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Build Your Own Bubble

Deepanjana — Tue, 05 May 2026 07:44:27 GMT

We got elecshanked in West Bengal yesterday. By which I mean, felt gutted by the results of an election in which voters had to choose between a party with a track record of reducing the state to a broken mess and a party with a track record of reducing the country to a broken mess. After 15 years of Mamata Banerjee’s TMC, Bengal chose BJP. India now has a saffron cummerbund made up of BJP-ruled states running all across its middle.

A new dawn has broken today (following BJP workers reportedly breaking other things as they gleefully celebrated the party’s historic win by smashing anything that reminded them of TMC). It’s the first time the party has come to power in Bengal and the numbers suggest Hindutva is genuinely popular here. A lot of people had braced themselves to see rural pockets of Bengal vote for BJP, but the party also scored comprehensive victories in Kolkata, whose upper middle classes have long claimed their city is a bastion of cosmpolitanism and good taste. Yesterday, Kolkata picked jhal muri over biriyani. So much for good taste.

The Bengal results make plain how fed up the state is of Banerjee, but the numbers are also an uncomfortable indicator that the social fabric of Bengal is far more torn than most of us had realised. I coined elecshanked last afternoon while ~~mourning~~ chatting about the election results with a friend. BJP in Bengal was making headlines, Tamil Nadu and Kerala had their own shockers to report. We stared at screens, unable to decide whether we were witnessing democracy in action or democracy being reduced to a joke. My friend wrote to me, “There should be a name for this crushing feeling.”

Enter “elecshanked”:

verb;

from “election” (a decision-making process in which a population or part of a population vote to choose an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office)

and “shank” (to attack someone with a knife, slang) (a ball going in an unintended direction).

You’re welcome.

While I was protesting the election results by coining new words and eating beef stroganoff, men roamed the streets of my parents’ neighbourhood, yelling “Jai Shri Ram”. This warren of narrow lanes is home to a Christian cemetery, at least two mosques and many temples. It’s never quiet here and during All Souls’ Day and Durga Puja, our street becomes impossible to navigate by car. On a daily basis, we’re used to hearing honking cars and people standing on the broken kerb, having private conversations at full volume; azaan in the middle of the day and before sunset; the brass clamour of aarti at the Kali temple at 6pm. This morning at 6am, people were greeting one another with “Jai Shri Ram”. It seems this is the new normal.

So here I am, to counter the new normal with my old one. When the world feels invasive, bubbles keep us safe. Their transparency is less fragile than it looks. Bubbles are held together by what we decide to let in and all that we choose to keep out. And while they do have a reputation for bursting, my experience with bubbles is that so long as you keep culture-vulture-ing, they’re difficult to pop.

If the internet is to be believed, 2026 is the year of Chinamaxxing. For once, I was somewhere close to a viral trend. It started with a book I’d picked up without much thought at The Bookshop in Delhi’s Lodhi Colony. I’m very fond of this place. It’s got a wonderful selection and the space is perfect for book-bathing. Less pleasant was the realisation that they didn’t think Lightning In A Shot Glass was worth putting on their shelves.

Just like there’s a very particular joy that comes of spotting your own book in a bookstore you love, the disappointment of not making the cut is very particular too. That disappointment curdles into something a whole lot more explosive when you (read: I) see The Bookshop giving pride of place to books that were released around the same time as Lightning In A Shot Glass, and are terrible. But they’re written by influential people so there they were, and here I was, getting more livid by the moment and wanting to stomp to the cash counter to wag my finger at them ferociously. And then leaving without buying anything. However, I’m of the belief that readers are duty bound to buy books when they enter a bookstore, and I am first and foremost a reader. The Bookshop not selling my book wasn’t a good enough reason to abandon my principles. As a compromise with myself, I decided I would buy only one book. I also set myself a price limit.

The book that made the cut was Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan. If I could, I would shove copies of this book to every person who says “I like reading non-fiction”. Branigan’s book is about how the Cultural Revolution is remembered, which is not the same as how it has been recorded into history. Over a period of approximately 10 years, Chinese people were encouraged to turn on one another as part of a project to rid society of capitalist and traditional elements. The violence and chaos was horrific. It wasn’t particularly cultural, but it certainly was a revolution and the trauma it spawned is rarely discussed.

Branigan examines what roles those years have played in China’s national narrative. She’s got on record people who admit to having done terrible things (most existing accounts are of survivors who insist they were only bystanders and witnessed the atrocities, but didn’t participate in them). Red Memory a fascinating read and particularly interesting because this is non-fiction that pays attention to something as shifty, malleable and prone to being rewritten as memory. I think I enjoyed it all the more because at the end of 2025, I’d read Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens by Laszlo Krasznahorkai (he of endlessly long-winded sentences — seriously. A sentence stretches across pages — and absolutely charming Nobel prize acceptance speech). They’re two very different outsider perspectives, of foreigners looking for truth in China.

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From non-fiction to fiction: A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang. The novel is about a second-generation Chinese American Qianze whose estranged father shows up out of nowhere, saying he’s the bearer of a prophecy that concerns her. He looks ragged and sounds deranged. He’s also surviving on alcohol and cigarettes. The surreal and the historical weave into one another as Qianze discovers her family saga through her father’s hallucinatory episodes. She discovers how across generations, her family has survived by repressing memories and suppressing parts of themselves.

Yang goes back to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the Cultural Revolution, all the while keeping one foot in Qianze’s cramped little apartment where father and daughter awkwardly share space. The many strands threaten to overwhelm the book as it slinks towards the conclusion, but that’s a minor quibble. Especially for a debut novel, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing is an achievement. Great title, chilling book. I really liked this interview with Yang. One line in particular has stayed with me: “Just because something or someone shifts from prey to predator doesn’t necessarily make them more powerful.”

Speaking of the weaving together of surreal and historical, I fell in love with Nonesuch by Francis Spufford until I realised this is the first in a series. Now I have to wait till gods know when for the sequel, which is very upsetting because Nonesuch was a delight.

Set mostly in London during the Blitz, when the Nazis bombarded Britain, Spufford spins a magical tale about fascists who have sinister, supernatural weapons; a fiery young woman who won’t take ‘no’ for answer; and angels trapped in the architecture of London. Iris Hawkins (inspired by Spufford’s grandmother) works in a lowly job at an investment firm in the City, but she dreams big. Her curiosity and pride lead her to uncovering a plot to travel back in time and kill Winston Churchill before he rallied the British to fight against the Nazis. Along the way, Iris falls in love with Geoff, an engineer with the BBC, and literally brushes up against more than one angel. I should add that angels in this novel are nothing like what Christian art would have you believe they are. Also, Nonesuch has one of the best villains I’ve read in ages.

The fantastical elements in Nonesuch never feel jarring or stretch credibility. They have their place in this world that is teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Spufford’s London, which he describes in loving, meticulous detail, is a magical place with secrets and shadows and pragmatic-minded workers who forge ahead, navigating barriers of class and gender, to live the lives they want for themselves. The prose is some of the most beautiful you’ll read and Spufford has that rare gift of being able to make the paranormal feel as real as the historical. Basically, my only grumble with this book is that I have to wait for the bleddy sequel.

Elena Ferrante is Alive

Deepanjana — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 05:49:47 GMT

What are updates on X-formerly-known-as-Twitter called these days? Are they still tweets? Whatever they are, one popped up yesterday with this information:

“I received terrible news from Rome. Elena Ferrante passed away. She hadn’t written for some time and was ill. Goodbye, my extraordinary, unforgettable, brilliant friend!”
(from @AnnGoldsteinNY)

Ann Goldstein is probably best known for being the mysterious Elena Ferrante’s translator, so it follows that most of us believed the news at first, especially those of us who are far removed from the circles in which Goldstein and Ferrante mingle. I shared the tweet with an author friend and we spent a few moments fondly remembering the incredible Neapolitan Quartet and what a head rush My Brilliant Friend was for us as women readers and writers. We marvelled at how Ferrante had held on to her anonymity; a miracle in this day and age when authors are told that publicising themselves is as integral to the writing life as writing itself.

Later, I went back to X and checked Goldstein’s account. It had barely any posts other than the one about Ferrante, didn’t follow anyone of note, and had less than 100 followers. No one else had reported Ferrante’s passing and it had been two hours. To quote Jatayu, one of legendary Bengali detective Felu-da’s two sidekicks, highly susfishious.

“Probably fake,” I wrote to the friend with whom I’d shared the original tweet. We both shook our heads at how weird humans are and went on with our day.

By night time, that one tweet had been shared by a host of people from the world of literature, including celebrated authors and well-connected publishers. People with whom Ferrante has, I imagine, less than six degrees of separation. People who, I imagine, could pick up their phones and drop a message to someone who knows Goldstein or has access to reliable information on Ferrante, and say, “Saw this tweet. Is it true?”

Because it wasn’t. The Ann Goldstein account was a hoax set up by one Tommaso Debenedetti, who actually has a Wikipedia page because he is a professional peddler of fake news. In a later tweet from the Goldstein account, he claimed to be a journalist and said he’d tweeted in hope of getting Ferrante’s people to offer some proof of life. “Her last book was in 2019 and her last article was in 2021. Her editor should tell us something!” Debenedetti wailed.

He has since renamed the Ann Goldstein handle and is now “Hanna Stjärne, Executive Director of the Nobel Foundation.” The bio declares this is her “official account”. Cute.

As an aside, isn’t it crazy to think that just a few years ago, Twitter was the one that we turned to for breaking news updates and reliable on-the-ground perspectives? What’s crazier is that it’s still the preferred platform for so many journalists and that no one has been able to build a viable alternative. (Don’t show me Bluesky, Upscroll etc. They only make me miss the old Twitter more.)

Coming back to Debenedetti, who seems to have picked up announcing fake deaths as his pandemic-era hobby. Some made sourdough, some took up knitting, I dreamt of quitting my job to sit at home and write novels; Debenedetti went around telling people the following were dead: Milan Kundera (2020), Kazuo Ishiguro (2022), Pope Benedict XVI (2022), Amartya Sen (2023), and Elfriede Jelinek (2025). Previously, he’d sold completely fake interviews to reputable publications, which had been accepted without question.

A lot of us like to feel a little superior because we’re readers. The old-fashioned “man of letters” was a badge of pride and we hold on to this feeling centuries later, when writing is not just competing with other media for audience attention but also facing an existential threat thanks to AI systems that churn out novels in a matter of minutes. We’ll proudly share scientific studies that declare reading improves empathy, comprehension, analytical skills etc etc. We’ll feel triumphant each time we see someone (even if it is Google's AI-powered summary) say there are cognitive and therapeutic benefits to writing. Reading and writing make us feel just a smidge superior. Yet some of the finest writers, editors and publishers of our time also unthinkingly hit the retweet button on Debenedetti’s tweet.

It’s not the lack of fact-checking that bothers me as much as realising the news of the death of a beloved and respected author inspired so little by way of an actual emotional response. Most just retweeted. A few added a line or two, like “Sad news”. Even those with deep connections in the American literary publishing world didn’t bother reaching out to someone to confirm the news.

The hollow performance of posting “RIP Elena Ferrante” feels both chilling and nauseating. It shows that sections of our cultural elite were focussed on making the right noises, rather than actually working out how one felt and acting authentically. This is arguably the opposite of creativity or empathy, the very qualities that readers and writers are supposedly suffused with thanks to their fondness for literature.

Once upon a time, we used social media like a creative space. Briefly, it privileged individualism, making it cool to speak up and stand out. Now social media is a performative arena that encourages herd mentality, like a Miss Universe pageant that just won’t stop. We wade through the internet unthinkingly, scrolling without really registering or reflecting on what’s rushing past.

The fake ‘news’ about Ferrante’s death is a sharp reminder that brain rot is real. The protective talisman can’t just be the book as an object or the act of writing, but the process of thinking that is foundational (or should be) to being sentient. This ability to gauge and feel, to perceive rather than see, is what we’re giving up in the current stage of social media decay. In exchange, we get numbness.

It used to feel jarring or even offensive to flit from horrible tragedy to a meme, but that’s normal now. Get up in the morning, potter around, open up your chosen social media and scroll past your friend’s party or vacation photos followed by shots of bombed cities, a comedy sketch about perimenopause, evidence of genocide, ad for a beauty product, cat video that’s probably AI, a clip from a promotional interview from whatever actor or film is doing the rounds, a lecture from an influencer who claims they’re not here to lecture anyone, an ad for a useless gadget, a make-up tutorial, another cat video (this time not AI)… and so it continues. Suddenly, it’s been more than an hour and you remember almost nothing of what you’ve seen, but an hour has passed without you actively thinking about everything that is breaking your brain and your heart, and that’s enough.

We’ve groomed ourselves to feel less and dismiss more, moulding ourselves into a decrepit equanimity. Not that I have vast experience in such things, but I think this is how you make people obedient, especially in times of deep and crippling despair.

Which would have been a great segue into an excellent book I wanted to tell you about, but life demands I leave the computer and be present elsewhere. So I’m going to have to run, but with the promise that I will genuinely and truly be back in a jiffy (relatively speaking) to talk about books rather than brain rot.

Thank you for reading. Dear Reader really will be back soon.

The Quiet Warfare of Ikkis

Deepanjana — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 13:16:33 GMT

An edited version of this was published in Hindustan Times.

There’s a heartbreakingly tender scene in Sriram Raghavan’s Ikkis between Asrani and Dharmendra.

Dharmendra plays Brigadier Madan Khetarpal, who was born in a part of undivided India that went to Pakistan after the Partition. He returns to his hometown in his sunset years and finds the home in which he grew up. He’s welcomed by the family now living there and the family throw a party for Madan. One of the people who attends is Asghar (Asrani), one of Madan’s childhood friends. Asghar looks at Madan and asks if he’s Madan’s grandfather. When Madan laughs at this, Asghar is perplexed. He knows Madan, he reiterates. Madan is that young rascal who goes around flirting with Husna and makes Asghar act as their courier. Someone apologetically explains to Madan that Asghar has Alzheimer’s and now inhabits a hazy place made up of fragmented memory, unable to let go of the past and incapable of finding the present. Meanwhile Asghar stares at Madan. There’s something he recognises in Madan, a shadow of someone Madan used to be, while also clocking that the man before him is a stranger.

If Madan is preserved in the amber of Ashgar’s cognitive decline, then also preserved but in Madan’s crystal-clear memory is Madan’s war-hero son, Arun (Agastya Nanda). Arun died in battle just a few kilometres away from where this reunion is taking place. Just as Madan will forever be a dashing young man for Asghar, Arun is similarly frozen in Madan’s mind. Both young men are out of reach for the old men who remember them. Madan and Asghar are also connected by their grappling with gaps in knowledge. Asghar has lost the recent past and present; Madan knows only the legend of his son, rather than what really happened to Arun in his final moments.

The scene is written and directed with empathy and sensitivity, but it strikes an emotional chord with the audience less because of what we see on screen and more because of the context. This was the last time Asrani and Dharmendra, two beloved actors of Indian cinema — both in their 80s when they worked on this film — would share a scene. Objectively speaking, neither delivers a particularly good acting performance, but there’s something intangible they bring to the scene, that magical quality of veteran movie stars and character actors who can effortlessly draw on lifetimes’ worth of experience. This mingles with the tenderness of the fictional moment and the next thing you know, you’re doing your best to make sure your sniffles are discreet.

Would this scene have hit as hard if we hadn’t lost both actors in 2025 and if Ikkis wasn’t their last film together? For better and for worse, we’ll never know.

When it comes to films, timing may not be everything, but once in a while, a film lands at a moment that feels perfect. Sriram Raghavan’s soulful war movie Ikkis is one of those charmed titles even if it doesn’t make history in terms of its box office collections. A week after its release, it looks like Ikkis is faced with the fate that befalls most films that have progressive values nestled in them — audiences are waiting for it to land on streaming.

Ikkis was pitched as Dharmendra’s last film and whether by design or otherwise, there was some negative buzz around it because some online entities felt Raghavan’s script was too generous in its view of Pakistanis. Coming on the heels of Dhurandhar and weeks before Border 2, Ikkis is a reminder that there’s more to Bollywood than blunt-force storytelling. That popular Hindi cinema can deliver an action and emotion-packed historical drama without playing hooky with facts. That there’s more to on-screen heroism than being loud and pumped up on testosterone and bitterness.

Also, it’s poignant for Ikkis to be in theatres weeks after the re-release of Sholay, in which Dharmendra’s Veeru and Amitabh Bachchan’s Jai enacted the ultimate bromance. In addition to being Dharmendra’s last film, Ikkis marked the theatrical debut of Bachchan’s grandson, Agastya Nanda (technically, Nanda’s first film was the regrettable and forgettable The Archies, but it only released on streaming). Veeru playing father to Jai’s grandson tugs at every Bollywood-loving heartstring.

The coming year is full of war tales, with films like Border 2, director Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Love and War and the Salman Khan-starrer Battle of Galwan lined up for release in 2026. I’m curious to see how many are able to match Ikkis in terms of cinematic sophistication.

Raghavan’s film not only has one of the best ensemble casts in recent times, but also stands out for how much it respects the audience’s intelligence. Mirroring the bright-eyed optimism of its heroes, Ikkis’s storytelling assumes the audience is smarter and more open-minded than recent box office results would suggest. Here’s a script that doesn’t flatten out complexities or tap into propaganda-flavoured insecurities. Instead, it dares to be a war movie that dreams of peace. It leans into beauty, instead of violence, with mic drop dialogues whose lyricism feels like an ode to yesteryear writers like Kaifi Azmi, Sahir Ludhianvi, Gulzar and Abrar Alvi.

Ikkis is the story of Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal (Nanda), the soldier who refused to follow orders to retreat during the Battle of Basantar, in the India-Pakistan war of 1971. Arun’s defiant and daring manoeuvres denied the Pakistanis the breakthrough they were seeking, at the cost of his life and that of the tank’s radio operator. Bollywood geeks will notice thematic parallels between Arun’s heroics and that of Captain Bahadur Singh in Chetan Anand’s Haqeeqat, in which a young Dharmendra played the valiant soldier who faced the Chinese troops in an unwinnable battle during the Sino-Indian war of 1962. (At the start of Ikkis, Raghavan nudges us to remember Haqeeqat by showing a couplet from an unforgettable song from its soundtrack, “Ab Tumhaare Hawale Watan Saathiyo”, written by Kaifi Azmi and sung by Mohammed Rafi.)

Raghavan’s film is not just about the action of war, but about true heroism and the long shadow it casts. The framing narrative shows Arun’s father, Brigadier Madan Khetarpal (Dharmendra) going back to Pakistan in 2001, for a school reunion. The trip allows Madan to see his alma mater and hometown for the first time since Partition. It also brings him to the place where Arun breathed his last, in the company of Brigadier Jaan Mohammad Nisar (Jaideep Ahlawat) who actually killed Arun.

Ikkis’s three-chambered heart is made up of Dharmendra, Ahlawat and Nanda. Nanda is pitch-perfect as Arun while Ahlawat is outstanding as Nisar. The scene in which Ahlawat as Nisar narrates Arun’s last stand against the Pakistani army is a masterclass in how to pack an emotional punch without any histrionics. Raghavan chooses to show and tell those final moments of Arun’s life by recreating that last battle in addition to showing Nisar recount his memories in the present. In the hands of a lesser director, this repetition would have felt like a stretch. In Ikkis, it serves to bring home the valour, grit and tragedy that make war stories so charismatic.

Raghavan is best known for crafting twisty thrillers and being one Bollywood’s geekiest cinephiles. Set pieces and period settings are a departure for him, but Ikkis is proof that a gifted storyteller isn’t hamstrung by genre. Instead of trying to infuse suspense into his plot, Raghavan creates tension by making the audience care for the characters. As gripping as the warfront is the grace of the people navigating a set extraordinary circumstances — all of which are drawn from history. All the men in Ikkis are heroes and with their gruff, get-it-done macho charm, they’re everything we expect of Army men. Rahul Dev, Sikander Kher and Vivaan Shah in particular stand out in the supporting cast and considering the fascinating life of Lieutenant Colonel Hanut Singh, I’m hoping the Bollywood Santa delivers everything that’s needed to get Raghavan to make the ‘Hunty’ biopic.

While most popular Hindi films begin with defensive disclaimers that seek to disconnect the film from reality, Raghavan begins with a declaration that his storytelling in anchored in research. Then, names and photographs of the unsung heroes of the Battle of Basantar appear, underscoring that as Ikkis unfolds, real incidents will be recreated. The end credits have photographs of the real people alongside candid photos of the cast. These are all subtle reminders that Ikkis draws not on paranoia and conspiracy theories, but on historical record and memory.

This is not to suggest Ikkis has no weak links. The film’s soundtrack is painfully bland and I couldn’t help but imagine how much more impactful Ikkis would have been if someone like Madan Mohan (music director of Haqeeqat) had been able to create just one song as poignant as this one.

The script also has some contrived moments that pull it down at critical moments, like the exchange between Madan and an irate Pakistani soldier (played by Deepak Dobriyal) who lost his leg in the war. Much like the detail of Nisar having a framed photo of Arun in his room, the scene is too theatrical and performative to feel authentic. In a film that otherwise rings true, the false notes feel sharply jarring. That they’re well-intentioned doesn’t help and the lack of subtlety is out of sync with the rest of Ikkis. Perhaps the most unfortunate effect is that they remain memorable for all the wrong reasons and give ammunition to those who would like to dismiss Ikkis as an “aman ki asha” initiative. (One moment’s silence for the fact that today, “aman ki asha” has become a snide slur rather than the message of hope that moved so many of us when the campaign was first released in 2010.)

The other chink in Ikkis’s armour is the romantic sub-plot, which has been a tried and tested way to make audiences fall harder for the hero. Unfortunately, in Ikkis it achieves the opposite. Arun has more chemistry with a piece of chocolate cake than he does with Kiran (the baker of said cake and played by a wooden Simar Bhatia). As a result, the scene in which they break up feels mostly like unnecessary padding to the film’s 147-minute runtime.

Barring these blips, for most part Ikkis feels committed to reality and moves with momentum, reeling in the viewer as the world of the film unfolds before them. Most remarkably, Ikkis doesn’t feel burdened by despair, even though death and heartbreak are central to the story. Arun, Madan and Nisar’s stories stand on the conviction that even war can’t rob us of our humanity. Ultimately, this makes the film uplifting.

Whatever its box office fortunes may be, with Ikkis, Raghavan has kickstarted the new year not with sadness or unbridled rage, but with optimism and courage. Happy 2026 to us all.

Let's Talk About Dhurandhar

Deepanjana — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 05:12:57 GMT

An edited version of the following was published in Hindustan Times.

When writer-director Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar released on December 5, there was no guarantee the film would be a huge hit. While it was one of the most anticipated movies of 2025, at the last minute it had gone from being one film (with a budget of approximately Rs. 400 crores) to two films, which suggested someone in the Dhurandhar camp didn’t feel confident about the film’s commercial prospects. The runtime of 214 minutes was another cause of concern. (With interval, that’s three hours of a moviegoer’s life. If you have a longish commute to the cinema, that’s half a day gone.)

Then came reports of block bookings and inflated numbers, which has now become a standard part of a big film’s marketing strategy (Chhaava and Sky Force have both been accused of inflating numbers to create a perception that the film is a hit). “The story of the film is something like the hero infiltrating the terrorists but here it’s become about infiltrating the multiplexes and buying tickets,” wrote Box Office India while also reporting that Dhurandhar didn’t need to engage in such tactics because it was benefiting from word-of-mouth publicity. “The buying of tickets have made it into a farce despite the film doing reasonable business so far,” wrote the website.

Dhurandhar took some time to gather momentum, but it is now set to be one of the biggest blockbusters of 2025. An interesting detail is that as conversations and debates have raged around the film — aided and abetted by Right wing trolls who have viciously attacked many film reviewers — Dhurandhar has done excellent business at multiplexes. The conventional wisdom in Mumbai’s film fraternity is that a film has to succeed among the “masses” that patronise cheap single-screen threatres, but Dhurandhar is a monster hit because of the well-heeled multiplex-goer. And that demographic has been persuaded to watch the film after hearing how it’s a Right-wing propaganda film. The point is not whether this is a fair summary of Dhurandhar, but that this is what got the urbane middle classes and elite to go to the cinema. That and the sight of Ranveer Singh bursting out of the seams of a salwar kameez, presumably.

Three days after Dhurandhar’s release and long before the film had started earning the big bucks, My Gov, the “citizen engagement platform of Government of India”, uploaded a video in which it triumphantly celebrated the Prime Minister of India’s “natural rizz” by declaring he was “the OG Dhurandhar”.

This is an odd claim, given the film is about a man who pretends to be Pakistani, infiltrates criminal gangs of Karachi by being a lowly thug, fakes a romance with a barely-legal woman, and supplies guns to the terrorists who attacked Mumbai in November 2008. Maybe My Gov didn’t get the memo about Dhurandhar being split into two parts?

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The real hero of Dhurandhar might ultimately be Dhar’s fictional director of the Intelligence Bureau Ajay Sanyal (R. Madhavan), who may or may not be modelled on National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and is lying in wait for a great leader who will recognise the genius of bureaucrats with combovers. However, as the first part of Dhurandhar is mostly set in the years when India had a Congress government, Sanyal must accept being sidelined and let his protégé take the spotlight. (Hashtag: Achhe Din)

For 214 minutes, Dhurandhar lays the ground for Sanyal’s daring and elaborate plan to save India from itself (we’ll probably get to see the glorious realisation of said plan in part two). For now, we get Madhavan looking disgruntled while in Pakistan, a set of Indian agents go deep undercover in the Karachi neighbourhood of Lyari. Helpfully, as per Dhurandhar, everything from counterfeit money to torturing suspected Indian spies, arms smuggling and the 26/11 terror attack is plotted in a single warehouse. You may wonder why the Indian government didn’t just blow up that warehouse when all the bad guys had gathered there (they do so frequently. Dhar imagines those who plan terror attacks get together to do watch parties, which gives terrorism the vibes of a pyjama party gone terribly wrong). The answer is: because a spineless Congress government is in power. Naturally.

The underlying message of Dhurandhar is that the solution to all of India’s internal security and foreign affairs issues is going to be the government that has to its credit incidents like Pathankot 2016, Pulwama 2019, Galwan 2020, Pahalgam 2025 and Operation Sindoor (in which we supposedly wiped out terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan only for terrorists to explode a car bomb in New Delhi’s Red Fort area six months later, killing at least 15 people as per official figures). If there was ever a narrative that relied heavily on Indians getting their news from WhatsApp rather than actual journalism, it is Dhar’s in Dhurandhar.

However, arguably no one should be turning to Bollywood for facts. This is not a film industry that has held realism in high regard. Indian popular cinema’s USP is its ability to deliver escapist entertainment that defies logic, feels immersive, and arrives at emotional truths despite its bombastic excesses. Dhar achieves all this with Dhurandhar, which is failed only by the decision to exaggerate its length — an ironic (and Freudian) problem for a film filled with swaggering alpha males.

Despite its limp ending, the film is gripping for much of its runtime. Dhurandhar is reportedly the most pirated Indian film in Pakistan in recent times and that may partially be because of powers-that-be encouraging its spread, but it’s also great fun to watch. Dhar is a gifted director and he knows how to make the masala blend that has made Bollywood India’s most popular cultural export. The soundtrack is well curated, incorporating covers of songs from old Hindi films as well as foreign tracks like the Arabic rap song, “Fa9la”. Dhar’s script is sharply-written and moves at a steady trot until concluding “chapters” of the second half. There are excellent performances from Rakesh Bedi, who is outstanding as an oily Pakistani politician; Gaurav Gera, who is unrecognisable as a juice stand owner and exemplifies what it might mean to go undercover; Sanjay Dutt, who leans into playing the bad cop Chaudhary Aslam; and the film’s breakout star, Akshaye Khanna (whose chin acting gives Claire Danes a run for her money) as Baloch gangster Rehman Dakait.

Much has been said about how Dhurandhar misrepresents Pakistanis in general and Lyari in particular, but given popular Hindi cinema’s general aversion to nuance, I’d argue Dhar’s Pakistani baddies are written to be far more charismatic and interesting than the average Bollywood villain. Dhurandhar is informed by the discourse of WhatsApp groups, but it’s adapted skilfully for the big screen. The danger of films like Dhurandhar is that they simplify complex politics. However, what Dhar doesn’t simplify are his characters. He doesn’t make the mistake of writing bad guys whose villainy feels caricaturish. He is clearly alert to the politics that inform his story and the contribution he wants it to make to the nationalist discourse in India. He’s careful to establish the representative of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency ISI as the embodiment of cruelty (Arjun Rampal as Major Iqbal) and the Pakistani characters who get to look cool are all Baloch. There are regular reminders of how the Baloch have suffered in Pakistan and their separatist movement, which according to Dhurandhar is failed by the greedy ambition of its leaders who sell their souls to the ISI. Despite this, Rehman Dakait becomes such a compelling anti-hero that his final fight is intercut with reminders of the Baloch gangster’s involvement in 26/11 to remind audiences they’re supposed to celebrate, not mourn, Rehman Dakait’s exit from the film and cheer for the film’s protagonist, Hamza (Singh).

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In its first part, Dhurandhar is a film about a hero who is forced to accept the frustrations of failure. I imagine he will go on a rampage in part two and looking at the speed at which his hair grows out in Dhurandhar to become luxurious tresses, the sequel should be titled “Draupadi”. However, for now, Ranveer Singh plays a spy whose victories are few. We see little of his past or real self and know him only by his undercover persona, Hamza the lowly bodyguard. For most of Dhurandhar, Hamza must actively refrain from asserting both his machismo and Indian nationalism. His every success is coloured by the detail that in order to become India’s saviour, he must first be a convincing Pakistani and aid the very people who are acting against Indian interests.

Dhurandhar begins with a re-enactment of the IC 814 hijack. Forced to offer the terrorists a deal that leaves Sanyal fuming, the bureaucrat tries to redeem the situation. After informing the hijacked passengers they will be soon be freed, he urges them to complete the sentence and says “Bharat mata ki…!” The passengers see a gun-waving terrorist standing behind him and remain silent, much to Sanyal’s shame. One of the ironies of Dhurandhar is that if Hamza was faced with completing the slogan, he would also have to stay silent in order to save himself. Later in the film, when he’s in a room full of jubilant Pakistanis who are celebrating a win against India, a devastated Hamza must mouth their slogans. It’s one of the moments in Dhurandhar when Singh brings out all his acting chops. Wittingly or unwittingly, the first part of Dhurandhar does occasionally make space for complexity and Singh gets to play a hero whose muscularity is tempered by the necessity of appearing insignificant.

A major challenge that Dhar faces in Dhurandhar is that the plot in the first half requires hypermasculine villains to establish their awfulness while the hero lurks as a non-entity. How does a writer-director get the audience to back a man who only bides his time because this first film is a setup for the second? Dhar’s solution is to make Hamza (and Singh) kameez-bustingly muscular, but also vulnerable. Rather than his actions, Hamza’s physical presence is a constant reminder of his masculinity and strength. Yet he’s also the one who is almost raped within hours of arriving in Karachi and is constantly worried about being identified as an infiltrator. He’s the one we hear whimper and say “I’m hungry” when he comes home after a particularly excruciating fight. In a film full of alpha male villains, the hero is the one accepts his weaknesses.

Dhurandhar is riddled with the anxieties that inform the Hindu Right and the suspected use of tactics like block booking suggests a lot of people needed this film to be a hit, rather than just look like one. To Dhar’s credit, his film is engaging enough despite the political biases that are foundational for his imagination. Also, thanks to Dhurandhar’s interminable runtime, the majority of the film is an action drama and the messaging adds up to a handful of forgettable minutes. The real propaganda is waiting to be unleashed in the upcoming sequel, scheduled to release in March.

While Dhar has proven his story-spinning skills with Uri: The Surgical Strike, he’ll need to be at the top of his game to make the many tragedies of the recent past look like victories. By the same token, critics and reviewers will need to be equally proficient. It’s worth keeping in mind that the most effective counter to propaganda is not to ignore it, but to engage with and reveal the mendacity of the messaging.

Perhaps the shiniest silver lining in this whole saga is that the most memorable part of Dhurandhar has nothing to do with action, nationalism, testosterone or even star power. It’s Akshaye Khanna as Rehman Dakait, being carefree and dancing to a Bahranian rap song. I’d like to believe that the virality of that sequence is a testimony to the Indian public’s instinct for joy, rather than violence. Take that, propaganda.

Who's got a new book? Me.

Deepanjana — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 14:52:06 GMT

Yesterday, I got mail. From the look of the package that the courier handed me, it seemed to be a book. I figured it’s something that has come in response to my wheedling emails asking for review copies.

(Margaret Atwood’s memoir is priced at Rs. 1999 and the Kindle version costs Rs. 1519. Salman Rushdie’s new volume is in the same price range if you want the physical book. The ebook version is, thankfully, much cheaper. David Szalay’s Flesh became more expensive within minutes of the novel winning this year’s Booker prize. I’m unemployed. If a book costs more than Rs. 800 and I can score free copies, I am going to do what I can to get said free copies. Only to then be consumed by guilt for not reviewing those books because either I haven’t got round to reading them or they’re so annoying that finishing the book feels like an act of self-harm. Or because I’ve been procrastinating writing this newsletter. But I digress.)

Anyway, so courier shows up at my doorstep, hands over an envelope, which I absentmindedly tear at while contemplating my next move in Candy Crush. A little late in the envelope tearing process, it strikes me that the colours visible through the bubble wrap look familiar.

LEFT TO RIGHT: 1. The state of the envelope when it struck me that I might not be the right person to review this book. 2. The photograph behind me in the second photo is by Hashim Badani. It’s a little bit of Bombay that has come with me as I’ve travelled further and further from the city. 3. No idea how one gets these bookmarks, but they’re delightful. Hopefully, they will be available in bookstores. 4. By the time I finished the final draft, I was literally seeing lightning anywhere I saw a glass. The lightning in this double exposure is from a video a friend sent of a storm in Goa.

Reader, that’s not a review copy. At least I hope it isn’t. Because if it is, then I’ve been sent a review copy of my own book. Not that I’m complaining because it means that I now have incontrovertible physical evidence of Lightning in a Shot Glass being not just a mahussive document in my computer that I tinker and tweak at irregular intervals, but a real, honest-to-goodness book. It also means those of you who pre-ordered it on Amazon should be getting your copies soon and in a matter of days, it’s going to be in bookshops.

And it costs Rs. 499, which means even unemployed people can afford it. Ergo, please buy Lightning in a Shot Glass.

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At this point, you’re entitled to respond with “Why?” and I could whirl into an existential spiral by asking why not and what madness makes anyone want to be a writer in a world filled with people who don’t want to read books but do want to write them and want others to read theirs… but I will not. Instead, I will give you a two-part answer to why you should buy my new novel.

1. Look at that gorgeous cover (designed by Veer Misra). You know you want to have a drink with those two cover girls for company, and the best way to achieve this is by buying the book. Also, that’s the hot-pink energy your bookshelf needs. If not anything else, you want that cover lying around your home because as interior decor accents go, it is top class.

2. The book has the following:

women’s friendships
working women
reminders of what makes Mumbai feel like home to so many who feel like they don’t belong anywhere
age-gap romance with an older woman and a younger man
realistic conversations, including those with call-centre-type helplines
unrealistic men
ode to Richard Curtis
state-of-the-nation vibes, including a look at the artefact that is the print newsroom
enough hot sex for you to write a treatise on the female gaze and women’s pleasure, should you be so inclined.

Also, while I have absolutely no problem with this book being seen as “for women”, the few men who have read it seem to have enjoyed it fine. Even the ones who are straight. Including a lawyer. That said, if as a man you feel uncomfortable carrying around a book that has a hot-pink cover, might I point you towards the tactic that us kids of the Eighties used regularly to protect our books and our reputations — cover it with newspaper or brown paper. Newspaper would be particularly fitting since one of my protagonists is a print journalist.

Lightning in a Shot Glass is a book that tries to imagine a better reality without losing its grip on credibility. As a reader, I felt I could easily fill shelves with books that capture the bleakness of our present, but I struggled to find those that acknowledged present-day India without surrendering to sadness or bitterness. So I wrote one such book. For some reason, escapism in India is tightly intertwined with being ridiculous or dumb. I’m one of those who believes that for an escape to be truly satisfying, it has to be built on intelligence. Lightning in a Shot Glass is not a silly book. It wears its smarts and its progressive heart on its sleeve. It’s also sassy, spicy and funny. Writing it brought me joy and in the past year, which has been full of challenges and disappointments, making this book ready for print was something that repeatedly brought a smile to my face. I promise there are parts that will put a smile on yours too even if you feel like the whole book isn’t your cup of tea.

If I’m wrong about that, you’re welcome to wag your finger at me. If you’d like to do so in person or better yet, if you want to tell me how much you’ve loved reading Lightning in a Shot Glass, there are two book events planned so far. In Delhi, on November 28, author Shrayana Bhattacharya will be chatting with me. I plan to sneak in questions about her Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, which you’ve all probably read and loved given it’s been a bestseller for years (literally). In Mumbai, standup comedian Aditi Mittal will be in conversation with me. I’m hoping I can just blend with the wallpaper (or the bookshelves in this case) and let Aditi do all the talking because a) she’s hilarious, and b) she loved Lightning in a Shot Glass.

Years ago, I remember meeting an author at a lit fest who told me, after I introduced myself, “You didn’t like my book.” There was an edge of angry accusation in their voice. My first instinct was to apologise, but I stopped myself because the fact was I had good reasons for disliking that book (all of which I’d carefully written down in my review). There was no reason for me to feel sorry for or ashamed of my opinion. That said, I didn’t want to be honest to the point of being hurtful because I know how protective we as authors feel about our work. “It’s true I didn’t like it,” I admitted, “but I read it with care and it gave me things to think about. So thank you for that.”

Reader, I hope you will do the same for me — read Lightning in a Shot Glass with care. And if it doesn’t work for you, feel free to abandon it, but I hope the book will, at the very least, give you a little joy.

Thank you for reading and Dear Reader will be back soon.

Clichés of India: Kantara Chapter 1 and Homebound

Deepanjana — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 10:35:22 GMT

A crisper version of this was published in my HT column (behind paywall).

When Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was attacked for its depiction of India, director Steven Spielberg must have felt blindsided. Yes, he had shown it as a place in need of a white saviour, where elephants function like long-distance buses, and where chilled monkey brain was a culinary delicacy, but he was hardly the first filmmaker to exoticise India. In fact, Spielberg had refused to go the brownface route and had instead opted to cast Indian actors like Roshan Seth and Amrish Puri. Yet when Temple of Doom released, accusations of prejudice came at him from all sides.

The late Amrish Puri, who played the villain Mola Ram in that film, stood by Spielberg’s creative choices. In his autobiography, The Act of Life, Puri wrote: “I know we are sensitive about our cultural identity, but we do this to ourselves in our own films. It’s only when some foreign directors do it that we start cribbing.”

I was reminded of Puri’s assessment while watching Kantara: Chapter 1 (2025), directed and written by Rishab Shetty, who also stars as the film’s protagonist, Berme. Set in a mythical past, this prequel to Kantara is lavishly produced and bursting with spectacle. It has some striking cinematography, two stunning action sequences, and a fantastic heroine in Kanakvathi (a dazzling Rukmini Vasanth). Unfortunately, unlike Kantara, with its inventive use of folklore from Tulu Nadu, the world of Kantara: Chapter 1 teems with clichés.

We’re shown an India that is a land of tigers, monkeys and miracles; where gods walk among humans. The king is stereotypically villainous. Berme feels like a reimagining of Rudyard Kipling’s “man-cub” Mowgli, mixed with the Disney Tarzan’s penchant for swinging from vines. The forest-dwellers are primitive innocents (one of them marvels at stitched clothing when Berme returns from the city, wearing a tunic. This is despite the forest-dwellers having traded with the city for generations. Incidentally, there’s a strand of pre-history depicted in Kantara: Chapter 1 that resembles a clash Volga writes about in On The Banks of the Pampa, between the urbanisation championed by the upper caste and the nature-centric lifestyle of indigenous people. Volga’s version is much more powerful).

Despite Shetty being rooted in the region where the legend of Kantara is set, his gaze in the prequel feels more like that of a colonial outsider. How should we respond to an Indian perpetuating biases like colourism, rewriting folklore to suit the dominant Hindu perspective, and othering local communities by exoticising them?

Mystic India isn’t the only cliché that haunts us. India poses a challenge for storytellers because here, opposites often stand side by side. What feels normal in India is frequently surreal to those looking in from the outside. An important mandate of the creative arts in postcolonial countries has been to develop aesthetics that are more expansive than the Western gaze. For centuries, the Orient has been where the West’s exotic fantasies of the other have come home to roost. India, for instance, has been a land of opulent palaces, the Kama Sutra, glittering jewels as well as starving, unwashed, infantilised masses; it’s a land of spiritualism, but also rife with venial subaltern villainy. India is where ugliness is photogenic, where logic and rationalism fail. For the creative set, it’s been a struggle to break out of these restraints.

Particularly in the first few decades post-Independence, Indian cinema’s take on social realism led to some landmark works that would find more favour with the West, perhaps because they looked at realities we were tired of confronting at home and which activated the white saviour complex in foreign audiences. While examining very real issues — issues that Indian commercial cinema usually avoided — these films also sparked valid debates about whether they were capitalising on the suffering of the disenfranchised. The term “poverty porn”, originally coined in the Eighties to describe ad campaigns that exploited human tragedy, came to be attached to Indian films that focused on victimhood and squalor.

Director Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound, which is India’s entry for the best international feature at the Oscars 2026, has to contend with this narrative.

Stills from Homebound (above) and Kantara Chapter 1 (below).

In Homebound, Ghaywan’s earnestness makes it easy to sympathise with his protagonists, long-time friends Shoaib Ali (Ishaan Khatter) and Chandan Kumar (Vishal Jethwa), but sadly this film is no Masaan.

Shoaib is a patriotic Muslim who has refused a job in Dubai and hopes to enter the police force. Chandan is a Dalit who checks off General Category when filling out application forms. Both are poor and want to be seen as more than their marginalised identities. Yet there is barely a moment when the audience or the two men are allowed to set aside these aspects of their identity. Shoaib and Chandan are almost mummified by the labels of Muslim and Dalit respectively. They have no community other than one another until they start working in a factory, but those scenes are too few and come too late in the film to make much of an impact. Even when Shoaib and Chandan are on their own, they talk only about being straitjacketed by the prejudices of society. The two of them become devices to talk about a social evil, rather than people with full lives.

The only character who manages to forge an emotional connection with the viewer is Chandan’s mother Phool, thanks to Shalini Vatsa’s spellbinding performance. Even when the writing focuses on her caste and poverty, Vatsa emphasises Phool’s complexity, rather than just her victimhood.

Although the two films are very different in terms of treatment and target audiences, it’s difficult to not think of the other Dharma Productions film about the plight of the marginalised, director Shazia Iqbal’s Dhadak 2. Released without fanfare earlier this year, battling the stigma of being associated through its title with the mess that was Dhadak, and (like Homebound) forced to contend with outlandish cuts demanded by the CBFC, Dhadak 2 is the story of a young inter-caste couple. The film is not without its awkward bits (for instance, why is Siddharth Chaturvedi, who plays the hero Neelesh, in brownface?) and the love story is hamstrung by the lead pair having almost no chemistry, but Iqbal’s sensitivity and directorial skill comes through in the way she puts together Neelesh’s world. From his colony to his friends, family, heartbreaks and ambitions, we get the sense of Neelesh as a person, rather than a stereotype.

Homebound’s commitment to accurately depicting the lived experiences of India’s minorities is commendable. However, with its golden light, photogenic poverty and relentless misfortune, it also echoes uncomfortable stereotypes of impoverished India. Additionally, absurd scenes like the one in which Shoaib runs off with office property and is later rewarded with a promotion for doing so, pivot upon the idea that logic should be suspended when it comes to India and its poor.

These clichés aren’t fiction, but they are half-truths. In the hands of a good storyteller, exoticism can be a powerful device. It can reflect what makes the country unique, highlighting India’s diversity and complexity, and giving voice to our dreams. Even if he is a white man from the colonial era with a complicated relationship with the Orient, let me quote the French poet, archaeologist, novelist and doctor Victor Segalen who tried to imagine exoticism as a weapon against conformity. “Turn it into a great moving force. A source of nourishment. A vision of beauty,” he wrote in his diary while mulling over the concept of the exotic.

Neither Kantara: Chapter 1 nor Homebound are able to reclaim the constructs of exotic India and reinvent them on the filmmakers’ own terms. Instead, Shetty and Ghaywan end up adding credence to stereotypes that make India seem like less than the sum of its many and diverse parts. From the directors of Kantara and Masaan, I expected more and better.

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Ba***ds of Bollywood vs Humans in the Loop: Who did Escapism Better?

Deepanjana — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 10:49:31 GMT

(An edited version of this was published in the Hindustan Times.)

Days after it dropped on Netflix, debutant director Aryan Khan’s show, The Ba***ds of Bollywood (BoB) became one of the platform’s most-watched shows in India. The asterisks should spell out “star”, so that the “bads” of Bollywood are also the bastards” of Bollywood, but for reasons best known to the powers that be — numerology? typo? pre-empting the maximum star-rating the show should get? — there are three asterisks instead of four. If only this was BoB’s only problem.

In BoB’s opening scene, we see a stuntman attempt a dangerous jump without a harness, wires or any safety equipment. You’d be forgiven for thinking this is a shoot set in the Eighties or Nineties, when Indian cinema could neither afford nor cared for safety while doing stunts. Except there’s a green screen, which means this is set in the present, in the age of computer-generated imagery (CGI). Sure enough, some impressive CGI comes into play within seconds as a smart-mouthed struggler named Aasmaan (Lakshya) replaces the stuntman. He takes a leap of faith (literally and metaphorically) and becomes a breakout star (again, literally and metaphorically).

Can you remember the last time a stunt double impressed a director and producer enough to convince them to reshoot an entire film so that the stunt double replaces a hero? Welcome to the world of BoB.

On paper, BoB is a satire centred around the experiences of Aasmaan, an upcoming actor who must navigate the backstage drama of Bollywood after his first film is a surprise hit. The hype and anticipation surrounding BoB has been like nothing we’ve seen before, thanks to Khan being superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s son. More fascinating has been how this has ostensibly served to lower expectations, rather than raise them. The Chinese whispers that circulated about BoB stressed that this was Aryan Khan’s debut; that he didn’t just direct the show, he also wrote it and conceived it from scratch; that with comedy, the important part was the punchline, not the buildup; that Shah Rukh Khan had upped his swoonworthiness by personally messaging critics about his son’s show.

While BoB is 27-year-old Khan’s first directorial venture, he has benefited from more exposure, formal training and industry access than most debutant directors from India. Considering the wealth of talent (and presumably, money) that has been unleashed upon BoB, there was every reason to expect excellence from the show.

When international streaming platforms came to India, it meant Indian shows could now compete on a global stage. After a decade, the unpleasant reality is that most Indian shows fall embarrassingly short compared to foreign counterparts. We usually prefer to not acknowledge this, choosing instead to hold Indian shows to a different yardstick. For instance, the reviews and social media chatter mostly point out that BoB is better than Call My Agent: Bollywood while turning a blind eye to how it lacks the storytelling smarts of shows like Entourage, Extras or The Studio.

More than a show, BoB is a seven-episode showreel that makes a (questionable) case for Khan’s ability to deliver the masala that makes a hit Hindi movie. In all fairness, unlike the foreign shows mentioned above, BoB is not particularly in love with movie-making and neither is it enamoured by the glamour of show business. That’s not the point of BoB. Instead, the show seems more interested in the egos and gossip that characterise the Indian film industry, which could have been entertaining if BoB was better written. While bits of BoB work and Boobians will feel appeased, for most part, the show is about as credible as the submarine chase in Parvarish while being half as fun.

BoB twinkles, but only occasionally. For instance, it was an inspired idea to have Emraan Hashmi moonlighting as an intimacy coordinator. The musical meeting Hashmi has with a fan, played to delightful effect by Raghav Juyal, is a highlight of the show and Juyal is the only actor in the ensemble who is able to elevate the script with his performance. However, as good as he is, Juyal can’t save BoB, which is weighed down by clumsy writing, juvenile wit, garish visuals and uninspired acting. If this really is impressing Indian audiences as much as the noise around BoB claims, then it says volumes about how bad contemporary Indian comedies are.

Khan wears his nepo-kid heart on his sleeve — every episode has starry cameos, callbacks to older Hindi movies, and references to tongue-wagging moments like the sparring between Siddhant Chaturvedi and Ananya Pandey about nepotism during a roundtable hosted by Rajeev Masand. This sadly does not compensate for BoB’s plot, which careens without paying heed to common sense, logic or laws of physics. This is not unique to BoB. In fact, these qualities have been foundational for popular Hindi cinema, particularly in the Eighties and Nineties, which is a period that BoB references repeatedly, but too little of the show is either entertaining or memorable.

It seems as though Khan drew on the sensibility of vintage Bollywood because it allowed him to include exhibitions of machismo, misogyny and violence in BoB. Most of these feel jarring in the present-day context. For instance, in one episode, a woman is not just fat-shamed and assaulted in public on a film set, but by the end of that episode, the word “woman” is used as an insult. It becomes shorthand for someone who can be kicked around. One of BoB’s mystifying tangents shows a bratty star kid masturbating furiously while imagining himself with the domestic worker he had previously screamed at for not serving him well enough. (This, incidentally, is supposed to be comedy.) Predictably, none of the domestic staff are written to have any personality. They are characterised only by the jobs they hold, which establish them as possessions of their employer and incapable of independent agency.

Perhaps most reminiscent of the Nineties is the moralising tone that Aasmaan adopts when he discovers a woman had the temerity to have loved more than one man in her lifetime. It’s as though he’s been possessed by Juhu’s nosiest and most judgmental aunty. (No lectures for the adulterous male in BoB, obvs.)

If you make it to the final episode, Khan attempts to justify the tone he’s used in BoB with the final twist in his tale. It makes for a flamboyant conclusion, but it’s doesn’t explain why a film or show made in the 2020s is filled with tropes from the Eighties and Nineties. Neither does the conclusion justify the holes in BoB’s plot. Why did Aasmaan punch the lights out of Ajay (Bobby Deol) at an awards show? Why does the villainous producer (Manish Chaudhari as Freddy Sodawallah) look like a cut-price version of Ajit? Why does the cutting-edge technology of “spoofing device” look like one of the rejected props from a Bond film from the Seventies?

BoB is fascinating only if one casts an analytical eye to a show that seems determinedly superficial. For instance, Deol’s Ajay is an ageing superstar who, like real-life ageing A-listers of Bollywood, packs a lot of muscle, both physically and culturally. However, unlike the public personae of his real-life counterparts (all of whom have cameos in BoB), Ajay radiates menace and has a nefarious side. With his tattoos, snarls and devil-may-care aggression, he comes across as the exact opposite of the polite and compliant superstars of today (just look up their social media to see the birthday messages they recorded for our Prime Minister, if you want video evidence of this).

There seem to be some deliberate attempts to suggest an equivalence between Ajay and Shah Rukh Khan, which feels scandalously juicy because Ajay is an incoherent mess of a man. He’s a control freak who manipulates his daughter and whose charming public persona hides secrets that expose his moral corruption. (Armchair psychologists, calm down, look up “fiction” in the dictionary, and read the definition to yourself at least 50 times.)

Khan’s Bollywood is a world that is bleak, exploitative and incestuous. It says a lot about the Hindi film industry that in one of its most princely insiders, Bollywood has inspired callous characters and a story about people being conned into losing rights over their own narrative. So much for popular entertainment being an escapist refuge.

In contrast, the indie film Humans in the Loop (HitL) holds out an imaginary which, while rooted in reality, is much more of a hopeful flight of fantasy. Director Aranya Sahay’s film is partially about a mother and daughter finding their way to each other, and partially, persuasive propaganda for artificial intelligence (AI). Oscar shortlists and nominations are more about lobbying skills and publicity budgets than the quality of a film, but on a level playing field in an ideal world, HitL could have given the high-profile contenders a run for their money in the Oscar race.

At the heart of HitL is a porcupine that Sahay presents almost like a talisman that guards the forest and its people. The shy creature shimmers with mysterious power as its black-and-white quilled body weaves its way through tall, green grass. The porcupine’s familiar is Nehma (brilliantly played by Sonal Madhushankar), an adivasi and a single mother whose lifeline is her job as a data annotator. While she navigates the demands of an American client and feeds information into AI programs, her disgruntled daughter Dhanu (Ridhima Singh) misses the city and father they’ve left behind. With first her mother and then a friend she makes in school, Dhanu steps into into the forest, learning her way around its menace and beauty. The two-dimensional versions of reality contained in the boxed-in world of Nehma’s work contrast with the ineffable immensity of the natural world that Dhanu encounters in the forest. Both mother and daughter grope their way around unfamiliar terrain, learning details and becoming more aware of both their surroundings and themselves.

Inspired by an article written by Karishma Mehrotra for Fifty Two, Sahay presents AI as an empowering agent in HitL. Sahay’s film repeatedly makes the case that technology is innocent. More than once, characters say AI is like a child. It is learning from the information fed to it by humans. The fact that AI is controlled by corporations with questionable agendas is acknowledged, but only in passing. That it effectively steals from artists and stands on the shoulders of underpaid labour is something the film glosses over. Instead, Sahay focuses on an idealistic perspective and wonders what AI could mean for those who are invisibilised.

Within the world of HitL, AI makes it possible for Nehma to provide for her family and become more self-assured. Meanwhile, in a scene that is both hilarious and tense, the forest disorients Google Maps entirely, reminding us of its limitations. Counterbalancing how Dhanu is failed by digital technology, AI lets Nehma stamp her presence upon a world that is dominated by a colonising, white-centric perspective. Realistically, Nehma’s tiny acts of rebellion would have likely led to her being fired, but in the imaginary world of HitL, they bring Nehma to the centre. The world changes with AI, and for the better.

The imaginaries in both BoB and HitL are rooted in reality. Both create fictions out of actual incidents and imagine worlds that are recognisable, but also distinct from our own. In both, children chafe against the choices made for them by their parents. Both have girls who decide they’re going to run away; and parents fuelled by a desperate determination to protect their children.

In the middle of all these intersections is an unexpected fact. It’s the indie film that creates a more hopeful imaginary than the one conjured by mainstream entertainment. Imagine that!

The Long and the Short of it

Deepanjana — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 07:23:23 GMT

There are still three months left to the year, but I think I’ve found my favourite read of 2025 — The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, by Kiran Desai. Non-fiction is great for both virtue signalling and also actually making you smarter, but there’s nothing quite like getting lost in a story.

I didn’t expect Loneliness to be so easy to get into or so difficult to leave behind. About 100 pages into the novel (that’s about 1/7 of its total page count), I realised that even though I didn’t know how it would end, I wouldn’t like the end of Loneliness. I’d already started to feel protective of Sonia. I felt invested in the state of her parents marriage. The various family politics had me as curious as a gossipy neighbourhood aunty. When a book allows a reader to slip so smoothly into its world, there’s no way the reader will like being ejected from it. Something invariably chafes or irritates as one nears the end — because it’s not going the way you want it to for the characters you care about; because it’s reaching the end and you’re not ready for it to finish.

True enough, as Loneliness turned towards its final bend, I started feeling disgruntled. Desai changed gears, there was a shift in tone, loops started closing, and I grumbled to myself about dissonance, awkwardness, the struggle of making the gothic feel credible in modern times, and other irritations. They’re not invalid. Loneliness is not a flawless novel, but its shortcomings barely register. Because Loneliness is a beauty. It’s also elegant, frequently funny and as hopeful as it is riddled with despair.

This is a difficult book to summarise (full sympathy for the blurb editor) because Desai’s novel is many, many things. It is (and this is not a comprehensive list):

a family saga
a coming-of-age story
the quest for a soulmate
a clear-eyed critique of privilege in India
an examination of unhappy marriages
a portrait of abuse
an exploration into what makes men feel manly
a look at how painstaking it is to put oneself together after trauma has shattered a person into splinters
an homage to art and creativity, and
an ode to the sorcery that is the perfectly-made kebab.

The thread that connects the many beads of stories in Loneliness is Sonia and Sunny’s love story, which has all the flourishes of a desi romance, beginning with a chance meeting on a train and ending with a scene at an airport. It has tropes like the overbearing mother and realities, like the long shadow that abuse casts over someone. In short, Loneliness is the quintessential postcolonial novel from India, even though its author has been based in New York for more than two decades. Loneliness begins in 1996 and follows the fluctuating fortunes of a vast cast of characters, who are all complex, intricately imagined and radiate main character energy. When the novel opens, Sonia is a student in America, steeped in winter snow and depression. Sunny is a lowly employee at the wire service Associated Press and doing his best to be whatever he thinks the Americans in general and his white American girlfriend in particular want him to be. There’s a half-hearted effort to do some matchmaking, which doesn’t go very far for Sonia and Sunny, but does introduce us to the absolute characters that make up their families. Desai manages the threads of her many sub-plots and characters expertly, weaving them together to create an intricate tapestry showing a modern Indian family that is far from ‘normal’, but feels intimately familiar. Also, not for one paragraph in the book’s 670 pages was I confused about any character or their place in the world of Loneliness. That’s an incredible storytelling feat.

For all of you who have or part of book clubs, this is a great book for a read-along. Every chapter will give you loads to talk about and discuss. Highly recommend.

Especially in the parts where Desai writes about Sonia’s twisted relationship with the much-older Ilan, Loneliness reminded me of Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Michael Hoffman), which won the International Booker Prize last year. Hans is marginally less vile than Ilan (he’s written with more tenderness; Ilan is an act of savagery), but both of them delight in having a brilliant young woman at their mercy. It also struck me that Sonia, like Katharina, is the child of a broken marriage though in Kairos, the separation of Katharina’s parents is much less significant and also less fraught than what Desai shows us in Loneliness. In both novels, the parents’ separation doesn’t stop them from being support systems for the daughters. Katharina turns to her father just as Sonia does, and both fathers are there for their daughters in ways that may be imperfect and inadequate, but are still resolutely loving and supportive.

Although Sonia and Sunny are the protagonists, Loneliness’s three-chambered heart is made up of Sonia, her mother Seher, and Sunny’s mother Babita. Each of these women is a survivor and each one is haunted by a different man. Babita continually speaks to her dead husband. Seher can’t shake off her father, who came to India from Germany and years later, disappeared while walking in the mountains. Sonia is enthralled by Ilan, who is initially her lifeline, but quickly becomes monstrous. If there’s one personality trait these three women share, it’s a bone-headed determination to navigate life on their own terms. And it’s a joy to read.

Novelists always fold bits and bobs from their own experiences into their writing, and even the most cursory search into Desai’s biography will show she has repurposed details from her life to enrich the fiction of Loneliness. For instance, Seher’s parentage is a gender-flipped version of Anita Desai’s and when Sunny walks around Jackson Heights in New York, it’s Kiran Desai’s neighbourhood that we’re seeing. Even if we’re shown the area from Sunny’s perspective, it doesn’t seem like overreaching to assume Desai’s own point of view is in the descriptions. Similarly, if you can read the sections with Ilan and not think of Orhan Pamuk, you’re an elevated soul and I bow before you.

Yet it’s not the double weave of gossip and biography that makes Loneliness so compulsively readable. It really is Desai’s storytelling. If you don’t know anything about Desai’s life, Loneliness will still pull you in and hold you close. Desai’s descriptions, particularly of quiet moments, are exquisite.

Detail from the cover of The Butcher of the Forest (designed and illustrated by Andrew Davis). You’ll see unicorns in a whole new light after reading this book. Shudder.

In case you’re not feeling up to reading 670 pages, I do have a recco for you that will, on the surface, feel less intimidating. Premee Mohamed’s The Butcher of the Forest is just 135 pages and unlike the realism of Loneliness, this one’s a dark fantasy. However despite its slimness, The Butcher of the Forest is a dense, gripping and likely to give you goosebumps so keep some chocolate handy while reading. (I’d say make it dark, to match the tone of the book. And also because dark chocolate is just yummier. But I digress.)

On a wintry morning, Veris finds soldiers at her door. The tyrant who rules over these lands has ordered her to appear before him because he has a task for her. His two children have wandered into an enchanted forest that swallows up whoever enters it. The only person who has gone in and come out alive is Veris, which is why she must go in and save the tyrant’s children. She has just one day to navigate past the terrible and ancient magic of the forest find and bring the children to safety.

Mohamed wastes no time in The Butcher of the Forest and within a few paragraphs, she’s hooked the reader. Her prose walks a careful tightrope between restraint and lyricism. There are no indulgent excesses and none of the stylistic bits feel laboured. A wealth of information is packed into simple fragments and with well-placed asides, Mohamed establishes both Veris’s grit and also the world in which she lives, with its mindless violence and overwhelming fear.

This fable is the kind of story that I suspect the Brothers Grimm would have loved. There are creatures and references to existing folklore and legends, but it’s not a spin-off or a reimagining. This is a fairytale world, but the mood is more Pan’s Labyrinth than Disney. Horror, eeriness and beauty are layered upon one another to create a reality that is constantly unnerving and taut with tension.

The relentless pace of the plot of The Butcher of the Forest mirroring the tension that Veris feels about the deadline that’s chasing her. When I came to the final twist (which took me by surprise), I realised I’d actually stopped breathing. Somewhere along the way my breathing in the real world had synced with that of a fictional woman in an enchanted forest of terrors that exists only in the imagination of an author I’ve never read before.

Speaking of dark fantasy and horror, a few months ago, the “Barbie Box challenge” took over the internet. In exchange for a photo of yourself and some information about your life, AI programs created images in which you would be turned into a toy figurine, often placed on a desk with a computer in the background for scale. For approximately a week, everyone was cooing over and posting AI-powered renderings of themselves, each one in toy packaging with its transparent window showing a little box with an action figure inside that was blank of face and plastic in form, surrounded by accessories that people believed summarised themselves.

July Reccos

Deepanjana — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 20:02:33 GMT

Thanks to this year’s Booker longlist, I’ve had a mini existential crisis. I could swear I started reading Audition by Katie Kitamura and Universality by Natasha Brown, but for the life of me, I can’t remember anything about either book. Also, how did I have no idea that Kiran Desai has a new novel out? Ans: Because it isn’t really out out. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny will come out in September. Possibly around the time that the shortlist is announced. Put your cynic hat on if you want, but prizes are primarily about publicising books. The quality of the lobbying campaign is often more relevant than the quality of the book. Nothing else explains Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst not making the cut. I’ll write about it properly when I finish reading it, but this one already feels like a strong contender for one of my best reads of 2025. (Definitely try to avoid evil corporations like Amazon if you can and instead support your local indie bookstore, but that said, the Kindle version is just Rs. 280!)

I hesitate to wave dismissively at Audition and Universality because in the contest of July vs My Brain, most rounds have ended with Brain being knocked out. It might have helped if I’d noted down my thoughts on the two novels before abandoning them, but for that, I needed my planner. Which I didn’t have because I hadn’t made one.

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Back in the ye olde days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when time turned into a Mobius strip, I started making my own planner-journal (mostly because it was a good excuse to spend stupid amounts of money on washi tapes and scrapbooking material). At the end of making numerous mathematical errors, fixing them (only to find I’ve made new mistakes, because that’s life. Also, that’s me doing maths) and washi-taping the heck out of pages, it was very satisfying to have a notebook that was customised for me, with space for all my stuff — books read, movies and shows watched, ticket stubs, deadlines, doodles, meetings, etc.

Since then, I’ve been making these planner-journal things every year. Twelve months usually require two notebooks and in addition to supporting Indian retail and Japanese stationery imports, my notebooks are a handy record + reference I can turn to if I want to know, for instance, which books I read in which month, and what struck me about them while reading.

The May 2025 doublespread

This year, when I should have pulled out a notebook and made my planner-journal for the second half of 2025, I procrastinated. Next thing I know, June is ending; I am hurtling into a July that feels like a Mexican wave of disasters and bad news; and my notebook is as blank as it was on the day it was bound. All I have on record for July are fever readings, doctors’ appointments, appointments for medical tests, and barely-legible notes and prayers, written while functioning on two-odd hours of sleep. All other work was set aside because my father fell sicker than he has been in a long time. But he got better, slowly and determinedly. As he clawed his way back to better health, I got a little hug from the universe when it sent some wonderful books and shows my way.

Since my memory is awful enough to give a fruit fly superiority complex, I figured I’d use the newsletter to jot down what I do remember of my July reads. It’s not a long list, but it’s a good one. So without further ado, here we go.

The World With Its Mouth Open, by Zahid Rafiq

Set in Kashmir and written in prose that is almost clinical in its precision, this volume of short stories is compelling and deeply disturbing. There’s a eerie quietness to the world in which they unfold. Characters go about doing everyday things, like going to tuition or visiting a doctor. Only in Kashmir, there’s no such thing as ‘normal’ and even the most banal details wobble with an instability rooted in despair and uncertainty. Rafiq’s fiction has no interest in tropes like contrasting the beautiful landscape with man-made ugliness. Neither does he give his reader lessons in history and human rights. Instead, The World With Its Mouth Open trains its gaze on the facades that a traumatised society puts up in an effort to feel normal. These stories show the reader how violence has warped the ordinary out of shape. I couldn’t stop reading this book, pausing only to remind myself that I was reading a story and there was no need for me to hold my breath.

On the Banks of the Pampa, by Volga, translated by Purnima Tammireddy

“The darkness in the forest was so dense that not even dawn could dispel it entirely” — as opening lines go, this one is perfect. On the Banks of the Pampa is Volga’s retelling of the story of Sabari from the Ramayana. Sabari is a minor character in the epic, conventionally held up as an example of unquestioning devotion and used to make Ram look a little more awesome. Volga’s Sabari is much more; and if you’ve read The Liberation of Sita, it won’t surprise you to know that at the end of his encounter with Sabari, Ram’s aura is more than a little dimmed. This Sabari is a survivor and a custodian of ancient wisdom, she is a hero in her own right. But the darkness is dense, and not even the extraordinary Sabari can dispel it. Through Sabari and her guru Matanga, Volga delivers a sharp takedown of what is often described as “development” and the caste hierarchy. She also offers redemption to Kaikeyi, who is usually pegged as a villain. In Volga’s retelling, the queen is reduced to a pawn and the Machiavellian mastermind is Vashishtha, one of the great Saptarshis. It’s a slim book, but it’s packed with ideas and idealism.

The Elsewhereans, by Jeet Thayil

When I first read this book was “a genre-defying novel that melds fiction, travelogue, memoir, a ghost story, a family saga, photographs and much else”, my eyes rolled much like the knee jerks when it’s being checked for the patellar reflex. I ended up picking it up for the wrongest of reasons: the book fit perfectly into the bag I was carrying and my hair looked exactly like that of the woman on the cover of The Elsewhereans. Fortunately, The Elsewhereans is much more than these superficial details. Once I flipped to the first page, I couldn’t stop reading and then, when I realised where Thayil was going to end his book, I slowed down as much as I could, grieving and celebrating with every word I read. At its best, The Elsewhereans is a hauntingly beautiful portrait of a marriage between two remarkable, complicated people and a travelogue that travels through time and across seas. If you’ve never read Jeet Thayil before and are not in the mood for poetry, this is an excellent introduction to his prose. While it does have some discordant moments — the ghost story bit, for example, feels like a wasted token even though it had the potential to be much more than a stray, suspended detail — for most part, The Elsewhereans flows with elegant ease. The novel is at its weakest and most self-indulgent whenever the grown-up Thayil enters it without his parents, but those tangents didn’t really stay with me. It’s when Thayil writes of Ammu Thomas and Thayil Jacob Sony George that he is on song, and his ability to pick the perfect vignettes out of a lifetime of memories, questions and resentments is awe-inspiring. Warning: Early on in The Elsewhereans, there’s a description of a wedding feast that made me search for “Kerala food” on Zomato and reach for Gelusil simultaneously. All in all, not a perfect book, but utterly charming.

The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love, by India Holton

India Holton writes rom-com for literature nerds, and I am here for it. I zipped through pretty much all of her fantasy rom-coms and they’re all varying degrees of fun, but this one is particularly delightful. The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love is a classic enemies-to-lovers romance, set in Victorian England, with a sprinkling of Indian Jones-flavoured quests and so. many. puns. There is barely one sane moment in this bonkers book, which also has the most fabulous flock of fictional birds including one called the thunder-winged loon. Holton’s writing reminded me of the winsome Amelia Peabody series (which I really should re-read. They’re complete joy). In short, this one’s perfect for those times when the only thing to do with reality is to escape it.

I don’t usually do this, but I’m going to end with two show recommendations, both of which have a connection to books and writing.

The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case

The title tells you what this show is about. It’s based on Ninety Days: The True Story of the Hunt for Rajiv Gandhi’s Assassins by Anirudhya Mitra. I haven’t read the book, but Nagesh Kukunoor’s show was a very good watch. It’s one of those rare shows which I think might have benefited from being a little longer and less ruthlessly tight in its focus. Yes, there’s some overacting and a few awkward bits, but The Hunt holds the viewer’s attention. The casting is excellent, with actors looking credibly like the characters they play and production design that rarely feels artificial. Bureaucrats in safari suits, the hierarchy of a government office, security officials whose body language goes from loose-limbed to threatening in the blink of an eye, the steady gaze of a young woman who is ready to die for her politics — The Hunt is one of the best procedurals I’ve seen in Indian streaming. Also, the show’s closing monologue is magnificent.

A Dream Within a Dream

Not the poem Edgar Allan Poe, but the Chinese drama written by Ren Zhang Liu and starring Li Yitong and Liu Yuning. This is the first time I’ve watched all 40 episodes of a C-drama and felt the script made good use of every single episode. A Dream Within a Dream begins with an actress reading the script of the drama in which she’s been cast as a tragic female lead. After grumbling about the tropes and the incoherent misogyny in the story, the actress nods off to sleep and wakes up to find herself in the world of the drama. Her first task is to change the storyline so that her character doesn’t die or fall into the hands of the odious male lead. However, that turns out to be much more complicated (and funnier) than she’d expected.

The female lead of A Dream Within a Dream is just glorious.

While the first half of A Dream With a Dream plays with a familiar combination of court politics and romance, the second part is a meditation upon writing packaged in a flurry of action. What makes for a well-written character? What does agency mean? What does a writer owe a character they’ve created? How does the imagination affect the real? Can the imaginary have a real impact on the way we think? I loved how this show explored all this metaphorically and literally while also being funny, sweet and doing all the things expected of a drama. The female lead Song Xiaoyu/ Song Yimeng is one of the most delightful heroines you’ll encounter and gods above, that Liu Yuning! I could watch him stride around in slow-mo, in those floaty Chinese robes, all damn day… .

So that’s all I have for you this time. Here’s hoping August is kinder than July was. Take care, stay well, and thank you for reading. Dear Reader will be back soon.

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Heart Lamp and More...

Deepanjana — Tue, 27 May 2025 11:44:43 GMT

If you go to the website of the Booker Prizes, some clicking will take you to the page that announces the winner of this year’s International Booker Prize: Heart Lamp, by author Banu Mushtaq and author Deep Bhasthi.

That’s not a typo, by the way. Not on my part at least. However, “Deep” is/ was a typo by the people responsible for the Booker Prizes website. I know it’s not intentional and we all make typos, but to misspell the translator’s name on a page announcing “the world’s most influential award for translated fiction” is a tiny indicator of just how amazing a feat it is for Heart Lamp to have won this prize.

While the English have a long tradition of condescending to Indians (among others. All thanks to Britannia at one point ruling the waves etc), we live in hope that this colonial baggage is being unpacked with every passing day and with every book like Heart Lamp that wins international recognition. For one of the winners’ names to not just be incorrectly spelled, but remain uncorrected for days is embarrassing for the Booker Prizes, but makes Heart Lamp’s win feel sweeter to my postcolonial heart. You may not care to spellcheck our names, but we’re still taking the prize money. Cheers and thanks!

Screenshot taken on May 27, around 7am.

Within two days of the International Booker Prize being announced and Banu Mushtaq’s entirely wonderful speech — one of the most heart-delighting bits of the video is right in the beginning, when Banu Mushtaq is cocooned in a group hug that shimmers and sparkles with silk, sequins and friendship — I had four people ask me careful questions about the book. “What did you think of Heart Lamp?” asked one person. “I wonder, was Heart Lamp your favourite of the shortlist?” asked someone else. “Have you seen the reviews for Heart Lamp? Justified?” said another and finally, my favourite: “Did this one deserve to win?”

“Deserve” is such a loaded word, one that is invariably glazed with jus de sour grapes. In the context of prizes, it’s generally used by those who think they are either better than the prizewinner or know better than the jury. (I know I’m guilty of the latter all the damn time. My impostor syndrome will go into overdrive when it comes to reading a sentence I’ve written, but if a book or film I don’t like wins an award, I have no hesitation in declaring the jury is either spineless as a tapeworm or made up of fools.) The question of whether a prizewinner is ‘deserving’ comes from having inherited generations of stories about how better-qualified candidates were sidelined by formalities, politics and/or prejudice. Yet it’s worth remembering that sometimes, the loopholes can help the deserving. Remember how Percival Everett’s James won the Pulitzer? If no, here’s a quick recap from the New York Times (the link takes you to an article that should explain why I’m not inclined to drive even the teensiest bit of traffic to the NYT):

But it turns out that “James” was not the top pick among the Pulitzer’s five fiction jury members. It wasn’t even in the top three, according to three people with knowledge of the process, who were not authorized to speak about the confidential deliberations.

In a surprising twist, the prize went to Everett after the Pulitzer committee’s board failed to reach a consensus on the three finalists that the fiction jury initially presented — Rita Bullwinkel’s “Headshot,” Stacey Levine’s “Mice 1961,” and Gayl Jones’s “The Unicorn Woman.”

But I digress. I was talking about ~~gatekeepers~~ juries and their mandate to anoint the most worthy as prizewinner. Another reason we’re cynical about prizes is the conviction that winners are chosen less for their ability and more because their identity or work serves an agenda. This is often true and let’s not be under any misconception that there is either a universal best or that juries can do no wrong. However, while we’re at it, let’s also not lose sight of the detail that not all agenda are necessarily bad. For instance, if Heart Lamp won because this year’s jury wanted to shine the spotlight on marginalised voices, is that really a bad thing?

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Heart Lamp is an important work in Indian literature because of the world in which Banu Mushtaq sets her stories and the challenges that Deepa Bhasthi navigated while translating the short stories from Kannada. These are stories written about and for women, with the author turning her back on the dominant, masculine perspective that has been held up as literary. Mushtaq’s characters in Heart Lamp are often unabashedly sentimental and dramatic, wailing at the world that restrains them, and also challenging what is considered respectable (especially in the elevated echelons of Kannada literature). Heart Lamp is important for the conversations it can inspire, which may in turn help to open up publishing to new voices and make some readers more aware of the world beyond their bubble.

In the Indian context, Heart Lamp reminds us that patriarchy cuts across religious boundaries. Islam may accord a wealth of respect to women, but in a culture that forces women to be a diminished version of themselves and values femininity only for its son-birthing biology, its followers submit to patriarchy first and then Islam. Mushtaq takes a hammer to the idea that Muslim communities take care of their own, emphasising instead the class and gender divides that keep social hierarchies in place. This is the India that the West is used to seeing — poor, backward, alternating between villainy and golden-hearted innocence, and blitzed with misfortune — but it’s also a look at the social inequalities that India’s elite and middle classes do their best to ignore.

All of this makes Heart Lamp culturally relevant in our present and Banu Mushtaq, an important writer. However, it doesn’t necessarily make Heart Lamp the most compelling read. This is a volume that doesn’t draw you in as much as guilt you into finishing it. The short stories are selected from Mushtaq’s writing across decades, but the selection feels monotonous rather than diverse. The stylish prose that Mushtaq served with that one unforgettable sentence in her Booker acceptance speech (“This moment feels like a thousand fireflies lighting a single sky — brief, brilliant and utterly collective”) is barely present in the stories of Heart Lamp. They follow predictable arcs and are populated by characters who become a sad, unidimensional blur. While there are images and moments that stayed with me for the abject misery they embodied, most of Heart Lamp felt overwrought, with too little subtlety and too much sentimentality. From time to time, I had to remind myself that this wasn’t simple fiction, but stories drawn from the non-fictional experiences and longings of very real women.

For me, the best part of Heart Lamp is the translator’s note, titled “Against Italics”, which should be essential reading for Indian anglophone writers. Even if you think in English, as someone whose heritage includes other Indian languages, there is some kind of translation you do each time you write. The polyphony we have in our heads by virtue of being multilingual can’t not impact our English and the rhythms of our prose and poetry. At least, I hope it does. Without that, without an ear for the nuances that Bhasthi writes about in her note, we’re less Indian writers in English and more just trying to pass off an imposed foreign language as our own.

I haven’t read all of the books shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, but of the four I did read, the one that dazzled me most was Under the Eye of the Big Bird, a weird and brilliant set of interconnected stories by Hiromi Kawakami (translated by Asa Yoneda). I loved everything about this bewildering book, which felt dreamlike for the way it would pull me into its alternative reality within seconds. So long as I was reading, everything made sense. The moment I surfaced out of the story, most of the coherence seemed to fade away — until the end. Under the Eye of the Big Bird is one of those rare books that I re-read immediately after finishing the first read because once the pieces of the story’s jigsaw puzzle finally fell into place, I wanted to go back to savour Kawakami’s storytelling, free of the distracting need to make sense of this eerie world with its mutant humans, sentient trees and other curiosities. One of the book’s most fascinating meditations is upon the idea of motherhood and the role of the mother figure.

Set in an unspecified future, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a deliberately confusing chronicle about the last ditch attempt by humans to survive when faced with a very real possibility of going extinct. Kawakami wants us to think about a world order that is maintained by artificial intelligence, and what that might mean for humanity. There’s nothing predictable about Under the Eye of the Big Bird, and even when the world starts to feel familiar, the characters in the stories kept surprising me. Kawakami’s prose is elegant and spare, slowly revealing to the reader the beauty and horror of this near-apocalyptic world. Considering how snooty the literary fiction establishment can be, it’s a miracle this speculative science fiction work made it as far as the final shortlist. I will absolutely be looking up every darn thing by Kawakami that I can get my paws on (RIP what’s left of my bank account).

My other favourite from this year’s shortlist was A Leopard Skin Hat, by Anne Serre (translated by Mark Hutchinson) (fair warning: I almost fainted when I saw the price because the book is 50-odd pages long). Written as a memorial to Serre’s sister who died by suicide, A Leopard Skin Hat reduced me to a sniffling puddle. The book is a journey through memories and our guide is the nameless Narrator (who seems to be a stand-in for Serre although he’s masculine in the book). He’s the storyteller and a long-standing friend of Fanny, the troubled one who endured and endured until it was time for her to ascend. The shadow of Fanny’s death haunts both the novella and the Narrator as he looks back and lovingly recalls painful and beloved details of their friendship. You could finish Serre’s book in a day if you really wanted to streak through it, but I spent days over A Leopard Skin Hat, lingering over turns of phrase and marvelling at how perfectly she was able to capture complicated, shifty emotions into words that in a lesser narrator’s hands would feel flimsy and inadequate.

Presumably because it isn’t enough for Serre to reduce her reader to emotional mush, she’s also playing around with form and structural conventions in A Leopard Skin Hat. The book bounces between tenses (a particularly delicious and disruptive idea when you keep in mind how obsessed French is with its tenses), shifting from one to another with elegant, manic carelessness. It brings home how Fanny’s mind may have moved, but also suggests that in the Narrator’s mind, Fanny occupies both the past and the present. Similarly, the omniscient narrator shape-shifts into a first-person narrator, only to slip back into the third person again. And it’s done smoothly enough for even a pedantic grump like me to not feel irked by the shifts. A Leopard Skin Hat is a portrait of madness and a paean to friendship, both of which allow Serre to show just how sophisticated she is as a storyteller. Yet at the heart of the book isn’t its technical finesse or experimental flair, but the gleaming, adamantine sadness of someone grieving for one whom they loved deeply, but still may have failed.

So that’s three out of the four books I’ve read from the International Booker Prize’s shortlist. The fourth is Perfection, which I’d written about over here.

(Wow! Two newsletters in a month! Who am I even!)

With that, I will bid you farewell and return to real life. Let’s hope the Booker website corrects its typo soon. Thank you for reading and Dear Reader will be back soon.

Mayday!

Deepanjana — Thu, 01 May 2025 21:26:04 GMT

Ok, it’s past midnight as I start typing this, which means technically, it is not May day, but it’s still mayday. In a sense. Bear with me.

I write to you as a reader in distress. Last weekend, The Bookshop put up a post on Instagram that I would have liked a million times if I could. You should read the whole carousel, but here’s the part that feels particularly relevant:

“Book prices have risen every year since then [the pandemic], though we continued to reason with publishers and were in relative consensus about pricing structures. Until April 2025 when Penguin Random House India, part of one of the biggest publishing conglomerates in the world, and the biggest importer of international titles to India, decided to price books pretty much at par with their pound or dollar price.”

This means the average price of a paperback goes up to approximately Rs. 1,000 from Rs. 500-Rs. 600. To quote The Bookshop, that makes books “shockingly unaffordable”. Correcter words have ne’er been typed.

Look, if you’re one of those people who can afford all the books you want to read, I’m happy for you, but for most of us, books were scuttling towards feeling expensive even before this hike by Penguin Random House India. Paperbacks of international titles were coming to around Rs. 800-odd, which Amazon would invariably end up selling at Rs. 500-odd. Publishers will tell you that for their business ledgers to not look like a crime scene, books need to be more expensive, especially in India. Fair enough, but from a book buyer’s perspective, saving/ spending Rs. 300 on every purchase quickly starts adding up. Irrespective of how easily you can afford the books you buy, when books become expensive, most of us want to know if the title will feel ‘worth’ its price tag.

So what decides a book’s worth?

I’m asking this question as much as a reader (who will genuinely struggle to afford all the books she wants to read) as a writer. Because I’ve written a novel and if a publisher picks it up, I don’t want it to feel unaffordable. A hefty price tag becomes a burden on both the book and the reader, and serves neither very well. That said, I would also like to be paid as handsomely as possible for this book — not only because of the effort that went into writing it, but because I’d like to be able to afford other books written by other people. Writers are paid pittance and if we can’t afford our reading habit, our writing will be all the worse for it. Without reading, there is no worthwhile writing. Especially in the age of AI writing books in the time it takes you to click on “Subscribe now”, for the sake of the craft and art of writing, writers need to read. How on earth will we do that when a single book costs as much as a month’s electricity bill?

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The other day, I opened up Instagram and Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico popped up on my timeline four times. In this day and age, that is a sign from the universe to buy the book haste post haste. I looked up the book on Amazon (since I don’t have a bookstore near me these days) and discovered it’s a 120-paged book that is priced at Rs. 1296. If you can afford that without gulping nervously, I’m happy for you, but the idea of spending that much on a single book leaves me feeling like a giant panda having a small nervous breakdown.

I ended up scoring a free copy of Perfection, which is good because I suspect if I had paid for it, I might have loved it a little less. It is a brilliant and exquisitely crafted novella, but the only situation in which I imagine myself reading it a second time is if I go mad and decide to reimagine Perfection the way Latronico decided he was going to reimagine George Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties (Rs. 699 in paperback). Latronico’s book reminds you to really open your eyes to the world around you and while that is priceless, the book has a concrete, pragmatic value. I suspect if it wasn’t more than Rs. 1000, I wouldn’t ask myself if I will ever re-read it.

In contrast, I’d like to believe that the book of mine that is currently gathering virtual dust in the inboxes of multiple publishers is one that could be read and re-read. It is nowhere close to being either as elegant or as insightful as Perfection, but it is breezy and full of joy. It’s entertaining and occasionally funny. Most importantly, it’s comforting. It’s a novel that will (I think) make you smile every time you pick it up. Provided you do pick it up and aren’t scandalised by what its protagonists end up doing. Provided you’re not deterred by the price of the book.

Which brings me back to that first question: What decides a book’s worth? Especially as someone who hopes to keep writing and convincing both publishers and readers to pick up her books, I wish I knew. As a reader, I know that I simply cannot afford all the books that I want to read, which means either I have to reach out to publishers for review copies or …

Incidentally, 2025 is the first time in ages that I’ve written to PR people, asking for review copies. Just thinking about those emails is making me crumple with guilt. You see, I used to have a policy. If a friend has written a book, or if the book I want to read is by an Indian author, or if it’s available in India, I’ll buy it. To my mind, free copies are meant for those in the business of reviewing. I, on the other hand, am in the business of reading and that means I should support those who write. So far, so groovy … except now paperbacks cost approximately Rs. 1,000 and I find myself sending out emails with the assurance that I will write about the book I’m asking for in my newsletter. By which I mean this thing that lands in your inbox with all the regularity of a wayward comet.

(Everyone, say a prayer that no PR ever looks up the frequency of this newsletter.)

(Also, as it turns out, I haven’t actually finished reading any of the books for which I went e-wheedling, so the entire exercise has been an epic fail.)

Before I go, here’s a quick list of books that I remember reading between January and April.

The City and its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami

Filed under: Books that are Not Worth the Rs. 1000+ Price Tag. Quite a few lovely, shimmery bits of prose, but this was mostly tiresome. Do not recommend. A friend suggested hearing it as an audiobook while stoned. I do not understand the wisdom of that suggestion. This book is expensive enough without adding the cost of hallucinogens to the mix. If you’ve got that much money to waste, buy a different book. Heck, you might even get three books for that amount.

Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin

Thoroughly enjoyed the way Elkin wove the physicality of Paris into the emotional terrain of her characters. On the surface, this is the story of an apartment and two couples whose marriages unravel in the process of them trying to make a home out of these walls and windows. There’s a lot more unravelling below the surface. It’s a little uneven, frequently very funny, and an intimate (but also very intellectual) portrait of feminine desire.

Hurda by Atharva Pandit

The starting point of this crime thriller is an extraordinary work of journalism. Back in 2013, Smita Nair wrote this incredible article (if you’re not an Indian Express subscriber, it’s behind a paywall) about a case in which three minor siblings first disappeared and then were found dead. The retelling in Hurda is riveting until well into the second half of the novel, when it shifts gears in order to become literary (or something clever like that). As debuts go, very very impressive.

Requiem in Raga Janki by Neelum Saran Gour

I don’t know how I missed this book when when it first came out in 2018, but I’m grateful to the gods of indie bookshops that I found it during my last book-bathing trip to Trilogy in Mumbai. This is an extraordinary historical novel about the singer Janki Bai. While the later chapters feel rushed, the characters are fantastic and the bits in which young Janki is being taught Hindustani classical music are worth their weight in gold.

The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide

My father gifted this to me for my new bookshelf and it is such a gentle delight of a book. This slim little volume is about a transforming neighbourhood and a couple whose lives are touched by wonder when they’re adopted by a cat. I loved how Hiraide infused the everyday with a sheen of wonder. There are fragments that end up lingering in memory like an old photograph. It’s a proper masterclass in the art of describing the ordinary.

Love, Queenie by Mayukh Sen

I wanted to love this book so much and even though it didn’t come to life as I’d hoped, I’m glad that it exists because perhaps someone will be inspired by the research to novelise Merle Oberon’s life. Hopefully, someone who reads Sen’s book will be inspired to write a novel like Delayed Rays of a Star with Oberon as its protagonist. A woman with as many secrets and adventures as Oberon deserves some epic storytelling. Sadly, this non-fiction account isn’t it.

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

A sharp spy thriller that becomes more and more tender as it unfolds under the aegis of Bruno Lacombe, an eccentric who has retreated from modern society to live in a cave. His only contact with the wider world is through the long-winded emails he sends to the cult-like group of eco-activists that see him as their guru. Kushner’s protagonist is a woman spy who embeds herself with Lacombe’s followers. She is a hundred times more charming and capable than James Bond. Good fun.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

Latronico started writing this novel as an exercise during the pandemic. He figured that since he couldn’t seem to manage anything creative, he’d rewrite Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties. Unlike Perec’s rather unforgiving portrait of a young couple, Latronico is more tender and understanding towards his protagonists as he puts together an incredibly intricate literary diorama of the millennial existence. As he said in an interview, he recognises aspects of himself in the lives that Perfection’s Anna and Tom lead, which is perhaps what makes the novel feel so lived and real despite the almost clinical neatness of Latronico’s prose. Muchly enjoyed.

With that, I’m going to sign off because if I don’t I’ll be maydaying my way through tomorrow. Someone give me a cookie for finally, for once, writing a short edition of this dashed newsletter.

Thank you for reading Dear Reader.

How Love Moves

Deepanjana — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 17:58:33 GMT

The other day, I found Rs. 10 in my pocket. It was a complete surprise and even though Rs. 10 is not exactly a princely amount (according to today’s exchange rate, that’s 11 cents if you’re in America or Europe), the tenner made me inordinately happy. Obviously, this has nothing to do with the note’s actual value. At best, it will pay for parking at Kolkata’s Lake Market, but that’s not really the point. The Rs. 10 popped up out of nowhere. A bit of whimsy from a universe groaning under the weight of awfulness? I’ll take it gladly. These are times in which the little joys are precious. I’m hoping this newsletter showing up in your inbox unexpectedly will feel much the same way — it’s a little something that has very little value in the larger scheme of things, but hey, it’s here!

Today, I come to you with not books, but a film I saw in an art gallery. Some of you might know that I have a column in the Hindustan Times in which I write about films and shows that have left me with Thoughts. Since it comes out in the print edition of the newspaper, there’s a non-negotiable word count I have to stick to, which has been quite a re-education after all these years of writing for websites. Being a columnist with a print publication is a bit like making your peace with Mumbai real estate — you squeeze in as much as you can into spaces that feel cramped but which you’re grateful to have. Sometimes, the word count is not a bad thing because it forces you to focus and not waffle; but sometimes, it makes you (read: me) whinge like tantrummy toddler. This is one of those weeks. So I thought that I’d show up here with the unedited version of my column on Pallavi Paul’s How Love Moves.

Paul’s film felt special when I watched it a couple of weeks ago. It feels all the more so now, as an online backlash unfolds against Mohanlal’s L2-Empuraan because it has a sequence that seems to reference the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. The latest news is that L2-Empuraan will make 17 cuts to appease the trolls — this is after receiving a CBFC certificate, mind you. Anyway, my edited column is here and the unedited one is below. Thank you for reading and Dear Reader will be back soon.

In the far corner of the gallery Project 88, there hangs a velvet curtain with the Urdu word dum (breath) written on it in gold thread. A few steps away lies a white body bag, embroidered with colourful peacocks. In the belly of the gallery is a large screen. When it lights up to play artist Pallavi Paul’s film How Love Moves, the screen becomes a portal that takes the viewer to Delhi Gate Cemetery.

It’s a place with the air of a secret garden, with its overflowing green and majestic peacocks. Here, lives are connected by death and life is treasured. A gravedigger says he doesn’t believe in death. The living don’t die, he maintains. They just make their way past the veil that is life to the afterlife, to the divine. In How Love Moves, the graveyard is a place of hope, where those who have lost someone see glimpses of their beloved in a butterfly, feel their presence on a breeze. It offers refuge to the homeless and those in need shelter. We’re told stories of how there have been times when the living have lain next to the death and it became impossible to tell one from the other. The dead are buried in this graveyard, but they are not forgotten. If anything, they are resurrected through the act of remembering.

The embroidered body bag from How Love Moves by Pallavi Paul

Two narrators share their stories with us over the course of 63 minutes. One is a migrant woman who came to India in search of a new life and along the way found love, only to end up witnessing her husband’s brutal murder during the Delhi riots of 2020. The other is a chatty gravedigger named Shamim Khan, who, with his equally chatty colleagues, buried approximately 4,000 bodies in the months when the second wave of Covid-19 and riots ravaged the capital. These two voices keep alive the memory of people who have been anonymised into inadequate data points by death and trauma. “Those who understand death know the dead are not worthless,” Shamim says at one point, adding, “They’re Allah ki amanat (God’s creations) and must be returned to him with respect.”

Paul is a gifted interviewer whose subjects seem to be aware of the camera, but not performing for it. There are hauntingly beautiful moments shot by cinematographer Ashok Meena, which offer an intimate and unclichéd portrait of Delhi as a city of mist, shadow, peacocks and earth tones. (I’m not absolutely certain, but I think Meena was the cinematographer on Against the Tide, which is an exquisitely-shot documentary about Mumbai’s fisherfolk.) Meena’s cinematic gaze highlights the grace in the people and places it records, rather than the scars. The film makes space for ugliness too, through Paul’s use of viral mobile clips that were circulated during the lockdown as well as snippets from news channels.

The storytelling is sophisticated, made both more beautiful and sharp by superb editing. The 63-minute film is divided into five parts, each named after Islamic prayer times (fajr, zuhr, asr, maghrib, isha), and to watch How Love Moves during Ramzan feels like the very definition of timely.

How Love Moves is full of beautiful shots, but this was one of my absolute favourites

How Love Moves is a powerful film about our recent past and it is all the more impactful because as a society, we seem to be intent upon putting the pandemic years behind us. Our almost frenzied need to forget those troubled and troubling times runs counter to what Paul has done — remember and feel for that past. If you’re in Mumbai, I cannot urge you enough to brave the dug up streets and unforgiving traffic to see How Love Moves. Since it is part of Paul’s solo exhibition, the film is freely available to anyone who can journey to the far end of south Mumbai.

Being in an art gallery in Colaba technically makes How Love Moves more accessible than most documentaries in India, but in practical terms, its location makes the film weirdly unapproachable as well (especially if you’re coming from one of Mumbai’s far-flung suburbs). A gallery is not considered the natural habitat for a documentary film, but it remains one of the few spaces where being mainstream and formulaic is not an advantage. Here, there is room for dissent, experimentation and grace. There is also the hope of finding one’s audience. Paul’s film could easily have been labelled a documentary, but that would have meant joining the league of brilliant Indian documentaries that the public can’t access without help from piracy.

Perhaps Paul will make a conventional documentary feature with the footage she has collected, but as the Indian film industry tells us repeatedly, making the full-length feature film you want is a labour that even Hercules would have balked at if he knew everything he’d be up against. There are obstacles at every level and each one can twist a film to become less creative, less brave, less relevant, less beautiful. It takes a miracle for a film to go from being greenlit to released, but in the age of “anticipatory compliance” and fear, even a miracle may not be enough to ensure you make the film you dreamt of making.

“Only god knows where this passion will lead us/ Oh lovers of the world, tread with caution” ~ from How Love Moves by Pallavi Paul

Last week, filmmaker Anurag Kashyap pointed to precisely this problem during a venting session in the comments section of his own Instagram page, after binge-watching the masterpiece that is Adolescence, created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham. Incidentally, if you’re feeling a post-Adolescence emptiness, find Avinash Arun and Ishani Banerjee’s School of Lies, which is one of the most poignant portraits of boyhood that we’ve had in Indian entertainment. Then watch Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls, which won the prestigious Independent Spirit John Cassavetes award last month. Especially considering how mainstream entertainment dumbs down teenagers on screen, it feels like a blessing that regular streaming platforms made space for School of Lies and Girls Will Be Girls.

It isn’t surprising that Kashyap was triggered by Netflix’s CEO Ted Sarandos taking credit for his platform backing inventive storytellers. The coffee shops of Bandra and Versova are haunted by lingering echoes of disgruntled writers, directors and technicians who blame interfering producers for mangling their work out of shape. (Netflix in India is known for being particularly interfering.) “How do we ever create something so powerful and honest with a bunch of most dishonest and morally corrupt @netflix.in backed so strongly by the boss in LA (sic),” Kashyap wrote on Instagram, voicing the frustrations of many. There must have been a Mexican wave of agreement that spread across Andheri, Juhu and Bandra when Kashyap’s post popped up on Instagram.

Yet against all odds — and there are many — somehow, there are storytellers who manage to create work that is impactful, courageous and beautiful. Sometimes, you have to look for them in art galleries.

How Love Moves is on at Project 88 till April 26. The film is screened three times a day. Please check the gallery’s social media or call them to confirm timings.

The Best of 2024

Deepanjana — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 18:11:30 GMT

The curious thing about a year starting in the middle of the week is that on the last Friday of the old year, the new year feels quite a distance away. There’s a whole weekend in between, along with a Monday and a Tuesday. Considering the way this wreck of a year has been, that’s enough time to turn the world upside down a couple of times over. Because if there’s one thing that 2024 has reminded us, it is that life has a way of surprising you with death. At some point in the future, maybe we’ll sit down to sift through the cultural grains to understand what it’s meant for humans as a species to turn our back on the natural world because it’s too terrifying to see what we’ve done to it; to go from a terrifying pandemic that made us afraid to draw breath, into a spiral of civil war, genocide, war and grievous loss. It’s a reckoning that we’ll have to do at some point, but that’s for the future at its vaguest. For now, in 2024, let’s just escape into the world of the imagination.

Casual, by Geof Kern

I found this photo by Geof Kern the other day and immediately fell in love with the reader who is so immersed in her book that the circling sharks become peripheral. There’s also the relevant detail that most sharks are not dangerous to humans. The danger is an illusion. This could actually be a photograph of peaceful coexistence, of sharks feeding on the fish that sustains them and a human feeding on what sustains her. Or it could be an absolute idiot who’s about to lose at least one foot because she was so engrossed in her reading, she didn’t realise she’s mid-sea and being eyed by hungry predators.

For the last newsletter of 2024, I want to share with you books, films and shows that made me feel a little like the woman in Kern’s photo. So here we go. Drumroll please, for my personal favourites from 2024.

The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger

It’s not only that Schlanger is writing about a topic that feels like an iridescent mash-up of science and fantasy, but also that Schlanger herself is a reminder of why we should exalt writers of (good) non-fiction. Schlanger started focusing on the subject of plant behaviour and plant intelligence because after the ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic, she felt the need to turn her attention to something that felt restorative. In The Light Eaters, she brings together the scientists who are studying plants and discovering just how magical they are with their abilities. Because yes, plants have abilities. Also, according to Schlanger, under the microscope, the emerald green slug slurping up algae looks like the slug is drinking boba tea. Sold.

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

This is an extraordinary book and I’m mystified that it didn’t make it into lists (while Knife did). Maybe it’s because Flanagan blends memoir with science, history and fiction to create an extraordinary work that defies definition. Flanagan started writing Question 7 after being diagnosed with early onset dementia. He thought he had about a year before the illness set in, so he started writing this memoir, making it a chain reaction of experiences and information that connect his parents, grandmother and himself to the world around them. The dementia diagnosis turned out to be false, which was terrible doctor-ing on the doctor’s part, but I can’t help feel a little bit grateful. It’s hard to imagine everyday life pushing Flanagan to be as driven as he must have felt, to write something as complex and beautiful as Question 7.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Harvey writes about a day in the life of the six aboard the International Space Station in this little jewel of a novel. While making us privy to the floating islands of the astronauts and cosmonauts’ thoughts, Harvey also describes what they see. It’s a masterclass in the use of perspective and description.
Back in 2013, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield went up to the ISS and became famous for putting up photos of Earth on his Tumblr. These photos showed the beauty of this planet in a way that many of us had never imagined. I kept remembering Hadfield’s photos while reading Harvey’s descriptions of Earth as seen from the ISS. Her descriptions are like incantations — read them and you will see what she’s describing in your mind’s eye. If you need a book to pull you out of a reading slump, this is the one. Not only because it’s slim, but because of the feeling of wonder that Harvey inspires with her writing.

Clouds over the Pacific ocean (above) and somewhere in the Mauritanian Sahara (below), as seen by Chris Hadfield from the International Space Station.

Consent by Jill Ciment

I wrote reams on this wonderful book earlier this year, so allow me to point you in its direction. The best part of compiling year-end lists is that the process can be an eye-opener. Like, for instance, I know I loved Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams when I read it, but I needed to go back to this post to remember why. Another thoroughly enjoyable read of 2024 was All Fours by Miranda July, but months later, I could only remember fragments of it. Admittedly, this has more to do with my memory or lack thereof — I’ll never be one of those people who can nonchalantly recite poems or chunks of Shakespeare — but while I can’t quote from Consent, I remember everything Ciment dwells upon as she looks back on her relationship with her husband.

The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms by Olivier Roy

Although Roy’s focus is Europe, the point he makes about the very concept of culture being in crisis felt persuasive to me. Props to Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous for their translation because Roy’s an academic and he’s French, but Schoch and Selous make this book read with easy fluency. It’s like Roy is talking to you, explaining why he thinks Europe has lost its cultural swagger, how norms have become so much more oppressive with the growing reach of the internet, and the way markers of identity are increasingly becoming disconnected from their original cultural context. This is a book that isn’t nervous about being full of big ideas. I wish someone would write a book like this analysing modern and contemporary Indian culture.

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

A woman journals for 10 years. Then, from a decade worth of journalling, she pulled out a pile of sentences, which she organises into alphabetical order. Out of this emerges Alphabetical Diaries, in which each letter in the alphabet gets its own chapter. Here’s how this literary experiment works: All the sentences beginning with M are in one chapter, followed by N, which has all the sentences beginning with that letter. Two consecutive sentences may be about unrelated things, from different years, connected only by Heti having written both and the shared first letter. It shouldn’t work. This should just be a ridiculous, poncy experiment that loses the sheen of novelty in no time and ends up being a jumbled, boring mess. But this is Sheila Heti. If there’s anyone who can take chaos and fashion it into something moving, beautiful and weird, it’s Heti.

Disappointingly, I read very few romances this year. From that very limited set, my favourite cosy read was Small Bomb At Dimperley by Lissa Evans. It’s like Jane Austen-lite — funny, gentle and dealing with difficult topics with a light but mature touch – but set in 1945. At the heart of the novel is a crumbling old house and a cast of characters trying to figure out where they belong in a fast-changing world, along with a love story (obviously). For those who like their romances to be a little on the smutty side, Failure to Match by Kyra Parsi neatly hits the spot even though the hero is yet another reworking of the Christian Grey character. Fortunately, the woman is not the simpering idiot that was the Fifty Shades heroine.

Now for the movies. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy All We Imagine As Light, but it isn’t on my list. It may have been if I hadn’t encountered so many gushing reviews. Being overhyped is a very real problem, especially in the age of algorithms. Clicking on one review opens the gates for a pile of related ‘content’ and suddenly, all the cats, doodles and beautiful men in the Explore page of my Instagram have been replaced with praise All We Imagine As Light. Anyway, my point is that All We Imagine As Light was good, but it left me underwhelmed. However, I loved the film’s cinematography. Ranabir Das turns the city known for its bright lights into one of shadows and bleached colour. Once the city of dreams, it’s now full of people who move like automatons and inanimate things that seem alive. I can still see that exquisite shot of the sari, hung to dry in a flat, billowing gently near an open window as though it wants to fly away. Also, the film’s final shot — the shack with its twinkling lights and happy people, under a tree whose branches tangle into the dark and starry night sky — is perfection.

The other unforgettable example of cinematography was the Nicole Kidman show, Expats. The show began powerfully, introduced some incredible actors, but the star was cinematographer Anna Franquesa-Solano who filmed Hong Kong so as to emphasise the city’s concrete solidity. Using a palette that is occasionally reminiscent of All We Imagine As Light, Franquesa-Solano turned Hong Kong into a tapestry of grey, blue, beige and shadow, using light to accent its bleakness. From crowds to flyovers and the humble mop, everything is filmed in a way that emphasises how unexotic the city is, while also revealing an underlying grace.

But I digress. Movies.

Girls Will Be Girls

I think this is my favourite Indian film of the year, though admittedly, it benefits from recency bias since I only saw it after it landed on streaming (on Prime Video, for those in India). Shuchi Talati’s debut film is about a teenage daughter and her prickly relationship with her mother. The little, everyday frictions between the two are captured so well. Despite very little happening in terms of incident, Girls Will Be Girls feels taut as a perfectly-tuned string. Much of the credit for this goes to Preeti Panigrahi, who is pitch perfect as the goody-two-shoes central character, Mira. Girls Will Be Girls is also the first Indian film in which people speak English in a way that sounds natural. That said, this is one to watch either alone or with friends. I’m not sure how many mothers will feel comfortable watching this film with their daughters.

No Other Land

This would have been a brilliant documentary at any point in time, but that a group of Palestinians and Israelis came together to make a film just before Israel embarked upon a genocidal war on Palestine makes this all the more important and heartbreaking. When the collective started making the film, the idea was to show the tactics used by Israel to destroy an area in the West Bank known as Masafer Yatta. Now, it’s documentation of a place and people from a time when they were determined to dig their heels into the land that is their home while being forced out by the Israeli state. It’s also a portrait of a friendship between journalist Yuval Abraham and Palestinian activist Basel Adra.

Dahomey

In 2021, France returned 26 works of art to Benin (from a collection of approximately 7,000, looted during the period when Benin was a French colony). Director Mati Diop follows the artefacts’ journey and lands in the middle of a raging debate in Benin about these national treasures. The documentary is an exercise in magical realism and Diop’s use of the black screen and auto-tuned voices are phenomenal. (I love the idea of auto-tuned voices representing elements that exist beyond life, death and history because these transformed voices retain only the barest trace of humanity, having been stripped of their original timbre and tone.) Dahomey is a portrait of a people who are in the process of constructing their identity, excavating it out of colonial oppression and erasures; a people who are trying to determine how the past fits with the present. I wish it was possible to screen this film for any and every college student who has chosen to study the Humanities. Tremendous and thought-provoking.

Conclave

A film set in the Vatican is duty bound to look stunning and Conclave takes this responsibility seriously. It doesn’t matter where you pause the film, you’re guaranteed an incredibly beautiful frame. Even if all you see on screen is an ashtray with cigarette butts or a luridly yellow wall that turns out to be the perfect background for black habits. I hadn’t expected a film about choosing a new pope to be either so riveting or so darn hopeful, but Conclave is somehow both. Ralph Fiennes is extraordinary as the bland and bureaucratic Cardinal Lawrence. He’s in almost every scene and doesn’t have a single moment of obvious heroism, yet he effortlessly claims the spotlight for his character. Also, I doubt there’s a living actor who can pack so much emotional charge into every vowel of dialogue that he utters.

Anora

Sean Baker’s film about a young sex worker who catches the eye of a Russian oligarch’s son is tremendous, even though the story intermittently loses its momentum (but the ending is perfect). The titular Anora is a woman whose life is a collection of hardships, but she still shimmers with the determination to be happy. I expected Anora to be moving because Baker has a gift for telling the stories of women who may be broken, but remain full of joy and hope. What I hadn’t anticipated was how funny it is (this is my mistake. Baker never loses sight of humour and laughter, no matter how heartbreaking his topic. Just look at Tangerine and The Florida Project). The scenes with the Armenian gangsters are hilarious and Mikey Madison as Ani/ Anora is very much the moment.

Wild Robot

This is one of the most heartwarming films I’ve seen in ages. There’s gorgeous artwork, a cast of brilliant voice actors — led by Lupita Nyong’o as Roz the robot and Pedro Pascal, as Fink the sly fox — and the cutest duckling of 2024. What more could you ask for? Wild Robot is also a very timely meditation upon artificial intelligence, emotional intelligence and obedience. Although the film drops broad hints about a sequel, Wild Robot doesn’t end in a way that makes you feel like you’ve spent ticket money only to be dropped miles before the destination (I’m looking at you, Wicked).

Kishkindha Kaandam

Malayalam noir delivered one of the quietest thrillers of the year. Retired Army veteran Appu Pillai has lost his licensed pistol, much to the embarrassment of his son Ajayan. The question of what happened to the pistol leads Ajayan’s new wife to start looking into the curious rituals that the father and son follow. Why does Appu Pillai keep his room locked? Is the visitor who claims to be an old friend of his really the person he claims to be? Why does Ajayan want to keep his wife and father at a distance from one another? There are a couple of logical loopholes in the plot, but the tension is so delicious, I was willing to turn a blind eye to them.

Ullozhokku

Another Malayalam film about family secrets. When Anju’s ailing husband dies after years of being unwell, she is desperate to move on and begin a new life with the man with whom she’s been having an affair. For Leelamma, her son’s death forces her to confront truths she’s tried to turn a blind eye to for decades. The relationship between Anju and Leelamma is keenly observed and both Urvashi and Parvathy sink their actorly teeth into their roles. Director Christo Tomy does a fantastic job of using floodwater in his storytelling.

Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron

This documentary works best if you’ve watched The Boy and The Heron and are in the mood to rabbithole into the labyrinth that is Miyazaki’s imagination. Director Kaku Arakawa followed the man behind Studio Ghibli around for seven years, documenting how Miyazaki made The Boy and The Heron. The way the documentary uses clips from various films to articulate subtexts is a geek’s delight and the film feels like a legend that helps the viewer decode The Boy and The Heron. It’s also a portrait of an artist who is growing old alone. Incredibly moving.

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Of Jill Ciment's Consent, Neil Gaiman and Alice Munro

Deepanjana — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 11:35:01 GMT

Towards the end of her extraordinary memoir Consent, Jill Ciment writes about how her husband of 45 years, Arnold Mesches, responded to the news that he was dying of cancer. First, there was disbelief, then there were tears. And then:

The next morning, he was back in his studio.
When he saw me standing in the doorway, staring at him, speechless, he said, ‘You should be taking notes for your book.’

It’s a moment that shows Mesches trying his best to hold on to what has anchored him and his humanity — the art that he made, and the artist wife whom he supported. There’s something defiant about his decision to keep painting when he has just weeks to live, just as there is something gentle in his acceptance that as the husband of an author, he is also always a subject; and he has submitted to that fate without rancour.

As a novelist and a memoirist, Ciment has mined her life (and her husband) for stories and subjects. Of course Mesches knew this, but with that one sentence — “You should be taking notes for your book” — he sets himself apart from all the husbands who are embittered by envy at their more-successful wives. At this moment, as Mesches encourages Ciment to cast her writerly gaze on him, he becomes something of the ideal lover (to a writer at least). He’s also the man who was in his 40s when he met and made the moves on a teenaged Ciment. When Ciment recounted their love story in her memoir Half A Life — written in the mid-1990s, when Mesches was alive — she cast herself as a girl who acted on her desires and seduced a middle-aged man (who was married and 30 years older than her, had a daughter Ciment’s age, and was also having an affair with a friend’s wife). In Consent, written after Mesches’s death, Ciment tilts the rearview mirror and wonders whether her happy marriage with Mesches was fruit from a poisonous tree.

Consent is an extraordinary work. It’s beautiful, both in terms of language — you can practically see every room Ciment describes — and also as a portrait of a long, complicated and fulfilling relationship. The courage that Ciment shows when she interrogates herself and her own writing is breathtaking, as is the generosity with which she accepts the darker, discomfiting aspects of her partner and their romance. In a radical act of rewriting and retelling, Ciment takes passages from her previous memoir and dismantles the text in Consent, puncturing Half A Life with details that she hadn’t included when she’d first written about her relationship with Mesches. None of the details do Mesches any favours. The older book, with its incompleteness and blinkered perspectives, is now very literally half a life.

What we get in Consent is still a love story, but one that turns the usual formula on its head. The ‘chase’ and the heady early days are usually romanticised, but in Ciment and Mesches’s story, these are the years that are uncomfortable and need to be recontextualised. Ciment does this without mercy but with grace. She also continues the story, archiving the couple’s happily-ever-after, which rarely gets written about in any detail because the post-chase life is generally considered boring if it’s without conflict. Ciment shows these to be the dynamic years when Ciment comes into her own while Mesches settles into his role as her partner. He had limited success as an artist, but evolved into a good husband. Mesches was the one who gave Ciment the confidence to become a writer. He’s the lover who believes in her, encouraging her to look past her limitations (imagine what it takes for a dyslexic high school dropout, whose dreams of being a visual artist crumbled into the reality of working as a nude model in a peep show, to believe she can be an author). Consent is a reminder that we all contain multitudes; that people change and that context is critically important for us to understand our experiences.

It’s not as though Ciment was actively and deliberately lying when she wrote Half A Life, but only after the #MeToo conversations did she get a different perspective on her experiences. They made her take a second and third look at her past, revealing both the predatory glint in Mesches’s behaviour and also Ciment’s own trauma and pain, which made her determined to not cast herself as a victim or a survivor. However, reality, experience and memory don’t often neatly arrange themselves in binaries or categories. In Ciment and Mesches’s case, love thrived in the spaces in between.

Ciment admitting that she may have remembered (and recorded) her past incorrectly would always have stood out as brave, but reading Consent right after learning that Neil Gaiman had said the allegations of sexual misconduct against him are “false memories” was a potent reminder of how rare Ciment is as a person and as a public figure. For someone who has been so eloquent in his support of women’s rights to toss out a denial that could be taken out of a MRA (men’s ‘rights’ ‘activists’) handbook is not just disappointing, but also effectively lends more credence to the women’s claims. The allegations against Gaiman were the subject of The Master, a podcast by Tortoise Media, who have done some fantastic audio shows in the past (highly recommend Sweet Bobby and Who Trolled Amber?). To Tortoise Media’s credit, they give a platform to two women who allege they were sexually assaulted by Gaiman while also acknowledging that in both cases, the relationship was at least partially consensual. As the podcast repeatedly reminds the listener, it’s a complex issue and there are other women who have vouched for Gaiman. However, no amount of character certificates from friends changes the fact that Gaiman was way older than the women who have accused him of abuse and in both cases, he occupied a position of obvious power. He’s famous and charismatic; in one case, she’s babysitting for him — all this significantly muddles Gaiman’s defence that the relationships were unquestionably consensual. Add to this the non-disclosure agreements that his legal team had some women sign and how grudging police tend to be when it comes to pursuing such investigations.

While believing the women who say they were sexually assaulted by Gaiman, it’s also worth pointing out that The Master doesn’t feel rigorous enough journalistically. To begin with, one of the hosts is Rachel Johnson, best known for being Boris Johnson’s sister (which she can’t help) and teetering between conservative and lazy in her journalism (which she can help). There are also editorial calls on Tortoise Media’s part that make the podcast seem dangerously close to a personal attack on Gaiman rather than an examination of the allegations against him. An entire episode is dedicated to Gaiman’s family’s links with Scientology even though his religious beliefs don’t seem to have any part to play in this scandal. There is almost no attention paid to the role played by Gaiman’s ex-wife Amanda Palmer, who was friends with one of the accusers and if not complicit in Gaiman’s predatory play, she certainly seems to be aware of his predilection. The podcast also veers towards kink shaming when it goes into details of the kind of sexual play Gaiman supposedly enjoys (really did not need any of that imagery in my head). For anyone who didn’t want to believe the allegations, there were enough journalistic gaps in The Master to give Gaiman the benefit of doubt — until Gaiman served us his “false memories” explanation.

Soon after the Gaiman story, Alice Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner wrote a searing essay detailing how Munro sided with her husband Gerald Fremlin after learning Fremlin had sexually abused Skinner. One of the most chilling aspects of Skinner’s essay is that even as a child and later as a grown-up, Skinner did everything right. She talked to grown-ups, she went to the police, she followed all the due process you could expect her to, but Fremlin remained unrepentant (he characterised Skinner as a Lolita. She was 9 when first abused her) and Munro stayed by his side. That the woman whose writing was so insightful in its portraits of bullies, silenced women and quiet rebellions drew her strength from an abusive man is an uncomfortable truth to accept. If you’ve read Munro’s short stories, then the author’s decision to protect the man who abused her own daughter feels terribly upside-down, but also a reminder that things like consistency in characterisation and logical causality are the mechanics of fiction, not life. In real life, people are good to one person and evil to another; some are incandescent all the time, others light up in one space and fade into the wallpaper in another. Maybe that’s why we impose certain expectations, rules and demands upon storytelling. Life doesn’t make sense; at least fiction should.

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Skinner wrote that she chose to come out with her story because she wanted the fact that Munro was complicit in her own daughter’s abuse “to become part of the stories people tell about my mother.” She wrote, “I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.” Skinner is absolutely right to demand this of future readers and writers. This is the context within which we should read Munro — and we should read her, contrary to the pronouncements of people like Mukul Kesavan who wrote an uncharacteristically shallow and short-sighted column about reconciling Skinner’s story with Munro’s writing despite not being familiar with her work. More frustrating than Kesavan having succumbed to hot-take culture — why else would he write a whole column about a writer whose work he doesn’t know and therefore doesn’t care for? — is the way so many online (all men) have applauded the column. If good writers are important for a literary culture to thrive, then equally important are attentive readers. To know that your readers aren’t really registering what you write anymore and instead just having a Pavlovian response to your byline has to be a chilling epiphany. It feels like yet another reminder that few people read and fewer still read carefully. Everyone wants ‘content’ that can work like white noise. Writing is the last bastion against that thoughtless, automaton-like consumption, provided we are thoughtful readers.

(This seems like a good place to thank all of you who read this newsletter regularly or have read this particular edition till this point at least. We’re almost done. Kinda. Sorta. Ok not really. But there’s not too much more, godpromiss.)

“Readers who are parents might be forgiven for thinking that a writer who blamed her abused daughter for her husband’s paedophilia was a sociopath whose condition might have a bearing on her books,” Kesavan wrote in his column, after proudly announcing he hasn’t read Munro and doesn’t plan to now that he’s been enlightened by Skinner’s essay. (Curiously, Kesavan didn’t feel the need to make any such pronouncements about Gaiman or discuss any of the allegations against him.) Presumably, Kesavan intended to honour Skinner by rejecting her mother’s stories, but the declaration still feels like a knee-jerk reaction. It doesn’t feel like he had to “wrestle with the reality” the way Skinner hoped readers would. I’ve no idea if Munro was a sociopath — it seems a rather easy way of rejecting her in a way that effectively absolves her. Maybe even sympathises with her obliquely: “Poor dear of a sociopath, she didn’t know right from wrong” — but no one who has actually read Munro would consider her writing sociopathic. Munro as a writer was keenly aware of right and wrong. This is why her characters could use slyness like a superpower. This is why her failure as a woman and a mother is as comprehensively disappointing as it is.

Sometimes, you can separate art from the artist. Sometimes, the art is the artist’s Siamese twin — distinctive and yet viscerally connected. Sometimes, you can see the monster in the art, but not the artist. Some artists are monsters and they've made great art, but that doesn’t mean being monstrous is fundamental to being creative. You could be a decent person and be creative. Sometimes, one's art is obviously related to one's life or personality or interests. Sometimes, it's entirely imaginary. Some art is valuable because of that autobiographical or historical angle. Some art is valuable because it is untethered to all reality. It's possible, maybe even essential, for there to be all these kinds of stories; for stories to resist any one unifying rule. It isn’t comfortable for us to be faced with the reality that Munro’s resistance was limited to her fiction and she couldn’t (or worse, didn’t want to) stand up to her husband. Just as it is deeply uncomfortable to realise that Gaiman, for all his insight and brilliance, is also a man who doesn’t understand consent and feels pleasure at feminine submission (maybe even inflicting pain).

But no one said art was here to mollycoddle us into a satisfied stupor of self-indulgence. Or that artists are obliged to subscribe to any moral code, particularly in their personal lives.

I am grateful that we finally know Skinner’s story. Now that she’s trusted readers with it, we’re tasked with the responsibility of holding that knowledge in one corner of our mind while reading and recommending Alice Munro. Read Munro and know that a woman who could be so weak-minded was also capable of spinning the cobweb-like stories of Lives of Girls and Women, for instance. The same holds for Gaiman. I won’t shy away from reading or recommending either of these authors’ writing, but from now on, if I suggest a Gaiman book, I will casually add that he was accused of sexual assault and responded with appalling chauvinism. This might dull the charisma of Shadow in American Gods or add an uncomfortable, dishonest edge to the smooth-tongued father in Fortunately Milk — and that’s ok. It’s better than ok, it’s good.

Thank you for reading. Truly.

Dear Reader will be back soon.

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Until August + All Fours + more

Deepanjana — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 17:15:58 GMT

As if it wasn’t bad enough that I’ve been very (ahem) irregular with this newsletter, people keep signing up for it. Which means each time I get an email notifying me of a new subscriber, embarrassment verily twangs within me and I sternly tell myself to just sit down and write the newsletter… tomorrow. I am declaring “tomorrow” to be now even though I’m at work and technically should be writing about season two of We Are Ladyparts (fantastic show. Highly recommend). Instead, I’m going to catch you up on what I’ve been reading. Chances are this newsletter will be more haphazard than ever because I’m going to be distracted by the work conversations swirling around me. So far, these have included the fact that you can actually watch tomorrow’s announcement of the results of India’s general elections in a movie theatre (price of ticket: Rs. 99) and how to write the word “sex” without writing said word on Instagram (answer: seggs, s*x, s3x. At this point, I put on my headphones).

(For the two people who subscribed this morning, this is mostly your fault. I apologise in advance.)

The past couple of months have seen more re-reads than normal. While on holiday, I carried with me Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle, which still feels fresh and unpredictable (the first book in the series, The Wizard of Earthsea, came out in 1968. Take that for longevity). To prepare for season three of Bridgerton, I went back to Romancing Mr. Bridgerton, which I remembered as the best of what I’d read from this series by Julia Quinn. The book is so bland and mediocre compared to what Shondaland has done with its adaptation that I found myself cracking my knuckles on my head like a Punjabi aunty while watching Nicola Coughlan and gang.

Maybe not the most appropriate reaction to the carriage scene, but I’m standing by it. #ProudlyAunty

I also ended up re-reading parts of The Enchantress of Florence and The Ground Beneath Her Feet after reading Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie. Not one of these three will count among my favourites from Rushdie’s long list of written works — there were just conveniently close at hand on one of the bookshelves at my parents’ — but the first two have many startlingly beautiful passages that reminded me why I was a proper Rushdie fan in my 20s. I’m not going to offer a critique of Knife because it feels graceless to cast a critic’s eye at what is so obviously a trauma response. This is a book written less for a reader and more for the author — and that’s fair enough. Especially when you’ve dragged yourself back from the door of death after seeing a scene from your nightmares manifest into reality and being stabbed multiple times. In a parallel universe, there’s an alt version of me that has written an essay on the genre of the confessional in the modern era, looking at Knife, Hanif Kureishi’s Substack, and Grazie Sophie Christie’s essay on journalling. In this universe, I’m distracted by a conversation about whether or not “Meet Joe Black” is a misleading title for the Brad Pitt film which is proof if we ever needed any that my bright idea of writing this newsletter at work was a terrible one.

(I’m going to finish this at home.)

Where were we? Re-reads. From what I can remember, I think my only other re-read was Mansur by Vikramjit Ram, which is a novella that is at its best when it describes the petty politics among the artists in Emperor Jehangir’s court in Mughal India. I went back to this book after reading Loot by Tania James, which was a proper romp. It’s historical fiction that imagines a life for a young man named Abbas, who collaborates with a French clockmaker to make the infamous automaton, Tipu’s Tiger. The first parts are set in Tipu Sultan’s kingdom before the area fell to the East India Company. The second part of Loot is set in Europe and England, and includes a heist that deserves to be adapted into a streaming series like The Great. I can totally see Olivia Colman playing the widow Lady Selwyn who inherits Tipu’s Tiger and moonlights as a writer of erotica. Alia Bhatt would be perfect as the French-Indian Jehanne, who tries to con Lady Selwyn with a little help from Abbas. Dear Netflix, if you have to spend obscene amounts of money on a project, make it something like this instead of a second season of that mind-numbingly dull Heeramandi. Sigh.

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One of my best reads of these past two months was a book with no words. When the Sun Sets by Ogin Nayam is one of the most beautiful books I’ve seen and a dazzling example of how storytelling is about ideas rather than language. The book answers the question of what the sun does after it sets, and casts the sun as a woman. Off the top of my head, the only sun goddesses that I can think of are Shinto’s Amaterasu and Sol from Norse mythology. Most cultures have historically imagined the sun as virile and masculine gods of fertility. I love the number of questions that shimmer to the surface when you start thinking about why maleness has been linked to the sun and what changes when you imagine the sun as a woman. Nayam’s sun ties her hair, knits, reads, entertains a flurry of the cutest clouds you’ve ever seen, and picnics with the Rainbow. She’s a woman who works, one who cares for her own and depending upon your own experiences of either being a woman or seeing women, you’ll find yourself wondering about what’s going on in Sun’s head.

I have spent hours staring at the way Nayam uses washes of colour, geometry and patterns that I presume are traditional to him (he’s from Arunachal Pradesh and I know nothing about that part of the country). One of my favourite double spreads in the book is the one in which Nayam shows the sleeping sun (dense black with just two slight, delicate dashes of yellow) on one page and her waking up to go back to work in the next (a colourful triptych that shows her putting on her work attire). Another shows a twilight meeting of Sun and Moon, who stands with a cluster of night-bright stars dressed in twinkly white. When the Sun Sets is one of those books that I would frame if it wasn’t for the sheer joy of being able to hold a work of art in one’s hands.

Finally, two books that felt like crazy-mirror reflections of one another — Until August by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and All Fours by Miranda July. Both have as their protagonist a woman in her 40s who escapes her marriage and domestic life by retreating into a hotel room in a nondescript place. Both reflect aspects from the real lives of the writers who have created them. Both are haunted by dead women relatives — July’s protagonist has a grandmother and great aunt who threw themselves to their deaths; Marquez’s heroine has an annual ritual of laying flowers at her mother’s grave — and both women are undone by desire. In spite of all these resonances between the two, no reader will ever confuse them.

Ana Magdalena of Until August is very much a woman character as imagined by a man, in a book that isn’t technically a first draft but reads like one. She often feels half-sketched, hovering like a wraith in a scene rather than a whole person. There are moments when the prose sparkles and Until August ends on a high, with Ana Magdalena breaking free of the past by embracing it. She realises that in some ways, she has been following in her mother’s footsteps and the book concludes with her determined to carry her mother with her (very literally) while also charting her own path.

Marquez wrote this book in his last years, before his mind completely succumbed to dementia, and I couldn’t help but wish he’d begun this novel sooner. Women characters have usually stood on the sidelines of Marquez’s fiction, but they’ve mostly been charismatic, vibrant and eccentric enough to rival his heroes. It would have been lovely to see how Marquez crafted a woman protagonist like Ana Magdalena, who definitely seems to have shards of Marquez’s own personality in her.

In contrast, July is a writer in her prime and a woman writing another woman, composed of dreams and fragments that July was entrusted with by a whole sisterhood that she reached out to while writing All Fours. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel about a woman and her midlife crisis, which is as wry as it is emotional. By leaving her protagonist nameless, July almost encourages the reader to see July in this character who is moderately-famous for works across media (like July), resembles her physically, and has a husband and child (like July does). Then the author proceeds to push this woman to the edge of her tether and makes her ricochet from euphoria to depression. This is a ruthless novel in the way July lays bare her protagonist. With witty one-liners that chime in with the regularity of a metronome, the novel is richly self-aware and July’s protagonist yanks herself away from sentimentality at regular intervals. All Fours is funny, raw, and messy with emotions and bodily fluids. There’s sex, masturbation, infidelity, period blood, snot and of course, tears. There are breakdowns, panic attacks, hormonal storms and creative highs and (spoiler alert) an ending that is truly happy but doesn’t conform to the conventional idea of a happy ending by a long shot. (This is not a book for delicate sensibilities though. If graphic descriptions of sexual acts are not your thing, steer clear of All Fours.) And there’s dance, rapturous and sensual, seducing both July’s heroine and readers. If you were wondering what’s the point of the title, allow me: “Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable, but it’s actually the most stable position. Like a table. It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.”

Insightful as it is, while reading All Fours, I kept wondering if it is as hard to write a book that feels relatable to men as it is to write one that resonates with women. Because what about a woman who isn’t constantly whipped into a frothy confection by sexual desire? What about the woman who wants to change her tampon without her lover standing witness? What of the one who feels her fight-or-flight response kick in at the thought of baking cupcakes and cookies at home? With men getting to occupy the spotlight as well as the penumbra in fiction for so long, it seems almost easier to write a character that will feel generic but relatable to wide range of men. With women protagonists especially, it feels more difficult. There are not enough of them and the ones that exist are tasked with more of a burden than they should have to bear.

All Fours is about an urbane, creative woman who is my age, and I confess, just the basic fact of a protagonist who is 45 years old made me assume that I will find her relatable. I didn’t though. All Fours felt almost exotic to me — not necessarily unreal or stretching credibility, but there was no point at which I saw even a glimmer of myself in July’s heroine. I felt for her, delighted with her and worried for her, but at no point did the distance between me and the first-person narrator disappear. In fact, I didn’t really feel even a fleeting sense of oneness with any of the women in the book. This is not a criticism of All Fours because a) it’s good fun, and b) I’m certain that there are many women who will feel July found the perfect words for their feelings, experiences and maybe even their fantasies. The point is that we could do with more stories that take us deep into the hearts and minds of women. Give July’s protagonist from All Fours some company and make the world of fictional women a little more diverse than it is now.

Which brings me past the 2,000-word mark, thus continuing this newsletter’s tradition of being ridiculously long. On the plus side, you’ve been spared paragraphs in which I bemoan the state of my nation and do the word-shaped equivalent of tearing my hair out while squinting my eyes to find silver linings in these wretched times. (Yes, for once, I edited this newsletter. That’s why a 3,500-word email has not landed in your inbox. You’re welcome.) Instead, I’ll leave you with screenshots from one of my favourite K-dramas from last year.

Here’s to writing a story that we’ll want to tell, rather than forget.

Take care, don’t lose hope and thank you for reading.

Dear Reader will be back soon(ish).

Reading 400 Pages in a Day?

Deepanjana — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 20:31:47 GMT

I thought I was having a decent reading spell when I finished writer, director and producer Ed Zwick’s memoir, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions in about 10 days. It’s a big fat book that doesn’t feel weighty because Zwick shares some delightful Hollywood stories that range from gossipy to earnest. He talks about ego tantrums by stars (Matthew Broderick’s mother was a nightmare to work with. Julia Roberts derailed a film because she wanted her co-star to be Daniel Day Lewis and he wasn’t available), shares zingy snippets (Brad Pitt’s main concern during an intimate scene was the make-up for his butt), and is one of those people who can talk about directing Tom Cruise, Daniel Craig and Leonardo DiCaprio (among others). Zwick’s credits include films like Shakespeare in Love, Glory, Blood Diamond, and Love and Other Drugs. With names and titles like that, it’s no wonder the 400-odd pages don’t feel like a drag.

Plus, having begun his career as a journalist, Zwick is good at writing in a way that steers clear of self-indulgence (until the last chapter). Something’s always happening in Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions and each chapter ends with a list that makes points which are sharp and funny, and is a tongue-in-cheek concession to anyone who wants this memoir to serve some educational purpose. Also, Zwick admits to mistakes, which is rare for anyone of his stature to do these days. However, this doesn’t mean he has perspective on The Last Samurai, which Zwick wrote and directed. He’ll have you know the film made big money in Japan (never mind the cringe-inducing white saviour complex) and thanks to it, Ken Watanabe got his big break after a bad spell, which saw him landing in debt with the Yakuza no less. The more fascinating part of that chapter though is to see what goes into making a Tom Cruise film, from studios cheerfully spending millions of dollars to Cruise photoshopping himself into a photograph. To quote Zwick, “Apparently, even movie stars have FOMO.” Good to know.

So yes, I finished that tome. Then today, I sat down to do some reading for an assignment I’ve taken on because I’m an idiot and Reader, it did not go well. At one point, I realised it had taken me 90 minutes to wade through 10 pages. Just to give myself a change of pace, I thought I’ll read something else and then get back to the work reading. Next thing I know, the day is over and I’ve read the whole book. By which I mean 400 pages. In a single day. All because Pip Williams’s The Dictionary of Lost Words is just that wonderful. I haven’t read something with this kind of compulsive delight in ages. Which is why here I am, at midnight, sitting down to write this newsletter to tell you that if you’re someone who likes stories about history, language, power and sisterhood, then Williams’s novel is for you.

In her author’s note, Williams writes that the idea of The Dictionary of Lost Words came to her after she read a book that she enjoyed, but which left her with a question: “Where, I wondered, are the women in this story, and does it matter that they are absent?” The story she’s referring to is the creation and compilation of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Through the prism of the fictional Esme, Williams puts together the history of an extraordinary endeavour while also celebrating the smaller, everyday triumphs of women’s lives in 19th century England.

Esme’s earliest memories are of sitting on her father’s lap, looking at the slips of paper that have on them words submitted for the OED. Her father is part of lexicographer James Murray’s core team, who work in the Scriptorium and sift through the countless words in circulation to decide what will make it into the first edition of the iconic dictionary. From the words that are discarded or dismissed — there are stringent criteria for a word to qualify as worthy of an entry in the OED — little Esme starts putting together her own dictionary by sneaking out the slips with words that wouldn’t make the cut. The casual, slightly-klepto hobby turns into a secret passion project when Esme realises that Murray’s dictionary won’t accommodate many words that are part of conversation, but not considered worthy of polite society or being published. Without any plan in mind, Esme goes around Oxford collecting words, mostly from working women of different kinds.

Considering Williams’s starting point, there are (predictably) many wonderful women characters. Some of them are drawn from history, most are from the author’s imagination. The heroine of The Dictionary of Lost Words is unusual for being someone who doesn’t want to stand out. Repeatedly, we see Esme sit in the wings or stand at the fringes of a high-profile gathering. She watches and takes notes, rather than actually doing things or even speaking up. Bookish, curious, carrying the weight of many sadnesses despite her privileged upbringing, Esme sees herself as a witness, rather than a protagonist who must claim centrestage for herself. As her godmother writes, when describing Esme in a letter, “This is what she did, you see: she noticed who was missing from the official records and gave them an opportunity to speak.”

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There’s an episode early on in The Dictionary of Lost Words when Esme has a terrible experience in boarding school (the subtlety with which Williams reveals this to the reader is brilliant and masterful). Esme is sent away from home because those who love her want to make sure she gets a good education so that the world opens up for her in a way that it didn’t for women in previous generations. However, the move turns out to be a terrible misfire, reminding the reader that privilege and opportunity didn’t always protect girls from cruelty and trauma. Her boarding school experience makes Esme shrink into herself and even when she does emerge from her shell, Esme remains cautious and careful about every step she takes. Grappling with both her personal experiences and history, Esme’s the kind of person who fades from record — until she’s phoenixed back to life by an imagination like William’s.

I loved Esme’s relationships with her godmother Edith and Lizzie, who works as a maid in the Murray household and is young Esme’s nanny. Their bonds go through the push and pull of life, fraying with tension at times, but ultimately holding steady. Incidentally, Edith and her sister are based on two real women who contributed greatly to the OED. Williams also takes care to create a set of minor characters who get shades and nuances, like the foul-mouthed crone Mabel (who introduces Esme to the word cunt, among other things) and the flower-seller who has her shop right next to Mabel’s stall.

From Studio Joyeeta.

Alongside this dazzling cast of women, who feel entirely real and relatable, are some wonderful men. From Esme’s father, to the charming playboy she encounters as a young adult, the cantankerous printer who struggles to hold on to his workforce when World War I breaks out, the lexicographers in the Scriptorium, and the man Esme falls in love with, The Dictionary of Lost Words is full of gents who are easy to adore. It also has perhaps the most perfect and romantic proposal for a bookish person. I properly aww-ed, out loud, in my living room. It feels important to point out how Williams has written the men in the novel because a lot of people seem to be under the misconception that a “woman-centric” novel is one that pays no attention to anyone other than the women characters. Fortunately, The Dictionary of Lost Words isn’t burdened by such dullness.

When the novel was nearing its end and had become lopsided in my hands, one side neatly fitting between my barely-parted fingers while the other needed my hand to stretch to contain its pageload, I couldn’t help but wonder how Williams was going to end this story. I peeked at the title of the epilogue. It read “Adelaide, 1989.” My eyebrows rose with disbelief. It seemed a bit of a stretch since I was minutes away from the epilogue and the page I was on was about shellshocked soldiers from World War I. Let me just say that Williams finds the most charming way to connect Esme’s history to 1989. When I reached the last line of The Dictionary of Lost Words, I had a smile and a full heart.

My other excellent recent read is A Master of Djinn, which technically belongs to the fantasy genre, but really, it’s crime fiction. Set in an alt-reality in which magical creatures are part of regular society, A Master of Djinn is set in a steampunk-ish Cairo. It’s 1912 and Egypt is a kingdom that has thrown off the Ottoman yoke, thanks to an alliance of the human and the supernatural. When the members of a secret cult are killed in a horrific way that defies logic, agent Fatama el-Sha’arawi from the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities is put in charge of the case.

From angels to ifrit and ancient Egyptian gods, A Master of Djinn is teeming with magic, but to P. Djèlí Clark’s credit, most of these supernatural creatures are imagined in a way that runs counter to the way they’re usually depicted. Angels, for example, are not beatific creatures, but rather gleaming, unnerving beings who leave you feeling unsettled. From the geography of his Cairo to the details of the creatures that inhabit it, I loved Clark’s worldbuilding. There’s no spoonfeeding or lazy exposition. Instead, he drops the reader in the middle of this world and lets it reveal its otherworldliness to the reader at an elegant, steady pace.

Fatama, with her sharp three-piece suits and cane, is a charmer. Standing by her, shoulder to shoulder, is Hadia, the partner whom Fatama initially doesn’t want because she’s used to working along. Unsurprisingly, the two end up getting along and make for an excellent buddy-cop duo. The two women are two kinds of modern Muslima — smart, ambitious, independent and quick-witted; one with hijab and prayers, while the other flouts conventions. The differences don’t get in the way of their eventual camaraderie. Fatama’s other ally is the mysterious Siti, who shimmers with enchantment and seems to have a special connection with the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet.

In this magical Egypt, magical creatures and different faiths live side by side, but the presence of the supernatural doesn’t mean there isn’t tension in society. The Cairo of Clark’s djinn-verse is grappling with inequality, prejudice and ghettoisation. Europeans are hovering around Egypt, eager to profit from it, and the poor in cities like Cairo feel increasingly desperate. The simmering tensions are brought to the surface when the murder that Fatama is investigating leads her to someone who claims to be al-Jahiz, a messianic figure who disappeared after ripping open a boundary between the magical and the mundane. The new al-Jahiz claims he’s returned to lead the downtrodden to revolution and glory. He also freely confesses to having committed the murders Fatama is investigating. Which is all very well, but al-Jahiz is too powerful for Fatama, even when she has Siti and Hadia by her side. He also has a dangerous new gift: he can control djinn and make them do whatever he commands. If the humans and djinn have to go up against one another, it would be civil war.

A Master of Djinn is a solid police procedural, albeit with djinn, enchantments, and humans who have something of the divine in them. As always with good genre fiction, there’s an exploration of many ideas that are grounded in contemporary reality rather than fantasy. Clark’s day job is in academia — he’s a professor of history — and that rigour and research adds a richness to the characters and relationships he’s created in this fictional world. Notions of femininity, a critique of the Orientalist perspective, and an exploration of what it means to be robbed of personhood are just some of the ideas that layer the murder mystery in A Master of Djinn. I thoroughly enjoyed it as much for the way Fatama played detective as for the beautifully-imagined world that weaves together so many different strains of folklore, legend and myth to create something that’s distinctive and unique.

Ok, it’s 1.55am now, which seems like a good time to wind up and wind down. Thank you for reading, and Dear Reader will be back soon.

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Happy Saraswati Valentine Day

Deepanjana — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 04:38:45 GMT

It just so happens that today is Valentine’s Day and Saraswati Puja, a.k.a. the one day in the calendar that is officially dedicated to Saraswati, the divine nerd of the Hindu pantheon. There are some who find parallels between Saraswati and the ancient Greek goddess Athena — both are said to have sprung, fully formed, from the minds of divine patriarchs (Brahma and Zeus, respectively) — but I’m not convinced. Athena has a tendency to side with powerful men while Saraswati’s stories have her going up against Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Athena also tends to go out and do things. Aside from the many stories in which she appears among mortals and yanks their chains, Nike, the goddess of victory, is considered an attendant or attribute of Athena. There are associations of war and athleticism with Athena, which suggests she’s inclined towards activity. In contrast Saraswati reads books, plays the veena, and minds her own business. As you might have guessed, she is the kind of goddess I am happy to get behind.

Back when the rifts between Hinduism and other Indian religions still seemed bridgeable, Saraswati was a goddess who had devotees from many religions. (Maybe she still does. As a single lady who stands up for herself and chooses to be alone, Saraswati is neither docile nor domestic. She is perhaps too independent, too bookish and too unimpressed by testosterone to be a favourite of the Hindu Right).

Spotted in Kolkata, an army of Saraswatis. Photo: mine.

Rather than keeping people out, Saraswati Puja used to bring together artists, writers, musicians, academics of all shapes, sizes and faiths. We’d seek her blessings by putting brushes, pens, notebooks, laptops and instruments at the feet of the idol of Saraswati. We’d wear yellow clothes and eat yellow food (it’s supposed to be Saraswati’s favourite colour even though she herself is only seen in white). Some would perform a formal puja, but more important than any religious rite was doing things of which the goddess would approve. On Saraswati Puja, writers wrote at least a few lines, readers read books, music was played — because Saraswati is the discerning one. She’s not the sort to be mollified by ritual and performance. I’d like to believe she’d rather you stayed home and read a book, watched a film, made music … wrote a newsletter.

I’ve been stalling the writing of Dear Reader with the kind of diligence that would make me a fine candidate for the goddess of procrastination. (Incidentally, there was actually someone with that portfolio in the ancient Greek pantheon. Her name is Aergia). There’s no good reason to not have sent out a newsletter in January. The year began with me reading Cosey’s fantastic graphic novels, which I devoured (in French!) and which I really want to tell you about. The problem is that every time I’ve sat down to write, I’ve successfully found something else with which to waste my time. A number of you have dropped pointed comments to me, about how it’s been a while since there was an edition of the newsletter in your inbox. You were probably hoping it would shame me into sitting down to write. Instead, I chose to focus on how lovely it is to actually have loyal readers and turned briefly into a marshmallow.

Titled: Why I Haven’t Got Round To Sending Out this Newsletter

But I digress.

The other day, a friend of mine gifted me a novel with a blurb that described it as “a love letter to life.” That seems like a tall order for a book, but the moment I read that line, I remembered this fragment:

“And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?” he asked.
Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.
“Forever,” he said.

Look, if you’re one of those razor-sharp readers who didn’t get seduced by the heady beauty of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s prose and furrowed your brow at the depravity and blind spots in Love in the Time of Cholera, I applaud your unwavering moral compass. I confess I’m not so upright. I open a novel with the expectation of being wooed and few writers do this as deliciously as Marquez. Love in the Time of Cholera is one of those messy, flawed romances that makes you want to use words like “frisson”, only because it sounds lovelier than “goosebumps”.

The ending of this novel ruined me. After a lifetime of being kept apart, of their love story being punctured by other people, Florentino and Fermina’s happily-ever-after is to be at sea with one another, quarantined from the rest of the world. It’s gorgeous, ridiculous, entirely romantic, and because of those final lines, “forever” became synonymous with “love” for me. I could hear Florentino speaking that one word, its sound softened by lips and teeth that meet in a play of flesh and air, an almost-kiss past which slip out the “f” and “v” consonants. Sure, both Florentino and Fermina are now in their 70s, but what is love if not something that endures and can excavate beauty out of the most unexpected moments?

Marquez pulled out all the stops with Florentino Ariza, the poet and lover who often feels like a male fantasy (this applies to a lot of Love in the Time of Cholera. Marquez is many things, but he is not one of those authors who places women at the centre of his text. His women are strong and memorable, but the hero is almost always a man). Florentino has slept with 622 women while pining for the one he couldn’t have, which is ridiculous enough, but there’s a whole lot more that’s icky about our man. It’s almost as though Marquez set himself a challenge of enchanting the reader with a protagonist who makes a mockery of morality and pushes both boundaries and buttons. Sometimes disgusting, consistently heartbroken, often funny, and steeped in darkness, Florentino is quite a character. Do I want him in my life? No. Will my pulse flutter when I imagine him whispering “Forever” in my ear? Yup.

So yes, this is not a novel (or hero) to make the feminist heart go pitter-patter, but Love in the Cholera (translated by Edith Grossman) is a grubby treasure that leaves you with a sense of uneasy satisfaction, and also many questions. What will you accept in the name of love, both as a reader and as someone who longs for a love story? How much will you forgive in the hope of a happy ending?

In short, definitely the sort of book that qualifies as “a love letter to life” for me.

Though if we’re talking about literary love letters, how can we not talk about Possession by A.S. Byatt? If Love in the Time of Cholera shows love as a curiosity that’s sticky with sex and taboo, Possession makes platonic feel sexy. The romance in this novel unfolds through letters, diaries and poems; through polite words that never let propriety slip even though they’re riddled with aching intensity.

Byatt created two fictional, Victorian poets for Possession infusing them with traces of real legends. Randolph shows flashes of Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Emily Dickinson and Christina Rosetti are folded into Christabel. I remember reading the book and being convinced that Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte were real people whose collected works of poetry I needed to have in my life. It’s incredible to think that Byatt not only crafted this incredible story of how two academics in the present discover a love affair that’s been a carefully-guarded secret, but also wrote enough poetry to con a reader into thinking these two fake poets were real.

Painting by Jonathan Wolstenholme.

Another title that can proudly raise its hand to be on the “love letter to life” bookshelf is Sheila Heti’s weird and wonderful new book, Alphabetical Diaries. For 10 years, Heti kept a journal, typing up daily entries on her computer. Then she pulled out sentences from a decade-worth of writing and arranged them in alphabetical order. The outcome of that experiment is the kaleidoscopic Alphabetical Diaries, which technically should be a memoir (since the sentences are all from Heti’s journals) but becomes something more akin to fiction. The scrambled fragments are the opposite of stream of consciousness with sentences that have no connection to one another being forced together. A sentence from 2018 could be next to one from 2015, disconnected in every sense to what comes before and after, but now connected by something as random as an alphabet.

Every letter gets its own chapter in Alphabetical Diaries — Z, predictably, is very short — and in that chapter, every sentence begins with the same letter. Quickly, the sentences show flashes of patterns. Names recur, relationships reveal themselves, and the mind works overtime to organise the chaos. Let me give you an example. Here are two sentences from the I chapter:

I am not Leonard Cohen. I am not sure that I like this realisation.

We don’t know what realisation Heti had actually been writing about or what emotion was originally sewn into that second sentence. Here, organised as Alphabetical Diaries is, it is stitched to the first and together, they become an amusing moment. Originally, that second sentence may have been earnest or wistful or nervous. There’s no way to tell what it was originally meant to convey and despite nothing changing in the sentence, it’s become something new.

Very often, you can feel the disconnect between sentences in Alphabetical Diaries and whenever that happened, I found myself marvelling at the human mind’s need to find patterns and organise chaos into coherence. We’re a species of storytellers and finding meaning is as important to us as our opposable thumbs. We’ll make meaning out of anything and everything. It’s our way of making the chaos and uncertainties of the world feel manageable. Maybe that’s how homo-sapiens found the will to survive.

I’m the sort of person who tends to roll her eyes at auto-fiction, but Alphabetical Diaries is one of those crazy literary experiments that works because Heti is an editor extraordinaire. Ironic, earnest, funny, sentimental, smutty, esoteric, Alphabetical Diaries is gentle, intimate and strangely unputdownable. There’s no suspense, but it feels tense in parts. The tones and moods shifts from sentence to sentence, keeping the reader on her toes and delving deeper and deeper into the heart of the book’s writer, who may or may not be Heti anymore.

Heti takes a hammer to linearity, chronology and conventional ideas of structure in Alphabetical Diary, and what emerges from is a shatter-pattern that feels as much like a novel as an intimate and candid introspection. When you unmoor thoughts from context and chronology, do you retain any sense of the mind behind them? Are you seeing the real Heti in Alphabetical Diaries or has the rigid randomness of her process created something, someone, new? Has the non-fiction birthed fiction? Your guess is as good as mine.

Fiction and non-fiction together, because the imagination is more amazing than anything in life, and life is more amazing than anything you can make up.

Now that is a love letter to life.

Before I go — Saraswati Valentine Day is all well and good, but the world continues to be a hellscape, with war, tragedy and unrest bleeding us dry. It’s also a Wednesday and the day job beckons — let me leave you with a few lines from a poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

I want to live here as if I am, forever,
burning with lust for the unknown.
Maybe "now" is much more distant. Maybe "yesterday" is nearer
and "tomorrow" already in the past.
But I grasp the hand of "now" that History may pass near me,
and not time that runs in circles, like the chaos of mountain goats.
Can I survive the speed of tomorrow's electronic time?
Can I survive the delay of my desert caravan?
I have work to do for the afterlife, as if tomorrow I will not be alive.
I have work to do for the eternal presence of today.
Hence I listen, little by little, to the ants in my heart:
Help me bear the brunt of my endurance.

Here’s to enduring, and finding strength in love letters and life — because what else can we do?

Thank you for reading and not losing patience with this newsletter writer. Or losing patience but still reading this newsletter.

Saraswati willing, Dear Reader will be back soon.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi

Deepanjana — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 16:00:44 GMT

One of the first books on pirates came out in 1724 and was titled A General History of Pyrates. The book’s title had an interesting detail when you keep in mind that women were usually considered bad luck on a ship. (Blackbeard, for example, is known to have killed women just for being on his ship’s deck.) Here’s the full title: “A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE PYRATES, FROM Their first RISE and SETTLEMENT in the Island of Providence, to the present Time. With the remarkable Actions and Adventures of the two Female Pyrates Mary Read and Anne Bonny.”

Yup, female pyrates. Avast ye, me hearties.

Mary Read and Anne Bonny joined pirate crews by dressing as men; were fiercely violent; took on and shed lovers with ease; survived all manner of challenges, and at one point were the only two people holding off the entire crew of an English sloop commissioned by the governor of Jamaica to contain piracy in those waters. In short, both women were fascinating. It makes no sense to me that there’s no series on the life of Anne Bonny, who’s adventures culminated with her getting out of prison despite being captured by the authorities and charged with piracy. Unlike poor Read, who died in prison (possibly after childbirth), Bonny was able to claim a happy ending for herself. Some say she returned to her first husband after her stint in prison, others say she assumed a new identity and returned to being a pirate on the high seas. (Clearly, Bonny becomes the vessel for whatever is the storyteller’s own understanding of happily-ever-after.) It’s also worth noting that Read and Bonny were impressive enough as both people and pirates for the rest of their crew to be accepting of both their being women and also their queerness.

Shannon Chakravorty’s Amina al-Sirafi belongs to this tribe of pirate queens and in addition to all the general wonder she inspires for being the woman captain of a pirate crew, Amina is also brown, from the 12th century and in her 40s when we meet her. (That she’s fictional while Read and Bonny were real women is a minor detail.)

Shiver me timbers… ok, I can’t do piratespeak. If you want to share this post, this is the button.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi was recommended to me by Trilogy’s Ahalya who noticed another book I’d picked up and said, “That book? Really? Then you need to read this one.” (This is why good bookshops will always trump algorithms for me.) She was right, but the truth is that even though I was theoretically sold on The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi the moment Ahalya told me the protagonist was an unapologetic brown woman in her 40s, the book joined my piles of unread books and gathered dust. Until it was time for me to pick a book to carry with me on holiday. A book about a woman journeying the seas seemed like the perfect companion for a reader who happens to be a woman journeying over seas. I started reading The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi while waiting to board my flight. Fourteen hours and multiple flight and train changes later, I wasn’t necessarily rested, but I had finished a novel that was sheer joy.

Haunted by a tragedy that she doesn’t want to revisit, Amina is a retired pirate at the start of The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi. Once a feared nakhuda — Persian for “master of the boat” and hella more sexy than “captain” — Amina is now a mother, daughter and sister, barely able to scrape a living together. Her simple life gets turned upside down when a wealthy older woman effectively blackmails Amina to return to her old profession. The woman’s granddaughter has been kidnapped and she wants Amina to locate the young girl, but discreetly. Their family is a respectable one and can’t risk becoming the subject of gossip that would follow if an official complaint was filed about the disappearance.

Amina grudgingly agrees because in addition to threats, the older woman dangles the bait of a fabulous reward. And so, Amina is reunited with her beloved ship, Marawati, and old partners in crime: Dalila, the mysterious mistress of poisons (who truly deserves her own series); Tinbu the man from Malabar who is also the best first mate one could ask for; and “Father of Maps”, Majed of Mogadishu.

The case of the missing girl quickly becomes complicated when Amina realises that the girl left her family home willingly. Also, the man who has allegedly kidnapped her just happens to be a wizard of black magic. Oh, and there’s also a demon hunting for Amina.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is historical fiction at its rompiest, with Amina hurtling from adventure to adventure. It’s so refreshing to come across a woman protagonist who isn’t young, who knows herself, can have adventures and grow despite having a storied past and being all kinds of awesome at the very start of the book. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman in my 40s, but it’s glaringly obvious to me that there’s a serious shortage of fiction that feature older woman as stars of stories. A woman getting to be a protagonist is rare enough (though there has been a bit of an improvement on that front), but if she gets to be the lead, she’s invariably young or fretting about growing older because she’s in her 30s (trust me, as someone reporting from the other side, it only gets better). Ageing seems to terrify us as societies (we’re not particularly used to the idea of growing old and being healthy. At least in recorded history, today’s medical science is prolonging life in a way that few previous civilisations could have imagined) and ageing women have been systematically dismissed and demonised. Maybe this is because because by this time, we’re likely to be a lot less patient with others, whether they’re lovers or family or colleagues. The temptation to throw caution to the winds is stronger than ever before and ‘consequences’ no longer sounds like a scary word because most of us have been there, done that. Yet older women in fiction tend to be depicted as spent or broken. Whatever the reason that older women make imaginations dry up, heroines like Amina are manna from heaven for crones-in-waiting like me.

Chakravorty’s story has many modern aspects, but they’re all perfectly swaddled in a magical world inspired by the medieval era and set in the lands scattered across the Indian Ocean. In her author’s note, Chakravorty writes that while working on the book, she’d declared, “I’m going to make it completely historically accurate except for the plot.” She’s done just that, taking us to different places in what we know today as the Middle East, Mogadishu and Socotra. Carefully researched and beautifully imagined, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi draws on folktales and history, which make the story feels credibly real. The book also makes you appreciate just how much we turn blind to when we follow a Eurocentric perspective on history. “In our modern age, we are accustomed to thinking of continents and land borders; rarely do we see the sea and its littorals as places of shared culture,” writes Chakravorty in her author’s note. “But long before the so-called European Age of Exploration (an age that would do more damage to existing Indian Ocean networks and indigenous populations than any such incursion before), the ports of the Indian Ocean were bustling, cosmopolitan places where one could find goods and people from all over.” True fact, and there’s something rather poetic about fiction doing its bit to widen the perspectives that may have been blinkered by non-fiction.

I know I spoke about the women pirates earlier, but the more I think about it, Amina reminds me of Lady Isabella Trent. Amina’s older, grizzlier and much more foul-mouthed, but they’re both powerful women who radiate determination and refused to be broken by circumstance. Filed under: Literary crushes.

There are few things that feel quite as neat as ending the year with a bloody good book. (For all those who would like to correctly point out that the year is not yet over, I agree that we’ve got a few days left to go but I’m fairly certain I will not be doing much reading in this time.) It’s been a tangled knot of a year, but that it’s winding down like this, with a bit of magic, feels reassuring. (Never mind all the other things that seem determined to get more tightly, unravel-ably knotted.)

Traditionally, this is the time for annual round-ups and best-of-the-year lists, but I’ve read so little this year that it would be ridiculous for me to attempt any of these. Instead let me leave you with wishes for the year that’s coming.

May you find yourself in stories and also lose yourself in them whenever you need that reprieve.
May you find comfort and insight, even if it’s through fictional characters.
May no one be able to shift you from being at the centre of your narrative, and if that happens, I hope you’ll be able to wrest back control.
May you feel all the feels, without being overwhelmed by them. And if you are overwhelmed, may books be the life raft that helps guide you to safer waters.
May we all find what we need to make our imaginations become wilder than ever before. After all, considering the hot mess that the real world is, the imagination has a lot of heavy lifting to do.
In short, may the stories you need find you in the year ahead.

Here’s to a new year in which we feel a little more blessed — with good, happy-making books, if not anything else.

Take care, and see you in 2024.

Of Stories, Memories and Escape

Deepanjana — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 20:42:19 GMT

I’ve been thinking about stories a lot these past few months. Reading has felt like a challenge, especially of late and holding on to the thread of a tale in the maze of real-life distractions and too-real horrors has felt like a herculean task. My mind repeatedly jitters back to wondering what a story is, the many things it can mean, and the even-more that a story can contain once it’s been told. Because until it’s been told, a story doesn’t really exist. It may be an idea, it may be history, but for something to be a story, it has to be told and only then does it take shape. Only once it’s taken shape can a story contain meanings — obvious, subtle, unexpected — and its lines can morph to become another shape, gain layers, lose meaning; transform to reflect the imaginations around it, and be what a reader needs a story to be at that time, in that place.

What story will you turn to when one part of the world remains mundane and unruffled while another is reduced to rubble, crushed bone and spilt blood? Does every memory get woven into a story? When there’s nothing physical to remember something or someone by, what is a story and and what is history? In biology, the memory cell is produced as a response to the specific antigens on a pathogen. Should the pathogen resurface, the body is able to get its guard up swifter because of the memory cells. In this way, memory becomes a key part of a body’s defence and at a cellular level, remembering becomes a sign of good health. Is that true of stories that leave us devastated, and what of the others that offer the escapist comfort of forgetting temporarily? Can we remember without stories? Could stories rooted in memory be part of a culture’s system of defence? Or are they part of a rebuilding project? Can they be both?

Illustration by Akira Kusaka

You would’ve guessed by now that a lot of this is coming from being a second-hand witness to the genocide and second Nakba in Palestine. For most of us, the only thing we can do is watch — from the comfort of homes that are not vulnerable to air strikes, in neighbourhoods where water and bread are not scarce, and where hospitals are not being turned into graveyards by Israeli missiles. Though it turns out geography won’t necessarily save you. A friend in London told me about an acquaintance who was brutally beaten up by a group of white men who stopped him because he was carrying a Palestinian flag on his way home from a recent march. The men asked him his name, which is unmistakably Muslim, and then knocked his teeth out while shouting slurs at him. In Bengaluru, a pro-Palestine gathering was shut down by the police and in Mumbai, despite the protest being sparsely-attended, there were reports of a handful of protesters being held in a police station for hours. “You want to protest? The van is right here,” one policeman, blatantly dangling the threat of arrest to a friend who had said he had come to attend a protest.

For us in India (or those of us who follow the news), the genocide in Gaza is the terrible climax of a year soaked in sadness and loss. There was nightmarish ethnic violence in Manipur (along with an internet shutdown to restrict information being circulated to the rest of India). Encounters in Kashmir; bomb blast in Kerala; train collision in Odisha; floods in Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab (Pakistan was devastated); heatwave killed hundreds in Uttar Pradesh; riots in Haryana — and that’s just what I remember off the top of my head. We’ve reached the point where the ongoing war in Ukraine is becoming a blind spot.

Ironically, finding out what’s happening in Gaza has been comparatively easier than getting news from Manipur — not that this makes processing either set of horrors easier. For those of us who enjoy the privilege of not being directly impacted, our role is limited to consuming the news, watching the footage and listening to people’s testimonies. All we can contribute is our attention and a commitment to bear witness (and maybe money by way of donations). In times of genocide, this may leave us feeling useless, but perhaps it isn’t entirely so.

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Journalists and civilians in Gaza (many of them painfully young) have shouldered a terrible burden by tirelessly showing the world the reality of Gaza. The least we can do is watch and imprint this nightmarish reality upon our memories. “I step away from time to time to find the strength to return to the news,” a colleague had told me some years ago. I found myself remembering those words as I gratefully dived into the new (and delightful) Percy Jackson adventure, The Chalice of the Gods. Riordan gets everything right with this breezy little adventure, which is why it’s easy to let the book draw you into that familiar world where ancient Greek myths layer the regular reality of New York and nearby areas. It felt like a blessing to retreat from the real world for a bit. “News flash: Nothing’s changed in the time that it took me to finish The Chalice of the Gods,” I wrote to a friend. “Wars are still warring, genocide continues, and if there’s a god of democracy, they must be feeling suicidal at the sight of how they’re being failed by all those world leaders who profess to be democratic.” My friend wrote back, “100% relate to god of Democracy. Would prefer apocalypse to this current shit.”

Early-ish in Israel’s campaign to destroy Palestine, I thought I’d draw up a Palestine-themed reading list and reached out to friends for suggestions. Quite a few people sent me names, but I still haven’t been able to compile the list. I hadn’t realised back then how every day’s updates from Gaza would leave me feeling a little bit more battered and how exhausting it felt to go about my day appearing cheerful because that’s easier than explaining to unfamiliars that I’m the sort who gets affected by tragedies happening to strangers in strange lands. Weeks later, today, more parts of me feel paralysed by sadness and rage because I don’t want these feelings sublimated into something that feels more digestible. Time will inevitably force us to heal/ scar/ manage or maybe even forget, but for now, I don’t want to lose sight of how little I’ve been able to do or how leaden this sadness feels. The other reason I’ve held back from putting the reading list together is that I feel very uncomfortable earning currency from tragedy, albeit unwittingly. If you really are curious to read up on Palestine, then I’m not the one to whom you should turn. People like Fatima Bhutto are putting out fantastic resources and authors like Adania Shibli, who was abruptly disinvited from the Frankfurt book fair this year (where she was supposed to receive an award), are the kind of people you should look up.

Me, all I can do is follow the news, sit with my books and my feelings, and forage for little joys. A few days into November, these lyrics shuffled their way into my playlist:

“Let's become the lovers we want
Banging our heads in the fog
Flowers will close and open
Life going by like we care
One day is whatever we make
(Whatever we make)
From pieces off the side of a road
(Whatever we make)
Walked on our map of what hurts
What hurts worse
Let's become the lovers we need.”

As I listened to the song, I felt myself sitting up straighter and the next thing I knew, I’d opened up a new folder and titled it “NaNoWriMo”. When I told a friend, she asked what I was writing. “Crime?” she said, hopefully.

I shook my head. “Romance,” I told her, “low pressure, full escapism.” She laughed because she knows as well as I do that escaping is anything but easy, especially in these times. Still, it’s worth a spin of an attempt. After all, where would we be without fantasy and the hope that veins its restless heart? Later, at another time, on a comfortable perch of hindsight, we’ll sit and talk about what we deliberately kept out and what unexpectedly crept into our stories from this present. For now, while witnessing unimaginable hate, I’ll try my hand at a love story.

(The song is “What Hurts Most”, by Iron and Wine, for anyone interested.)

This newsletter was a bit off-track (in addition to being very late), so if you patiently read till the end, thank you for reading. Dear Reader will return with regular programming next month, godpromiss.

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September in October

Deepanjana — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 04:37:43 GMT

What kind of a person sets out to find romance and instead chooses murder? Me. Obviously I’m talking about reading — from the creased titles of crime writing on my bookshelf, I’ve gathered that murder in real life requires more focused attention than I’m likely to lavish on violence. For instance, I can absolutely see myself heading out, determined to buy a gun, only to get distracted by a sunset. Or some really pretty stationery. But I digress. Of late, the books in my Kindle or on my bedside table have all been dense (more on that later) and so, the other day, I thought it would be nice to have a tonal shift. Entirely set on getting a Mills & Boon, I started looking for romances only to find myself, five minutes later, in the middle of a clutch of cosy mysteries.

Like I said, for better or for worse, this is not the kind of focus that will get murders done in real life.

Mary Winters’ Murder in Postscript is set in Victorian London and her protagonist is Countess Amelia Amesbury, a young widow who has a secret life as an agony aunt for a newspaper. When she receives a letter that speaks of a suspected murder and that letter writer is found dead in a park, Amelia sets herself the task of uncovering the killer. Sleuthing while being an aristocratic lady requires some deft multitasking, especially since Amelia lives with her husband’s stern aunt and not-so-stern niece. There’s also a dashingly handsome marquis in the mix, but if you’re hoping for a romance, don’t get your hopes up. Murder in Postscript is the first in a series and Winters knows that the best part of a love story is not in the happy ending, but in the road to it.

It seems wrong to describe a murder mystery as easy and breezy, but that’s Murder in Postscript. Amelia is pleasant enough, the mystery is interesting (until we reach the resolution, which is meh), yet there’s something very uncompelling about this novel. The beginning sets the scene well, but in later chapters, Winters struggles to figure out ways to get Amelia out of the house while remaining credibly within the conventions she’s laid out for this faux-Victorian society. In parts, Murder in Postscript feels like something written by someone who loved the Enola Holmes mysteries, but didn’t have as much invention or wit in their writing. Bottom line: Murder in Postscript is one of those cosy mysteries that is perfect for when your brain has given up. You could abandon the book halfway, and it wouldn’t bother you for even half a second. Or you could finish it and cheerfully forget most of what happened in the novel within 15 minutes. It also made me appreciate just what a fantastic job Agatha Christie did with the Miss Marple mysteries.

Much better written is Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, which Bijal recommended to me (I think I read it in August, not September; but whatevs). Bijal and I are both voracious romance readers, but our preferences are different. I tend to go for smart and smutty, and if a romance wants to keep me interested without some graphic lusty action, it better be sparkling with wit and charm. Bijal veers towards romances that are well-written, well-observed and well-behaved. True to her style, Romantic Comedy is PG-13 and entirely delightful, offering a contemporary take on the ye-olde-trope of the lead pair falling in love over letters. Sally’s a writer for a late-night comedy show that’s a lot like Saturday Night Live. Noah’s a pop star whose path crosses with Sally’s when he guest-hosts an episode of the show. Through their relationship, Sittenfeld slyly looks at gender biases, social rituals and the sweet comfort that make love stories so damn special. Also, it’s very funny. Think You’ve Got Mail, but more feminist and set in the Covid era.

Time for a mini epiphany. I was listening to the current season of Anita Anand and William Dalrymple’s excellent podcast Empire and one of their guests was Simon Sebag Montefiore. He came on their podcast just a week after I’d finished his majestic book on Russian monarchy, The Romanovs. What a coinkidink, I thought. But is it really? Anand and Dalrymple’s podcast made its way to Russia and its imperial ambitions because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They’re looking at the history and constantly finding parallels with the present, and also showing how much the past impacts the present. Which led to…

… a lightbulb moment in my head. Here are the books about or set in Russia I’ve read (or re-read in parts) in the last few months: The Lost Pianos of Siberia, Mikhail and Margarita, Anna of all the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova, The Romanovs, Natasha’s Dance. All excellent books, by the way, and while they’re not the only books I’ve read, there’s a distinct pattern here if one is looking for it. Case in point: Mr.B, which I just finished yesterday. I thought I’d moved heaven and earth to get a copy of Jennifer Homan’s biography of dancer and choreographer George Balanchine because it won a Pulitzer this year and because I couldn’t remember having actually read a book about any dance, even though I love watching all dance. While all that is true, Mr. B also fits very snugly into the Russo-centric reading list that I’ve unwittingly been following. (If anyone has suggestions of Ukrainian history or fiction, I’m all ears.)

George Balanchine was one of the most brilliant choreographers and is considered the father of American ballet. He was born in St. Petersburg to a proudly Georgian (and bigamous) father. His early childhood was spent in Finland but that idyll ended when was accepted into the Imperial Ballet School at age nine. Separated from his family, he would survive revolutions, World War I and illness, and leave the Soviet Union in 1924. After some years in Europe, in 1934, he came to America upon the invitation of arts patron Lincoln Kirstein, and the country became home. He had four wives, one common-law partner, and many lovers. He died in New York City, in 1983.

(Photo by Ernst Haas/Hulton Archive)

It’s an incredible life, lived during some of the most turbulent periods in modern history. That’s good enough reason to read a biography, but Homans is why Mr. B is unputdownable. First, there’s her research. Balanchine, who described himself as “a cloud in trousers” is a difficult man to pin down (that phrase is borrowed from a line by Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky to whom Homans attributes another lightning-bright phrase: “All is new! Stop and marvel!”). His childhood years are not neatly archived and he often embroidered the past when recounting it later. Of his dance and his process, he was fiercely protective. Homans says his ballet troupe was almost like a secret society. Still, Homans’s patient research brings together records, letters, diaries, interviews she conducted with 200 dancers, and historical facts, tied together with the ribbon-like beauty of her prose. Here’s an example:

“Equilibrium is forever perilous, and the stage floor at the Mariinsky [Theatre] was dangerously raked, slanted at a sharp angle so that audiences could better see the whole. Dancers learned to calibrate their balance and weight on this disorienting incline, like dancing on the deck of a ship tilting to sink.”

Elsewhere, she writes, “Dancers’ bodies are like the memory palaces of antiquity,” which is beautiful on its own and perfection as a description of Balanchine’s work. The czarist Russian culture in which he was immersed as a child was erased by revolution, but traces of it lingered, mingling with influences from so many other cultures as well as Balanchine’s distinctively original choreography. There’s fondness in her narrative voice as she details his dance and his life, but she doesn’t turn a blind eye to uncomfortable details (like the times he used blackface in his choreography or the romances that he had with vulnerable young dancers).

Mr. B is a gem. I’ve lingered over its sentences, scribbled notes, highlighted sections and already thinking of how wonderful it will be to revisit it. Here’s Homans’s description of one part of a performance titled The Four Temperaments:

“The body dismantled like a machine. A once-strong supporting leg bent and broken like a warped metal pipe. A man pivoting a woman like he is screwing a twisted nail into the floor. A woman thrusting her hips jarringly off-kilter and swinging into a gyrating arabesque that her partner can barely control. There is sex, but it is mechanical: a woman’s legs split wide to the audience; a man’s thigh jutting phallically between her legs as their bodies interlock. They do not melt or romantically join, but instead assemble like industrial parts. Dancers climb in and out of their own movements, squatting, skittering, backs humped with effort, and at times they appear dismembered, joints broken. There is no easy flow, and the steps and phrases unfold like the montage of static images in Balanchine’s choreographic notes: a man without a memory cannot see a dance.”

There’s a photo by Paul Kolnik from a performance of The Four Temperaments that I think of when I read “a man without a memory cannot see a dance”:

Coming back to Mr. B, I don’t think you can write like this if you haven’t known dance in your own body, which Homans has, having trained at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet (not for the book. She’s also a former professional dancer). I hope someone will be able to write biographies like this about Indian dance greats, whose lives and work are slipping out of conversation and memory.

Something that comes through again and again in Mr. B is how magpie-esque Balanchine was, collecting influences and inspirations from different cultures. Is it offensive? (Occasionally.) Is there a whiff of appropriation? (No.) How much of a part do factors like race, age and power dynamics play in this power dynamic? (A lot.) Balanchine was once described as a man who was liberal in his heart and conservative in his gut, which Homans brings out in her biography. He was also someone who took creativity seriously and you see this in the way he threw himself into the art that appealed to him. Homans’s careful record of his artistic influences is a great reminder of how cultures are enriched when they engage with one another through the medium of an artist.

This idea is also at the heart of Martin Puchner’s Culture: A New World History, which sounds like one of those annoying, crash-course-esque books that reduce history and cultures to a wordy Powerpoint presentation, but is actually the opposite. There’s another edition of this book, which has the title Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop. It’s not snappy, but it’s a much better summary of Puchner’s argument.

Puchner is one of those people whose work seems to stand as a counterpoint to the culture of specialisation that has dominated the past few decades. Part historian, part literary critic, part philosopher, Puchner brings a range of topics into his writing and emphasises that culture is about connections, not cateogries. In The Written Word, which covers everything from Gilgamesh to Harry Potter, he looked at how writing as a practice developed. It’s a delightful read that covers thousands of years with smooth ease. Culture also does the equivalent of a pub crawl through world cultures, and this time it’s to establish how cultural products have thrived or survived because outsiders encountered them. Puchner’s point is that for knowledge from one culture to be passed down generations, it needs to go beyond its boundaries and that sometimes happens with a translation; sometimes it takes an archaeological dig. The book is a joyous reminder that cultural exchange and resonances don’t have to be mired in appropriation. It’s possible to love another’s culture and despite politics and hierarchies, one culture can be enriched by foreign influences.

I’m writing to you from Kolkata, a city where I don’t belong but which has grudgingly become home because of my parents. I’m at my parents’ dining table and scattered around me are seven newspapers (yes, they get seven newspapers. Daily), two boxes of medicines (one for each parent), the latest Keigo Higashino (which my dad wasn’t impressed by), Lizzie Collingham’s The Biscuit (which my mum has approved of), the latest edition of the literary magazine Biblio (which I’d forgotten existed), an old edition of a Bengali little magazine that my father gave me to read an essay describing Ramzan in Bengal (he has not forgotten my vow to read at least one Bengali “thing” every month), and a recipe book my mother has pulled out because she wants to make me something to carry back to Mumbai (I’m not complaining). There are also three cups of tea, cooling swiftly, and a giant jar of ginger biscuits, disappearing just as swiftly. Our three phones are nearby, within hearing, and we’re ignoring the alerts for new messages and emails. A breeze wanders in and out from an open window that looks on to another building’s roof where someone is putting laundry on a washing line, looking up every now and then at the thin layer of clouds in which the October sky has wrapped itself. In a few minutes, I will check email, my parents will surrender to WhatsApp and we’ll all hurtle-turtle into everyday life. Let me leave you before that happens, freeze-framing this slice of life instead, made up of morning tea, rustling pages, hard news, harder recipes and the comfort of literature. May the bric-a-brac of your life come together like mine has to bring you many such precious moments.

Thanks for reading and Dear Reader will be back soon.