Book review: Too Much Happiness

(Published in the Business Standard, January 2010)

Too Much Happiness

Alice Munro

Chatto & Windus

Distributed by Rupa & Co, POUNDS 11.99








In an Alice Munro essay on writing, she explained her view of the short story: “A story is not like a road to follow. It's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows...."

Stepping into any one of the collections of short stories she’s been writing for the past four decades—her first was published at the age of 37—is like stepping into a bigger and broader house than most in the world of literature. Munro has said elsewhere that most humans have a need to explore and examine the materials with which they have constructed their own lives; few of us, as she observes so astutely, want to believe that our lives are constructed of pointless moments. And perhaps it is this quality that makes Munro so celebrated and so often a locus of critical discomfort—wisdom is a writerly virtue that’s currently out of fashion.

In ‘Fiction’, one of the sharpest and most satisfying stories in Too Much Happiness, Munro allows herself a moment of sly fun. A music teacher is reading a book by a former student who remembers their relationship with far greater intensity than the teacher does. The book is: “A collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than settled safely inside.”

This is an often cited argument against the short story: its relative brevity makes it suspect, and serious writers are expected to graduate at some point to the novel. Munro began her career by trying to write novels, but as the mother of three and the manager of a busy household, she discovered as far too many women writers have that her writing had to be snatched, had to fit into shards of time. Success and fame bought her time—but it also brought her the realization that the short story was her form, not the novel.

Munro has built a far larger, more sprawling house in her apparently confined chosen space than most writers have with the vaster terrain of the novel. The stories in Too Much Happiness, for instance, deal with a father who kills his children after a marital quarrel, a predator whose particular form of abuse, practiced on young girls, is less obvious and more scarring than rape, the subtle traps woven into the waft of female friendship, the hidden ‘deep holes’ lying in wait for a couple in a long marriage. These are only the roughest plot summaries; Munro’s skill makes each short story, from Dimensions to Wenlock Edge and Child’s Play, open up an entire world, complete in itself.

Munro’s view of the world is not harsh, but it is pitiless, as in this stray observation from ‘Fiction’, which is in part about the particular humiliation of a marriage ended by one person’s inappropriate, almost risible, choice of another. “It almost seemed,” Munro writes, “as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness—however temporary, however flimsy—of one could come out of the great unhappiness of another.”

Perhaps the only sign of her age lies in this willingness to make sweeping authorial comments, to take the long view instead of seeing the more distressing human trials—divorce, terminal illness, lost love, betrayal, grief—as unjust, unbelievable upheavals.

This can be stretched too far, as it is in ‘Free Radicals’, which brings together a woman dealing with cancer and a killer on the run. This is lukewarm Flannery O’Connor territory, rather than vintage Munro. And in the title story, Too Much Happiness, the average reader will have to work to match Munro’s enthusiasm for her subject. This is a fictionalized version of the life of mathematician Sophia Kovaleski, who survived the suicide of a spouse and the gender bias of the time in Russia, only to die of influenza at 41. Too Much Happiness is Munro’s answer to a play Kovaleski wrote, The Struggle for Happiness; but it occupies an uncomfortable length, and reads far more like an embryo novel than most of Munro’s longer short stories.

As always, though, Munro’s work opens up more windows than any reader might expect. Too Much Happiness is a mesmerizing, rich collection, filled with Munro’s understanding of the workings of the world, and her continuing wonder at the variety and depth of our lives. Wenlock Edge closes with a brief look at people on the streets, going about their ordinary business, to shops and libraries and homes, and then ends on this note: “On their way to deeds they didn’t yet know they had in them.” It is this sense of possibility, good and bad, that Munro’s best work awakens in her readers, and Too Much Happiness more than delivers on the promise of the title.

Food: India's national dish

(Published in Outlook, January 11, 2010. I had a wonderful sparring match with a foodie friend where we both agreed that India's national dish should be dal--but that since there's no chance of agreeing on what kind of dal, I said I'd stick with the choice of the masses.)





In Looking Through Glass, Mukul Kesavan exhibited the classic cunning of the Indian intellectual. Faced with the question of naming a national dish, his narrator ducks and suggests instead a tricolour banquet, with delicacies drawn from various regions across the country.



It’s a clever and diplomatic solution, given the alternative. Scotland’s national dish, haggis, pays obeisance to that country’s sheep-rearing past, by stuffing sheep’s intestines with oatmeal, mixed meat and blood. (Scotland’s unofficial dish is technically vegetarian, but is considered culinary barbarity—Mars bars, coated in batter and deep-fried.)



Foie gras is for political and other reasons not officially part of France’s heritage, but in 2005, the country announced that goose livers, however unpalatable to the animal rights brigade, were to be considered part of its proud culinary heritage—by law. And several countries across the Middle East proudly claim credit for being the first to serve sheep’s eyeballs to (suffering) visitors. (They’re mentioned in passing in the Arabian Nights.)



If we were to follow suit, we might find ourselves ransacking the Nimat-namah and other medieval cookbooks for peacock recipes, economically combining the demand for a national dish with the presence of a national bird. There’s an ancient Rajput recipe for goat stuffed with peacock, while the ingredients for a banquet in Jahangir’s time lists the quantity of gold leaf required to coat a hundred roasted peacocks, along with helpful suggestions on how to place the feathers back on the cooked bird for maximum presentation points.



But tricolour peacock pate or biryani is destined never to grace our August 15 tables. In one sense, it fulfils all the requirements of a national dish: it’s an equal-opportunity shocker, guaranteed to offend vegetarians of all religious persuasions, environmentalists and bleeding heart liberals. Given the fragility of these sentiments, a wise writer of this sort of article would hastily remove it from her hypothetical menu, before the guardians of India’s cultural traditions start rumbling ominously.



Why do we need a national dish in the first place? It’s a good question. Given that this is a country where a tiny shift in dialect can be enough to split a state, and where arguments continue over whether clubs in the 21st century shouldn’t wake up to the fact that the British have left the building and allow its members to sport dhotis, the debate over what would be the perfect national dish is bound to be fraught. And in India, given the number of contenders from biryani-pulao to tandoori chicken to bhelpuri to dosas and parathas—and the infinite variety of regional variations—we could spark off the desi version of the Boston Tea Party: the Indian Chai and Curry Riots.



Even Wikipaedia, that unfailing source of dubious information and debatable facts, sensibly shies away from naming India’s national dish in its otherwise long list of what’s on the world’s tables—though it does, tentatively, offer chai/ lassi as our national drink. (Thereby offending, and uniting, kapi drinkers across the country, whether they take their brew French-press style or in time-honoured filter fashion.)



This should be simple enough. Given that biryani, pulao and khichdi are part of the Indian palate, and that a rough three-fifths of the world’s nations have some kind of rice dish as their national favourite, surely we can anoint some combination of rice-and-veggies or rice-and-meat? Not so. Aside from the fact that wheat-eating regions will have their sentiments damaged, there’s the tricky question of which recipe you choose. The classic, plain vanilla dal-and-rice khichdi has over 60 variations. Choosing a Lucknawi biryani over the Hyderabadi kacchi biryani over say, a classic coastal seer fish biryani is beyond my capabilities—and we haven’t even got to the pulaos yet.



The same issues crop up with almost every dish you might offer. Bhelpuri is present in most regions of the country, as is its predecessor, the humble dalmoth mixture—but Bombay claims the bhel, which makes it far too urban a dish, and it is almost absent from the further reaches of North India. The ubiquitous bread omelette seems, at first glance, to be a unifier—it’s the hostel food of necessity across the country—but it contains eggs, alienating most of sattvik and pavitra India, and is, to the best of my knowledge, unsanctified by tradition and unmentioned in the Vedas.



The samosa seems promising—but then we would have to acknowledge the possibility that it’s actually the sambusak, brought into India by marauding traders who borrowed this from their travels along the spice route. Even the khichdi is tainted by the British insistence on adding flaked fish and hard-boiled eggs to a much drier rice-dal blend, and renaming it kedgeree. It’s hard to escape the alien taint, whichever way you look.



History revisionists, and apologists for the tendency of heartland Bharat to ignore the North-East, might urge that we adopt either the momo or chowmein, both of which have travelled well around the country, and been forgiving of adaptation. Chowmein, in particular, should please the post-liberalisation generation. Instant noodles were for a brief while in the 1980s the most identifiable, and affordable, signal of a new modernity, and feminists might argue that Maggi did more to free women from the drudgery of domestic work than a thousand scholarly rants. But chowmein isn’t as ubiquitous across India as, say, the equally alien import of the pizza is in America: it fails the Railway Station test, which requires that any national dish be by and large available at most of the stations of the cross from Kanyakumari to Kashmir.



Given the complexities of the problem, why can’t we do without a national dish? The answer, in one word: curry. As generations of Indian food historians from the venerable K T Achaya onwards have pointed out, there is technically no such dish as curry. There’s a curry leaf; there are different kinds of curry powders and masalas, though these must not be confused with the post-Raj abomination known as Madras Curry Powder; and you might admit at a pinch that to curry a dish is to use a combination of specific cooking techniques.



The problem is that given our reluctance to anoint a national dish, we’re stuck with a non-existent version—the phantom Indian curry. In the popular foreign imagination, a dish of curry is pretty much the way the ambassador to Jahangir’s court, Thomas Roe, described it: a mess of spices in an inexplicable gravy. Roe redeemed himself by noting the plethora of sauces that went into the makings of different kinds of curry, but to the world at large, “curry” conveys the sense of a kind of spicy, mouth-burning hodge-podge.



The UK adds insult to injury by dubbing any Indian meat dish with a fiery, coconut-infused gravy a “vindaloo”, causing the ghosts of Portuguese seafarers past to turn in their graves. And a recent survey in the UK revealed that chicken tikka masala rivals fish n’ chips in popularity as the national dish. This might seem like the revenge of the empire, but consider this a moment: the CTM was invented by a cook in a Bangladeshi restaurant and its main ingredients include Campbell’s tomato soup. To settle for curry, conjuring up in most minds this bastardised concoction, would be to insult India’s centuries-old culinary tradition most grievously.



That leaves an insidious staple, as popular as the bread-omelette, more ubiquitous than the chowmein, found in pre-Mughal if not quite Harappan India. The dosa has crept into our lives in a quiet revolution, a stealthy and entirely bloodless coup. It can be found in dhabas in the Himalayas, stuffed with exotic ingredients in five-star restaurants—no one has yet invented the black truffle dosa, but some of us bet that this is only a matter of time. It can be stuffed with paneer, or with chicken and keema fillings for the unregenerate carnivore, but it’s the masala dosa that flies its flag across India.



And best of all, it is guaranteed to offend everyone equally north and south of the Vindhyas; the true Chettinad or Syrian Christian purist finds the masala dosa an abomination, and the North Indian culinary enthusiast is horrified at the pan-national appeal of this South Indian invention. You can even, experimenting with spinach and carrot fillings, create a suitably tricolour masala dosa, while retaining the potato stuffing that is the trademark of the true Udipi stalwart. We can continue to argue over the rest of the menu for a genuinely nationalist Indian banquet, but for the moment, the dosa gets my vote.

Speaking Volumes: Blyton Rocks

(Published in the Business Standard, December 2009)

The BBC thought she was a “mediocre…boring” writer; librarians at various times across the world have called her books sexist and racist; and over in the US, her name evokes polite puzzlement. But Enid Blyton is the only dead writer to make it to a list of bestselling authors of the last decade, joining modern-day stalwarts like Terry Pratchett and JK Rowling. And her popularity makes no sense whatsoever.



The world that Blyton described belonged to the realm of fantasy even in her day. There were few boarding schools as pleasantly idyllic as Mallory Towers; even in a much safer time, responsible parents didn’t allow their children the kind of freedom the Famous Five have as they explore islands and run off with the circus; and the England she describes is as mythical as the Faraway Tree or Toyland.



In a brilliant article for The National, writer Amy Rosenberg discovers and explores the fascination that Blyton continues to hold over her fellow writers, from Siddhartha Deb to Pankaj Mishra and Rukun Advani. And every British colony has its own reasons for the Blyton fascination—her easy-to-understand vocabulary, the pull of the exotic (muffins, midnight feasts, caravans), the insidious pleasures of being children in a world where adults are only peripheral.



In India, Blyton formed part of a strange Holy Trinity. Kay Webb’s marvellous Puffins came into the country long after the influx of books from Soviet Russia. So while there were some of us in a particular generation who graduated from Young Pioneer stories to the Wombles and the Borrowers, this was not a universal reading experience for the English-speaking generation of a certain era. The classic children’s authors of the US are available now, so my nephew reads Maurice Sendak, E B White and Frank L Baum—but again, these were precious commodities in Nehru’s India.



For Indians now in their mid-thirties-early fifties, the three authors who shaped our childhood reading more than any others were P G Wodehouse, Frank Richards and Enid Blyton. Richards’ Billy Bunter books were a marvellous example of how easy it is for children—and their parents—to overlook the politically incorrect in favour of excellent entertainment: few of us, reading his boarding-school classics, remarked on the exoticism of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, whose accent was a constant source of comment and hilarity for Bunter and co. But then, few of us remarked on the stridently Communist propaganda of the Soviet classics; my impression is that as children, we skipped the politics and stuck with the colour.



Wodehouse still survives as a peculiarly Indian passion; but his universal popularity in the last two decades has been on the wane. (We may be the last generation to keep the Blandings flag flying, or to speak fondly of Eggs, Beans and Crumpets.) A small nostalgic segment of readers in the UK keeps his world of crumbling estates, chorus girls with hearts of gold and daft young men attended by perfect butlers alive, but he is much more celebrated in this quarter of former Empire than anywhere else in the world.



Blyton, for all her prosy moralising and blatant class-consciousness, is still read, loved and celebrated everywhere except for the US, where her books lost their moorings. This might have been because the US adheres with such fierceness to the principle of a classless society, or because much of Blyton’s appeal is too English, and too steeped in nostalgia, for the Americans.



Reading her books as an adult is a discomfiting experience. Blyton was far more intolerant of the lower classes—policemen, gypsies, domestic servants—than an E Nesbit or an Arthur Ransome, and her children protagonists share much of her smugness. The Toyland books have been dissected for the bizarre relationship between a crusty old bachelor—Big Ears—and an impressionable young protégé—Noddy, not to mention the strongly racist reaction to Gollywog. And the elves and goblins of The Faraway Tree are almost sickly-sweet, compared to the malevolent orcs and balrogs of Tolkein or the seductively bloodthirsty vampires of the Twilight series.



And perhaps that is part of Blyton’s continued appeal. Where else in children’s literature today, where issues from drug use to homelessness to abusive parents or date rape are part of the fabric of teen novels, would you find such an idyllic world? Blyton’s world contained fewer Wild Woods than a Wind in the Willows, but were much more geared to the older child’s experiences than the equally sunny world of Winnie the Pooh.


It was a world of ginger beer and potted meat sandwiches, a world where your toys could come alive with no sinister aftermath, where smugglers and spies were relatively benign creatures who wouldn’t dream of bombing the London Metro or the Taj in Bombay, and where the Faraway Tree could transport us, in a blink, to an even more magical place than boarding school.



Blyton’s world never existed. But perhaps the continued appeal of her books, down the generations, is an index of how much we wish it had—in these times almost more than in her age.

Obituaries: Paul Samuelson, Dilip Chitre

(Published in the Business Standard, December 2009)

Paul Samuelson had a Nobel Prize in economics to his credit, a large and faithful following who venerated him for his resurrection of Keynesian economic theory, the ear of several US Presidents and a tradition of fruitful, running battles with the likes of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan. But when he died this Sunday, at the age of 94, the legacy he left behind him was to be found in college classrooms across the world.



The fascinating thing about Economics, his bestselling textbook, is not that it was so comprehensive and influential when it first came out in 1948. Samuelson was very much a product of the Great Depression in the US, and credited his development to being in the right place at the right time—ie, Harvard of the early 1930s, where he learned his trade under the tutelage of Joseph Schumpeter, Alvin Hansen and others.



In his Nobel acceptance speech, Samuelson spoke of that era: “Just when I had completed my advanced training, World War II came, followed by fifty years of exploding college economics enrollments. My generation had a strong wind at its back. My famous teachers had become full professors only after 40. Wunderkinds in my generation could become anointed before age 30. Outside the Ivory Tower, economists were sought out by governments, corporations, Wall Street traders, and textbook publishers.”



The other great truth of his life was the importance of getting paid for work that he would happily have done for free. When McGraw Hill approached Samuelson to write a basic textbook on economics, he took on the task with trademark seriousness. When the classic 1948 textbook celebrated its 50th anniversary—Samuelson’s Economics, in its updated edition, is now just over 60 years old—he set down his intention as a young, upcoming academic in the 1940s:



“My great predecessors—John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, Frank Taussig and Irving Fisher—were writing for their times. I was writing for the last half of the 20th century—an epoch that surpassed even my youthful optimism.”



Over the decades, Samuelson’s brand of economics has been revised, attacked and reassessed. But his textbook, augmented by William Nordhaus’ corrections and updates, has endured, in a field where shifts in theory can be violent, merciless and leave innumerable “books of the decade” on the remainder pile.



Stanley Fisher, who read the textbook as a student in Zimbabwe, got its enduring appeal better than most: “To read Economics is to have a glimpse of the extraordinary mind that created it: undogmatic, generous to predecessors and contemporaries, encyclopaedic, of course brilliant, and, most remarkably, sceptical, not inclined to take itself too seriously.” Literary classics often survive a century, but if Samuelson’s Economics does, it will be among the few textbooks aside from Gray’s Anatomy to achieve that distinction.



* * *



In memoriam: This week also marked the passing of the poet, translator and critic Dilip Chitre, who died at the age of 71 in Pune, of cancer. For many of us, Dilip Chitre often represented three poets in one. There was his own, iconoclastic work—a massive corpus where the Ekun Kavita (collected poems) runs to three thick volumes.



Chitre’s comfortable bilingualism and his famous intolerance for shibboleths guaranteed that he would not be lionised by the Marathi critics of his day, though it was a different story when it came to his work in English.



For readers outside Marathi, Chitre opened up and made new the work of two distinctly different voices—Sant Tukaram, the 17th century Marathi poet-saint known for his sinewy, uncompromising mysticism, and Namdeo Dhasal, once seen as the firebrand of contemporary Dalit literature. Chitre was drawn to the power and strength in both these writers. He was influenced by another great poet, Arun Kolatkar, when it came to translating Tukaram: he approached the poems “like a dance”, paying attention to the rhythm and the back-and-forth of the structure, where each poem begins with the words “Says Tuka”.



His Dhasal translations are towering, and are deliberately unlyrical: Gaandu Bagicha, for instance, is translated with no euphemisms for Dhasal’s out-to-shock language of the streets and the slums, and the Golpitha poems retain Dhasal’s searing images. (Dhasal grew up in Golpitha, and his memories of his father’s butcher’s shop form some of the most powerful images in that early series of work.)



Chitre was unimpressed by the rabid demands of those who wanted cultural censorship on the grounds that specific books or works of art offend religious sentiments. In a classic email to India Uncut, he laid down the true meaning of the word secular: “In India, it is often misinterpreted as ‘equally sensitive to all religions’ and not ‘equally neutral to all religions’… Whether God or democracy is our priority as citizens of this nation cannot be left to God to decide. He is not a registered voter in India.” Many of us hope that even after his death, Chitre will have the final word on this subject.

Apologies and a nibble: English vegetables, desi steak

(Haven't had time to update the blog for a while--my apologies. Here's a place-holder--an essay on food, written in 2003, that I thought I'd lost. Enjoy.)

Galangal and lemon grass were piled up in hillocks. The mushrooms were fresh and came in four varieties-white, dried dhingri, dried shitaake and dried, slightly dubious porcini. "Maydum," said my old faithful vegetable seller, "aur bhi fresh-fresh aaye hain." I came back with the usual urban load of fancy ghaas-phoos: borkoli, snaw piss, red peepers, aspagragrass -- and with a phrase reverberating in my head. English vegetables.

As opposed to desi veggies. My father-in-law had used it first, in appreciation of a dish of babycorn and red peppers tossed with hing, jeera and fried onions: "Aamar," he had said in Bangla, on the only visit he ever made to our house, before the cancer made travel difficult, "English vegetables khub bhalo laagey."

It was a winter evening and as I mechanically sorted, made mental menus and stashed my load of exotica away, I found myself counting the absences. The day before Diwali is when Bengali households celebrate by lighting fourteen lamps and cooking a mixture of fourteen kinds of saag. This year I'd made up the quota with the usual greens -- palak, methi, lal saag; and some less usual ones -- bok choy, watercress. (My conscience cavilled that watercress was not saag. I rejoined that I didn't have all day to shop, and that watercress was peppery, green and leafy -- ergo, close enough to saag not to make a difference.)

I slowed when I hauled out a bunch of carrots: orange, like the ones in the 'phoren' picture books for children, and tasteless, unlike the deep red, hairy, indigenous varieties that were increasingly hard to locate. Mulberries and phalsa had been equally hard to find in the summer gone by. In the fancy markets, English vegetables were easier to get than ever before; the old, desi roots-and-tubers stuff harder to come by, barring a few limited staples.


***


Ten years ago, at the Calcutta Club, I'd eavesdropped on a conversation happening two tables away. "These Phrench Phries," complained a man in a Bong-Yank accent, "they are bherry limp. Not like the ashol jinish, the real thing, at all." "It is the potatoes, Alok da," said his companion gravely. "Until India learns to grow potatoes like the Idaho variety, we cannot sample the authentic Phrench Phry." One chewed on a relatively inoffensive steak, whose authenticity had not been called into question, while the other contemplated, with solemn displeasure, the unworthy impostor on the plate. Together they managed to convey the impression that what to my untutored palate was a perfectly reasonable alu-bhaja would never make the passing grade as even third-rank Phrench Phries.

That was before the Hindutva brigade discovered that the two ingredients you need for the perfect Phrench Phry were: a) the humble potato raised to the standard set by the Idaho variety and b) distinctly unsacred but tasty beef tallow as the frying fat. Or the Phrying Phat. Either way, it was only a short while before, for McDonalds and company, the Phat was well and truly in the Phire.



***



That evening, as I chopped red peppers, cucumber and tomatoes for a last summer gazpacho before winter set in and drove me to the comfort of hot soups and plain dal-bhaat, the German laser knives someone had gifted me felt wrong in the hand, their weight suddenly awkward. Setting them aside, I came up with a chopper set on a wooden board that a friend had brought down from New York. It made swift work of the Spanish onions and the peppers, and I remembered the pride with which he'd told me that this was the very "offset serrated blade" praised by Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential.

I'd reached the tomatoes and the last of the twilight was shading into smog when the sleekly post-modern lines of my New York-imported offset serrated blade blurred into another, more familiar image. Take away the jargon, and my chopping equipment stood revealed as a boti -- the raised blade set on a rough piece of board that's ubiquitous in Bengal and most of India. The boti retails at the equivalent of $2 or less; my offset serrated Bourdain-approved blade sells for $130 in some California stores.

The kitchen stood revealed as a cross-cultural minefield. The antique Italian peppermill, a gift handed down by my mother-in-law, used by her mother in the days when the possession of such an item conveyed an aura of world citizenship on the user, is employed in our house to grind saunf and roasted jeera. The silver salad set and the silver toast rack we received as wedding presents are forlorn white elephants: there is no butler to polish them, I prefer wooden salad sets anyway, and we are a toast-averse household. Jars of dried Italian herbs sit side-by-side with various masalas, bought whole once a month, roasted at home and freshly ground. The dried Provence and other herbs taste like...crumbly green flakes. Just as we inveigh against "curry powder", there being no such beast in the Indian culinary lexicon, I imagine a brigade of forlorn Italians raising their voices to the heavens in protest against the use of tasteless flakes instead of the fresh herbs from the garden the original recipes demand.

I know that this discomfort is inherited, a family legacy. As with bloodlines and songlines, if you follow the tangled skein of foodlines far back enough, you may discover truths about yourself. Uncomfortable truths; but truths, all the same.



***



In my mother's house and my grandmother's house, meals came in two varieties: Indian and English. Indian was self-explanatory: in Didima's house, it featured the best of Bengali cuisine, with a detour down the cosmopolitan byways of a Brahmo household. In my mother's Delhi house, the delicate spicing of classic Bengali cuisine collided with the in-your-face punch of North Indian cuisine. It was one of those marriages that worked, against all reason.

In both households, however, the English meals followed the same pattern. Vegetables were boiled to within an inch of their lives, more occasionally lightly steamed with lemon butter; glorious jeera-spiked versions of white sauce alternated ominously with "bakes" distinguished by listless curls of Amul cheese. Cabbage was served up in thick, tasteless wedges that resembled steamed cotton wool, but sometimes it received the fusion blessing of coconut and mustard seeds with a dash of malt vinegar, all added Anglo-Indian style to the crisply shredded and only barely blanched vegetable. But the crowning sleight-of-hand came with the Roast: mutton roasted on coal fires, served with tasty but gluey "gravy". It was years before I realised that this wasn't even mutton dressed up as lamb: it was mutton dressed up as lamb pretending to be the forbidden meat, beef.

The sacred cow occupied a slightly ambiguous position in our household. It was perfectly all right to go out to five-star restaurants and order a steak, since it was understood that hotel steak was godless, procured from an atheist cow. This polite fiction was maintained even in the face of the knowledge that most (atheist?) steak-providing cows in Delhi were actually (agnostic?) buffaloes.

In Calcutta, conversely, beef was acceptable except if you had especially religious-minded Hindu relatives coming over for dinner, and even then occasionally passed off in extremis as innocuous mutton. If the record states that we were responsible for corrupting good Hindu souls, so be it; but add that they thoroughly enjoyed what they were eating, so long as they were allowed to do so in ignorance. The sturdy Brahmo steaks Didima cooked were seasoned with crushed pepper, fried onions, grapes, and of course, a delicious guilt.

But families change, and so did mine, eschewing red meat apparently for reasons to do with cholesterol. Once I organised an impromptu family lunch -- several decades after our five-star steaks and our Calcutta beefsteaks. The potato salad and curried mushrooms went down well, but the plate of steak -- cooked medium-rare, so that its pink juices oozed balefully out -- lay accusingly on the table while everyone politely ate the takeaway tandoori chicken we'd ordered as a backup. It was a small thing, but it pointed at a rift, indicated that at least in matters of what we were or weren't willing to put into our bodies, my family and I had gone in different directions.



***



Between these two extremes, the Indian lunches and the English dinners, lay a third path, not moderate but iconoclastic. It was provided by my Thakurma, who travelled from household to household along with her husband until she and Thakurda established a kind of metronomic movement between my father's house and his younger brother's house. There were two other brothers, but one lived in inaccessible Air Force cantonments, dots on the map of India. The other had married a practising Wiccan who convinced him that he was actually the bastard of a royal family, fostered out in my Thakurma's household. Ignoring the evidence presented by the family nose, the very distinctive protuberance that was replicated faithfully on the physiognomy of all the brothers, he elected in the interests of marital peace to disown his natural family.

Having Thakurma and Thakurda to stay was no penance: one was the source of magical stories, the other of practical wisdom. Besides, Thakurma's culinary contributions were of the subversive kind. She cooked everything forbidden by the dentist and took absolutely no notice of family preferences, convinced -- correctly -- that her skill in the kitchen would overcome all resistance.

We had an early skirmish over fish, which, in repudiation of my Bengali roots, I refused to eat. A galvanised iron tub of catfish was a permanent presence in the kitchen; I named each whiskered creature and was told that the ones missing every night had gone on a trip, and never connected the maacher jhol on my plate with the straying travellers. Aside from catfish, though, I flatly refused to eat anything else from river or sea.

Wiser than my mother, who was on the losing end of a running feud with a ten-year-old's stubbornness, my Thakurma retreated from the battlefield. When my suspicions had been lulled, she greeted me with nimkis and an addictive mashed, pickled thing that I instantly loved. It was smooth; spiced to perfection with mustard oil; had a taste that brought the sea into my mouth; I thought she'd wrought magic with the humble potato. When she confessed that I'd been eating non-catfish fish for eight days without protest, I flew into an absolute rage. It's only now that I can acknowledge her triumph: not only did she make me eat what I hated, she made me love it. In the war between my prejudices and my tastebuds, she won.

As the years went by, the two households were tossed around. My Kaka went abroad; we spent six years shifting from house to house in Delhi while my father was posted in Calcutta. In that period of collective rootlessness, my grandparents shared our refugee status. Sometimes with us, sometimes not, depending on the size of the house my resourceful mother, lumbered with three rambunctious children, could find.

All the places we stayed in then had a common feature: the pre-shrunk kitchen. Instead of the large, roomy spaces we'd grown up with, we had to accommodate ourselves to closets with a stove bunged in. Thakurma's repertoire of sweets, which ranged from malpoa to payesh, from sandesh to labango latika, from layered patishaptas with their filling of coconut and raisins to narkeler nadu, shrank in tandem.

Perhaps we noticed, perhaps we didn't. My sister and I had discovered liqueur chocolates, one of the many dazzling items that we knew of only as articles brought back from the amorphous land called Abroad. My mother walked in to find her daughters replete with chocolate, but with no signs of a liqueur hangover. "There was smelly water inside," my sister explained. "We threw it away and ate the rest." The kitchen sink reeked of assorted liqueurs for days, until our cook poured quantities of yeast down the drain. The sink continued stinking, but now in a familiar as opposed to exotic way.

I do remember, despite the lure of biscuits from Paris (they tasted disappointingly like Britannia biscuits) and then-exotic Toblerone, that Thakurma kept up the tradition in exile with a token offering. Sometimes it was alu-bhaja for tea, flaunting their swadeshi flavour in stubborn denial of conquering alien tastes—Thakurma never ate a McDonald’s French Fry in her life, and wouldn’t have felt that she’d missed out on much. More usually, she'd pull out a battered Dalda tin which contained moas -- the lightest of confections, puffed rice held together with melted jaggery. When they returned to live with us, the tin smartened up, courtesy the birth of my brother, Dalda giving way to shiny blue Lactogen.

But the habit remained; though she made patishaptas and channar-payesh once in a while, it was Thakurma's moas that flavoured those years of our childhood. They provided a rare thread of continuity in those years of evictions and constantly changing schoolbus routes, of exoduses where my mother lead the way like a new Moses, appealing to our sense of adventure as we moved yet again, me lying in a malarial haze at the back of the lumbering black Ambassador, my baby brother stolidly holding the TV aerial out of one car window like a conquering flag and my sister perched on a pile of rugs and cushions in the front passenger seat.



***



"Would you like to see our ovens?" asked the chef of a snazzy new Italian restaurant, just opening in Delhi. "They're wood-fired." I heard the pride in his voice and followed gladly into the inner reaches of the kitchen. Men and women in chef's whites, tocques clapped smartly on their heads, shaped loaves, prepared duck's breasts for roasting, checked a brace of guinea hens. The ovens were huge, industrial sized. The doors were deliberately unpainted, in a designer way meant to indicate rustic charm. They were large, and as they clanged open, twin odours of meat, from one, and bread, from the other, were released in fragrant clouds.

A beaming assistant yanked freshly baked foccaccia out of the oven and deftly assembled accompaniments of virgin olive oil, pesto and sundried tomatoes. Another platter contained zucchini, cherry tomatoes and other English vegetables in a raspberry-vinegar reduction. "For you," he said. "To taste." The bread smelled divine. And I knew that if I so much as tried to take a bite, I would vomit.

Three years ago, I had accompanied my father to the electric crematorium on Ring Road, braving the raised eyebrows of well-meaning North Indian friends who felt that women had no place in that temple to death. But the woman we were about to cremate was the first feminist I'd ever met in my life; it was because of her that my mother had become a lawyer, well into middle age, instead of remaining a housewife. It was because I'd seen her writing short stories that I was trying to earn a living with hack journalism instead of marrying some rich guy and doing ikebana arrangements around the house. The least I could do was show up to say goodbye.

The electric crematorium, with its bare stage for relatives to say a few words, do a few last rites, reminded me of the many knocked-together arenas where exiled Bengalis would gather during the Pujas to put on bad, histrionic, nostalgic plays. My grandmother's body looked very light; those who raised her bier didn't have to strain.

She had died in the sterile, impersonal space of a hospital ward, instead of in her own bed at home. She and her husband had remained eternal refugees, first from Bangladesh and then from Orissa; the small patch of land she had tried to buy and claim as her own outside Delhi was mired in an interminable legal tangle. The only space they'd had was the space they'd carved out inside our lives, and that was huge, unpartitioned, beyond all boundaries.

I joined the avalanche of mourners who'd shown up for Thakurma's funeral, realising for the first time how many lives she'd touched. From my father's colleagues, who had often sat down to chat with 'Mataji', to the vegetable seller, to my friends, to her own friends -- they were all here, in tacit tribute to a life fuller than we'd thought possible.

The furnace at the electric crematorium is built like a Dutch oven. After the final rites have been performed, the eldest son steps forward and breaks the skull of his parent with a stick. Some say this frees the spirit; a dourly realistic friend told me briskly that this prevents the skull from exploding in the intense heat of the flames. "One doesn't want," she said, "bits of one's brains going off any old where."

My Thakurma lay on the platform in front of the oven. There was a final muttered prayer, a clang, the platform slid first forward and then with surprising speed, backward as the door to the furnace opened. She went in head first, her eyes closed, and before the door swung shut again I saw her head and then her torso haloed by flames.

On the plate held out by the assistant chef, I imagined I could smell wood ashes, burning flesh, crisped bones. His smile was beginning to slip a little; the staff was beginning to look a trifle questioning. In place of the focaccia, I thought I could see my Thakurma's fair, wrinkled, only slightly mottled flesh, beginning to sear. The door of the restaurant’s brand-new, state-of-the-art wood-fired oven clanged again, as someone pulled out the duck breast au jus.

I took a deep breath and inhaled scents from the past: the talcum-and-damp-newsprint smell of old age, incense, the harsingar flowers Thakurma used for her daily puja, the faint aroma from the John Exshaw brandy she drank in ladylike quantities, that last whiff of burning hair and flesh.

"Thank you," I said, tearing a chunk off the Italian bread. I dipped it in olive oil and ate, not knowing quite what I was devouring -- flesh, flour, a memory, the present. Whatever it was, it stayed down.

2010: The Year Ahead in Books

(Published in the Business Standard year-end special issue on books, December 2009)

Fiction: It’s a great year for the novel of ideas, with writers from Ian McEwan to Gregory Roberts exploring new territory.

Roberts wisely allowed a long gap to elapse after the runaway success of Shantaram, but his new novel, The Mountain Shadow (Hachette) will still invite comparisons. Mountain of Shadows continues Lin’s story in a far more stylised way; a meeting with eight men will force him back into adventure and intrigue. Will this be as good—or if not, as bulky—as Shantaram? Ian McEwan is on familiar ground with Solar (Random House), where a scientist faces the wrath of the media for analysing the difference between male and female brains.

Dom DeLillo’s critics weren’t impressed with his 9/11 novel, Falling Man, but the advance buzz about Point Omega (Scribner) seems positive. DeLillo has a chance to take a more nuanced look at war and terrorism through the eyes of his protagonist, a secret war advisor. Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ promises—and has already delivered—controversy. David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (Hachette) already has literary groupies genuflecting in advance, and with new collections of short stories by Hanif Kureishi and T C Boyle, the cup of the inkstained wretches of this world runneth over. After a long silence, Thomas Keneally offers a novel—The People’s Train, which features a Russian revolutionary exiled to Australia.

Upamanyu Chatterjee’s brand of dark satire is back in Way To Go (Penguin), while fans of “headline fiction” might like Narayan Wagle’s Palpasa Café (Random House)—a novel of Nepal that starts with the royal murders and continues through the current conflicts. Anita Nair (Lessons in Forgetting, HarperCollins), Namita Devidayal (The Mother, Random House), Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (One Amazing Thing, Penguin) and Shobhaa De (Sethji, Penguin) all have new fiction out in 2010.

Keep an eye out for Omair Ahmed’s Jimmy The Terrorist (Penguin), and for these debut writers—Soumya Bhattacharya (If I Could Tell You, Tranquebar) and Tishani Doshi (The Pleasure Seekers, Penguin).And fans of historical fiction have Humayun’s travails, as the duo of writers known as Alex Rutherford offer the second volume in the Empire of the Moghul series—Brothers at War. On the literary front, Jeet Thayil and Dilip Simeon should also be out with riveting first novels, on addiction and revolution respectively.

Indian non-fiction: Shrabani Basu’s Victoria and Abdul (Rupa) is a fascinating account of the relationship between Queen Victoria and her Indian secretary, Abdul Karim—well worth reading. Somnath Chatterjee’s Memoirs of a Parliamentarian (HarperCollins) promises to be more candid than most politicians’ accounts of their lives and times. Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir (Penguin) should be every bit as melodramatic as the title. David Rhodes might top the blood-and-action stakes with his memoir of being kidnapped by the Taliban, A Gift of God: The Story of a Kidnapping (Penguin).

APJ Abdul Kalam’s The Scientific Indian (Penguin) is a reader-friendly guide to issues like water harvesting and space exploration. It’ll probably be as popular, but perhaps not as riveting, as neurologist V Ramachandran’s end-of-2010 release, Adventures in Neuroscience (Random House).

Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s The Butterfly Generation (Rupa) is about the fault lines between the socialist India of the ‘80s and the consumerist India of the ‘90s—it promises to earn out Mehrotra’s record advance. Later in the year, Salil Tripathi’s Silent Spaces (Tranquebar) takes a literary journey across the globe, with writers from Marquez to Rushdie as his guides. And in autumn, Ramachandra Guha examines The Makers of Modern India (Penguin). Jug Suraiya brings the year to a close with his wry brand of humour in his memoir, Times of My Life (Tranquebar).

Business books: Michael Lewis’ The Big Short is probably one of the most anticipated books of 2010—the Liars’ Poker author does a consummate job of unravelling the current global financial crisis. On the subject of fallen magnates, Kingshuk Nag takes a look at The Double Life of Ramalinga Raju (HarperCollins).The Luxe Book (Hachette) by Suman Tarafdar and Taneesha Kulsreshtha offers a little relief, with a look at high-end brands.

Kevin and Jackie Freiberg’s Nano-vation (Penguin) is the authorised version of the Tata’s small car story, with an emphasis on the good news rather than the political upheaval in Nandigram. RC Bhargava offers The Maruti Story (HarperCollins), just as we bid farewell to the tiny 800. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Alam Srinivas explore The Ambanis and the Battle of India (Penguin) and how gas pipelines became the war zone between the two brothers. SP Hinduja’s What’s Your Problem? (HarperCollins), promises to diverge from the hagiographical approach to business family history, as he mixes family stories with his personal brand of philosophy. There will be a slew of China books on the market, as always, but the most promising is probably veteran business journalist Raghav Behl’s The Red Elephant: The Story of India and China (Penguin).

The Business Standard 50 Best Books of the Year: 2

(Published in the Business Standard's special year-end issue on books, December 2009)

THE NON-FICTION LIST:

The Idea of Justice: Amartya Sen (Viking/ Penguin)
One of the most widely discussed books of the year seeks to redefine justice as an active goal rather than a passive abstraction, via the Indian concept of “neeti”. The Nobel laureate’s arguments are succinct, thought-provoking—and always entertaining.

The Case for God: Karen Armstrong (Bodley Head)
In a decade where faith has come under attack from the Dawkinites, the former nun makes a plausible and persuasive case for the continued existence of religion, if not the Almighty.

The Hindus: Wendy Doniger (Viking/ Penguin)
The eminent Sanskrit scholar goes back to the Vedas and the few clues from the Indus Valley civilisation among other sources to trace the development of the multiple ideas of Hinduism. Enjoy the splendid digression into the role of dogs, cows and other animals in the scriptures.


Nine Lives: William Dalrymple (Viking/ Penguin)
This thinking person's tour through India's vast array of religions explores nine different ways of finding faith, from Sufis to Tantrics. Dalrymple's relaxed, casually conversational style draws one effortlessly into an examination of faith in all its complications, from religious passion to the faultlines of competing beliefs and the surrender of one's life
in the name of, and with the permission of, God."

Lords of Finance: Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin Press)
Perhaps the best business and financial book of the year, Liaquat Ahamed offers a riveting study of concentrated power, hubris and the collapse of apparently invulnerable financial systems.


Ayn Rand and the World She Made: Anne C Heller (Doubleday)
The power and influence of Ayn Rand has outlasted her death, despite the frequent literary dismissals of her work. Anne Heller offers a fascinating look at the ways in which Ayn Rand was shaped and in which she shaped the world around her in return.


The Last Empress: Hannah Pakula (Simon & Schuster)
The Dragon Lady of China, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, is an ambiguous figure. This exhaustive and well-written biography explores the workings of the world of the last empress of China in illuminating detail.

Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life: Carol Slenicka (Scribner)
This stunning work offers deep insight into the life and relationships of one of the greatest writers of the 21st century, with special emphasis on Carver’s often controversial relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish.

Open: Andre Agassi (Knopf)
Agassi’s confessions of drug use overshadowed the other aspects of his biography. The tennis great unveils the darker side of sport, and of parental ambition in an oddly moving memoir.


Curfewed Night: Basharat Peer (Random House)
This memoir of growing up in Kashmir provides a personal view of its troubled history. Peer’s background as a journalist allows him to blend the personal and the political with consummate ease.

Stranger to History: Aatish Taseer (Random House)
Taseer explores the faith of his fathers through the prickly terrain of family history via the faultlines of today, as Islam reveals its multiple faces.

A Place Within: M G Vassanji (Penguin/ Viking)
The Canadian writer’s explorations of India become a quest to understand the roots of his work, as he meets some of his most revered fellow practitioners and thinkers.

Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity: Sam Miller (Jonathan Cape)
Miller’s evocation of Delhi’s history, past and present, makes this book the perfect guide. Take it on a long walk around Old and Brashly New Delhi, and you won’t be disappointed.

Dreaming in Hindi: Katherine Russell Rich (Houghton Mifflin)
This unusual memoir explores what it means to find a new language—and a country—in midlife.

Rethinking Hindu Identity: D N Jha (Equinox)
An outspoken scholar presents his view of the shaping of an often rigid, often troubled view of Hinduism.

Fear and Forgiveness: Harsh Mander (Penguin)
The Gujarat riots and their aftermath, examined by one of the most conscientious voices among India’s citizens.


The Difficulty of Being Good: Gurcharan Das (Viking/ Penguin)
Lessons in contemporary dharma, via the Mahabharata, take us through the squabbles of the Ambanis, lessons from Arjuna on the battlefield, and the importance of living well versus the need to win.


The Ethical Worker: Subroto Bagchi (Penguin)
The management guru explored ways of bringing values into a workplace that might often seem to place ethics below profits, in this final work.

The Satyam Saga: Bhupesh Bhandari and others (BS Books)
A comprehensive look at the rise and fall of India’s IT behemoth. (Disclaimer: This book was compiled by a team of Business Standard journalists; I decided to let it stay on the list despite the potential conflicts of interest because of the number of business gurus who recommended this to me.)


Baulsphere: Mimlu Sen (Random House)
Travels with the faith-intoxicated singers of Bengal, written by an insider to the world of the Bauls.

MS & Radha: Gowri Ramnarayan (Wordcraft)
One of India’s most insightful critics pens a beautiful evocation of a relationship between a musician and a connoisseur of Indian music.

An Indian for all Seasons: The Many Lives of R C Dutt (Meenakshi Mukherjee) (Penguin)
A classic biography of an Indian pioneer from the late and respected critic.