Fifty (ok, four) Shades of Brown

Two issues and two hundred subscribers! Yes, I admit it. I am indeed keeping count of the number of people subscribing to Dear Reader. (This is a particularly noteworthy feat given mathematics and numbers aren’t exactly my forte.) Now that we've hit three digits, I've stepped far out of my safety zone, given I make a mess of single-digit addition, but thank you to everyone who has signed up. If you have a book that you'd like me to list, please get in touch via Twitter (@dpanjana) or my website. If you've got suggestions for the newsletter, they're most welcome too.

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It’s been a colour-coded week of reading and not by design. Somehow, though, every book I’ve read has something to do with brown.

Maybe it’s just the long shadow cast by Kamal Al-Solaylee’s Brown: What Being Brown In the World Today Means (to Everyone). This one’s been a slow read, but that’s because I’ve been exhausted and not because of Al-Solaylee’s writing. Possibly because personal essays just aren’t floating my boat these days, I wasn’t entirely riveted by Al-Solaylee’s own story, but when he started talking to different brown people all over the world, the book became fascinating. His central point is that brownness as a racial category is slippery and difficult to define. Yet people from Manila who are working as domestic help, the descendants of the Indians who went to work as ‘coolies’ in Trinidad, the Arab diaspora in UK, the undocumented Latino workers in America — they’re all on the brown continuum. Not just that, being brown means that we will all be jerked around and lumped together, considering the socio-political realities of our times. Precisely because we're so attuned to our differences, Al-Solaylee wants to foster a sense of solidarity among brown people. This is interesting because traditionally, we have divided ourselves along racial, religious and class lines (in India, we can add caste to that mix).

Also from Canada and talking about being brown — specifically, South Asian — is Maria Qamar. Her book Trust No Aunty is a “survival guide”, which means Qamar advises the reader on how to deal with the interfering, conservative family that is both a brown stereotype and as true a fact as desi ghee. Along with her advice, Qamar has funky illustrations, recipes and other little tidbits to keep the reader awake and interested. Qamar is very popular on Instagram (@hatecopy) and makes comics that look like the lovechild of Amar Chitra Katha and Roy Lichtenstein. There’s nothing wrong with anything in Trust No Aunty and Qamar sounds like the coolest kid in class. Yet neither the art nor the advice felt particularly insightful. I’m genuinely curious about what makes a book like Qamar’s stand out to a reader — is it the tone of easy camaraderie? The fact that she’s telling her reader what to do, but as a friend rather than a bossy parent? Is it that she doesn’t try for diplomacy? Or is it her sense of humour? She’s got swagger and I’d love to hear Qamar speak, but I can't help wondering if Trust No Aunty would be better as a website than a book.

One of the reasons I started reading Austenistan (edited by Laaleen Sukhera) is because I went to see a film and came out of it wanting to murder everyone who had described it as a heartwarming romance. It seemed obvious that the best way to pick myself up was to read stories inspired by Jane Austen’s cleverly satirical portraits of middle-class and aristocratic England. I do like the title and the seven stories in the slim volume are a breezy read. Just at a very basic level of writing and plot, the stories in Austenistan are far superior to the excerpts I've read of our pulpy, paperback fiction. Set in Pakistan and telling stories of the urbane and uppity, Austenistan is like a set of mini Mills & Boons with brown heroes and heroines, like those miniature perfume sets you get at Duty Free perfume shops. At first glance, they’re just lovely but soon enough, you realise all the bottles smell the same. The one story that stood out for me was “Begum Saira Returns”. Her I’d like to see more of. The rest of the heroines are fun enough as pale brown replicas of Lizzie Bennett and gang, but Saira Qadir, with her cropped blouse, her heartache and her somewhat predatory attitude towards men, she's a truly interesting character.

I’m only about halfway through Jeet Thayil’s The Book of Chocolate Saints — you see what I mean about the colour coding? — so I won’t get into it this time. Fingers crossed I finish it before next week. The blurb had reminded me of FN Souza, but in The Book of Chocolate Saints, Thayil’s created a whole new manifestation of genius, blending Souza with the legendary Dom Moraes. I’ve been alternating between the novel and Dom Moraes: Selected Poems, which has a fantastic introductory essay by Ranjit Hoskote. Here’s a poem from that volume.

DRACULA

The moon reflected like
A bent coin in the lake
Kept him undead.

The echoes of his scars
Thrown back from fractured stars
Whine in his head.

The night was once his friend,
Who trembles like a frond.
Treeshadows fall

Across his harmed grimace,
His arms spread to embrace,
Nothing at all.

He the black priest who bent
Once to his sacrament
No longer can.

He drinks in the frail smell
Of water and snailshell,
Trying to be man.

Garlic and crucifix,
Which drove him like a fox,
To earth, unmade

Him, desperate, who when dawn
Orders its coverts drawn
Must still evade

The tangled arms of trees
Under whose canopies
Hibiscus flash

Such flames as, fed on air,
Will spread till full dayflare
Turns him to ash.

Cocks shout from nearby farms.
Tired, he drops his arms.
Wind flicks his cape.

What snare of air, whose net
Have trapped him and will not
Let him escape.

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NOVEMBER RELEASES

Hachette

The Book Hunters of Katpadi: A Bibliomystery by Pradeep Sebastian
Literary fiction
Neelambari Adigal and her young associate, Kayal, together run Biblio, a one-of-a-kind store of rare books in Chennai. On a book-collecting trip to Ooty, Kayal stumbles upon an incendiary manuscript purportedly authored by explorer and translator Sir Richard Francis Burton. How much action and intrigue can be drawn out of dust, history and antique first editions? Find out from an author who, incidentally, is himself a collector of fine press books.

Harper

Jasoda by Kiran Nagarkar
Literary fiction
In a drought-stricken place called Paar lives a midwife named Jasoda. She nurses a
dark secret: a mother of four sons, she kills every daughter born to her, till her eldest son puts a stop to it and one daughter survives. There’s also an odyssey to the city by the sea. This is Kiran Nagarkar’s seventh novel.

The Nine-Chambered Heart by Janice Pariat
Literary fiction
Nine characters recall their relationship with a young woman – the same woman – whom they have loved, or who has loved them. We piece her together, much like we do with others in our lives, in incomplete, illuminating slivers.

The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel
Modern history
Before they even had the right to vote, a group of remarkable women were employed by Harvard College Observatory as ‘Human Computers’ to interpret the observations made via telescope by their male counterparts each night. Sobel shines a light on the hidden history of these extraordinary women who changed the burgeoning field of astronomy and our understanding of the stars.

A Uterus Is a Feature, Not a Bug by Sarah Lacy
Business
It’s a working woman's guide to overthrowing patriarchy and focuses on changing how mothers are seen and treated in the corporate world. On an average, mothers earn $11,000 less in salary and are held to higher punctuality and performance standards. Forty percent of Silicon Valley women said they felt the need to speak less about their family to be taken more seriously. Many have been told that having a second child would cost them a promotion. No wonder Lacy’s fuming.

A Memory of George Michael by Sean Smith
Biography
Affectionate yet honest and moving, this is both a celebration of George Michael’s music and a lasting tribute to a decent and much-loved man.

Why Dylan Matters by Richard F Thomas
Music & critique
Let the man who was initially ridiculed by his colleagues for teaching a course on Bob Dylan alongside his traditional seminars on Homer, Virgil and Ovid tell you why Dylan’s Nobel prize is well-deserved.

Juggernaut – Fiction & Non-Fiction

The Fall: The Babri Masjid Demolition by The Hindu
Modern history
Compiled from the newspaper’s archives, this rewinds to the days before the fateful morning.

The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide by Azeem Ibrahim
Modern history
One of the worst cases of ethnic cleansing in recent history, the Rohingya tragedy has been unfolding for decades. This book exposes not only the culpability of the Buddhist clergy, but also the culpability of governments, including the present regime presided over by Aung San Suu Kyi.

Don’t Want Caste edited by MR Renukumar
Fiction
This is a series of short stories originally written in Malayalam. The week’s releases are MR Renukumar’s Slipperiness, Mea Culpa by Raju K Vasu (trans: Abhirami Girija Sriram) and A Santha Kumar’s The Serpent Lover (trans: Ravi Shanker).

Keeping Up With Kaneda
Fiction
When you're saat samundar paar, even a modest course at a community college becomes a gateway for merriment and just the fact that he’s in Canada is enough to give our enthusiastic hero “goose bumps”. Not sure whether that means the goose is bumping into hero or if hero is carrying goose over bumps.

Yodapress

Love & Rage: The Inner Worlds of Children by Nupur Dhingra Paiva
Non-fiction
With the trained ear of a child psychotherapist, the author listens to children’s stories as they emerge in her consulting room, through word and play, and translates them for adults.

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Dear Reader will be back next week, with more new books and more nattering. Thanks for reading.