Akbar + Bombay Hustle + Kintsugi + The Tower of Nero
Contains only the most genius Mughal miniature-inspired GIF ever. You're welcome.
By and large, I do my best to not lie, but there are times when it feels like the best option would be to lie through my teeth. One of these was when I was shown the cover of my novel, Hush A Bye Baby. For those of you who haven’t seen it, let me just say that it’s very…red. With a foetus that looks vaguely like it’s glowing as though it’s the spawn of Satan.
When I first saw the cover on an email, I imagined someone seeing Hush A Bye Baby on a book shelf and picking it up in the hope of finding some glowing zombie babies inside; only to find a sociopathic gynaecologist and a geeky police officer. That’s like picking up a book with a Mills & Boon cover, only to find it’s A Farewell to Arms inside. (This is not to suggest I’m Hemingway. Leaving aside literary ability, there is exactly zero chance of me getting drunk and sleeping with a bear.)
But I didn’t tell my editor or publisher these misgivings. I said it looked great. I may even have used multiple exclamation marks in my reply. I believe the word for that is “overcompensation”.
When I saw the cover of Kintsugi, by Anukrti Upadhyay, I couldn’t help but remember me being diplomatic about the cover of Hush A Bye Baby. Had Upadhyay done the same? Because gods above, that cover really does not do Upadhyay’s book any favours. First though, there’s the title. There are many overused and abused words floating around in pop culture. Kintsugi (the Japanese art of mending cracks and broken areas with lacquer or gold) is one of them. I hear kintsugi and immediately, I’m imagining a heartbroken, wilting heroine; a single tear trickling down a delicate face; and plinky-plonky music. Maybe even a rock garden. On top of that, this tortured word is written in a font that is the first cousin of a dingbat font. Also, just to drive home the kintsugi point, the cover has golden cracks on it. I turned to the back cover and right up on top, this line was written in large letters: “Broken things are precious too”.
All of which is a damned shame because Upadhyay’s novel is actually quite lovely. Made up of romance, a coming-of-age story and tragedies, Kintsugi is jam-packed with ideas, but to Upadhyay’s credit, the weight of the many issues don’t drag the novel down. There’s something delicately iridescent about Kintsugi, which you’d never guess from either its cover or the title.
The novel opens in Jaipur, where Haruko, a Japanese-Korean origin American, is studying techniques of working with gold, from a master jeweller. Women don’t work in these workshops traditionally, but Haruko’s talent and skills impress even the patriarch. She also ends up inspiring a young girl, Leela, for whom working as a jeweller will mean going against her conservative family. Also going up against her family is Meena, an Indian student in Tokyo who finds both love and despair in a foreign land. The heart of the novel is Leela, who grows up from being a curious teenager to a capable, independent young woman. She’s an absolute delight.
Kintsugi explores ideas of belonging, identity, duty and love through its cast of characters who navigate a labyrinth of challenges and disappointments. It would have been very easy for this novel to become a melodramatic string of events, like a soap opera, because there’s a staggering amount happening in the 200-odd pages. Love, accidents, heartbreak, death, turtles laying eggs, brutal but poetic monitor lizards — it’s all in Kintsugi.
The novel does have its moments of awkwardness, like the relationship between Haruko and Dr. Prakash, which felt terribly forced. Upadhyay writes Haruko’s passion for her craft beautifully and it’s easily relatable even if you’ve never really given much thought to what goes into making a piece of kundan jewellery. Sadly, the same cannot be said for Haruko’s headlong tumble into Dr. Prakash’s arms. More troublesome than this relationship though is the way the two queer characters in Kintsugi are effectively erased. They somewhat literally disappear from the narrative, which is particularly regrettable because this is done to shift the reader’s attention to a heterosexual couple. While I’m all for making heart-eyes at two people in love, it feels a little unfair that the queer character must be forced out of the narrative in the process. Both the queer characters deserved better resolutions than what Upadhyay gives them.
For most part, the prose in Kintsugi is elegant and restrained. Upadhyay focuses on how people cope with crises and survive. Instead of lingering over a shocking event as it happens, Upadhyay writes around it — we either hear about it from those who aren’t that deeply impacted by it or characters talk about the incident with the benefit of hindsight. It’s a clever device that shows the passage of time and evolution of a character while ensuring the tone of the narrative doesn’t become high-strung.
By the end of Kintsugi, I understood why Upadhyay had chosen this word for the title — a lot breaks in this book, from bones to hearts to skulls to families; and yet it feels like a happy ending ultimately — but I still wish someone had convinced her to pick a title that sounded less pretentious.
Also, I should point out that I’ve been told I have no taste and that both the title and cover of Kintsugi are exquisite. I hope a lot of people think this way and read the book, but as far as I’m concerned, my first reaction to both remains nausea. If there was ever a book that lived up to the axiom of “don’t judge a book by its cover”, this is it.
Ira Mukhoty’s Akbar, The Great Mughal, on the other hand, is a book that you’re welcome to judge by its gorgeous cover. I’ve been looking forward to reading more of Mukhoty since Daughters of the Sun, which is about Mughal women who have been largely forgotten despite being powerhouses in their own time. My expectations of Akbar were high and Mukhoty did not disappoint.
There are so many stories that have been passed down generations about Akbar — for example, his relationship with Birbal; his practice of roaming around incognito in the bazaars of Agra; his Hindu wife; his gleeful taming of elephants; the respect he accorded women like his wet nurse Maham Anaga — that he’s practically part of Indian folklore. Through her painstaking research, which makes you feel almost like you’re part of the imperial court and caravan, Mukhoty shows why Akbar became such a legend. Especially against the backdrop of contemporary Indian politics, with its dominant Hindutva narrative that demonises the Mughals, the history that Mukhoty presents is piercingly relevant. For instance, the prohibition of cow slaughter? Akbar did it first. Who extended their patronage to Hindu temples and priests in Mathura and Vrindavan in the 16th century? Akbar and his mother Hamida Banu. Feel free to drop that into the next conversation about Muslim “invaders” who destroyed Hindu temples (you can also throw in some examples of Hindus persecuting Buddhists if the topic of discussion is how tolerance is a Hindu trait. Like, for example Shashanka cutting down the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya or Pushyamitra Shunga vandalising the Sanchi Stupa. But I digress…).
Admiring as she is of him, Mukhoty doesn’t blindly adore Akbar. His ego, eccentricity and violence are on display along with his curiosity, leadership and determination to do what he believed was right for his subjects and empire. In addition to all this, Akbar is fun to read. Even when Mukhoty’s talking about tax systems being revamped, it doesn’t feel dry because she focuses on the people doing this work and their motivations. She adds details and nuance for not just Akbar, but others in his court so that these historical figures start feeling like people you know. Also, the book is jam-packed with fantastic details, like there was once a place called Shaitanpur (for sex workers) and the Persian translation of the Mahabharata that Akbar commissioned, titled Razmnama, hasn’t been seen in over half a century (it’s sealed by court order in the City Palace Museum in Jaipur). Left to my own devices, I could probably write at least six novellas based on the snippets and trivia in this book, which for me, is the highest praise that I can lavish as a writer because lord knows, it takes some doing to fire the imagination.
Speaking of imagination, please enjoy one of the most inspired Mughal miniature GIFs ever, by Adrita Das:
While we’re talking about non-fiction, I enjoyed Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City by Debashree Mukherjee, who has a great Instagram account in which she shares vintage movie memorabilia. Bombay Hustle looks at the film industry in Mumbai between 1929 and 1942, as it transitioned from silent films to talkies. Mukherjee’s focus is on those who peopled the industry at this time, or the cine-ecology, as she terms it, which is a phrase I like for how it conveys that sense of the film world having its own particular environment. There are other phrases — like “heterodox sensorium”, “oppositional ontologies” and “temporality of ontogenesis” — that I don’t like and which Bombay Hustle drags around like clanking, awkwardly-heavy shackles while talking about how films as mass entertainment helped to democratise culture. That said, this is a scholarly text whose target audience is evidently not the casual reader. So if you do decide to take on the Bombay Hustle, keep a dictionary or Google open at a computer near you.
Mukherjee does an excellent job of placing the film industry, its productions and its processes within the larger context of what was happening in India at the time. Even though films are traditionally considered something of a bubble in India, Mukherjee argues that if you look for it, you will find the impact of things like nationalist rallies, industrial strikes, the city expanding to the north, changing social attitudes and the political idealism of the era. Using examples of everything from film synopses to the surviving paperwork of early film studios and records of crimes against film workers, Mukherjee creates a portrait of a fledgling industry trying to create an identity that was both respectable, but also modern.
There are a lot of great stories in Bombay Hustle and one that’s really stayed with me is that of actor Shanta Apte’s 1939 hunger strike. Apte was no small fry. She was a proper star in her time and would later go on to set up her own production company. Frustrated by the studio that she was contracted to because she felt sidelined, Apte went on strike. Dressed in trousers and a sports shirt, she appropriated the security guard’s bench at the entrance of Prabhat Studios, in Pune. That one move violated gender norms (everyone was used to seeing Apte in saris) as well as class boundaries. For all those who saw her sitting there, at the gates of the studio, the actor on strike may have been reminiscent of Mahatma Gandhi’s dharnas against the colonial government. However, the press at the time did not make that connection. The articles written about Apte at the time criticise her for being wilful and describe the strike as a publicity stunt. Mukherjee makes an excellent case for how Apte’s actions were radical, brave and progressive. A year later, Apte would publish what was effectively an insider’s account of the film industry, exposing its institutionalised bad practices and suggesting a certain solidarity when she drew parallels between industrial factory workers and those who work for the dream factory of cinema. I have a feeling a lot of people would find Apte’s observations relatable even today.
The period that Bombay Hustle covers is when actresses were the engines powering and sustaining the cine-ecology, with many working as producers and directors in addition to appearing on screen. To me, some of this resonates with Bollywood today, where more and more women are rejecting the secondary status that the industry has accorded them in the recent past. Instead, women are claiming positions of power and influence, particularly as producers. There are some fantastic stories lurking inside the folds of the academic polysyllables of Bombay Hustle and I am more than ready to see them being translated into something like a novel, or a well-made historical film or series.
Finally, that small-scale god of children’s fantasy fiction Rick Riordan has done it again. Riordan writes stories that take characters and ideas from ancient mythologies and plonks them in the present. More often than not, there’s a kid who is a demi-god (one divine parent, one human parent) who must go on a quest because there’s a monstrous villain threatening our world. All rather standard stuff, but because Riordan writes with great wit, skill and charm, you don’t feel bored by these adventures. Even when Riordan isn’t at his best, the books are wildly entertaining and generally unputdownable. The moment I know Riordan has a new book coming out, I resign myself to not sleeping for at least one night because I know I won’t want to stop reading until I’ve reached the very last page.
The Tower of Nero is book five in the Apollo cycle of stories, in which Apollo, the Olympian god of sun, poetry, music, healing and prophecy (among other things) is punished by Zeus and lands on earth, in the body of a spotty, teenaged boy. The book is also the last one in the Camp Half Blood series. Riordan has said in interviews that he isn’t opposed to the idea of Nico (demi-god son of Hades) having his own book, so maybe we can look forward to that. There are also hints dropped in The Tower of Nero that there may be a crossover in the works. As things stand in the present though, this novel is the last chapter in a 15-year-long story. If you haven’t read any Riordans, pick up The Lightning Thief. It’s pure joy.
Bringing a story cycle with so many characters and past adventures to a close is a phenomenal challenge and I really didn’t think Apollo was charismatic enough a character to conclude the series. He’s entertaining, but Apollo isn’t my favourite from Riordan’s pantheon (I’m Team Percy and Magnus all the way), but this finale is a winner. Apollo has grown into a wonderful big-brother character. The friendships and alliances in The Tower of Nero are heart warming. The book is filled with hilarious throwaway lines and has all sorts of excellent messages, from normalising LGBTQ relationships to surviving abuse, and there’s also a superb primer on how to treat those with disabilities. But be warned: there’s a lot of violence in The Tower of Nero.
While I am heartbroken that this series of over, the fact is Camp Half Blood is always here for us, ever accessible in the pages of these wonderful books that Riordan has gifted us over the years.
And I think I’ve gone on long enough for one newsletter, so I’ll sign off now. Thank you for reading. Take care and stay well. Dear Reader will be back soon.