Interesting Reads 2021

Fated to do and to die, only to remember, then forget – why try?
Mrs S. Pankajam has always lived two lives: one of ordinary fulfilment in her experiences as a wife to her husband and a mother to her two daughters, and the other a life of desires and sharp observations that only her mind is privy to.
When Mrs Pankajam starts losing her memory, her doctor recommends she keep a diary to maintain a semblance of continuity in life events. At first, she is reluctant. What is so spectacular about her life that warrants its story being recorded, she wonders. But as she sets pen to paper, meticulously documenting the revelations that her daughters (well past their teens now) continue to subject her to, the discovery of her husband’s eccentricities and her own guilty admissions to indulgences that may have caused his cardiac arrest, she finds her childhood persistently wrestling with the present as a marked reminder of a past she cannot run away from.
A witty and touching tale about a declining mind trying to make sense of an ever-changing world, Meera Rajagopalan’s finely crafted novel is one that challenges the reader to confront long-held beliefs and make amends while it is still possible.

‘I am Rani Jindan, Mother of the Khalsa. That is my identity. That is my fate.’
While we have all heard tales of Rani Lakshmi Bai and Padmavati, not many of us are familiar with another Indian queen.
Daughter of the royal kennel keeper, the beautiful Jindan Kaur went on to become Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s youngest and last queen; his favourite. She became regent when her son Dalip, barely six years old, unexpectedly inherited the throne. Sharp-eyed, stubborn, passionate, and dedicated to protecting her son’s heritage, Jindan distrusted the British and fought hard to keep them from annexing Punjab. Defying tradition, she stepped out of the zenana, cast aside the veil and conducted state business in public. Addressing her Khalsa troops herself, she inspired her men in two wars against the ‘firangs’. Her power and influence were so formidable that the British, fearing an uprising, robbed the rebel queen of everything she had, including her son. She was imprisoned and exiled. But that did not crush her indomitable will.
An exquisite love story of a king and a commoner, a cautionary tale about loyalty and betrayal, and a powerful parable of the indestructible bond between mother and child, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s unforgettable novel brings alive one of the most fearless women of the nineteenth century, an inspiration for our times.

The blind matriarch, Matangi-Ma, lives on the topmost floor of an old house with many stories. From her eyrie, she hovers unseeingly over the lives of her family. Her long-time companion Lali is her emissary to the world. Her three children are by turn overprotective and dismissive of her. Her grandchildren are coming to terms with old secrets and growing pains. Life goes on this way until one day the world comes to a standstill-and they all begin to look inward.
This assured novel records the different registers in the complex inner life of an extended family. Like
the nation itself, the strict hierarchy of the joint-family home can be dysfunctional, and yet it is this home that often provides unexpected relief and succour to the vulnerable within its walls.
As certainties dissolve, endings lead to new beginnings. Structured with the warp of memory and the weft of conjoined lives, the narrative follows middle India, even as it records the struggles for individual growth, with successive generations trying to break out of the stranglehold of the all-encompassing Indian family.
Ebbing and flowing like the waves of a pandemic, the novel is a clear-eyed chronicle of the tragedies of India’s encounter with the Coronavirus, the cynicism and despair that accompanied it, and the resilience and strength of the human spirit.

In the months leading up to Independence, in Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel are engaged in deliberations with British Viceroy Dickie Mountbatten over the fate of the country. In Lahore, Sepoy Malik returns home from the Great War hoping to win his sweetheart Tara’s hand in marriage, only to find divide-and-rule holding sway, and love, friendships, and familial bonds being tested.
Set in parallel threads across these two cities, Lahore is a behind-the-scenes look into the negotiations and the political skulduggery that gave India its freedom, the price for which was batwara. As the men make the decisions and wield the swords, the women bear the brunt of the carnage that tears through India in the sticky hot months of its cruellest summer ever.
Backed by astute research, The Partition Trilogy captures the frenzy of Indian independence, the Partition and the accession of the states, and takes readers back to a time of great upheaval and churn.

How is Tokyo, a city of thirty million people, so safe that six-year-old children commute to school on their own? Why are there no trashcans in Japanese cities? Why are Ganesha idols in Japanese temples hidden from public view? Globe-trotting journalist Pallavi Aiyar moves to Japan and takes an in-depth look at the island country including its culinary, sanitary and floral idiosyncrasies. Steering through the many (mis)adventures that come from learning a new language, imbibing new cultural etiquette, and asking difficult questions about race, Aiyar explores why Japan and India find it hard to work together despite sharing a long civilizational history. Part travelogue, part reportage, Orienting answers questions that have long confounded the rest of the world with Aiyar’s trademark humour. Tackling both the significant and the trivial, the quirky and the quotidian, here is an Indian’s account of Japan that is as thought-provoking as it is charming.

The Parsis are fast disappearing. There are now only around 50,000 members of the community in all of India. But since their arrival here from Central Asia, somewhere between the eighth and tenth centuries, the Parsis’ contribution to their adopted home has been extraordinary. The history of India over the last century or so is filigreed with such contributions in e very field, from nuclear physics to rock and roll, by names as Dadabhai Naoroji, Dinshaw Petit, Homi Bhabha, Sam Manekshaw, Jamsetji Tata, Ardeshir Godrej, Cyrus Poonawalla, Zubin Mehta and Farrokh Bulsara (aka Freddie Mercury). In this engaging, accessible, intimate history of the Parsis, senior journalist and columnist Coomi Kapoor, herself a Parsi, pores through the names, stories, achievements and the continuing success of this tiny but extraordinary minority. She delves deep into both the question of what it means to be Parsi in India, as well as how the community’s contributions—from tanchoi silk to chikoos—became integral to what it meant to be Indian. In Kapoor’s hands, the story of the Parsis becomes a rip-roaring, incident-filled adventure: from dominating the trade with China to being synonymous with Bombay, once, arguably, a city defined by its Parsis; from the business success of the Tatas, the Mistrys, the Godrejs and the Wadias, to such current contributions as the manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines by the Parsi-founded Serum Institute of India.

In this pathbreaking work, Shrayana Bhattacharya maps the economic and personal trajectories–the jobs, desires, prayers, love affairs and rivalries–of a diverse group of women. Divided by class but united in fandom, they remain steadfast in their search for intimacy, independence and fun. Embracing Hindi film idol Shah Rukh Khan allows them a small respite from an oppressive culture, a fillip to their fantasies of a friendlier masculinity in Indian men. Most struggle to find the freedom-or income-to follow their favourite actor.
Bobbing along in this stream of multiple lives for more than a decade-from Manju’s boredom in ‘rurban’ Rampur and Gold’s anger at having to compete with Western women for male attention in Delhi’s nightclubs, to Zahira’s break from domestic abuse in Ahmedabad-Bhattacharya gleans the details on what Indian women think about men, money, movies, beauty, helplessness, agency and love. A most unusual and compelling book on the female gaze, this is the story of how women have experienced post-liberalization India.

Colaba, May 2020; Lockdown, Day 46: Baman Marker, the Chairperson of Daisy and Lily Apartments, is found poisoned in his home. He dies soon after. The twin apartments are sealed, so the murderer could have only been one of the residents.
The news shakes fifteen-year-old Nandini Venkat, a devourer of murder mysteries, out of her stupor. After all, didn’t she spot a pair of legs climbing up and down the stairs that deadly night… With her not-so-alert twin, Ved, and BFF Shanaya, she begins an investigation.
But the Chairperson knew every little dirty detail about every single resident, so the list of suspects is long. Was it Mr Carvalho—Nandini’s crush Daniel’s father—with his shady past? Or Shanaya’s mother, Amrita Aunty, who had a running feud with Baman? Or mean old retired principal Lina Almeida who now makes lethal detox smoothies? Or the old and immobile Mr Alimchandani with a long-buried secret?
The seemingly listless days of the lockdown, when secrets and tensions bubbled below the surface, come back to life in this gripping and entertaining whodunit. With Murder at Daisy Apartments, bestselling author Shabnam Minwalla brings her phenomenal gift for dramatic storytelling to a new genre.

I imagined a game of dominoes, or the game we’d played when we were little-‘hai sha, hui sha, we all fall down’
The year 2020 will forever be reported as the time when we all fell down. But it was also the year we all got back up and were forced to come together in a way we had never imagined before.
In this timely masterpiece, Paro Anand writes of despair, courage and hope. Through eighteen short stories, she introduces us to characters who feel familiar and their stories intimate.
From a mother and son looking to make ends meet as the lockdown brutally affects their lives to a housewife who’s a victim of domestic abuse, from young keyboard wizards keen on making a difference to a home delivery executive who becomes an unlikely hero, this book unmasks the layers of the year that changed us all.
Make this book your very own by adding your unique pandemic experience to make it COVID’S 19 stories.

One day, when Prime Minister Nehru opened his overstuffed mail bag, out tumbled hundreds of colourfully decorated letters — from children in Japan! “We have never seen a live elephant,” they said. “Could you kindly send us one from India?” This exuberant picture book takes readers across land and sea to tell how Indira, Ambika, Murugan and others became India’s BIG gifts to the world.

Lakshmibai, the widowed queen of Jhansi, is determined to protect her son’s right to his father’s throne and safeguard the welfare of her kingdom. Faced with machinations to take over Jhansi, at a time when all of India is rising up against the British, she has to prove her valour and sagacity time and again. But will this be enough to save all that she values?
In this gripping novel, award-winning historical novelist Devika Rangachari brings to vivid life the interior life of this nineteenth-century queen, thrust into a position she does not desire but must assume, and of her son, who is cowed by the challenges he has to face but determined to live up to his mother’s courage.

They Made What?
Meet India’s brightest scientists and read all about their incredible, groundbreaking inventions in this first-of-its-kind book. Explore the most fascinating fields of science, from nanotechnology and engineering to tropical ecology and molecular physics, and find the answers to the scientific questions you’ve always thought about. Do all scientists wear lab coats? Where do they get their genius ideas from? How do they transform these brainwaves into life-changing inventions?
Bursting with activities, quizzes, easy experiments, cool tips and a galaxy of knowledge, this informative, exciting and entertaining book is sure to awaken the intrepid innovator in you!
They Found What?
Meet India’s brightest scientists and read all about their incredible, groundbreaking discoveries in this first-of-its-kind book. Explore the most fascinating fields of science, from neuroscience and biochemistry to evolutionary biology and thermodynamics, and unearth the answers to the scientific questions you’ve always thought about. Do scientists never fail at maths? What tools and technologies do they use to uncover something new? Do they really have robotic assistants?
Bursting with activities, quizzes, easy experiments, cool tips and a galaxy of knowledge, this informative, exciting and entertaining book is sure to awaken the intrepid innovator in you!

Winner of the 2021 Tata Literature Live! First Book Award – Fiction
Longlisted for The JCB Prize for Literature 2021
‘Rijula Das has evaded the prevalent tropes of writing. The book manages to achieve everything that good literature does while at the same time being entertaining’ – 2021 JCB Prize Jury
‘A deeply sensitive portrait of life (and death) in a red-light district’ – Tanuj Solanki
‘Addictive and hilarious’ – Avni Doshi
‘Takes us deep into the hidden and harsh universes of the layered city of Calcutta’ – Sarnath Banerjee
‘Rijula Das surprises you with everything in this book – the writing, the scenes, the characters, the story’ – Arunava Sinha
To be published in the US as Small Deaths by Amazon Crossing in early 2022.
In the red-light district of Shonagachhi, Lalee dreams of trading a life of penury and violence for one of relative luxury as a better-paid ‘escort’, just as her long-standing client, erotic novelist Trilokeshwar ‘Tilu’ Shau, realizes he is hopelessly in love with her.
When a young woman who lives next door to Lalee is brutally murdered, a spiral of deceit and crime further disturbs the fragile stability of their existence. Despite misgivings, Lalee lets new opportunities promising wealth and respite lure her away from the familiar confines of her neighbourhood. But beneath the facade of the plush hotels lies an underbelly of unimaginable secrets that will endanger her life and that of numerous women like her. As the local Sex Workers’ Collective’s protests against government and police inaction and their calls for justice for the deceased woman gain fervour, Lalee and Tilu must each embark on a life-altering misadventure in order to escape a similarly savage fate.
Set in Calcutta’s most fabled neighbourhood, A Death in Shonagachhi is a literary noir as gritty and devastating as it is wry and tender, laying bare the ruthlessness that preys upon our society’s outcasts and the impediments to dignity and love. Chekhovian in spirit and reminiscent of the works of Nabarun Bhattacharya, it introduces us to an astonishing new writer.

Terrific … read it’ SOHAILA ABDULALI
What happens after rape?
As the world moves on after expressing outrage, what happens to the survivors who are left to fend for themselves in an apathetic society and a nonchalant judicial system?
In After I Was Raped, we meet five individuals: a four-year-old girl, two Dalit women, an eight-month-old infant and a young professional. Through extensive interviews with them and their families and communities at large, Urmi Bhattacheryya reveals the stories of these survivors of sexual violence, as they recount how their lives and relationships have changed in the aftermath of assault. Shamed, ostracized and weighed down by guilt and depression, they continue to brave the most challenging realities.
At a time when only high-profile, sensationalized cases of sexual violence provoke a public reaction and many stories go unheard, Bhattacheryya’s sensitive portrayal of the lives of these little-known survivors raises difficult but important questions about our convenient collective amnesia.

‘A terrifying yet tender account of a girlhood spent under near-constant siege.’ Madhuri Vijay, author of The Far Field
‘Extraordinary – this memoir of growing up in Kashmir in the 1990s is illuminating, heartbreaking, and beautifully told.’ Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire
‘This is an unforgettable work that refuses silence. It is an urgent, brave call for justice.’ Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King
‘Page after page, Farah Bashir juxtaposes moments of heart-stopping terror and beauty in a stunning memoir of life and love under a bloody military occupation.’ Mirza Waheed, author of Tell Her Everything
‘I couldn’t put it down, and even after it had ended, the people and their stories – wonderful, horrific, familiar and unfathomable – stayed textured and formidable in my mind.’ Jennifer Croft, author of Homesick
‘A beautifully tender and often heart-stopping memoir of growing up in a world that is spinning out of control.’ Mahesh Rao, author of Polite Society
Rumours of Spring is the unforgettable account of Farah Bashir’s adolescence spent in Srinagar in the 1990s. As Indian troops and militants battle across the cityscape and violence becomes the new normal, a young schoolgirl finds that ordinary tasks – studying for exams, walking to the bus stop, combing her hair, falling asleep – are riddled with anxiety and fear. With haunting simplicity, Farah Bashir captures moments of vitality and resilience from her girlhood amidst the increasing trauma and turmoil of passing years – secretly dancing to pop songs on banned radio stations; writing her first love letter; going to the cinema for the first time – with haunting simplicity. This deeply affecting coming-of-age memoir portrays how territorial conflict surreptitiously affects everyday lives in Kashmir.

A remarkable tour de force. Richard M. Eaton
‘With this debut, Yashaswini Chandra gallops straight into the premier division of Indian historians. William Dalrymple?
Highly original … combining flawless scholarship with the author’s intimate knowledge of horses. Partha Mitter
The horse is etched on the Indian landscape, and to view the subcontinent’s past through the prism of the horse is to be swept up in its power and grace. Horses are a thread that connects Indian history, mythology, art, literature, folklore and popular belief.
In this inspired and singularly erudite debut, Yashaswini Chandra takes us on the trail of the horse into and within India. What follows is a surprising and exhilarating journey, covering caravan-trade routes originating in Central Asia and Tibet, sea routes from the Middle East, and the dominions of different sultans and Mughal emperors, the south Indian kingdoms as well as the Rajput horse-warrior states. She outlines the political symbolism of the horse, its vital function in social life, religion, sport and war, its role in shaping economies and forging crucial human bonds. We learn of the emergence of local breeds such as the Kathiawari and the Marwari, the Zanskari and the Manipuri. We encounter fabulous horsewomen too, Chand Bibi, Maratha princesses and women polo players among them. We meet grooms, farriers, breeders, traders and bandits. The highlight of course are the magnificent examples of the horse itself ? Rana Pratap’s legendary Chetak, Ranjit Singh’s much-contested Laili, Pabuji’s cherished black mare and those horses captured in paintings and equestrian portraits. This glorious age of the horse would meet its agonized decline with the onset of colonial rule and mechanization.
In the end, what is most remarkable is that the history of the horse in India, mirroring that of its human inhabitants, is a tale of migration and permanent intermingling. The horse is thus an exceptional and fitting vantage from which to appreciate the history of the land, influenced as it was by this most instrumental of animals.