Mother Mary comes to Me : Arundhati Roy (3.5/5.0)

 

4 min read

Arundhati Roy's mother was not a nice person. This was despite the fact that she might have been a good person, who did a lot of good for the society. She was mean, petty, vindictive and treated those close to her in the worst possible fashion. Her watching from a distance, as her brother was being evicted from the only home he knew, was classic bollywood villain style. To use the author's own terminology - her mother operated like a gangster in the small town in Kerala where she eventually settled.. Like most gangsters, all the way upto The Godfather, she had a tragic backstory which possibly made her the way she was. 

When I was reading VS Naipaul's biography, by Patrick French, I was overcome by a sense of deja vu (or the equivalent of having read this somewhere). Of course I did, because his most famous work A House for Mr. Biswas was based on his life or rather the life of his father. A similar sensation will come over a reader as they read this book, having already read Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things. This time I was aware beforehand, as most of us are, that GOST was based on a fictionalized twist in her mother's life story.

Mary Roy grew up in a privileged, anglicized syrian christian household ruled by a tyrannical patriarch. To escape, she married the first man who proposed to her, a quintessential planter in Assam. This was not very helpful as the guy turned out to be a hopeless alcoholic and in Mary Roy's terms a 'nothing man'. She left him and moved with her children to a family owned ramshackle house in Ooty, from where her mother and brother (an Oxford Rhodes scholar) try evicting her. Why they do this is not explained very clearly in the book, specially as Mary Roy subsequently depends on her mother and brother to support her family. This turbulence in Mary Roy's life  means that her children grow up with an extremely insecure upbringing. This is not helped by Mary Roy's own brusque behaviour with the children.

From this background Mary Roy starts a small school which eventually becomes the legendary Pallikoodam school in Kottayam and establishes her as one of the most respected and feared people in that town. She also challenges the norms of Syrian Catholic community in Kerala and fights for the daughter's share in family inheritance. She wins a spectacular victory in the Supreme Court. It is possible that for a single woman to make a mark in the patriarchal society of a small town she had to be a gangster.       

In many ways the author's own life has echoes of her mother's life. Arundhati Roy also, in a sense,  ran away from home. On top of her insecure and 'on the ledge' childhood, she also had a desperate hand-to-mouth vagabond  existence in Delhi. This phase of her life would have been tragic but can be viewed, as it turned out well in the end,  as a sex  and drugs (rock and roll - not sure ?) youthful adventure. While Mary Roy directed her energies making things and changing the world, Arundhati Roy's rebelliousness has taken a different route.  The combination of her literary success and  resulting earnings gave her the freedom to become a full time rebel for all seasons. An international champion of the oppressed, more comfortable opposing things than proposing solutions, like an Indian Greta Thunberg. Like the proverbial apple that doesn't fall far from the tree she has become a gangster in her own right.

In writing this book, the author book has tried to be as honest as possible, her relatives have specially been given the full benefit of her honesty. Her own personal life is not as clearly explained as theirs. Her instinct of running away from anything that approaches a regular stable (boring ?) personal relationship is not addressed. Her own class privileges and biases might have been glossed over as well. These minor points aside  I think this memoir is an good read about the lives of two interesting women.

Spy Catcher : Peter Wright (4.0/5.0)

 

2 min read

The word spy, specially a British spy, invariably evokes images of James Bond. You are thinking fast cars, glamorous women, assassinations. This book tells us that the reality is much more mundane and also far more sinister.

Peter Wright's father worked on radio technology directly with Marconi. From that privileged background somehow he meandered into poverty, working on a farm to landing at Oxford and eventually  starting  his life as a scientist for MI5 working on gadgets, specially radio devices. Eventually he rose up the ranks to be the assistant director.

This book is an overtly frank memoir of his times in the british secret services. On release, the book was banned in England, but not scotland.

The first thing that the book lays bare is the sheer scale of the govt snooping in Britain. It was not episodic or targetted but pervasive. The british intelligence services tried to plant listening devices in as many embassies , hotels conference rooms as possible. For e.g. when a former colonial state was negotiating its independence it was par for course for their british counterparts to expect MI5 to get a transcript of the other side's internal discussions. Things like breaking and entering also seem to be standard operating procedure.

The book spends a significant amount of time discussing the Cambridge Five and the impact of that scandal on the british intelligence services and their relations with the US intelligence services  CIA and FBI. The author makes the explosive claim that his boss and MI5 head Roger Hollis was also a soviet spy. He , strangely enough, seems to have shared his suspicions of his boss with the Americans. This should provide some perspective to those who think that their office environment is toxic.

Largely the picture of the intelligence services that emerges from this book is less James Bond and more petty office politics - a la  The Office. 

This is an OK read , the rating I have given is more for the explosive nature of the contents in the book.   

The Covenant of Water: Abraham Verghese (5.0/5.0)

4 min read

I wanted to say that Abraham Verghese's magnum opus 'The covenant of Water' is probably one of the best Indian novels in English for this year. Then I realised that the book was actually released in 2023. It's amazing that I didn't hear of this book for two years - mostly down to the fact that it was not shortlisted or even longlisted for Booker prize ! Instead, the book got its publicity from being Oprah's book of the month sometime in 2023. Oprah has declared it to be in the her top three all time favourite books. Thanks to my book club for picking this one a few months back.   

The book starts in the year 1900. A twelve year old girl in the southern Indian kingdom of  Travancore  travels on water to a church away from her own village. It's the day of her marriage, she is to be the second wife of a forty year old landowner and a mother to his two year old son. Over the course of the book this girl from an impoverished background is transformed to big ammachi, the matriarch of the five hundred acre Parambil estate. The book is as much about three generations of ammachi's family as it is about Parambil and the families that own and serve it.

In the second chapter suddenly we are in Scotland and checking if its the same book that we are reading. Digby, a dancing girl's son overcomes obstacles and becomes a doctor and comes to practise in colonial Madras. He is adjusting to the new sights and sounds of Madras and also the customs and hierarchies of the colonial white society in the city. There is also a Swedish doctor who has devoted his life to caring for leprosy patients.

Over the next sixty odd years , the story of the Parambil family mixes with that of these doctors and other myriad characters to produce this nine hundred page tome. The cast of characters includes several generations of  ammachi's family  including her children, grandchildren as well the various kochamma's, communists, naxalites, estate owners and opium eaters. There is also the mysterious affliction which affects a lot of the Parambil men. They are unable to navigate even shallow bodies of water and several of them die by drowning in shallow ditches. 

Kerala, specifically the princely state of Travancore figure features as a major motif in the book. The author has done an exemplary work of evoking the rural catholic Kerala from the turn of the twentieth century. This includes the people, the customs, the food, the courtyards and kitchens to their caste  prejudices. In the deep background India is getting its freedom.

With any such 'Kerala' English book the comparisons to Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things  are inevitable. The books are similar in how they describe the physical beauty and touch upon the political landscape of Kerala, specifically caste discrimination. This book, by the strength of its size is both more detailed in the way its evokes the landscape  and broader in its scope. There could be possibly five to six GOSTs within this book. Though I think the characters in GOST were  sharper and came in all shades, many more of them in darker hues. In this book we struggle to identify any mean, bad or ill intentioned people at all.    

Actually the author and book that this book most reminds me of is Vikram Seth and the Suitable Boy. While the story lines are completely different it is similar in the sense of a wonderfully written, multigenerational, early 20th century story. Vikram Seth along with V.S Naipaul and Rohinton Mistry have been the trinity of my Indian authors who write in English. ( All NRIs....hmmm). I can't think of any reason why Verghese is not right up there- will have to read more of him to confirm. 

The Emergency - A personal history : Coomi Kapoor (4.0/5.0).

 

The word 'Emergency' has been thrown about so liberally by the current ruling regime, to corner the Congress party, that it has almost become just another piece of rhetoric. Then there is the counter charges from the opposition of 'undeclared emergency' by the Modi government. All of this makes emergency feel like something bad, but not so bad - like a little more of the godi media and some more exaggerated sycophancy than what we see today.    

So it was quite a rude surprise to read about the reality of the Emergency that Indira Gandhi declared in 1975.

I guess all powerful people are paranoid about people plotting to take away their power. Indira Gandhi who had moulded the Congress party in her own image was no exception. By 1975 the conversion of Congress from the party that fought for the independence of the country to the party that was solely devoted to furthering the cause of the Nehru- Gandhi clan, was complete. Most stalwarts of the independence movement had left the party or had been kicked out. When the protest movement by JP in Bihar and others in the country gained momentum it was easy for Indira to convince herself that the country was moving towards anarchy and she had to act in the interest of the nation. The last straw was Indira's disqualification by an Allahabad court  in a case bought about by the maverick socialist Raj Narain

The book suggests that the idea of an emergency was first suggested in a strategy note by the Indira acolyte and then Bengal chief minister Siddharth Shankar Ray. The Allahabad court ruling was the event that triggered its execution. It started with a bang with a very large number of opposition political leaders arrested and power supply cut to most significant national newspapers preventing them from publishing.

One of the hallmarks of Emergency was how severely media was muzzled by VC Shukla. Most large media houses promptly and enthusiastically fell in line. Foremost among those being TOI, Hindustan Times and The Hindu. LK Advani summed up their attitude to emergency as "When asked to bend, they crawled". Among several smaller publications one large media house that resisted was The Indian Express led by the formidable team of publisher Ramnath Goenka and editor Arun Shourie.

Another hallmark of Emergency was the rise, the patronage and the excesses committed by Sanjay Gandhi. It was clear to many like the Haryana chief minister Bansi Lal that the way to Indira's heart was through Sanjay and they left no stone unturned in pleasing him. Sanjay had the run of the country and power dynamic in the congress started shifting from Indira's people to Sanjay's people. The likes of Ambika Soni came to the fore.

One interesting thing that I learned from the book was how emergency ended. Indira was the daughter of Jawaharlal - a man feted by the global 'intelligentsia'. This adulation was inherited by Indra as well. The withdrawal of this affection and a virtual blacklisting by western friends was the one thing that disturbed Indira more than any of the excesses committed by Sanjay and his people. 

The author has done a good job in bringing alive the atmosphere of the emergency. The book also provides us a backstory and context to several political leaders from 1990's to now. Author's own husband was arrested and mistreated during emergency so that would definitely have had some influence on her writing.  The books seems like an essential reading in the understanding of post independence Indian history.

PS: Another book that covers this period and provides a more visceral and poignant view is Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance . That is one of the gem's of Indian writing in English and one of the only English books I have read that really delves in detail into the lives of India's poor and unfortunate (of course this could be function of my limited exposure) , For me A Fine balance , not everyone's cup of tea, was like an Indian Grapes of Wrath and one of my few 5.0/5.0 books.

Ashenden : Somerset Maugham (4.0/5.0)

 

Most people know James Bond, that invincible British super spy, or Jason Bourne - his American cousin. If you are not happy with your spies being so energetic and gadgety, or their world's so black and white, u have John Le Carre's spies and spymasters such as George Smiley  or The Spy who came in from the cold. John Le Carre's aesthetic was apparently influenced by  Graham Greene's books that touched upon the spying business such as The Confidential Agent or The Quiet American. But before all of these there was Ashenden - one of the original gentleman spies.

Ashenden was introduced by Somerset Maugham in a series of loosely connected stories. Ashenden was a writer in England who was tapped by the secret services to work for them at the break of the First World War. He was stationed in Geneva, in neutral Switzerland, and got his assignments from his brilliant and ruthless boss known by his monosyllabic code name R. In course of his assignments Ashenden meets a lot of interesting characters and is involved in a lot of intrigue. However, he does not run after any bad guys or is himself chased in any alley. He mostly travels across Europe handling agents and spending a leisurely time. 

Somerset Maugham is one of my favourite authors of the English language (along with Graham Greene). Unlike a lot of the greats he is super smooth and easy to read. I specially like his short stories, of which he has written many covering his life in England, Europe and his travels to the far east. Ashenden stories are very similar in the pace and style to a lot of his other short stories and just happen to be about a spy.  

Ashenden is also the alter-ego for Somerset Maugham who was himself tapped by the British secret services during the First World War. He has used that experience as a raw material for his stories. Though he was not so impressed with the life of spies as evidenced by the scene in his first book, which I have reproduced below. Ashenden the author is being recruited by R , who is trying to lure the author with what great material he can collect a member of the secret services

" I'll tell you an incident that occurred only the other day and I can vouch for its truth. I thought at the time its would make a damned good story. One of the French ministers went down to Nice to recover from a cold and he had some very important documents that he kept in a dispatch acse. They were very important indeed. Well, a day or two after he arrived, he picked up a yellow haired lady at some restaurant or other where there was dancing, and he got very friendly with her. To cut a long story short, he took her back to his hotel - of course it was a very imprudent thing to do - and when he came to himself in the morning the lady and the dispatch case had disappeared."

R finished and looked at Ashenden with a gleam in his close-set eyes." Dramatic, isn't it ? he asked.   

"Do you mean to say that happened the other day ?"

"The week before last."

"Impossible," cried Ashenden. "Why, we have been putting that incident on stage for sixty years, we've written it in a thousand novels. Do you mean to say that life has just caught up with us ?" 

☺

I thoroughly enjoyed the Ashenden stories and just like his other short stories these will make for great vacation reading.

The palace of Illusions : Chitra Banerjee Divakurni (4.0/5.0)

 

Life is too short to read mediocre books. I keep a high bar for books that I pick up. It's a fact of life that when one keeps a high bar one will reduce the Type 1 error but at the same time some Type 2 error will creep in. In English, that means that while one will hardly read any mediocre books there will always be some good books that will pass below the radar.

That is what happened with me when The Palace of Illusions first came out fifteen odd years back. I thought this one more new age mediocre pulp feminist takes on Mahabharat. When the book was selected as a reading for my book club I had no option but to pick it up. I stand corrected, the book is a unique and distinctly feminist take on the Mahabharat, but it's definitely not mediocre.

The book is largely a re-telling of Mahabharat from the point of view of Draupadi. The main attraction of the book is that it is another pretext to revisit the Mahabharat. I am convinced that Mahabharat is one of the top cultural heritages of this country. It is an amazingly complex and layered tale where nothing is what it seems - good people do evil deeds while the evil beguile gods with their penance. God himself encourages brother to kill brother for reducing the pressure of human beings on earth.With such brilliant source material its very difficult to go wrong - but not impossible. Chitra Divakaruni , who is a teacher of creative writing at a university in the United States, skirts this line by a good margin.

One of the main quirks of the book is that it is told from the point of view of Draupadi - but the Draupadi of this book seems like an alter ego of the 20th century Chitra Divakaruni. The author has also introduced a whole Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu thi vibe with the supposed tension between Kunti and Draupadi - again I don't know if this was  directly referenced in the original sources. Then there is Draupadi's obsession with Karn , which I think finds mention in several other sources as well. Despite , or maybe because of, these quirks the books remains true to Mahabharat and is a distinct well written book.

While speaking of Mahabharat I would also take the opportunity to mention 2 other takes on the book. Devadutt Patnaik's Jaya remains one of my favourite versions of the Mahabharat - its an erudite take on the book which combines various traditions and provides the authors own interpretation. Then there is Shashi Tharoor's Great Indian Novel  which makes a clever use of the Mahabharat to tell the story of Indian democracy. 

Maila Anchal : Phanishwar Nath Renu (5.0/5.0)

It's the year 1946 in a remote village of Marygunj in Bihar, near the Nepal border. Villagers hear that the authorities are looking for a young man in their community. Baldev, a known nationalist trouble maker  is promptly tied and delivered to the police station. The villagers are shocked to learn that the officials wanted to consult  Baldev and actually call him Baldevji. In those pre newspaper days in the villages , news travelled at a glacial pace and the villagers did not realise that it's almost fashionable to be a nationalist and a follower of Gandhi baba.This opening act sets up the novel which is a heartbreakingly realistic portrayal of village life in India about the time when the country got its independence. 

The book is set in Marygunj, an indigo village named after the young dead wife of a long forgotten british collector. It is a typical village of the time with a few dominant families and many more poor ones. The main strand of the novel is about the arrival in the village of the idealist young doctor to set up a malaria research centre. In the course of his stay he takes care of and falls in love with the daughter of the rich and prominent householder in the village. The resemblance to 'Sachiv ji' and 'Rinky' is not coincidental. It is possible that this is one of the earliest usage of the 'pardesi babu' trope, used in so many old hindi movies and continued in 'Panchayat'. Their love story carries on in the backdrop of the Doctor's work, of the village politics and somewhere in the background, a country called India getting its independence. 

The village life that emerges from this book is not Gandhi's romanticized version. It comes across more like the sink of ignorance, casteism and exploitation that Ambedkar saw them as. What hits a 21st century reader first is the abject poverty in which so many villagers lived. The kind of poverty where there are people who have not had a poori or owned a shirt ever in their lives.

Then there is the exploitation. Exploitation of the poor , who are forever in debt - no matter how hard they work. Of women, specially of the lower castes - by their  families, by the rich, by the 'religious' gurus. Women who have to provide comfort to some lord who has their father's / husband's signature on a blank piece of paper. Surprisingly the book also shows how some lower caste women had more sexual agency then their upper caste peers. 

Freedom struggle in the country did not really impact the day to day lives of the villagers A few Congress programs in the village were largely objects of curiosity. Despite this, Gandhiji or Gandhi baba comes across as someone who was revered as a larger than life figure, almost a saint if not a god. 

It is largely believed that the Congress party lost its idealism in the Indira era, when power shifted from Nehru and first generation of freedom fighters. However, this book shows how the decay started even before Indepence , the moment power was in sight. Idealists in the party were being sidelined or even ridiculed in favour of the merchant classes who had lately become fervent Gandhians. One congress worker remarks that the new district Congress president was the same liquor shop owner whom they picketed a few months back. Actually even today, if we think about it, we can see all around us industrialists who benefitted from their 'support' to the Congress.

This book is an essential read for an understanding of where is the Indian society coming from. It's reputation as one of the most consequential books in Hindi literature, after Premchand's Godan, seems well-deserved.