from his achievement: this is one of the most illuminating and moving books of the year. The quotations from Herodotus and the personal stories from patients give this already impressive biography even more intimacy.

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (Abhijit Banerji/Esther Duflo, Random House): Why would a kilo of dal be enough incentive for families in Udaipur to complete an immunisation programme? How complex are the choices made by really poor families, and how can that decision-making be improved? Duflo and Banerji offer a new way to think about and address poverty. Constantly updated with new research from India, China and elsewhere, their website has grown into a resource that complements but goes beyond the book.

A Free Man (Aman Sethi, Random House): For five years, Aman Sethi followed the life of Mohammed Ashraf, a mazdoor in Delhi, and attempted successive interviews, often abortive. What began as a promising research project grew into this biography of a labourer, one of the millions of migrants who flock to the capital in search of work. Ashraf, with his philosophical bent and a Chekhovian approach to life, opens up another city for Sethi and his readers, one where you can live a life of azaadi (freedom) and akelapan (loneliness).

The Red Market (Scott Carney, William Morrow): The hair shorn from devotees at the Tirupati temple forms the centre of a brisk trade in wigs; less well known is the red market in human wombs, tissues and remains. His investigation of the vampiric harvesting of blood in parts of India was grimly shocking; the ins and outs of the skeleton business are equally unsettling. But what raises this book above ordinary journalism is Carney’s ability to ask the darker and more uncomfortable moral questions, about the ethics of the surrogacy business as well as more obvious crimes.

Death in Mumbai (Meenal Baghel, Random House): Instead of treating the murder of Neeraj Grover as a sensational crime of passion, Baghel asks a simple question: what would make an aspiring model, Maria Susairaj, and her naval officer boyfriend kill her former lover, hack his corpse into pieces, and look for a cold-blooded cover-up?

It’s the normal, small-town backbeat to the lives and aspirations of Grover and Susairaj that makes the murder doubly chilling, and Baghel quietly draws a picture of a generation growing up in Mumbai, unmoored but easily seduced by the city’s promise of making it big. As with Sonia Faleiro’s 2010 Beautiful Thing, Death in Mumbai is another small indicator that Indian writers are finding their voices outside of the enclaves of fiction.

Taj Mahal Foxtrot (Naresh Fernandes, Roli Books): It was about 15 years ago that Naresh Fernandes began wondering about the backstories to the musicians who lit up Bombay’s jazz age. For years afterwards, friends and acquaintances would receive unexpected presents: MP3s of Lorna’s sinuously honeyed voice singing Goan anthems to love and drunkards, for instance. It seems unfair for Bombay to have two unforgettable city biographies coming out in the same year, but Fernandes’ homage to the city’s jazz age captures Bombay in swing time. The men and women who lit up the city, the era of “music without birth control”, the clubs and the small tragedies — all of these are captured perfectly. Get the book, and the soundtrack.

Speaking Volumes: So long, and thanks for all the fish

(Published in the Business Standard, December 20, 2011.)

Except for the books, they had little in common. The writers and book lovers who died in 2011 spanned worlds of experience, from Diana Wynne Jones, who survived a horrifying childhood to become a writer of children’s books, to Vaclav Havel, the playwright who ushered his country safely into revolution and beyond. This column pays tribute to some of the best.

George Whitman, proprietor of Shakespeare & Company: “The rumour spread to the corners of the world that there was a strange bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris where you could sleep for free. A generation of writers and wanderers were sheltered and fed, and then that generation’s children,” wrote Jeremy Mercer of George Whitman’s bookstore.


Whitman had soup, dubious pancakes and books on offer for all who came; and Shakespeare & Company may be the only bookstore in the world to have its own, official song. “If you ever come to Paris/ On a cold and rainy night/ And find the Shakespeare store/ It can be a welcome sight…”

Indira Goswami: Better known to the young writers and countless friends who found shelter, companionship and a link to “home” in Assam as Mamoni Raisom, Indira Goswami’s novels and other writings defined Ahomiya literature for at least three decades.

In her Unfinished Autobiography, she wrote that all the places she loved were riverine places, from the Ahiron in Madhya Pradesh and the Chandrabhaga in Kashmir to the Thames in London, as though the Brahmaputra had marked her fiction indelibly. “Without my pen, I would die,” she said many years later.

Christopher Hitchens: It was typical of Hitchens, perhaps the true literary heir to Kingsley Amis and Hunter S Thompson, that the Twitter account he started about a year before his death from cancer ran under the flag of @hitchbitch. Hitchens was unabashedly outspoken, the last of the grand old hacks, stubbornly defending his support of the Iraq war, ferocious in his attacks on organised religion and what he saw as the iniquities of faith.

His literary journalism was of a piece with the man — laddish, opinionated, sharp. There would be no RIPs for Hitch; he had already written his epitaphs, in utterly unsentimental examinations of the indignities of late-stage cancer. Of his obituarists, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie were among the best, paying homage, as Rushdie put it, to a “great voice” and a “great heart”.

Srilal Shukla: Of all the satire and fiction Srilal Shukla wrote, the one that would last was Raag Darbari, written in the late 1960s, still as trenchant and biting today, over four decades later. His protagonist, Vaidyaji, was the philosophical manipulator who knew exactly how to make a corrupt system work for him. Shukla’s Shivpalganj was an amalgam of the many places he had known and worked in as a government servant.

There was a classic moment at the Neemrana literary festival, where a TV anchor asked Shukla to step out of the frame so that they could get footage of Naipaul. The cameraman was horrified. “Don’t you know who this is?” he told the anchor, who recognised neither Shukla nor the mention of Raag Darbari. Giving up, the cameraman said in exasperation, “This is Naipaul’s baap!” But Shuklaji had already left, amused rather than offended.

H R F Keating: In 1999, the creator of Inspector Ghote published an odd, now forgotten book: Jack, the Lady-Killer. This crime novel in verse was inspired by Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, though Keating confessed he couldn’t match Seth’s rhymes. (The title was taken from The Golden Gate: “The old folks settle down with books:/ He with Tom Jones, she with a thriller/ Entitled Jack the Lady-Killer.”)

This was not the first time Keating had turned to India for inspiration. Inspector Ghote was born in the early 1960s, out of a romantic fascination with a country Keating had read about but never visited. Ghote’s name was borrowed from a George Bernard Shaw diatribe about the illogic of the English language, where you could spell “fish” as “ghoti” — using “gh” as in tough, “o” as in women, “ti” as in mention. But the real allure of Inspector Ghote, for Keating, was that the anarchy of the Bombay CID allowed him to get away from the more stifling conventions of the English detective novel.

Ghote was a good man in a corrupt world, intent on following “the proper procedure” through a delightfully varied list of cases. By the early 2000s (Bribery, Corruption Also and Breaking and Entering), Ghote had become an anachronism, and references to Keating were almost always prefaced with the word “old-fashioned”; but he is still remembered with affection.

Diana Wynne Jones: The year was a hard one for fantasy-lovers, who lost Anne McCaffrey and Russell Hoban as well as Jones. Jones’ fantasies, from the Chrestomanci series to Howl’s Moving Castle, were guaranteed free of mawkishness and predictability. She wrote for the child she had been herself; frighteningly bright, alive and alert to the world, already aware that magic might have its dark side and fairies might have their own twisted agenda. “Writing for adults you have to keep reminding them of what is going on,” she had said. “The poor things have given up using their brains when they read. Children you only need to tell things to once.”

Speaking Volumes: Bag of Bones

(Published in the Business Standard, December 13, 2011. This is a longer version of the column that was carried in print.)


It was a measure of the relative innocence of Delhi (and India) in 1978 that the murder of two children would hit the city so hard. In the absence of the noise of today’s TV channels or the feeding frenzy of the tabloids, the deaths of Sanjay and Geeta Chopra felt, to middle-class Delhi, like a personal, familial tragedy.

The brother and sister were killed by Kuljeet Singh and Jasjeet Singh, better known by their nicknames, Billa and Ranga. Geeta and Sanjay had asked for a lift back home; three days later, their bodies were found in Buddha Jayanti Park. Their deaths had not been easy or swift, and for months afterwards, the horror of the murders, the deep collective grief over what those children had suffered before they died, became part of the city’s consciousness. Billa and Ranga were sentenced to death, and hanged in 1982.

The murders were unplanned, and yet they were carried out with a degree of deliberation and cruelty that raised questions about Billa and Ranga. It was easier at the time to see the pair as monsters; the idea that a certain kind of person might comfortably turn to killing, given an opportunity, is far harder for most humans to stomach. The hangings, greeted by and large with satisfaction, as a sign that justice had been done, was also a spectacle of medieval justice that raised larger questions over the death penalty. We know little about Billa and Ranga, aside from the fact that they had small-town roots, and that, after the murders, they instinctively sought shelter back home, not trusting to the anonymity of the big city.

There were no Truman Capotes to ask the really messy, unpleasant questions, nor were there the equivalent of writers like Vikram Chandra, to capture the sense of a city in the middle of change. Three decades later, the city is either indifferent to murders, unless they are suitably bloody – dismembered bodies found in gunny sacks – or its media will descend like hordes of flies on the more sensational deaths, as happened with the Aarushi Talwar case.

Bombay has been more fortunate in its chroniclers, from Suketu Mehta to Meenal Baghel, whose understanding of the city comes from the years she spent on the crime beat, and her time as editor of one of its more robustly sensational tabloids. The murder of a young TV executive, Neeraj Grover, in 2008 held the city’s attention for many obvious reasons.

The chief suspects were an aspiring actress, Maria Susairaj, who had ended a relationship with Grover, and her boyfriend Emile Jerome, a young, handsome naval officer. Grover’s body was found hacked into several pieces, a detail that acquired the sheen of legend in the media retelling: “three hundred pieces”, neither more nor less. In July 2011, Maria Susairaj was acquitted by a Mumbai court, who appeared to believe the version of events where Susairaj was cast as a helpless witness rather than an active participant; Emile Jerome received a 10-year sentence.

In Baghel’s hands, what could have been a conventional, if stirringly lurid, tale of predictable crime – passion, jealousy, a cunning cop pitting his wits against two very collected murder suspects – becomes a much more layered tale of darkness. The murder took place in the tiny flat of an apartment building called Dheeraj Solitaire, a name that speaks eloquently of the aspirations and hopes of those halfway up the ladder. Maria’s films – mostly flops – have contemporary, smart, Hinglish titles: Excuse Me and Ok, Sir, Ok.

The Bombay she and Neeraj move in is the world of smart gyms and parties that take them far away from either Mysore or Kanpur, where they grew up. Maria’s universe is a place where you might meet a possible future husband on Orkut while also hedging your bets on shaadi.com, and where, in the big city safely away from the prying curiosity of family, casual relationships that are all about “having mazaa” are filled with possibility and guaranteed free from judgement.

Baghel never lets us forget the violence of the actual murder; the blood from Grover’s body soaked their bedroom, and she has a chilling description of the effect it has in court when the packet that contains his bones is opened up, releasing the “dank” smell of death into the air. This is what hangs over Baghel’s tale of apparently commonplace aspiration: Neeraj Grover shaking off the dust of Kanpur as he works in the office of Ekta Kapur, the woman who runs a TV soap opera empire built on mothers-in-law, virginal heroines and wicked vamps, Maria holding marriage to a naval officer as a card in reserve in case her film actress dreams don’t come through.

The real darkness, in the story Baghel draws for her readers, is not in the crime that happened in the blink of a moment, with the current boyfriend confronting his fiancee’s former lover. It’s not in the carefully planned disposal of Grover’s corpse, where they might have got away with the murder if it hadn’t been for top police officer Rakesh Maria’s experience.

It’s in what happened in the days afterwards, when Emile and Maria went about their daily affairs with apparent normalcy, waiting for the police to forget about the corpse of Maria’s lover and friend, so that the actress and the navy man could go back to the important, absorbing business of their lives together.

Baghel never lets the reader forget that these two, Maria and Emile, are not monsters or psychopaths. Neeraj Grover's story is a very contemporary one: a young man struggling to get out of Kanpur in order to make something of himself, his ambitions and his successful arrival as a minor cog in Ekta Kapur's television serial factory marred only by his obsession with women: "Girlfriends turned up like finds out of an excavation out of Mohenjodaro."

But so is Maria's desperate and reasonably successful attempts to escape from the stifling conservatism of Mysore, her need to reinvent herself as an actress who's crossed the great divide between struggling and recognised. And Emile, the perfect cadet, who shares his small-town background with Maria and Neeraj, has few issues aside from an occasional burst of temper. Through her interviews with other actresses, psychics, police officers, Neeraj's friends in Bombay, Baghel builds up a compelling picture of a much less glamorous city, a place where those from India's small towns work so hard to fit in that they ignore the fissures and fractures of their divided selves.

Baghel offers no easy answers. Instead, she engages our sympathies, with all three protagonists, and then, as a quiet reminder, offers a list of material evidence compiled by the Crime Branch.

"All the clues to Neeraj's killing--the method and also the malevolence--lay in these items:

1. One bone, one foot long, burnt on one side.
2. Remnants of a burnt bag, red in colour.
3. Reddish-coloured half-burnt cloth.
4. Burnt pillow, pillowcase, burnt cloth, and plastic piece, all red."

And so it continues, down to a pair of bloodstained blue jeans with the label Skinny on the inside, one 13-inch chopper with an 8-inch long blade, one parcel containing bones, one yellow-coloured 5-litre plastic can with the words: Saffola Losorb--The Heart of a Family. These 33 things were all that was left of Neeraj Grover.