A Murder On Malabar Hill + What's Hidden In the Sea? + New books from Aleph

Dear Reader 1.12

There’s something about falling sick that still feels like a holiday, even though my school years are far behind me. So while wilting from a cough that refuses to stop khich-khiching, I went ahead and started reading a set of books that will take me ages to finish. The delusion is that you’ll be lounging around and therefore it’s a good time to start the 1000-paged biography of the Bronte family that you bought because the internet said it’s the family biography to read. And for relief, why not leaf through the 550-paged Collected Essays of AK Ramanujan?

Except being sick is exhausting and these books — despite their excellent opening chapters — are slow, dense reads. Which is probably why I’ve been reading kiddie books instead.

Aina Bestard's fantastic What’s Hidden in the Sea? comes with “magic glasses”, which is basically a card with three circles on it. One circle is green, the other is blue and the last is red. Look at the page through the green circle and you’ll see one set of drawings and then see the same page through another colour, and it’s completely different. On its own, the pages are a curious collection of delicate, intricate illustrations that use thin, colourful lines. Seen through a coloured lens, they reveal and conceal details, making her work a book and a magic show, all rolled into one. As if that wasn’t enough, she's also teaching you about colour, optics, perspective, marine life… just genius. These layered drawings are very much Bestard's thing. She's also written What's Hidden in the Woods? and What's Hidden in the Body? Here's a spread from What's Hidden in the Woods?:

If you’re in Mumbai, go to Trilogy in Lower Parel and pick up a book by Bestard. Pretend it’s for a kid, if it makes you feel better. If you aren’t fascinated by it, you don’t deserve the book so please do give it to a kid. Trilogy, incidentally, is one of my favourite bookstores in the city even though each visit leaves me significantly poorer. They rarely have standard bestsellers but they do have a wealth of interesting titles across many genres, for grown-ups and kids. If you haven’t been to Trilogy, you must. It’s run by bookworms and has a library section that has an excellent selection. They’ve also started a scheme by which you get a box of new books each month, in case you want a curated box of literary goodies. I don’t think details are up on their website, but I saw a little sign for it when I was at the bookshop last week, so if you’re interested, ask them about it.

For grown-ups, a quick and fun read is Sujata Massey’s new novel, A Murder On Malabar Hill (Penguin Random House, Rs 399). Set in 1920s’ Bombay, it’s the introduction to Massey’s newest detective, Perveen Mistry, the city’s only woman solicitor. Perveen works with her father, who is one of Mumbai’s most successful lawyers. When an old Muslim client of her father’s passes away, Perveen goes to meet the three behind-purdah widows to make sure there are no irregularities. Next thing you know, there’s a dead man, a runaway girl, a kidnapping and even a politically-inclined parrot for good measure.

A Murder on Malabar Hill is partly about Perveen’s past, which includes the story of her marriage to a curly-haired Sodawalla who lives in Calcutta, and partly about a murder investigation in Bombay. When I interviewed Massey about the book, she told me that she included Perveen’s backstory because it would make the reader interested in her. (I’ll put the interview up on my site soon.) It’s a fair point, but I think it actually slows down A Murder on Malabar Hill and diffuses the tension of the murder mystery. Massey’s research is solid and old Bombay shimmers nicely into view through her descriptions. It’s got some awkward bits of melodrama here and there, but good on Massey for finding a way to set a story in a male-dominated era and make it all about women.

Speaking of women characters, big data shows Victorian literary novels actually had more women characters than modern ones. A study analysed 104,000 novels and found a “steady decline” in the proportion of women authors and characters. Claire Jarvis, a professor of English at Stanford University, explained it like this: “As the novel becomes more and more respectable, it becomes less associated with female authorship.” Which is academicese for “men butted women out once the novel became ‘serious pursuit’”. I have a feeling these findings would shift drastically if the study included genre fiction (like romance) and it would be interesting to see what big data shows about what genres see gender equality in numbers, and the way language is used in them.

Meanwhile, three cheers to the growing number of women authors in contemporary literature. May we tell good tales.

Finally, Amitava Kumar has a beautiful essay in The New Yorker on being an immigrant, literature and the poetic imagination. “In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions. My nostalgia was simply the clear bottle in which I stored my explosive rage,” he writes.

UPCOMING RELEASES FROM ALEPH

Love and the Turning Seasons
Ed. Andrew Scheling
Poetry

An anthology of erotic and spiritual poetry spanning 2,500 years, including work by Kabir, Mirabai, Lal Ded and Vidyapati, as well as poems from folk traditions and the Upanishads. The list of translators has some wonderful poets and writers: AK Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Dilip Chitre, Ezra Pound and Gieve Patel, among others.

Indian Cultures as Heritage
Romila Thapar
Non-fiction

Let Romila Thapar tell you what culture is, what shapes it and how the multiple pasts of a society leave an imprint. And if you think she’s a dotty old Left liberal, read her and then figure out how you’re going to dismantle her arguments.

The Baptism of Tony Calangute
Sudeep Chakravarti
Fiction

The author of the critically-acclaimed The Bengalis turns to fiction. Possibly because this is literary fiction, the catalogue doesn’t offer something as mundane as a plot summary. Instead there’s a Professor who sounds “at once like a tired prophet and a man saddened by a straying lover” and a rumination on Goa. This novel “is really a passion play” in which the author “evoles the essence of a self-proclaimed paradise on the verge of losing itself, on the verge of chaos”. Gotcha.

The Short Life and Tragic Death of Qandeel Baloch
Sanam Meher
Non-fiction

In 2016, Pakistan’s first social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch was strangled to death by her brother who described the murder as an “honour killing”. Six days later, a bill to address the loopholes that let such killers be ‘forgiven’ was fast-tracked. Two weeks later it was presented in parliament. Who was Baloch and how did she come to reveal a fundamental schism in Pakistanis’ understanding of themselves as Pakistanis and Muslims?

Coming Out as Dalit
Yashica Dutt
Non-fiction

This memoir is one of the books I’ve been waiting to read. Dutt ‘came out’ as a Dalit after Rohith Vemula’s tragic suicide in January 2016. She’s a powerful writer and you should check out her blog, dalitdiscrimination.tumblr.com. It should be interesting to read this with Harper Collins’s An Ant Among Elephants by Sujata Gidla.

Pilgrim Nation
Devdutt Pattanaik
Non-fiction

Pattanaik explores the idea of pilgrimage and uses various sacred spots in India — Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Islamic and even those inspired by Bollywood — to understand the glue that binds this land together. Which begs the question: if you haven’t gone on a pilgrimage, are you just a little unstuck from the nation?

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Dear Reader will be back in two weeks. Thank you for reading.