Newsletter: Year end recap edition

December 31st, and tomorrow is both a Monday and the beginning of a new year. It seems a bit silly to set so much store by a calendar date, but I'm sort of swept up in the global excitement. It seems like a new year is like a blank page in a brand new notebook: anything could happen. Anything could also happen on the first of September for example, but you know what I mean. It's also the day when you look back on the year that passed and do a report card for yourself. Ends of years are useful for taking stock, especially on a cold morning like this one, when the sun is weakly pushing through the fog, and your hot water bottle is warm against your belly.

I had a pretty good year. Some self-doubt crept in re: my writing, but I hope to conquer the little critical voices in my head and move on in 2018. After all, as a writer of fiction, you should exist only to please yourself and not the sales figures or literary festivals or what have you. Maybe there will always be self doubt, because there's always someone you compare yourself to, and we all, ultimately, want to be JK Rowling or Neil Gaiman, or failing that, Margaret Atwood. I'm grateful to my readers though, and everyone who has sent me a message or an email saying that they liked my books and what I do, it's very heartening, especially when you think you're going it alone. A few things will be recalibrated for me in 2018, but they are all baby, nascent ideas, and I'll tell you all about them when they are actually in practice. I will be finishing the next book of my Girls Of The Mahabharata series early next year and I have an essay out in a Penguin anthology which will be released in February, so I'm still writing, and writing makes me happy. (It's only post publishing that all the doubts start to creep in.)

Anyway, that's the bitterness of the pill, here's the sweet!

This year in life events: We got married! We were never very marriage-y people, but we came to the decision with the same certainity we've approached most things in our relationship: it's the right thing for us to do at this point. The boring reason: we wanted it to be easier to live and work in each other's countries. The romantic reason: love and all those other things. Our wedding was almost exactly how I wanted it to be (the only thing I would change was not being so tired after three days of partying--despite the fact that we had a "low key" wedding, we wound up having three parties anyway. Small intimate parties, but parties nonetheless.) Life has... not changed a bit. Most often, we forget we're married, except when we're using wedding presents around the house.


This year in bucket lists: I loved my month in Europe, even though now, five months later, it's taken on the dreamy quality in my memory of someone else's life. We went from Germany to Spain, from Spain to France, from France to Luxembourg, from Luxembourg to the Netherlands (via Belgium.) I got to see Europe by road, by train and by plane. I got to have expensive meals (at the beginning of my trip) and two euro steak and wine (at the end) and I loved all of it, even being broke, a little bit. Through my entire trip, I had this vague feeling of standing outside my body watching myself: pinch me, this is real, this is happening.

This year in writing: Many MANY freelance assignments. A few of my favourites: fancy book launches in Mint, how The Handmaid's Tale is relevant in modern India for Scroll, re-examining Marilla Cuthbert for Indian Express, on children's literature for Mint again, on reading the childhood memoirs of your favourite authors for Open, on why myth-lit is so popular for Deccan Chronicle. This plus several columns made my year one of heavy reading.

I also had a new book (The One Who Swam With The Fishes) out last summer, and read a lot more about the Mahabharata than I ever expected I would, and now I can rattle off back stories and sub-plots and literary analyses like a pro.

This year in little luxuries: My favourite money spend this year was hiring someone to do our garden for us. It was a bit expensive setting up, all the pots and soil and what not, but Ram Lal is a genius and I love that we barely ever buy veg anymore, since we have a steady crop of things to eat around the year. It has really changed the way I live my life, just the simple fact that we're growing FOOD. I now know the colours of the aubergine flower (purple, like the fruit), how pretty the lauki flower is in the hot sunshine, and how everything tastes so much better when you can just reach out and pluck it.

This year in habits: Getting K a compost bin for his birthday was changing the way we process trash in this house. We still put out a lot of paper and plastic (I blame Amazon and their easy next-day deliveries), but no wet waste at all, it all goes into our bin. He liked it so much, he bought a second one, and while I still find it somewhat icky, it doesn't smell, and the gardener uses it in our plants so it's all very circle of life.

This year in life lessons: A project that seemed super definite and like it was going to be a Thing, did not, finally wind up happening the way I expected it to, so I have learned to, um, curb my enthusiasm, so to speak. This is the year my optimism started to fade, just a little bit, and become tempered with realism. I think I'll always be a rose tinted glasses kind of person, but every now and then you have to take your glasses off and really look at the world.

And that's my report card! Let me know how the year worked out for you in the comments at the bottom of this. Happy New Year, and I'll see you all on the other side.

Short review: Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama

I'm calling it. This is the last book I will read in 2017. Gorgeous Japanese crime fiction which is a great way to explore a country I have always wanted to go to. #bookstagram #mrmbookclub #nowreading

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New year's resolution: get through my to-be-read pile while also finishing off my next book and managing to have a social life and also finding time for travel and things. Not a very big ask, I don't think. #bookstagram #mrmbookclub

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Tsundoku: Two memoirs and one narrative non-fiction book I loved

(A version of this appeared as my column for BLInk in July)

I realised after I made the list for the books I was going to include in this edition that all of them were either autobiography or narrative non-fiction. This is a pleasant departure for me, since my leisure reading is almost always fiction, but I had made a resolution last year to add more non-fiction to my list. Do memoirs count as non-fiction? They're mostly stories—and the gold standard for non-fiction is those heavy-with-research tomes which are still light and readable. I buy them with every good intention and a few months later, they're paperweights or are propping up my projector. Oh well. These three books should help ease you into that set if you're a fellow fictionhead too.

Water cooler: We're all thinking it: how does an author like Ruskin Bond, who writes about unstylish things like walking in the hills and rooms on roofs, stay so enduringly popular? He doesn't even do the lit fest circuits, even though from all accounts, he's unfailing pleasant and generous with his time if you meet him in person. And yet, this year saw not one, not two but three memoir-y books by Bond: a reading memoir, recollections of his father, and the one everyone's talking about, Lone Fox Dancing, his straight up autobiography. I've been a Bond fan since I was little and he was twice a “required reading” book on my school syllabus, but having long outgrown the markets and vistas he talks about, it was almost like a reunion for me, it had been so long since we had last met. Lone Fox Dancing is marked by Bond's quiet style, the people are real and well-described, the story meanders from plot point to plot point like a gentle river, and all of it so vivid and so real, it's like it happened yesterday. Through it also the reader gets a sense of Bond's intense loneliness: the child abandoned, practically, by his mother who creates a new family for herself, the beloved father who dies young, the young student in search of love and finally, the adult who retreats into isolation by choice. Lone Fox Dancing by Ruskin Bond, Speaking Tiger Publishing, Rs 599.

Watchlist: The biggest news to hit my social media feed recently was the case of Zohra Bibi, a domestic worker employed in a building society in Noida, who didn't go home one night because she had been locked into a room by her employers. Her friends and neighbours rose up en masse, FIRs were filed, and think pieces abounded. About the perfect time to read Tripti Lahiri's new book: Maid In India: Stories Of Inequality and Opportunity Inside Our Homes. Lahiri speaks to the bosses as well as the maids, cutting a neat cross-section across the country: from the villages the women have left to make new homes in the cities, to the quiet, birdsong-filled mansions of Lutyen's Delhi. I wish she had spoken to more of the male help that exists, the drivers, the “man Fridays” and so on, but I suppose that would have been a different sort of book. As with all texts and stories about “the help” in India, you'll probably be left feeling guilty and defensive or smug and “I do what I can” but it's also worth examining your own responses to the book to figure out how the great inequality that exists in India works on you. Maid In India: Stories of Inequality And Opportunity Inside Our Homes by Tripti Lahiri, Aleph Book Company, Rs 599.

Wayback: Since I made this list thinking of memoirs, I'm recommending one of my all-time favourite autobiographies as the nostalgia pick for this week. I got put on to Agatha Christie's An Autobiography from a Facebook post made by a friend, instantly got it for my Kindle and spent the next week (it's gloriously fat) wrapped up in Christieland. Even non-mystery lovers will find things to love about her recollections of a Victorian childhood, growing up during the war, her house and her pets and her sister, the minutiae of life that is so engaging when you're reading about someone else's. The mysterious years after her husband left her where she just vanished are never alluded to, I'm afraid, but there's plenty about how she worked during the war in the pharmacy of a hospital and thereby got acquainted with all the poisons she puts into her mysteries. Also, about how much she hated Hercule Poirot. An Autobiography by Agatha Christie, Harper Collins, Rs 250.

Newsletter: The return of the part-time hermit

But I'm also writing my new book so THERE

I have been reading the Penguin Book Of British Short Stories (volume II from PG Wodehouse to Zadie Smith) which is not only reminding me how much I love the short story--sort of got out of the habit last year--but also included a gorgeous story by Evelyn Waugh, who I have never read before. Called The Cruise, it's letters from a young lady of leisure while she does a cruise to Egypt, and each of her letters has "Goodness how Sad" in them, and in one of them, a postcard, she makes it just "G how S" and now that phrase is stuck in my head. Squishy and Bruno fight? G how S. My coffee spills? G how S. I even woke up in the morning thinking "G how S" and it's a very convenient phrase for all manner of things.

The last time I was obsessed with a line I read in a book was way back in 90s, when I read Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris, and Fadiman, pregnant, is wandering about the house at night, wanting a piece of cheese "toasted mostly." My friend Nayantara and I had a whole bit about toasted mostly, and mostly toasted, and I think G how S that we don't really do things like that anymore. I think it's because people seldom read the same books at the same time anymore--books with memorable lines in them anyway, and the last time I can remember a collective fad as it were was with the Harry Potter books, and that's why we can still reference them today. I was re-reading Harry Potter just recently, the last two books, and now I've gone back to the beginning with Philosopher's Stone and G how S that they're over and I'll never read them for the first time again.

(I'll stop.) (But G how S.)


This week in domesticity: My cousin gave us an Instant Pot for our wedding, and it's been sitting in its box on top of the kitchen shelves for a long time, since we didn't have a transformer to convert the voltage (American to Indian.) It didn't even occur to me when I asked for it that it would need a transformer, because I'm used to buying things from Europe should I need to. (Well, not used to buying things from Europe, that sounds like I just whip out and order like French cheeses or something all the time. I mean that we've bought electronics from Europe before, on our last two trips and they haven't needed any fancy plugs.) Finally, we bought a massive box to change the voltage, which was more expensive than I expected it to be, having never bought one before, but luckily it is blue and matches the kitchen tiles and we have snuck it into a corner and stacked cookbooks on top of it so it looks inoffensive.

SO the Instant Pot. It's basically an electric pressure cooker, with a slow cooking and yogurt making option (also rice), but it's so insanely popular that there's a whole cult movement around it. Here are just two of the articles I found when searching for "instant pot why popular." I began using mine just yesterday and I feel like as a reluctant cook, it has cut down a lot of the guesswork for me, because... dun dun DUN, it has a TIMER. I just set the thing and leave it to do its work, no counting whistles, no need to turn down the stove. I made a coconut chicken curry yesterday and a cauliflower soup today (our winter veggies are basically just cauliflower and aubergine, so we have bumper crops of each.) Both SO good, and I'm totally giving all credit to the pot. I've also been kinda scared of the regular pressure cooker since the one time I tried to use it, it exploded (sort of) and there were vegetables everywhere.

And the soup! You guys, if you've never made a soup from scratch, only those packet ones, there's this wholesome Martha Stewart type feeling that floods through you. I made this soup, you think. SOUP. I MADE. And it tasted good! Plus, if you don't like veggies, it's a good way of disguising them and still eating healthy.

And lest you think I've only turned to domesticity and given up my social life, I'll have you know I went to two very fancy parties this week.

This week in oops, maybe that was a bad bargain: I bought a one month membership to Ola Select, but honestly, it wasn't really worth it. Sure, it's cheaper to get an "Ola Prime" but those are usually just beat up Swift Dzires, and I'd rather have a new Wagon R, I think. Also, it takes SO LONG to get a cab, which is not usually the case with Uber. With Ola, your waiting time shows up as "ten minutes" and then, half an hour later, it's STILL ten minutes. Makes it very hard to go out unless you've planned to book your cab thirty minutes in advance, which you know, I got out of the habit of. Will not be renewing I don't think, even though I really wanted to love Ola, since Uber is so evil.


Saturday reading list for those of you sitting at home today drinking soup:


Round ups:

* The best children's books of 2017.
* These very hyped gadgets went out of business, so a memorabilia gift guide to 2017.
* Things that offended Indians in 2017.
* A hater's guide to a posh Christmas catalogue.
* And finally, every single year end list because we can't get enough.

 

People assume that to choose to live in a cold place is to choose austerity and a life without comfort. Because, of course, to escape the cold—to winter in the tropics, retire under the sun, take off for the islands at Christmas—has always meant you had achieved a certain level of success. But a cold life is not without its own riches. There are clear winter days when the surface of the snow glitters like diamonds. We have access to silence, one of the rarest commodities. And cold ocean waters make for extravagant dinners: salmon hooked minutes before, clams and mussels gathered into buckets by cold hands, oysters slurped raw so that you can feel the ocean dribbling deliciously down your throat.

- In defense of winter in Alaska.

 

More and more, however, families and friends of those who die on Everest and the world’s other highest peaks want and expect the bodies to be brought home. For them and those tasked with recovering the bodies — an exercise that can be more dangerous and far more costly than the expedition that killed the climber in the first place — the drama begins with death.

 

- I LOVE Everest stories, and this one is insane and sad all at the same time.

 

The Love Commandos, on the other hand, advertises a one-time fee that covers the cost of a wedding ceremony and registration; couples are invited to stay as long as they need. Perhaps more important is Sachdev’s promise to protect them even when it compromises his safety. Armed men and disgraced relatives routinely come knocking, he said, and at least four khaps have issued bounties for his death. None have made good on their promise, but he and his colleagues have been beaten. “Look, we are madmen,” he explained. “We are not scared of dying.”

 

- In a year of bad news re: choosing who you love, here's a lovely story about India's Love Commandos.

Ugh, why can't I just buy face cream already without being hit with a patriarchal burden?

(This appeared in  February 2016)

Today I tried to buy a face cream. (Yes, I know, I know, they're mostly a rip-off, and there's no science that says regular body lotion can't be used on your face, but I'm a woman and susceptible to these things.) I say “tried” because no matter how many search results I saw online—and I waded through loads—all of them offered me “whiteness improving night cream” or “fair and bright day cream.” Nothing was just plain old face cream, as far as I could tell, until I landed on one simple one, not at all as nicely packaged as the others, but a face cream that was just that: cream for your face, without any added transformative effects.

The page refreshes to show items that are “based on your order” after you buy something. Here's what I got for the cream I had so painstakingly purchased because it didn't offer me a two-for-one fairness deal: Whitening Day Cream and Whitening Face Wash. The website seemed to be taunting me: oh, you didn't get the fairness cream? Why not add it now? It reminded me eerily of going to a beauty parlour and having my eyebrows done when I was younger with the beautician asking if I didn't want a “detanning facial” or a scrub. When I'd say no, I was quite happy with my tan, she'd make a face and say, “Well, your eyebrows are very weird.” (I stopped threading my eyebrows into oblivion after it was made quite clear that no one actually noticed my eyebrows even though that whole operation is extremely painful.)

White facing like a boss

I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised that fairness has become the default for beauty. From people having a choice to aspire to be fair, bringing about brands such as Fair And Lovely (and its male counterpart, Fair And Handsome), it's become something companies think you want so much that they don't seem to make any other options.

My first reaction was to blame the companies. I mean, if Olay or Garnier or Lakme weren't pretending these were the only ways women could keep their skin beautiful then we wouldn't buy into it. But then it's probably also the customer's fault. Sadly we've been conditioned to think that our skin needs to be pink and white to be beautiful—something that's almost impossible for most of the country. If you think of India itself by its skin colour, it varies so much that yes, some of us are fair—but there's milky fair which becomes bluish or yellowish fair, moving into a reddish tinge and then there are all the browns: from golden skin to light brown to dark brown to very very dark brown. We have them all—and the funny thing is that no beauty company has found a way to market to that. I, with my coffee-coloured skin, would enjoy a cream made for my complexion, as would someone who was perfectly fine with the amount of “white” they were and just wanted to stay that way and not get any paler.

The most ironic thing is that they don't actually work. Nothing can make you fairer if you have melanin in your skin. It's something that you know and I know, but people all over the country are buying into this myth, and therefore buying into the companies. Week after week they slather these snake oils on their skin and when they don't as the ads say “grow many shades lighter” they're deeply disappointed. The consumer court made Emami Limited, a skin care product company known for their brand Fair And Handsome, pay a 15 lakh fine for misrepresenting costumers. The complainant was a man called Nikhil Jain from Mumbai who said he didn't see any difference in his face after 3 weeks, even though he had been using the cream.

[I find it interesting that a man brought in this case, because I'm sure there are thousands, if not millions of women in India who have thought the same thing and haven't had the courage to admit they wanted to be more beautiful. Interesting also that according to a sales trend report done by Snapdeal recently, more men than women are buying fairness creams and grooming products.)

I would like options. We'd all like options. And I'd like people to be more careful about what they promise in advertising. Is this an utopian ideal? Perhaps. But if enough of us want it—like enough of us want fairness creams—maybe it'll happen.

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2017 has been kinda great for me and I'm a little guilty because the world didn't gave such a good year and I'm a little fearful because what if I jinx it for next year but still it's important to acknowledge that for me 2017. Has. Been. Wonderful. #throwback to #barcelona, my brand new engagement rings on my finger. #traveldiary

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Merry Christmas! I hope all of you got books in the mail like I did this morning. My mother gave me an Amazon gift card and I have spent part of it on books. Which adds to my now tottering TBR pile but hey, I'm an addict. From left to right: winner of the PEN/Faulkner award, a book that's been on my wish list for a long time because it's one of the best food memoirs out there and a new Japanese crime thriller because I've never read any from that country. #bookstagram #mrmbookclub #christmas #booksarealwaysagoodidea

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We're the gin in the gin soaked girlllllls. #reunited

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An open letter to the man who thought he was being supportive but really wound up sounding patronising

(This appeared as my F Word column in March 2016)

Dear Man At A Recent Event I Was Speaking At Who Stood Up To Say, “I think mothers are the epitome of power and we should respect mothers,”

And when I said, “And what about those of us who aren't mothers?” you said, “Obviously I'm talking about the rule not the exception.” and then I rolled my eyes but it was quite clear that everyone wanted me to not Go Into It, because I'd been Going Into It all afternoon and the audience just wanted their cake and tea.

So I shut up.

But I thought of you later. You're obviously someone's son, and you're probably a dad as well. But when did your conception of women become narrowed and defined to just Woman As Mother?

Let me explain to you why your words made something cringe inside me, like you were scratching nails down a chalkboard. It was as if you were saying, “Women exist to give life, and it is that we should respect, and none of the rest of it.” It's as if you were standing in for society who has been looking askance at me as soon as I hit 25, wondering when I was going to stop faffing around and do what nature created me to do. It's also like you were saying women who are mothers don't count for anything else, their greatest role in life is basically producing their children. Who, if they are girls, will have their own greatest role to play and so on and so forth, until we're all Russian nesting dolls, our charm lying in the fact that our tops can be snapped off to reveal the generations that lie within us. 

I have not one hundred per cent decided that kids are not for me. I thought I had ruled firmly anti-child when I first hit my thirties, but now coming up on five years in this decade, I'm wondering if this is an option I should reconsider. Unfortunately, my decision rests not on any altruistic reasons to have children—Looking to the Future and Love of Small Creatures but on very selfish things: a) I'd like everyone to get off my back and b) I don't want to die alone. These, I'm sure you'll agree, makes me the opposite of Woman As Strong Mother and basically makes me one of those people who is so scared by her own mortality that she's thinking of ways to prolong that.

Like you, I too have my own personal mom. She's great, totally awesome, totally strong, kick-ass in many ways, and has done many things to shape me into the person I am today. But while my mother may have grown into her own personal stree shakti as it were during the time she was my mother, I like to think that she would have grown and evolved and become this person without me in her life as well. To put it more succinctly, even though she may say this out of love, I do not think her biggest achievement in life was to bring me into this world.

In fact, while I'm thinking of my mother, I'm also thinking of an old friend of hers who never had children, and who was around my whole childhood. She was the person who gave me Little Women when I was seven and told me that while the small print might be intimidating, I would love it (I did, and when I visited Louisa May Alcott's home when I was eleven, I was the only person shown into the writer's private writing room, an honour accorded to me as the youngest reader on that tour.) She treated me as a small adult, I can't remember a time she ever talked down to me, and that shaped the way I thought of myself—your parents don't count, because your parents are duty bound to love you and listen to you—as well as the way I speak to children now.

In many ways, I think of the older women I met, my mother's friends who didn't have children and yet who knew how to connect with a child. Would you call their lives pointless? Some were in my life only very briefly, but I remember them all so strongly. One friend I remember gave me a set of two carved combs shaped like a man and a woman. “Oh, a man and his wife!” I said, delighted and she looked at me and said, “Why not a woman and husband?” Why not indeed? That's the first time I ever thought about that, and it may have been a throwaway conversation, but somewhere in my head it took root.

What about the mothers who lose their children? What about women who can't have children? What about more like me who don't want to? What about the women who produce terrorists and murderers? A blanket statement like yours is so harmful because it brushes everything else under the carpet, because it airily dismisses everyone else as “the exception.” Why, I bet even the woman you're holding up as this ideal of Motherhood has mixed feelings sometimes about her own kids.

All this to say: sometimes you need to think before you speak. #notallmothers

With love,

A Not Mother But A Woman Nonetheless

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A good short story collection is like the best thaali meal. Everything won't be to your liking but you'll try all of it and like most or it and by the end, you gave a better understanding of what's representative of the food of the area. Nothing against "collected short story" books, I have one myself after all (Before, And Then After. Very good. Please read.) but as the introduction to this volume says the short story is meant to be read as a one off, each writer standing out for their own style and narrative. I'd recommend this volume for anyone looking for a fix. #bookstagram #mrmbookclub #nowreading

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Newsletter: Resolutions, resolutions

Four days into thirty six, and I am filled with good resolutions. None of your humdrum ones either, no, these are little lifestyle changes that, if done properly, should reclaim all the parts of me that are scattered everywhere. The first one is to not check my phone the first thing when I wake up. It's harder than it sounds, so I've taken to putting my phone on charge in the dining room, which means I have to leave the coziness of bed to get it. It means that my mornings belong to me again, the outside world does not interfere until I allow it to, and I wake up slowly, eyelids fluttering, echoes of sleep still everywhere. I lie in bed then, sometimes I think about my dreams: when you look at a phone as soon as you get up, you don't remember your dreams anymore. Sometimes I talk to K, sometimes I think about the day ahead and what I'd like to do. It's become sort of precious, this just-this-house-just-this-bed time. Of course, since social media is a hard habit to break, I felt a bit fidgety this morning, but my brain learned to deal with the fidgets, it produced a train of thought for me to go down, a cat appeared to walk across my chest and meow for her breakfast. If you think of waking up each day as a rebirth, then every morning is the day you are born, you do a little accounting with yourself: how do I feel today? Are all my limbs intact? I feel in a better mood than I have on several mornings, I feel bright and alive.

The other thing I have done, and maybe I shouldn't mention it until it takes is started a reading journal. A "Book of Books" which is an idea I got from this article, earlier this year, but never thought to take up. However, starting to diarise again, no matter how small and specific, has been good for me. Because while the pages of my notebook are filling up with what I'm reading, and what I'd like to read, and books on my to-be-read pile and so on, there's also insights into my state of mind, which I wouldn't have thought of had I not been writing all my bookish thoughts down. Pamela Paul, the author of that article, felt the same way, she loved opening her "Bob" to see how her tastes had changed, how one genre influenced another and so on. I have gotten out of the habit of hand writing anything, but slowly--and with the help of a beautiful pen--I'm hoping to reclaim it.

This week in books and reading: The book that inspired me to begin this in the first place was Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell by Susanna Clark, a book it felt like the whole world had read except for me. I came home from Goa and found a copy waiting for me, part of Bloomsbury's new editions of some of their more popular books. In many ways, the cover of my copy is what drew me in, it was so beautiful, this mysterious woman done in shades of flame orange and burnt sienna, the satisfying heft of it, even the font, never say that new editions are a waste of time, because they can draw in the most unlikely of readers. Having tried to read this book several times in the past, especially when it first came out and everyone was reading it, and having abandoned it, I only picked it up because I wanted something fat and solid and maybe a little fantastic. To my joy, I realised it was the book that Jane Austen would write if she wrote books about magicians. I loved it, despite, or perhaps because of the fusty language, the "shewed" for "showed," the "surprize", the descriptions of history laced with magic, the hundred footnotes at the bottom of the pages. It's been so long since a book has felt like serendipity, look, here I was all along, and here you are, come to discover me. I think that's a sort of falling in love as well, of all the libraries in all the world, and here you are, in mine.

Now I've finished it, however, and my own Bob is teeming with ideas about what I should read next, and since a friend kindly gave me an Amazon gift voucher for my birthday, I bought four books off that and am reading one right now: Still Life by Louise Penny (that I am currently reading) (the first in a series of detective novels about a Canadian inspector called Gamache, and I have heard nothing but good things.) (I don't normally buy crime novels, but it's a genre I enjoy SO MUCH that I'm just going to own to it, guilt-free). I also bought Deep South by Paul Theroux (review), The Penguin Book Of The British Short Story: From PG Wodehouse to Zadie Smith (review) and The Parasites by Daphne du Maurier (review.)

This week in parties: My own birthday party last week was excellent, and here is a photo of me and K dressed as Mario and Princess Peach respectively.

 Our cook made a feast, and everyone drank and ate and talked, and it was all very civilised.

And because it's December in Delhi, literally my favourite time of the year, everyone's so social! And in such a good mood! We have become very Adult about our socialising and have created a shared Google calendar, just so you know we're that couple now. I'm not sure what use it is, because I keep diligently marking down all the parties we've been invited to, and K, just as diligently, asks me "what do we have on Wednesday?" But hey! At least the CONCEPT is grown up.

This week in food and drink: Kofuku for my birthday dinner with just the two of us. Lovely. Perhaps the best Japanese food I've had and the sushi was soooo good. And it's in the weird dystopian Ansal Plaza which makes it even more exciting.

Town Hall with my friend Nayantara, where because of MCD something or the other, they've stopped their terrace seating, which is too bad, because it was a very pretty terrace, however, we sat downstairs, she gave me a gorgeous box of Ruskin Bond inspired hand painted stationary and we drank copious amounts of wine.

Then Indian Accent, the new one at the Lodi, with my friend Shrayana, and we drank MORE wine and ate: panko crusted chillis stuffed with goat cheese, baked fish, bacon kulchas, mushroom kulchas, daulat ki chaat and a surprise birthday cake! Mmmm.

Then my friend Samit's birthday party last night, where he served up this insane haleem and nihari from some place called Purani Dilli? Sadly, I was too full from all the fried fish he waved in front of us for starters to do much justice to the meal, but out of greed, I tasted everything.

It's been a good week.

This week in stuff I wrote: A response to the Cat Person short story in the New Yorker for Scroll. ** I've also started to put a lot more of my archives on my blog, so please look at it also.

Sunday link list
 

 

It’s true that the bulk of these seventeen—seventeen!—stories sound like Tom Hanks movies. Or rather, they are stories that could have been written by an alien whose only exposure to the planet earth is through Tom Hanks movies … This book-shaped object made of cardboard and paper was never going to be a book exactly. It is a gift, something that parents give to their college-bound children as revenge for making themselves difficult to understand … in four hundred pages, there’s hardly even a hint of conflict or a suggestion that American life is anything less than a holiday where everyone rides Schwinn bikes, leaves the immigration office to go bowling, and has a dog named Biscuit.

- Lit Hub's most savage reviews of the year.

And that’s where memory—whether direct, or received from elders or pop culture—can be most subjective. As bad as the present may seem, the people who actually lived in those “simpler times” had less education, less health care, less equality, and less ability for economic and social advancement than today. It’s a little like the fallacy of past-life regression: no one ever thinks they were once a lowly peasant, or died of disease at birth. But we couldn’t have all been princes or kings. Now is still the greatest time to be alive, in other words, for the vast majority of humankind.

-Quartz has a great series on the nostalgia economy

 

You’re exceptionally hairy. A shock of bristly setae covers your body and face to help you keep warm, collect pollen, and even detect movement. Your straw-like tongue stretches far beyond the end of your jaw, but has no taste buds on it. Instead, you “taste” with other, specialized hairs, called sensillae, that you use to sense the chemicals that brush against particular parts of your body.

- What's it like to be a bee?

 

Jen: But the prime minister is the second-worst plot in a movie with 855 plots (number approximate). Can someone tell me what the meeting when PM Grant and President Billy Bob Thornton was *actually* about? Anyone? Anyone at all?
Tanya: It was about creating more tension between Hugh and Natalie. She was "his" in his mind because he had a crush on her and her chocolate biscuits and tea.
Jen: Which is *ridiculous.* Would the prime minister of Great Britain really take a stand against ... whatever he was discussing with the president ... just to declare his secret love for an aide? Please say the answer to this is no, please say the answer to this is no ...
Tanya: Well, um ... huh? I think someone's calling me.

- Tis the season to rewatch Love, Actually and have arguments about it

I'm Harry Potter! The Dark Arts better be worried, oh boy.

- What happens when a bot rewrites Harry Potter? HILARITY, THAT'S WHAT.

At my Delhi school one day, a seven-year-old in my class found out that my middle initial “A” stood for “Abdul.” He declared it was something to be ashamed about—rather viciously for his young age and in the unrelenting manner that children do when they pounce on an embarrassing secret. I realised at that early age that my Muslim surname was unlikely to ever be an asset and was best kept to oneself when it could be helped.

- On being Muslim in India

Engraving can make anything—even the most humble of junk store finds—feel a little more precious. Adding a personal message quickly and easily transforms a tchotchke into something meaningful. For instance, last year I found a WWII-era brass compass for my fiancé. I polished it up, took it to my local jewelry store, and had them etch in a phrase that—I swear to god—came to me in a dream.

- I love this DIY gift guide by Atlas Obscura most of all the gift guides.

Living in Bandra East (not THAT Bandra)

(Wrote this for a city newspaper)

I still remember where I was when I decided to move to Mumbai. It was a cold winter's evening, we were in a friend's flat in East Delhi and I was grumbling about how everything was the same-- much of a muchness. Sure, I was due to start a new job with a magazine very soon, but I had grown weary of Delhi, the city I had grown up in, and continued, it seemed, to grow old in.

This party was a combination birthday/farewell do for our friend, who was moving to Mumbai with a new job. “How lucky,” I sighed, and he said, “Come with me.” I might have laughed disbelievingly—one didn't just give up house and job and life and move so easily on suggestion—but the idea turned in my mind from a ragged broken piece of bottle to smooth-edged sea glass, and by the next morning, I called him and said, “Okay. Okay, if you're serious, I will come.”

I'm not going to get into all the minutiae of moving, but suffice it to say, when I joined him, suitcase in hand three months later, I had not only a room, but also a neighbourhood. All brand new and ready to call my own. This was Bandra East, a firmly middle-class residential colony, a seeming hold-out from the already rapidly gentrifying West, a stroll across the train station, a neighbourhood where Bal Thackeray was our “down the road neighbour” and the only food delivery option was a Mangalorean sea food restaurant down the road. Our flat was part of a set of buildings called “MIG Colony” or “Middle Income Group” and apart from our landlord, who had moved to South Bombay ages ago, everyone else there owned their property.

These were conservative people who kept to themselves—my friend had told the landlord we were a married couple to save appearances, and this we laughed about later when once he came to visit and asked why we didn't just move both twin beds into one room for our convenience. (Later when my friend moved out—another city, another job—and I moved two girls from my old college into his old room, we told the landlord we were having marital problems, something he probably already guessed by our lack of shared bedroom.)

In the beginning, Bandra (E) (even the bracket pulling me away from the lure of the West and its fanciness) didn't mean much to me in terms of where it was located. I was still Bandra, wasn't I, still in the thick of things, still trendy and cool with a posh address. (Nowhere but in Mumbai—and maybe certain pockets of South Delhi—does your address so quickly become a shorthand for whether or not you can be friends with someone. Live close enough, and there's an instant relationship, but live two or three unfashionable suburbs away, and even if you get along like a house on fire, it's unlikely you'll hang out all that much.) It took me a while to cotton on to the full extent of exactly how residential we were, how tucked away from everything else. For those not in the know, Bandra (E) began with a long tree-lined road, with the flats tucked away in side lanes. So quiet, you couldn't even hear traffic, so quiet that even getting a rickshaw at 9 pm was impossible, unless you walked all the way to the main road. As a result, our rents were at least 30 per cent cheaper than our neighbours in the West, but the price we paid was living in provincialism, so to speak, while all around us, Mumbai exploded with the cosmopolitan lifestyle I had moved to the city for.

Eventually, I moved to the West after all—and it was everything that it promised to be. From a morning woken up by crows in the coconut trees outside my window, I'd be jolted awake in the middle of the night by kids in their daddy's cars, racing down the drag of a sea facing road. In just five minutes, I could walk to any cuisine I desired, and my friend were suddenly accessible, next door, I didn't even have to plan my evenings to set out at a time when public transport would be available. It was ideal—and yet, and yet, when I think about Mumbai, I think about MIG, and being ensconced in that world, a slow world that rocked me into the idea of living somewhere else. If my friend had taken a different decision when he picked our shared real estate, I might have been a different person today, but as it was, there we were, and now on my visits back to Mumbai, I feel a stab of fondness for that street when I pass it. Once, it was home.

The Girl On A Train, Unlikeable Characters and Gone Girl

Comparisons are odious as the old English saying goes. But it’s something people in the publishing industry are guiltier of than anyone else. Whether it’s commercial fiction blaring the name of a more popular writer in the genre: a pink packaged book with “the new Sophie Kinsella!” on it for example, or a horror book called “just like Stephen King”, they put things in little boxes making it easier for old readers to access, but maybe a little off-putting to the person who didn’t like Kinsella or King to begin with. 

Which brings us to the problem with The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins. Hawkins’ book is an energetic crime thriller, a narrator who isn’t quite what she seems to be, and that was enough to make her publishers think, “Hmm, who was popular recently? Oh, yes, Gillian Flynn!” So inevitably, her book got called “the new Gone Girl” which led a lot of people who loved the book and/or the movie to pick it up in great excitement. Which led to the downfall.

I’ve read almost all of Flynn’s work. I’m a fan. But Hawkins’ first book under her own name (her fifth in total, the other four were romantic romps under a pseudonym) is as apart from Gone Girl as say The Millenium Trilogy is from The Mockingjay Trilogy. In The Girl On The Train, Rachel, a narrator who you learn in the first few pages, is commuting to London from her flatshare in the suburbs every morning at the same time, looks out for a certain house on one of the train’s usual stops. In this house is a young couple, whose life seems idyllic to her—they sun themselves, they seem happy, they laugh, and she makes up names for them and invents a life.

You can tell quite early on that Rachel isn’t happy with her own life (the reasons, innumerable, are revealed later) and so the book has a crazy, vertiginous feel. The reader is in the head of someone not quite reliable, and as it is with point-of-view narrators, you only are given the story in the beginning through Rachel’s eyes. When she is revealed to be not what you thought she was, you feel as betrayed as she does, and yet Rachel with all her flaws is a more likeable, more relatable character than Gone Girl’s Amy. You might have Rachel for a co-passenger, you might even make some chit-chat with her, but with Amy, you’d probably be a little intimidated by her beauty and wit.

Of course, you don’t have to like the main character of a book. The “anti-heroine” is coming into full force, but while men almost crave the anti-hero (consider Walter White in the TV show Breaking Bad and how men across the globe both longed to be him or be around him), women find it almost personally insulting. Novelist Claire Messud was taken aback when an interviewer from Publisher’s Weekly asked her why her main character was so unlikeable in her novel The Woman Upstairs and said, “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?’ ”

Which leads me to a deeper question: why do we read? Some of us do read to find friends, an idea that Messud thinks is ridiculous, but which is evidenced by how many feel-good pap novels still dominate the bestseller lists. When it comes to your average mystery reader, you read to feel engaged, to feel alive, goosebumps rising on your skin, your heart thumping as you stay awake till way past your bedtime just to find out who did it. In all this, it’s very comforting to have a main character who is as troubled by the mystery as you are, but who also figures it out two steps ahead of you, but sometimes, like in the case of The Girl On The Train, it’s also an interesting feeling to let go and let the novel take you where it will like an unmanned ship on a stormy sea. I will say this for both “Girls”, they give the reader the same sense of having your legs kicked out from under you: you think you know where you are until you don’t. You think you know this person whose head you’re inside until… well, until you don’t.

I do like that The Girl On The Train sort of conspires with us readers though. Rachel looking out from her train window and us, looking out through Rachel. Both of us realising that our version of the story isn’t the complete truth, but both of us wanting to believe it anyway.

Today in Photo

Too cold to do anything but contemplate what sort of horcrux Olga would be. #bookstagram #harrypotter #calicosofinstagram

via Instagram

Sofa, So Good

(Wrote this in  April 2016. I've grown to like our sofa since.)

It has been nearly a month since we shifted into our new home and still, I haven't been able to have a party of more than four or five people over at a time. The reason? We have no sofa.

The eventual sofa plan

This may sound petty to you—certainly it's reading a little petty to me as I'm writing it—but being now of the age where folding oneself onto the floor for longer than an hour or two leads to creaky hips and aching backs (blame our sedentary lifestyles), I cannot, in all good conscience force my guests to discomfort. Once, we had about ten people over, and like a good hostess, I stayed standing while everyone got dining chairs, and by the end of the night, my knees ached with the effort of holding me up for so long. And I do yoga regularly.

After many weeks scouring online websites and finding nothing exactly perfect—eg: great shape, but too-delicate fabric, which wouldn't last a week around our cats; nice colour, but a bit boxy looking; prohibitively expensive for all its style—we decided to go the Indian way and have the sofa commissioned and made from scratch. A craftsman came recommended from a friend, we bought the yards of plain black (apparently cat-proof) fabric, handed it over to him with an advance and picked a design from his coffee table book catalogue. It was a deceptively simple looking sofa, sleek and stylish with rounded arms and comfortable enough for two people to lie, feet facing each other at the end of a long day. We imagined narratives around it, eventually we will acquire a projector and this will be the sofa on which we watch movies. I imagined my stylish friends, in pretty shift dresses standing out against the black fabric. I imagined the winter to come, how the sun would hit it in just the right spot, me and a cat curled up for an afternoon nap.

There are things in our new home I've never owned before: a dining table that seats six, and now a three-seater sofa, all indicating our couple-d lives, a “we” instead of an “I.” I put furniture into terms I can understand—like a set for a stage or a blank page of a Word document. What scene are we setting? This is a house that will be full of people we love. This is a house that will see us entertaining effortlessly. This is a house where there is a comfortable nook in each room for two readers to be alone together.

Unfortunately, the sofa maker didn't see it that way. Proud as we were of supporting local businesses and not going online (plus saving some money), it seems to be an uphill task. His first photos (sent weeks after the commission, despite my urging) were of a boxy black sofa. Comfortable? Maybe. But not our original design. We edited, I wailed down the phone, he sent back draft two: still not what we were waiting for.

Finally, we sent him a drawing marking out exactly what needed fixing. He claimed to understand, but also told me categorically that he wasn't a photographer. “Just come and sit on it, madam,” he said on the phone, “You'll see how comfortable it is.” Unfortunately, my Hindi does not extend to the point where I can convey that comfort is all very well, but it's not the original sofa that we chose from his catalogue, one he promised us he could make with no problems at all.

And that's why small businesses in India seldom do very well to an outside audience. For me, it's par for the course, having grown up in this country, I'm used to not having exactly what I want when I have something made, but for my European partner, it's sacrilege to pay someone for a service he considers unrendered. And probably, if this sofa ever gets made, and we use it and then in five or ten years time, we consider replacing it, it'll be the online route for us, just because this was such a time-consuming project, all the calls and all the photos and all the driving we have to do to his far away workshop, just to explain to a professional that the sofa he made for us was not the sofa he promised. (It's not like his labour was cheap either.)

And therein lies the problem: he sees it as “good enough,” we see it as “not what we wanted.” Will there always be this culture clash? And will online and factory shopping eventually give the customers what they want, so all these enterprising men will someday be history?

Booze, Bihar and the middle of the country

(Written in  April 2016 just after the Bihar liquor ban)

Our yoga teacher, who hails from Bihar, always has an item of the news he'd like to discuss with us during class. Often, he gets so carried away, that he winds up talking animatedly about it, and I have to provide rejoinders from huffing and puffing on the floor. This is how I heard about the whole JNU anti-nationalist incident, how I realised what odd-even meant to most folks, and most recently, how I heard about the effect of the liquor ban was having in Bihar.

It's quite nice for someone like me, who doesn't really keep up that much with the news, to have this Talking Head, so to speak, in my living room thrice a week. His political views are almost diametrically opposed to ours, so there's often a lively debate during the stretches, while we all argue about whose way is the best.

My house help is also from Bihar, and when the yoga teacher said the liquor ban was making everyone in Bihar “dizzy,” she came out of the kitchen, clutching a dustcloth, looking anxious. “What's happened in Bihar?” she asked, and he said, “Why, they've banned alcohol,” and she looked relieved and left, but not before he had engaged her in a Whose District Is Best conversation. (I'm tempted to side with her, only because she's from Madhubani, and I've always been partial to their art.)

Not a problem anymore in Bihar!

Despite my father being posted in that state for much of my childhood and adolescence, I don't know very much about it. I have stray, scattering memories: once of a playhouse with a thatched roof, once of his collector's bungalow in Gaya which had two tortoises in the pond outside who I called Napoleon and Josephine. Of Gaya, my memories are strong—I remember being taken to see the famous Boddhisatva tree and that large garden, and a kitten we acquired for the winter holidays which died tragically of pneumonia. I had been allowed to ask a friend to stay for the holidays, and the two of us ran in and out all day, reading and bathing in the British era bathroom complete with porcelain tub, and ending the whole vacation with a play we put on for my parents.

But then, even though my father stayed on, he preferred to come to Delhi, where my mother worked and I studied, and as I grew older, the idea of a summer with nothing to occupy me except my own fantasies grew less charming. He had been back in Delhi for two years—very important two years, because this is when cable TV and the internet first came to India—and when he was posted back there again, those two things were greater than anything Patna could offer.

Anyway, so I didn't really think about Bihar beyond the occasional reminder that it existed. My father loved his time there, but I only remember it from some long ago summers, when I was too young to consider it as a whole. But the two people who I see the most often are from that state—so obviously Bihar is tied up more with my life than I think. What do I know about it now? Not a whole lot more. Thanks to these two people—I have a bit of representation—how that state votes for instance or how long it takes to travel to your far-off district from the state capital, which gives me an idea of the geography of it.

I think it may be time for me to pay Bihar another visit—this time as someone who was reluctantly linked to it her whole life—even though I may not get a good glass of wine (let alone any kind of glass of wine). If our fates are entwined—Bihar's and mine, then it's time to get to know her a little bit.

Smoking and the "cool girl" myth

(This appeared as my F Word column in December 2015.)

I haven't always been a smoker, of course. There was a time when my young lungs were disgusted by the idea of it. I picked it up, as people do, when I was in college—a bad decision I've wanted to take back hundreds of times since—and have been a slave to the cancer sticks ever since. Oh, sure, I've tried to quit. I've tried to quit so many times—and sometimes succeeded even, but here we are, my last column for 2015, and I'm still a failed smoker.  (ETA: And now at the end of 2017 even.)

But look how cool she looks!

For many years, I think the problem was that they went with my image of cool, rebellious writer chick. Whips out her cigarette and delivers bon mots at parties. A man I dated even confirmed it once: he was a non-smoker himself, and when I said, wistfully, “Do I smell like an ashtray?” he said, “But you look so cool when you do it!” And it's true, I do look cool. I look cool like all the ladies in films before me. Uma Thurman, on her stomach on the Pulp Fiction poster, legs up and crossed behind her, holding a cigarette in her hand. Sandy, from Grease, in the last song where she reinvents herself from virginal girl to a sassy leather-wearing diva who sings about how he's the one that she wants—all the while holding a cigarette which she lights with penultimate coolness. Even in Bollywood, in the early days, the bad girls, the exciting ones, the ones the heroes all wanted in the beginner were smokers. (Fun fact I just noticed: if you Google image search “Bollywood women smoking,” there's actually a picture of me from back in the day embracing a male friend's back, holding a cigarette.) Smoking is shorthand for signalling you're a certain kind of woman, the kind that is the Cool Girl that is mentioned in the book Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. A confident, self-assured woman who drinks Old Monk instead of white wine, who can drive a car faster than you can, who doesn't give a damn what the world thinks of her.

There's an episode of Friends, where Rachel suddenly takes up smoking. Smoking is no-no in Friends-land, Chandler is the only one who occasionally slips, and even then he is castigated so much by his wife and friends, that he promptly stops. But in this particular episode, Rachel wants so badly to fit in with her colleagues and be party to the certain intimacy that only a smoker's room provides, that she takes up the habit just to belong. Anyone who has ever worked as a journalist will attest to that fact: if you want face-time with a boss, a one-to-one interview with someone else, or just to know what's going on, there's nothing like a shared cigarette or lighter to make you feel like one of the boys.

Maybe that's why a recent article I read in The Quint mentioned that while overall cigarette consumption in India is falling, the rise in women smokers has been quite considerable. From 5.3 million women smokers in 1980, the number is now more than double now, second only to the US. In a male-dominated world, sometimes you have to send signals out that you're not some weak thing, some delicate damsel, that you're as willing to work your hardest as your male colleagues, and smoking sometimes indicates that.

But to be a “modern woman” has its own perils. Back in the day, when my own personal blog was very personal indeed, the most number of angry comments I got was when I mentioned that I smoked. It was also the biggest criticism people had about my first book: why was my main character drinking and smoking all the time? Was this any way for an Indian woman to behave? When I smoke in public—which I totally do less and less, in these health-concious times I'm always trying to quit—I have to find a corner to huddle in, or face stares that are even worse than normal. Smoking on the streets indicates that you're a fallen woman, a harlot, a shameless trollop who should be open to pretty much anything that men throw at her. (Surprisingly, this might be just an urban thing. In rural India, many women—a lot of them older---smoke as a matter of course. If it's not a communal hookah, they smoke beedis, and no one looks at them strangely either.)

Maybe women's attitudes to smoking will change when mens' do. When it's no longer so much about rebellion but just a nasty habit that we should all kick. When there's a way to belong that doesn't involve changing who you are, and when people take you seriously without “accessories.” Until then, I'm afraid we'll have to live with our rising number of female smokers— but I'm signing out. Again. Hopefully this time for good.

Today in Photo

Why yes we DO have matching raccoon sweaters thank you for asking. Photo stolen from @samitbasu #delhidiary

via Instagram

Tsundoku: Three books around a vague "history" theme that I recommend

(This appeared as my column in BLInk in September)

Early September as I write this: Booker month and hurricanes. It's always feels a bit like a month of farewells, and poets felt the same way as I do (read, for instance, Wilfrid Owen's Elegy In April And September), there's a whole rash of poetry about the end of summer and the beginning of fall for the Western world, and for us, the upcoming festive season, just around the corner. But I feel time marching on just about now, the Great Hot is nearly over and party season is starting in Delhi, but, as always, I'd rather be home with a good book. This column's inadvertent theme is history—what has happened and what might have happened --- which I suppose is only appropriate for such a ruminating sort of month.

Water cooler: Though it is, as I've mentioned, Booker month, when longlists are analysed, people place bets and novels are celebrated, there was another book that created a more underground buzz this month. A hardback children's book called Excavating History: India Through Archaeology by Devika Cariapa. It's not often that a children's book gets taken seriously, but this one deserves all the attention it has been getting. Excavating History is a history of India, but a scientific and comprehensive volume, using archaeological finds to do a quick run down of what's been going on the subcontinent from the Stone Age downwards. I don't mind admitting that I learned a lot of things, and added several new sites to my future travel list. With fun illustrations to appeal to kids and dense enough for the amateur historian adult, I'm recommending it to everyone with even a slight interest in what happened before the stories began. Excavating History: India Through Archaeology by Devika Cariapa, Tulika Publishers, Rs 625.

Watchlist: Every day on my news feed there's more about the Rohingya refugees. It's all terrible news and very sad to watch, and it does make one curious about Myanmar. Look no further than Amy Tan's Saving Fish From Drowning, an excellent immersive novel that works both as a fable as well as a critique of Myanmar's political situation. You may know Tan from her books about Chinese American mothers and daughters (The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife) and this book has nothing in common with those, but shows off Tan's chops in writing about a politically fraught situation with gentle humour as well as insight. In the book, twelve American tourists are travelling to Myanmar, on a trip organised by their friend Bibi Chen, who has since died. Bibi is the omniscient narrator, haunting the whole trip with her beyond-the-grave observations and watching as the travellers get themselves into predicaments she could have saved them from. There's also a kidnapping staged by a tribe who feel like they have been forgotten and sidelined by the current political regime, but frankly, I felt that plotline stood second to the glorious travelogues and descriptions of this country that litter the book. Read it, if only to understand what Burma has been up to all these years. Saving Fish From Drowning by Amy Tan, Harper Perennial, Rs 187.

Wayback: More recent than Excavating India and also much less scientific is Raj by Gita Mehta. The book is an elegy to the lost royal kingdoms of India, the struggles those landed people had with their subjects asking for their own rights and so on, how terrible the British were, and how they were stuck between a rock and a hard place with the nationalists on one side and the Brits on the other. Despite the eye-rolling at all the privileged royalty of India crying about no longer being royal, this book was the first time I ever felt a slight twinge of sympathy for them. The heroine is a passive woman tossed about by fate, forever needing a man to sort things out for her, and yet, and yet, I think you should read it. Raj is meticulously researched, a thrilling fly on the wall view into the zenanas and India's erstwhile royal families, and how they had to interact with Queen Victoria and how the more Indian ones resisted adopting English ways, it's all very well told, even if you do feel like giving the protagonist a good hard shake every now and then. Raj by Gita Mehta, Penguin Random House, Rs 499.

Today in Photo

Such a social whirl! Lovely birthday dinner treat at Indian Accent last night which continues to hit it out of the park. Plus a delightful date night with this one, perhaps my only friend who refuses to join Instagram. (ok ok maybe one of three.) it's been birthdayish for a week now and I feel so lucky and loved. #delhidiary #birthdayletters

via Instagram

On women who say "I only get along with men"

(This appeared as my F Word column in The Week)

Recently, someone proclaimed to me that she hated women. “I'm a man inside a woman's body,” she told me, “I don't get women.” I began to protest, but it was that time of the night, two drinks too many, no other sound apart from our conversation drifting off the balcony and across the park. Later, I recapped this, and my partner said I took things too literally. “Obviously #NotAllWomen,” he said, in a reasoned, reasonable tone, which made me feel about five years old and sulky. But the more I think about her statement, the more I wonder what it is like to not like women. It seems so strange, so alien, especially if you are a woman yourself.

For me, women have always been a sort-of safe zone. My eyes automatically scan a crowded room for other women, and when I see them, I am able to settle in more easily. If I'm walking somewhere, I like to walk behind a group of women, they may not know they're escorting me, but they are. Sometimes, when I am in a mixed group, and there is a single female walking in front of us, I see her glance back, apprehensively, take me in and then relax just a little bit. I am her ally, even if she doesn't know me at all, because it's the Woman Code, we make spaces a little bit safer just by existing in them.

I read this article once on serial killer couples, and it struck me as even more of a betrayal that the women were helping the men abduct other women. It wasn't the code! How could they let us all down like that? We are wary of lone men, and a woman adds legitimacy and security to them and if the woman herself is out to get us, what else can we hold on to?

Of course, this could be just me. I've always liked other girls growing up, other women now in my thirties. I used to think I was a guy's girl, preferring the company of men, but truth be told, very few of my friendships with men turned into something deep and meaningful, whereas I have a whole tribe of soul-sister-female-friends with whom I have remained close—some for over decades. I'm good with women, as I grow into my thirties, I may not have entirely stopped competing, but I now step back and examine the reason I'm feeling competitive in the first place.

Speaking of friends, I have this Whatsapp group with three other women, where I am the only non-corporate, non-commuting-to-Gurgaon person on it. We try to meet every other week, usually for loud and raucous drinks on a weekend, which inevitably ends with group messages the next day groaning about drinking too much. Our conversation lingers briefly on the subject of men—three of us are married or “as good as”--but swiftly moves on to jobs, advice, things we're doing, travel and more and more and more than just our relationships, that we not only pass the Bechdel test, we ace it, we hit a home run, we are the shining example the Bechdel test should be holding up. Not to brag or anything, but female friendships can be pretty darn perfect.

And so when a woman says she “just doesn't get other women,” (and the person I met the other night wasn't the first example of this—nor will she be the last), I wonder what it is she's missing from her fellow female interactions. Patriarchy can knock us all down and make us believe that there's only room for one great mother on the playground, one beautiful woman at a party, one top woman boss at a mostly male company, and this means women are sometimes nasty to one another, cold and cutting, or sly and passive aggressive. But then, so are some men, so why do we take it so personally when it's our own sex? I'll tell you why—because even the loudest advocate of Female Friendships Don't Exist, and Men Make Better Friends still, still lean on the idea that there is solidarity to be found with other women. And when they are betrayed, they burn brighter with resentment than the rest of us, who shrug it off as the actions of one person as opposed to a basic gender trait.

I feel like I am richer for having close female friends my whole life. Well—that's not true. For a brief, dark moment of my life, I had girl bullies, who dealt in psychological twists of the knife that left me introverted and self-conscious for several years. One of the things that pulled me out, that made me strong and confident again, able to face a room without flinching or worrying that they were judging me has been the love I feel on all sides of me. Love that is (with the exception of my partner) purely female.