Comfortably Numb - Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: The Saree Eternal by Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri

Deconstructing the drape In this Essential India monograph from Aleph Books, former diplomat Lakshmi Murdershwar Puri looks at saris and their genealogy. Choosing the personal route, Puri invites readers to step up to her almirah of saris and proceeds to give the backstory to each drape. The sari is the oldest surviving garment in the…

Book review: This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin

Dangerous aspirations The focal point of the story is deceptively simple in its linked concepts: greed, overarching ambition, not knowing `one`s place` in life (Pakistani society, in this particular case), the courage required to step out of line, and the inevitable nemesis that comes to those who do step out of line. The one major…

Book review: The Only City, Bombay in Eighteen Stories, edited by Anindita Ghose

Bombay stories This anthology joins the canon of other books on ‘the only city’ as Khushwant Singh once called Bombay. Edited by Anindita Ghose, it has contributions by a diverse and exciting mix of writers, names well known and relatively unknown to readers. We see the city — challenging, impersonal, complex, careworn, unforgiving, complicated —…

Feature: The flamenco disapora

The gypsy`s India connect The Roma gypsies, who have a strong India connect, are largely reviled even as their music and dance is revered I’m sitting inside a small cave high up in a barrio (district) in the Sacromonte hills of Granada in Spain, which has willy-nilly been home to marginalised groups like the Romani…

Book review: The Last days of Earth by Deepa Anappara

To map a sacred land The ethics of map-making and the invisibilisation of those who helped the British Empire in doing so, is at the heart of Deepa Anappara’s second book of fiction. Coming many years after Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, her first, well- received one, this book too, is meticulously researched and…

Book review: The Jasmine Murders by Roopa Unnikrishnan

Blood in the boondocks In her debut work, Roopa Unnikrishnan crafts an interesting murder mystery, positions it in the early Sixties, sets it in a deceptively ordinary TN small town. Of course, what we see is not what we get, and the place is a cauldron teeming with age-old taboos, seething communal tensions, secrets…

Book review: Travels in the Other Place by Pallavi Aiyar

There`s travel and then there`s travel…. Pallavi Aiyar`s book has no ambiguity about the subject at hand. A neat meld of memoir and travelogue, she takes us aboard her personal train, opens the compartment doors to us, tells us of trips into the land of Books, into the barren wastes of Illness, shows us how…

Book review: The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

When winter comes The phrase `the land in winter` is the house words for House Stark in George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones fantasy novels, serving as a warning of the long cold months and hard, dangerous times ahead. Andrew Miller has used these words aptly as the title of his Booker- shortlisted The…

Book review: Intemperance by Sonora Jha

The quest for love With a quirky central premise, this book draws you in straight away. A middle-aged Indian academic based in Seattle decides to hold a swayamvar to find a groom. The author follows up her previous critically acclaimed award- winning book ‘The Laughter,’ with this witty, perceptive, sparkling story. The book is narrated…

Book review: The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie

Intimations of mortality After an artful meld of history, imagination and some brilliant writing in `Victory City,` after a show of cold anger in `Knife,` Rushdie is the Elder Statesman or rather, the Elderly Litterateur here. This quintet of stories is quite self-indulgent, with many of the characters being vehicles through which the writer expresses…