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Keepers of Heaven’s Gateway

Image from Deccan Chronicle “ Doms are the keepers of a sacred flame – supposedly burning for centuries – over which they have sole ownership. Lighting each funeral pyre with the Doms’ fire is considered not only auspicious but also crucial. Without it, it is alleged, a devout Hindu will not receive moksha, liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth .” [ Fire on the Ganges ] Doms are an untouchable caste of people living on the banks of the Ganga in Varanasi, a place dear to Lord Shiva. The Hindus believe that if they die in Varanasi, their souls will attain the ultimate deliverance from the cycle of birth and death. If they cannot die there, at least the corpse should be cremated there. Doms are the corpse-burners in Varanasi. Though these Dalits called Doms are untouchable by caste, they are the gate-keepers of heaven. Radhika Iyengar’s book, Fire on the Ganges [HarperCollins, 2023], tells us the story of the Doms, a story of oppression and exploitation. Obliquely, this is

The Tenderness of Love

Book Review Title: The Travelling Cat Chronicles Author: Hiro Arikawa Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel Publisher: Penguin Random House, 2019 Pages: 249 This book will touch the most tender core of your heart. It is a love story with a difference: it is love between a man and his cat. Right from page one to the last page, this novel gives the reader a feeling of tenderness. Reading this novel is like sitting on the side of a beautiful mountain brook and listening to the gurgling of water while feeling the gossamer caress of the cool breeze on your body. I bought this book precisely because I have four pet cats who all have a special place each in my heart. If you love cats, this book will keep you hooked. Even if you don’t have a soft corner for those creatures, you will still love this book for the tenderness it makes you feel. The author, Hiro Arikawa, is a cat-lover, obviously.  Hiro Arikawa with her cat Satoru Miyawaki is a young man who takes care of a

Dudiya

Book Review Title: Dudiya: In Your Burning Land Author: Vishwas Patil Translator: Nadeem Khan Publisher: Niyogi Books, New Delhi, 2023 Pages: 220 According to official data, 25% of India’s land is forest. In reality, only 12% is forest. The rest has been encroached on by the corporate sector with the permission of the government. Even the Modi government which pretends to be corruption-free and idealistic has altered the forest laws in order to hand over certain forest land to some corporate bigwigs under various guises including environment protection! The people who are most affected by these shady deals between the Indian government and the corporate sector are the tribals and Adivasis living in the forests. This novel by Vishwas Patil, written originally in Marathi, is about these shady affairs in the forests of the country, particularly in Dandakaranya in Chhattisgarh. Dudiya is a real character, an Adivasi woman whose people were betrayed first by the government

Killers of the Flower Moon

Book Review   Title: Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Murder and the Birth of the FBI Author: David Grann Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2017 Pages: 339 Human greed has no limits. Worse, greed can make people inhuman. David Grann’s book which is classified as ‘history’ reads more like a crime thriller. It tells us the bloodcurdling history of how almost an entire tribe of people, the Osage Indians of Oklahoma, were killed with meticulous planning by a few individuals whose greed overwhelmed their humanity. A few hundred people were killed and many of those deaths were passed off as natural. The author of this book quotes the Osage historian Louis F Burns, “I don’t know of a single Osage family which didn’t lose at least one family member because of the head rights.” The head rights refer to the legal grants given to the Osage people for selling the oil in their lands. The whites in North America perpetrated many atrocities on the original inhabitants of those lands. E

History and Fiction

Book Review Title: Conversations with Aurangzeb Author: Charu Nivedita Translated from Tamil by Nandini Krishnan Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 335 History claims to give us truths and fiction really gives us glimpses into truths. Tamil novelist Charu Nivedita’s Conversations with Aurangzeb is in fact history masquerading as a novel. It is fiction inasmuch as Aurangzeb makes an apparition through a medium to the narrator who is a writer doing some research for his next novel. But it is not a novel because there is nothing that can be called a plot. It’s all conversation between the narrator and the spirit of the Mughal emperor. Occasionally a few other characters make their appearances, but they don’t add anything to the plot. How much can we trust history? This is the question that the writer explores in this novel. It is a cliché that history is written by the winners. It gets rewritten when new winners emerge. For example, India’s history is being rewritt

A Thousand Cuts

Book Review Title: A Thousand Cuts: An innocent question and deadly answers Author: T J Joseph Translator: Nandakumar K Having read the Malayalam original of this book, I turned to my mobile phone to catch up with the latest news. The first headline that Google gave me is: Darul Huda Islamic University comes out against Literature Festival in Kerala . This book is written by a college professor whose palm was chopped off with a hatchet in 2010 by a group of young Muslim terrorists. He was attacked brutally while he was returning from Sunday church service. He was stabbed in many places and some of the wounds were near-fatal. His palm was chopped off and thrown away. This book, written originally in Malayalam, tells us why the professor was attacked so inhumanly and how it changed his life quite radically. What provoked the terrorists was a particular question that the professor had set in the Malayalam question paper for the undergraduates of his college. It was an internal

All the light we cannot see

Book Review Title: All the light we cannot see Author: Anthony Doerr Publisher: Fourth Estate, London, 2014 Pages: 531 What we call light is just a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. Most part of the electromagnetic spectrum remains beyond ordinary human perception. Such is human life too: so many of its shades remain beyond our ordinary perception and understanding. Anthony Doerr’s novel, All the light we cannot see , unravels for us some of the mysterious shades of human life. Marie-Laure LeBlanc leaves Paris with her father Daniel who is entrusted with the task of carrying a rare diamond, Sea of Flames , to safe custody when the second world war breaks out. The National Museum of Natural History, Paris, has made three counterfeit diamonds of the Sea of Flames. Four men are assigned the task of carrying each of these diamonds to four different destinations. None of them knows whether they are carrying the original diamond or the counterfeit. Marie-Laure a

Gods and Ends

  Book Review Title: Gods and Ends Author: Lindsay Pereira Publisher: Penguin Vintage, 2021 Pages: 205 This is a book which presents characters taken from real life. You will think, as you read the novel, that you know this character and this and this too. Only the names sound different, even exotic: Vaz, D’Souza, Sequeira, and so on. All the characters are Goan Catholics living in Orlem, Mumbai. All the major characters are tenants of Obrigado Mansion, a rundown building belonging to aged Francisco Fernandez who lives with his daughter-in-law, occupying two of the rooms in the mansion. All other rooms are occupied by families that are grappling with quite a few problems. There are five families plus one widow who lives alone in one of the rooms. Each one of these characters catches our attention with their unique earthiness. The Sequeira family in Room 108, for example, is headed by Jude Sequeira who is little more than an alcoholic. He has a job in a factory. But since hi

Quarterlife

  Book Review Title: Quarterlife Author: Devika Rege Publisher: HarperCollins Fourth Estate, 2023 Pages: 403 This novel left me quite puzzled. So I returned to it with a staunch determination to read it again because I read some of the rave reviews it had received. What did I miss? I didn’t read it again entirely. I just couldn’t. It didn’t make that sort of appeal to me. I went through certain parts again. It didn’t create any better impression on me. But it had been long-listed for the Booker and many reviewers of good journals found it excellent. Something within me agreed with those reviews too. The Hindu said that “every page you turn, the book’s universe mirrors our everyday reality, the hyperfused gaze magnifying the cracks.” The Hindu ’s fortnightly publication, Frontline , said that the novel is “thickly packed with ideas that threaten to clog its flow until the narrative changes gear towards the end, saving the day.” The Hindustan Times thought that the author

Book of Thrillers

Book Review In spite of the common theme – thrillers – that holds fifteen short stories together, this slim volume is beyond easy classification. You enter a phantasmagorical world as you open this book. Restless ghosts and souls in search of redemption will jolt you in some of the stories. Quest for justice and thirst for revenge are recurring themes. Blood is spilt on many pages. Love yearns to blossom on a few pages. These are all stories written by bloggers who have made their mark in their own characteristic ways. These 15 bloggers are brought together by a community known as Blogchatter which supports and inspires bloggers in many ways. As a member of that community, I’d readily agree with Blogchatter’s claim in the introduction to this book: “This book isn’t just about the 15 authors who have contributed their stories but also the rest of the community who are the wind beneath their wings.” I would like this review to look at each of the stories, albeit briefly, becaus

Quasi-Humans

Book Review Title: Soft Animal Author: Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2023 Pages: 261   Very many people – too many, in fact – live partial lives. That is, most people don’t explore the depths of anything: the meaning of their life, of their love, of their religion, whatever. There is no passion about anything. Consequently, life becomes dull, even painful. This novel is about the dull pain experienced by a woman in her mid-thirties. She is married to a rich man who was in a love-relationship with her for long enough before marriage. He is an IT professional and she is a homemaker. Mukund Chugh and Mallika Rao. A rich Punjabi boy and the not-so-rich “south Indian girl” (as her in-laws refer to her). Mukund is a good guy. Mallika, the first-person narrator tells us that “All my life I had wanted to be with someone like Mukund, someone so sure of themselves and their identity.” But disillusionment follows soon enough. Entering into married