Book review: The Anger of Saintly Men by Anubha Yadav
THE ANGER OF SAINTLY MEN by Anubha Yadav, Bee Books.
These boys` lives.
Anubha Yadav`s first work of fiction is a raw coming- of- age tale of three brothers, Saurabh (Sonu), Anurag (Anu) and Vikram (Vicky) Singh. It contains all the pleasures and the not inconsiderable pain of adolescence, leavened with a vein of humour of the in-your-face, direct kind.
Then the boys grow into men and the pleasures as well as the pain changes in tempo as well as texture, and this time the reader doesn’t chuckle too often, instead watching with concern the direction the lives of all three take.
The book is also a wry take on patriarchy, in this case posited in Gurgaon, and Yadav makes an excellent chronicler of the many sins of commission as well as omission committed by the Singh brothers, as well as their male family elders, with most of the women being meek enablers.
Yadav does not bother to pretty up either her characters or the situations they find themselves in, and that only underlines the impact of a book that is rich in detail, rich in emotion.
This then is how a large part of male India lives. Read The Anger of Saintly Men so you can recognise sexism, misogyny and of course patriarchy, from a mile away.
Sheila Kumar • March 10, 2021