South Asia Reading Challenge

In the process of packing up my bags and home 2 weeks ago a tweet by @robcrilly caught my eye: read and review six books with a South Asian connection in 2011. This was right up my alley - now I have landed perhaps I should say gulli. I set to task, enthusiastically noting down titles for my shortlist that night. This brainstorm blizzard of 19 titles clearly left me far from 6! With bags to pack and key departure questions still outstanding, it was set to one side.

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Since then I've made the plane - and flown from London, over (most notably) Afghanistan and Pakistan, which rewarded the most wow-ing views when I opened the window shutter mid-flight, to land on the banks of the Ganges in the holy city of Benaras (Varanasi).

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When I opened the shutter in the flight... The view was breathtaking. It had been night until this point. The first pic is taken over Afghanistan, to the west-south-west of Kabul. In the second picture you can see the snowy mountains meeting their outwash plain and then the arrival of drier mountains (to the left), which would soon become west Pakistan.

And so it was this evening in Varanasi that I brought out my list and resolved to repack it more neatly. Sitting over a thali and chai along one of the many gullis that nudge against the famous ghats I came up with this:

1. The Immigrant, Manju Kapur (2010) - on the shortlist for the South Asian Literature Prize which will be announced at the Jaipur Literature Festival next week (21-15 Jan). Incidentally - my next destination!

2. Empires of the Indus, Alice Albinia (2009) - "Following the [Indus] River upstream and back in time... "

3. Maharanis, Lucy Moore (2004) - the lives of four influential women, each a princess of the royal courts of India, through the Raj era into independence.

4. The Wandering Faldon, Jamil Ahmad (2011) - Jamil Ahmad's short story in Granta 112: Pakistan ('The Sins of the Mother') was very powerful, and remarkable for its writing. It was here that I learned that at 77 he is about to publish his first work of fiction.

5. The Cloud Messanger, Aamer Hussain (2011) - Another Gulmohar Tree was a rare treat and I couldn't leave trying his next collection of short stories out of this.

6. Ghalib at Dusk, and other stories, Nighat M. Gandhi (2009) - the blurb says: "set in cities resonant with the subcontient's history - Karachi, Allahabad, Ahmedabad - Nighat Gandhi's stories are about alternative lives." The author was born in Bangladesh, lived in Pakistan in the 90s and is now settled in India, affording quite a rare perspective on the region.


On heading to the Jaipur Literature Festival this week I expect my reading shelf might get a little plumper! With full rights reserved to swap, add and junk titles, here we go....

First up is The Immigrant, which at 106 pages in I am loving.

Link: South Asia Reading Challenge

Snow in Shacklewell, E8 (1.47pm, 18/12/10)

A moment in time on Shacklewell Green

"Find the truth and then live by it"

Urban Retreat 2010 at the London Buddhist Centre, 11-19 September 2010

Art in the mohalla

This is Shacklewell Lane.

On the corner of Shacklewell Lane, London E8, where Kingsland curves into Hackney this advertisement for Boyd Pianos has long remained. Peeling wallpaper from a time past. And then overnight this graffiti/art arrived. I believe it is Fidel Castro who made his first official appearance in four years yesterday, warning of the threat of nuclear war.

The very modern advertisment above is for the Pekünlü mini-market where I often shop.

'An Elegy for Easterly'

Petina Gappah and her debut collection of short stories 'An Elegy for Easterly' deserve a follow-up (see last Sunday's post). It really is quite a wonderful collection. The 13 stories are set (with only one exception) in Zimbabwe - the Zimbabwe of the last two generations, the Zimbabwe of Robert Mugabe. This would not ordinarily draw me to a book; it was in fact the personal connection of having seen Petina speak with such liveliness at a festival that made her, and her book, remain in my mind. There is a lightness of touch, despite the tough, often brutal, tragic, world she shines her light on. The way she crafts these stories is so exquisite - like being kissed by the wind or unearthing woven gossamer. The stories are full of mysteries and secrets, and there is a mishieviousness in the writing as surprises are sprung on us, or on the characters, or as we fumble around in the prose to catch up with the world we have just creaked open the door onto.

There is a profusion of sex and death, the stuff of life. A politician's widow watches on as her husband's coffin is buried empty; a maid is found drowned after being cast pregnant from the house she has served for 2 years, the best nurse-maid they ever had; on the cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom Aids is all too evident for all the wedding party to see, and it is in those lips Rosie's own fate is sealed. The people of these pages are in many ways like any other; they love and laugh, and they have as much capacity to endure suffering as inflict it. But they find themselves living in an extraordinary world, where a loaf of bread costs half a million dollars and the news is always good news, no matter what. Here we find humour and irony, as well as tragedy.

It was in these characters and in the beauty of the crafting of their stories that I found hope. There is anguish here, yes, but in pages of such fineness of touch and vision and in the characters that lift gracefully from them, I couldn't find myself fully or perpetually crushed. There must be hope, I thought.

"For people who read all the time, reading has a quest to it"

Candia McWilliam - writer & reader, who found herself suddenly struck blind in 2006 whilst judging the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Optimism

This week I have experienced the reignition of my love - nay passion - for books, literature, the word. My desire is to socialise in the worlds I find in pages, with the characters and ideas that dance across them. I am currently with Petina Gappah in 'An Elegy for Easterly', a collection of short stories set in contemporary Zimbabwe. The first two were delicious. I encountered Petina for the first time at the Free the Word Festival at The Globe theatre in March 2009. (At this year's festival I saw Nawal el Sadaawi who I have also been thinking about again - the word "resistance" in the poem below instantly brought her to mind). Petina was one of four upcoming writers at the session titled "International Futures". 'Easterly' as she often refers to it on her blog - and which is a good place to encounter her sparkling personality - was on the eve of being published that week. Six months later it won the Guardian First Book award.

Well so far I am impressed and it is the sort of book that makes me want to write - and read. The cover is beautiful, so I leave you with that; and also the epigraph to the novel. This is a poem called 'Optimism' by American poet Jane Hirshfield. I loved these words. Petina sets them before her unravelling world of resilience against Robert Mugabe's regime. But they are words that speak to us all, and of the world itself since the beginning of Time.

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the
. . . . . . sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked
. . . . . . on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs - all this resinous, unretractable
. . . . . . earth.

Jane Hirshfield, 'Optimism'