Year of the Weeds + Unsheltered + Ambiguity Machines + Women & Power

Here we are, at the end of another year. I have a vague recollection of starting this newsletter because there was some reading challenge floating around the internet that laid what I thought was a rubbish gauntlet — something like reading two books a week or something. How’s that a challenge, she said, pffting contemptuously. It seems poetic justice then that I’ve spent the last five minutes trying to remember what was the first book I read since I sent out the last newsletter.

It’s the season of recaps and we seem to be conditioned to look back at the year and evaluate it. Somewhere on Twitter or Instagram, I saw someone had posted, “I’m happy with how much I’ve read.” Nothing wrong with that statement. Unless you’re a numerophobe like me, because now I’m wondering whether this person is reading to ratchet up numbers, like the reading equivalent of notches on a bedpost. Because honestly, that’s not hard to do. Hopefully, regardless of the number, you’re happy with what you’ve read this year. If you’re not, there are only about a thousand ‘best books of the year’ lists floating around to help you pick a book that is less likely to disappoint you. The Guardian’s got a bunch of them; The New York Times has attempted restraint and picked 10 while LitHub’s list is as unrestrained as ever; the Smithsonian has compiled the best science books of the year; Brittle’s 48 notable books by African authors is also a keeper. My takeaway from any and every end-of-the-year books list is this: I’m going to spend much of the coming year reading ‘old’ books. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

For instance, whenever you pick up Siddharth Sarma’s Year of the Weeds, you will be doing yourself a world of good. On paper, it’s a book for young adults, but this is unlike any children’s fiction I’ve read. Year of the Weeds is set in western Odisha and its hero is a little boy named Korok. Korok belongs to the Gond tribe and when a hill they consider sacred is identified as being bauxite-rich, the Gond find themselves fighting some very, very powerful people.

Year of the Weeds is rooted in reality and it’s written with the kind of elegance that literary fiction for adults struggles to achieve. Take this opening paragraph:

The bus was late.
But ‘late’ and ‘early’ are words you can only use if you have a watch. If you have a watch, time becomes a number, and a bus becomes late or early or even – why not? – on time. None of the five persons who stood by the road had a watch. So the bus was an idea that would happen some time.

With just these few sentences, Sarma has established how remote the setting of his story is, the crushing absence of the infrastructure most of us consider normal (particularly in cities) and the cheerful acceptance of all this as normal. I think what I loved most about Sarna’s writing is the restraint in it. He doesn’t unleash poetic flair for the sake of it. The language he uses to articulate his characters has everything to do with the people they are and the experiences they’ve had. So, for instance, Anchita, the girl from the city, notices how the Gond are being sold products by knock-off brands. Korok, on the other, has the gift of nurturing plants and so his thoughts are rich with simple but insightful gardening metaphors.

Sarma occasionally uses certain English words and phrases in the way they’re used by the Gonds — my personal favourites are “epho” and “kek” — and this could so easily have been an act of caricature, especially considering the position of a narrator who writes in English for an English-reading audience, but Sarna’s tone is pitch perfect. The point isn’t that the Gonds don’t know the English, but that we all do this — make sense of the absurdity we’re dealt with in whatever way we can. If the Gonds are clueless about English, the ones who know English are clueless about the Gond and ultimately, the joke’s on anyone who underestimated the tribals.

If you want a good book that can be read in one sitting, Year of the Weeds is a good pick. But I’d recommend you linger over it, noticing the care and craft that has gone into writing this remarkable story. Sure it’s labelled children’s fiction, but if I had my way, I’d make sure every adult in India — particularly those who are or want to be parents — read this book.

Also, what a beautiful cover.

Speaking of striking covers, Mary Beard’s Women and Power: A Manifesto is one of those books that doesn’t necessarily photograph well, but if you see the real thing, it calls out to you with its colour and mesmerising pattern. It’s inspired by a Roman floor mosaic that traditionally has Medusa in the centre. In case of the cover, the book title is at the centre. Will it, like the legendary Medusa, turn you to stone if you look it straight in the eye? No, but it might make you just an ickle dizzy.

Women and Power: A Manifesto contains two lectures from 2014 and 2017 along with an epilogue in which Beard updates it for 2018 by mentioning #MeToo. Beard is best known for being a historian who specialises in the world of ancients, particularly classical Rome. She got into a pickle earlier this year when she made a comment that suggested it was a regrettable display of genteel racism. While speaking about white people and their history, however, Beard makes no faux pas. Her 2014 lecture offers a wonderful overview of how public speaking has traditionally been the domain of men in European cultures and the way women who do speak up have been perceived.

There are only two main exceptions in the classical world to this abomination of women’s public speaking. First, women are allowed to speak out as victims and as martyrs, usually to preface their own death. … This ‘muteness’ is not just a reflection of women’ general disempowerment throughout the classical world: no voting rights, limited legal and economic independence and so on. It was partly that. … But we are dealing with a much more active and loaded exclusion of women from public speech — and one with a much greater impact than we usually acknowledge on our own traditions, conventions and assumptions about the voice of women. What I mean is that public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn’t do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender.

Reading this lecture made me think about the Vedic goddess Vac (which is the Sanskrit word for “speech”) who is believed to have mutated into Saraswati, the goddess of learning and music, and the generally talkative goddesses that Eastern traditions tend to have in their pantheons. Also, given the context Beard provides, how fabulous, radical and necessary are those irreverent gifs that take these silent and silenced women and let them speak up? You thought they'd keep quiet because you painted them that way?

The second essay in Women and Power looks at women politicians and the way they’re depicted as figures who essentially castrate their male opponents. That is what makes them fearsome. Beard also makes a fascinating point about the Greek goddess Athena, goddess of wisdom and (potentially) cousin of Saraswati — “In the Greek sense, she’s not a woman at all” because she’s a warrior (which is, of course, a masculine role) and a virgin (which means no motherhood) and she’s constantly shown in armour (keeping her femininity somewhat literally under wraps).

Life-changing? No. For that I’d recommend reading bell hooks or Naomi Klein. But Beard’s is a fun and informative read. Plus, you have to love the universe’s sense of humour that the female author of feminist works is named “Beard”.

One of my favourite books of the year — a claim I can make with some confidence on December 29 — is Vandana Singh’s Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories. I’m no expert on science fiction, but the futures and alternative realities that Singh imagines in this volume were utterly enchanting. Singh is a professor of physics and there is a lot of science in her science fiction. I have no qualms in admitting I didn’t even try to make sense of the science bits. I just took her word for it and relished the way she wrote about the people and the fantastical worlds in which her stories are set. Like all good science fiction, the unrecognisable bits – space ships, weird gadgets, time travel – are anchored in very normal realities that all of us recognise, like the love for a parent, disillusionment with the workplace, nostalgia for an old friendship, the longing for companionship. Much of the book feels like entering someone’s dreams – everything’s weird, but it all feels like it makes sense.

It sounds superficial, but one of the first things that struck me about Ambiguity Machines was that so many characters had names that are recognisably south Asian. For instance, “With Fate Conspire” is set in a future Kolkata in which scientists are desperately trying to sift through the past to figure out the moment that needs to be tweaked in order to prevent the apocalypse that threatens their present. The have a Machine that lets you look into the past, but only some people can make sense of what they see. The woman who has this ability ends up looking back at the life of Rassundari, who in our non-speculative reality wrote the first proper autobiography in Bengali. So here’s a story that travels through Calcuttas and Kolkatas of different eras, filling itself with Kajoris and Rassundaris along the way.

I wasn’t disappointed by any of the stories in Ambiguity Machines, though some felt immersive than others. I loved the ‘slum’ that Singh imagines on the outskirts of Delhi in “Indra’s Web”, a place where the city meets the forest but not in conflict. “Ambiguity Machines” is a collection of three stories in which people use mysterious devices to different ends. In one, a Mongolian engineer creates a “metaphoric” machine to conjure the image of his beloved while he is imprisoned and far away from her. In the second, a mathematician finds a path through a pattern that transports her to another time and place. The last one is about an archaeologist who finds a community of empaths — whatever one feels, so do the others. After receiving these three accounts, the reader is asked to put these accounts “in context”. You’ve got to love a story that ends with one word: “Begin.”

From science fiction to unrelenting reality — Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver.

My first thought when I reached the second chapter of this book was “Antakshari”, which is a game a lot of us played as kids in which you sing a song starting with the last word or letter of the previous person’s song. In Unsheltered, the last words of chapter one make for the title of chapter two, and this pattern continues for the whole book. The last two words of the book are “falling house”, which fittingly enough, is where Kingsolver’s novel begins — with a house that’s falling apart. Willa Knox and her husband Iano have lived an unremarkable, normal life. They’ve done everything right, as Willa points out more than once, but here they are, at the threshold of Trumpian America, with a house that’s collapsing on them, floundering in debt and trying to keep together a family that seems determined to disintegrate. About 150 years ago, Thatcher Greenwood felt much as Willa did. He had done all the right things too, from studying sensible subjects to marrying the right kind of woman, but there he was, in a house that was even then structurally unsound and a family that was falling apart.

Unsheltered flits between the 20th and 19th centuries, telling us two stories that are very different from one another in terms of plot, but intimately similar in emotional terms. Willa is trying to find a way to survive the avalanche of hardships that have come her and her family’s way. They include death, debt, a dying relative, unemployment and of course, the falling house in Vineland, a township set up in the 1860s by one Charles Landis. One of the early residents of Vineland is Thatcher, a schoolteacher who finds himself in an impossible situation when he realises that his bosses won’t let him teach what he considers science. Darwin’s theories are blasphemy here and as far as much of Vineland is concerned, the Bible is all the science that anyone needs.

Willa, who ends up being a writer who goes through Vineland’s archives to write a book about its early days, feels very close to Kingsolver herself. More real though is the character of Mary Treat, a naturalist who is best known for being one of Darwin’s letter-writing pals but to me is particularly remarkable because she was a divorcee who made her living from freelance writing.

The 19th century plot sees Thatcher and Mary Treat become friends and Thatcher take on the faithful in a public debate that’s great fun to read. It only gets depressing when you realise that you could easily have exactly that debate in so many places today, given the rise of the Creationists in America and our Indian homebrew of “Ancient Hindus Did It First”. So long as Thatcher has to tiptoe around his boss in order to keep his salary, he’s unhappy but ready to compromise. It’s when things escalate to murder that Thatcher decides it’s time to break free (with apologies to Freddie Mercury and Queen). Meanwhile in the 20th century, we see the warp and weft of Willa’s relationships with her husband and two children. This is a world that struck dumb with despair. Everything seems worse than it was before. Every dream is shattered. Every hope is saddled with conditions and conditions of repayment. But just when you least expect it, everyone learns to adapt. Somewhere up there, Darwin is high-fiving himself.

I think Kingsolver folded everything that frustrates her about America today into Unsheltered, and what is truly remarkable is that she didn’t lose sight of structure or plot while mining this emotional territory. I wouldn’t say it’s one of my favourite reads of the year, but it’s an excellent, thought-provoking novel. Now if someone would just write a proper biography of Mary Treat… .

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And for those interested, here’s what I’ve written and blogged this past month. In Cutty Snark, my column in the Hindustan Times, I wrote about
Why it was a big deal that actual FIRs were registered against two people who have been accused of sexual harassment/ rape by women colleagues
Rajinikanth’s 2.0 and Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next”
The film Kedarnath and Rohini Devasher’s show Hopeful Monsters
Zero by Aanand L. Rai, starring Katrina Kaif, Shah Rukh Khan and others

I also wrote this op-ed on the need for political and radical art, pegged to the wonderful retrospective of Navjot Altaf's work that is on at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai.

I’ve also been blogging bits and bobs, like this one on notebooks (contains Joan Didion) and this one on artist and activist Tushar Joag (RIP).

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So that, dear reader, is all I’ve got for you as 2018 draws to a close. Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter. If it’s been a good year for you, then may 2019 be even better. Everyone else, take heart from the fact it’s practically done and dusted. Happy 2019. May the force be with us.