"Midnight's Children" by Salman Rushdie

By Shiva_as_the_Lord_of_Dance_LACMA.jpg, photographed by the LACMA.derivative work: Julia\talk, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14771931

Winner of the Best of the Bookers: the prize for the best Booker Prize winning novel (1981) in the first forty years of the prize. It also won the 1981 James Tait prize. Rated by Robert McCrum as 91st of the Guardian's 100 best novels of all time. Chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began.

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight, at the exact same time as the nation of India is born (achieving independence from the British Raj on 15th August 1947). At the age of ten he discovers he has telepathic powers; all the children born within the first hour of India's independence have one superpower or another. His story and the story of his family are inextricably linked with the story of India.

Saleem's life does indeed seem to follow the trajectory of the prophecy made shortly before he was born.

It's an epic both in size and in its attempt to "embody the history and aspirations of a nation" (which is part of the definition of epic in the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory). 

It is narrated by Saleem as an older man (therefore past tense, first person) to his paramour, pickle maker Padma, who delightfully critiques his narration (this reminded me of Jeffrey Farnol's The Geste of Duke Jocelyn) and repeatedly switches into Saleem's present. It's discursiveness and the fact that Saleem's birth doesn't happen until the 25% mark, reminded me of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. 

It is peopled by a cast of eccentrics worth of Dickens, The central section of the book was for me the best. It follows Saleem through his childhood, and we meet his mates Eyeslice and Hairoil and Cyris the Great and Sonny and Evie Lilith Burns and the adult neighbours such as (naval) Commander Sabarmati, film magnate (and thus employer of Saleem's uncle Hanif) Homi Catrack, Doctor Schaapsteker ... One of the merits of the book is that there are so many characters and they are all memorable (and many of them pop up later) but they are caricatures, flat characters, who can be summed up in a few lines and who never change despite the contortions of the convoluted plot.

Many of the characters change their names. Saleem himself gets nicknamed Snotnose and Sniffer and Stainface, Baldy and Piece-of-the-Moon; he later becomes the buddha.  His sister Brass Monkey becomes Jamila Singer. His mother was Mumtaz Aziz and is Amina Sinai. Her first husband is Nadir Khan who later becomes Nasir Qasim. Cyrus the Great becomes Lord Kushro Khusrovand. Identity and its ability to change is one of the themes of the book. I loved so many of the characters. 

The only other of the Children of Midnight born as the clock chimed, in the same hospital as Saleem, is Shiva, a Hindu deity often depicted as the four-armed Lord of the Dance, one of whose attributes is as destroyer. But Saleem believes that he himself is the catalyst who brings death on his friends and relatives. The hero as destroyer seems to be another of the themes of this book; this reminded me of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. 

There are other recurrent motifs such as noses (Saleem's is enormous, a "cyranose" and, once cleared, is able to smell emotions) and spittoons.

This is a hugely entertaining book and some moments of great humour.

Selected quotes:

• “Clock-hands joined in respectful greeting as I came” (Book One: The Perforated Sheet)
• “His face was a sculpture of wind on water: ripples made of hide.” (Book One: The Perforated Sheet)
• “I sit like an empty pickle jar in a pool of Anglepoised light.” (Book One: The Perforated Sheet)
• “I wish, at times, for a more discerning audience, someone who would understand the need for rhythm, pacing, The subtle introduction of minor chords which will later rise, swell, seize the melody.” (Book One: Methwold)
• “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” (Book One: Tick Tock)
• “In those days, Bombay had been declared a dry state. the only way to get a drink or to get yourself certified as an alcoholic; and so a new breed of doctors sprang up.” (Book Two: The Fisherman's Pointing Finger)
• “All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate.” (Book Two: Snakes and Ladders)
• “Children get food shelter pocket-money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for having been born.” (Book Two: Accident In A Washing Chest)
• “Old people shroud themselves in the past during a war; that way they're ready to die whenever required.” (Book Two: Accident In A Washing Chest)
• “The sad mature wisdom of dirty washing lingered with me, teaching me its philosophy of coolness and dignity-despite-everything and the terrible inevitability of soap.” (Book Two: Accident In A Washing Chest)
• “Maya ... may be defined as all that is illusory; as trickery, artifice and deceit, apparitions, phantasms, mirages, sleight-of-hand, the seeming form of things: all these are parts of Maya.” (Book Two: At the Pioneer Cafe)
• “Cocksure men do terrible deeds. Women, too.” (Book Two: At the Pioneer Cafe)
• “You got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you've got to die.” (Book Two: At the Pioneer Cafe)
• “Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.” (Book Two: Alpha and Omega)
• “Unconscious in the night-shadow of a mosque, I was saved by the exhaustion of ammunition dumps.” (Book Three: The buddha)

August 2024; 647 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The English Teacher" by R K Narayan

Krishna teaches English at the College he was taught at. He has w ife and a daughter and a life of domestic harmony. Until it all goes wrong. Once again, Narayan explores the life of a very ordinary person and finds the transcendent in the everyday.

The first half of the book is firmly rooted in mundane reality, although sometimes Krishna finds lyrical beauty in his surroundings. But in the second half (and the turning point, almost exactly half way through, is a key moment) the sacred and the spiritual are foregrounded. But this is India and you can never be quite certain that a holy man isn't a con artist. 

It has a well-paced plot, structured after the four Ashramas (life stages) of Hindu tradition. The first stage is the 'chaste student'; although Krishna is already married and a father  teaching when we first encounter him, he is still living as a bachelor in the college accommodation where he was a student. The second stage, that of householder, describes his married life, and the everyday adventure of domesticity. This ends exactly half way through the book; the second half chronicles the third stage and ends on the brink of Krishna embarking on the fourth. The plot contained several developments which I hadn't expected at all but nevertheless could be seen to develop naturally, a classic Aristotelian reversal. I found the ending deeply satisfying.

It is narrated in the first person and the past tense by the protagonist, Krishna. He's a very ordinary man, fumbling and bickering his way through life, who only really discovers how deeply he loves when it's too late. He feels terribly real. His character is developed by his history and his circumstances. The other characters are drawn from the ranks of the ordinary and perfectly observed; even the visionary Headteacher, saintly in some respects, is fleshed out through the way he treats and is treated by his wife and children. This a drama of people you might meet down the street.

The language is careful, measured and grammatical; I felt that every word was carefully chosen. Despite it being a first person narrative, there was a lot more show than tell. There are moments of glorious description:

• "I was going to write of the cold water's touch on the skin, the cold air blowing on chest and face, the rumble of the river, cries of birds, magic of the morning light, all of which created an alchemy of inexplicable joy." (Ch 1) 
• "As the dusk gathered around us, utter silence reigned. I too sat, not knowing what we waited for, The casuarina murmured and hushed, the ripples splashed on the shore. A bright star appeared in the sky." (Ch 5)
• "As I sat in the sands of Sarayu, a late moon rose in the east, and the flowing water shimmered with it." (Ch 7)

If you, as reader, finds that the story is so ordinary that it seems a little dull, if you feel that it drags a little at the start, keep going. Your perseverance will be rewarded. It's never a page-turner but the events of the middle and the second half are well worth the wait. 

It also acts as a commentary on colonialism. Krishna is employed to teach the delights of the literature of a colonising people; the headmaster, Brown, has never bothered to learn any Indian language despite living in the sub-continent for thirty years. Krishna's wife, Susila, has spent years trying to read Ivanhoe and Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare but can't get past page fifty. Explicitly: "I could no longer stuff Shakespeare and Elizabethan metre and Romantic poetry for the hundredth time into young minds and feed them on the dead mutton of literary analysis and theories and histories ... This education had reduced us to a nation of morons; we were strangers to our own culture and camp followers of another culture, feeding on leavings and garbage." (Ch 8)

Selected quotes:

• "House-keeping was a grand affair for her. The essence of her existence consisted of the thrills and pangs and the satisfaction that she derived in running a well-ordered household." (Ch 2)
• "I have the feeling of a crow flying in a storm." (Ch 5)
• "It was a street within a street, and a lane tucked away into a lane. There was every sign that the municipality had forgotten the existence of this part of town. Yet it seemed to maintain a certain degree of sanitation, mainly with the help of the sun, wind and rain. The sun burned so severely most months that bacteria and infection turned to ashes. The place had a general clean up when the high winds rose before the monsoon set in, and whirled into a column the paper scraps, garbage, egg-shells, and leaves. ... And it was all followed by a good wash-down when the rains descended in November and December and flushed the streets." (Ch 6) Man proposes but God disposes. The municipality, if it is good for anything, should look after sanitation in the city but in the neglected areas such as the liminal district where the Headmaster lives, nature takes over the job and performs it efficiently enough. This is a key step on Krishnan's road to enlightenment. 
• "The street was littered with all kinds of things - wood shavings, egg shells, tin pieces and drying leaves. Dust was ankle deep." (Ch 6)
• "The memory of my own young days. Most of us forget that grand period. But with me it has always been there. A time at which the colour of things are different, their depths greater, their magnitude greater, a most balanced and joyous time of life... And then our own schooling which put blinkers on us; which persistently ruined this vision of things and made us into adults." (Ch 6)
• "It was as if a person lost in an abyss found a ladder, and the ladder crumbled." (Ch 7)
• "The kitchen is the deadliest arsenal a woman possesses." (Ch 7)
• "Success must be measured by its profitlessness, said a French philosopher." (Ch 8)

A slow burner but, once it gets going, it grips. June 2024; 184 pages

By the author of The Guide and The Painter of Signs and a host of other novels set in the fictional Indian city of Malgudi.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Anarchy" by William Dalrymple

A history of the destruction of the Mughal Empire at the hands of the East India Company, an act which led to the foundation of the British Raj. It is a story of repeated crimes against humanity committed by the British (and others).

The book seems to have as its thesis the concept, formulated by the first Baron Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor during the impeachment of Warren Hastings, and quoted in the frontispiece of this book, that "Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like." But it is a difficult argument to make. Certainly most Companymen sought to enrich themselves as fast as possible, without any concern for ethics or from the poor people they were stealing or plundering from, sometimes even killing people to get what they wanted. As Dalrymple points out in the Introduction, “One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot.” Even Warren Hastings, who was one of the best leaders of the company and a Hindophile, presided during the Bengal famine when a previously fertile and prosperous country starved, during which profiteering was rife; Hastings also refused to abide by the Treaty obligation of funding the Mughal Emperor, arguing that such money shouldn't be exported to Bengal, while conniving at the export of much more money to England by Companymen. However, the behaviour of the absolute monarchs in the little principalities, was perhaps as greedy and frequently bordered on the psychopathic. It is difficult to see anyone emerging from this history with credit, except the powerless. So the idea that corporate governance is uniquely rotten seems to fail the test of the evidence adduced.

Nevertheless, the book clearly demonstrates that the acquisition of India by the British involved dreadful crimes: looting and thievery (see above), creating famine (see above), the introduction of racist legislation so that the children of mixed Anglo-Indian marriages became virtually unemployable, massacring defeated troops and the even-in-its-day notorious climax to the siege of Srirangapatnam by troops commanded by the man who would later become the first Duke of Wellington: “That night the city of Srirangapatnam, home to 100,000 people; was given over to an unrestrained orgy of rape, looting and kidding.” This infamous looting inspired the scene at the start of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. In the novel, the Moonstone is eventually returned to India “something that has yet to happen with the real loot of Srirangapatnam.” (353)

I was surprised and disappointed to discover that, following the battle for Srirangapatnam, a medal was issued as well as prize money. There is no mention of war crimes in the wikipedia biography of the Duke of Wellington, not in the wikipedia article on the battle which doesn't mention the looting except under 'depictions in literature'.

I'm not one who believes that we should apologise for the crimes of our ancestors but I think we should stop honouring them. Perhaps we should tear down the statues of the Duke of Wellington and rename those places named after him, or at least remember that he would now be judged guilty of terrible war crimes. As for Clive of India, he should be infamous as a thug and a bully, a gangster and a thief.

The book also resonates with our present concerns in other ways:

• “As with all such corporations, then as now, the EIC was answerable only to its shareholders. With no stake in the just governance of the region, or its long-term well-being, the Company's rule quickly turned into the straightforward pillage of Bengal.” (Introduction)
• England going Protestant and establishing the Church of England is made to sound a little like Brexit: “In the course of this, in what seemed to many of its widest minds an act of wilful self-harm, the English had unilaterally cut themselves off from the most powerful institution in Europe, so turning themselves in the eyes of many Europeans into something of a pariah nation. As a result ... the English were forced to scour the globe for new Markets.” (Ch 1) This is an avowed aim of the Brexiteers; let us hope that this modern trade-seeking does not lead to rape, looting and wholesale murder.
• "Tax collectors and farmers of revenue plundered the peasantry to raise funds from the land, and no one felt in the least bit responsible for the well-being of the ordinary cultivator. Merchants and weavers were forced to work for the Company at far below market rates.” (Ch 5)

Much of the book was a powerful indictment of undemocratic rule. But there were times when it became boring. There is only so much repetition of battlers and lootings and negotiations and treaties that one can take. Sometimes it seemed that a large part of the narrative consisted of yet another casus belli, yet another battle, yet more looting, yet another puppet government. These were moments when I started to lose interest and I found it difficult to pay attention. The names and titles of the Indian monarchs and viziers seemed to merge into one another. I drifted away.

The book is also, in part, a family history. Dalrymple repeatedly tells us of the exploits (or sufferings, one died in the Black Hole of Calcutta) of other Dalrymples, presumable his ancestors, although he never makes this explicit.

But let me celebrate some stylisticl issues with the book that made it easier to read. There are some very useful maps at the front and also a great Cast List. There is a glossary of (most of) the Indian words used in the text. The page numbers are easy to find and the chapter is identified at the top of every odd-numbered page. Why can't all books be helpful to the reader like this?

Selected quotes:

• “The strappado - the Inquisition's answer to bungee jumping" (Ch 1)
• “Not for nothing are so many English words connected with weaving - chintz, calico, shawl, pyjamas, khaki, dungarees, cummerbund, taffeta - of Indian origin.” (Ch 1)
• “Meekness, benevolence and patience remained qualities which eluded Clive throughout his life. Instead, soon after hitting puberty, he had turned village delinquent. running protection rackets around Market Drayton.” (Ch 2)

August 2022; 397 pages

William Dalrymple has written a number of other brilliant books. 

• From the Holy Mountain is reviewed in this blog.
• I have also read (pre blog)
• In Xanadu, a great travel book
• City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi: a quirky collection of stories which mix the present and past of Delhi

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Great Arc" John Keay

A comprehensive and sometimes fascinating account of the project to map, by triangulations, most of British-controlled India, beginning in 1800 and ending in the early 1840s. Tigers weren't the only problem the Survey faced. Most of the surveyors suffered terribly from dysentery, malaria and a variety of jungle fevers. Triangulation requires one to see survey poles and flags from a distant theodolite so trees had to be chopped down, towers built (sometimes they piggybacked on religious monuments (such as the Jain statue shown below), to the anger of the locals; sometimes the surveyors were accused by local lords of spying on their women from the towers) and sometimes villages moved. Indian dust sometimes intervened anyway. And there are intrinsic problems with mapping which need correcting; these include:

• thermal expansion of the metal chains used
• refraction in the air causing sight lines to curve
• plumb lines don't hang true when they are near mountains

The first leader of this endeavour was a modest man called Lambton, who got on well with his staff and others (especially the ladies). His work was critical to the success of the mapping and he has been almost totally forgotten; the author uncovered his forgotten grave. His successor George Everest (pronounce Eve-rest) was a horrible man who took all the credit for the Surveys successes and blamed his subordinates when things went wrong; he was a dreadful man-manager and he has had the highest mountain on the world (which he never saw) named after him. Life is so unfair.

Selected quotes

• "Most of the rest of Africa remained shrouded in that mysterious 'darkness' which was simply Europe's ignorance." (Foreword)
• "Giving credit to his subordinates would not come naturally to George Everest." (Ch 1)
• "In 1802 'sea-level' was construed as high water, although later in the century a mean between high tide and low tide would be adopted as the standard." (Ch 3)
• "The people had not previously come across a European - let alone a breeding pair complete with offspring." (Ch 3)
• "If Hathipaon has a ghost, he may be sporting woolly underwear." (Ch 10)
• "By razing whole villages, appropriating sacred hills, exhausting local supplies, antagonising protective husbands and facilitating the assessment of the dreaded land revenue, the surveyors had probably done as much to advertise the realities of British rule and so alienate grassroots opinion as had any branch of the administration." (Ch 11)

By Kuldeep S - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72787861



It was regarded as the tallest monolithic statue until 2016.

It shows Jain guru Bahubali who stood still to meditate for so long that a vine grew around his legs.

June 2022; 172 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Witness the Night" by Kishwar Desai

Winner of the 2010 Costa Award for a debut novel.

A detective story set in Jalandhar in the Punjab in which courageous "professional but unsalaried social worker, rudely called an NGO-wali (and a rather amateur psychiatrist)" Simran battles to clear the name of Durga who had been accused of the murder, by poison and stabbing, of virtually her entire family. Apparently in the Punjab a Chief of Police can ask a friend of his from college to befriend a young girl who appears bang to rights and somehow this person has sufficient influence to be allowed to wander around the scene of the crime picking up missed clues.

Each chapter begins with an italicised section in which Durga, the young girl who survived the family massacre but was apparently raped, gives some account of what happens. These are carefully written to preserve the mystery of what happened and whodunnit to the end. The rest of the story is told from the point of view of the amateur sleuth (who drinks heavily but has a heart of gold).

There are moments when the writing jars:

• The very first section is intended as the hook and is a detailed account of the massacre: "The thick bile of sadness oozing from their hearts has regurgitated into their throats and blocked their voices, their pale shadowy hair seems like seaweed, green and stringy, floating in the air. Yet, all around their collapsed bodies is the scarlet odour of fresh killing, the meat at their feet is newly shredded for the dogs, which are peculiar and never bark. They do not even nudge the meat." I thought this prose too purple.
• There are some clunky moments of dialogue: "Listen, before we go in, no matter what happens, let me just say I really like you and thanks a lot. I was angry with you earlier, said a lot of things, I know - but you were doing your job, just as I am doing mine now. This sounds like a foolishly heroic statement, so I hesitate to say it, but if we can save her somehow. ..."

There are puzzling moments. The word 'somersault' is not spelled "summersault". The "Indian Made Foreign Liquor" shop's name is presumably an oxymoron rather than an "anachronism". I loved the "rickshaw puller's skinny legs peddling [sic] away" although I suspected they should have been pedalling. I wondered whether these apparent errors were intended to characterise the narrator as unreliable in some way.

The author is at her best when bringing us into the world of the Punjab. It is a world of unbridled patriarchy in which illegal abortion and infanticide is practised for girl children. It is a corrupt world in which the rich people can bribe the police to turn a blind eye. It is a world where poor girls can be bought to be sex slaves for rich boys. The author manages some nice moments of local colour:

• "We called all women older than us 'aunty' in Punjab. And all older men were called 'uncle'. Earlier we had more complex terms to describe relationships, but with the coming of the colonizers and the angrezi craze, much of the descriptive terminology, such as phoopi or taayi, had been junked." (p 167)
• The railway station "specialized in announcements made in Swahili which came on after the train had left." (p 116)

There are moments of insight:

• "In many cases it is difficult to distinguish the criminal from his circumstances, and then you understand that life can really be unfair." (p 9)
• "Surprising how even death - or a terrible disease like cancer - does little to mellow some people. They still carry their burden of destruction with them ... seeking to annihilate others before death snaps them in its jaws." (p 170)
• "If you live in a lake you don't antagonize the crocodiles."
• "It is said that if everything goes well, the wrath of the gods descends on you, so you have to put a black mark somewhere on your body to deflect misfortune." (p 40)

This is a debut novel which, despite some rather flat characters and the occasional poor writing, has some excellent moments, especially with the scene-setting. 

October 2018; 243 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Legends of Alexander the Great " translated and edited by Richard Stoneman

This compilation of legends about Alexander the Great is set in India. He and his army encounter terrible monsters including hippopotami, gold-digging ants, scorpions, dragons, and the terrible Odontotyrannus; they hear of dog-headed men and men whose head is beneath their shoulders. Alexander meets the Brahmans, naked philosophers who have no possessions and who lecture him on his greed and his ambition. There are extracts from better known works which refer to Alexander, such as the Confessio Amantis by John Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer who plays a bit part in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a play co-written by Shakespeare based on a work by Gower, and The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.

Good fun. It was particularly interesting to note how these different works quoted (with citation) one another.

Some great lines:

• “A chapati is best eaten from the edges inwards rather than from the centre outwards.” (p xvii)
• “Once you have started inventing strange hybrids it is not hard to go on.” (p xix)
• from Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle
• “A soldier named Zefirus discovered some water in a hollow rock; he filled his own helmet with it and brought it to me [Alexander], being more zealous for my life than for his own. Then I called together the whole army and in the sight of them all I poured away the water. I thought that if the army saw me drinking it would only make them feel even more thirsty.” (p 6)
• from On the Wonders of the East [Pharasmanes to Hadrian]
• “There are found ants the size of dogs, with feet like locusts. They are red and black and they dig for gold.” (p 21)
• from Palladius On the Life of the Brahmans
• “How many kings of foolishness do you think rule over fools? Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, tongue, stomach, genitals, the entire flesh of your body. There are many of them within, like implacable mistresses and insatiable tyrants, making endless demands; desires, avarice, love of pleasure, murder, assassination, meanness, dispute: to all of these and more men or enslaved, for these they kill and are killed.” (p 40)
• “Your mind is your tongue and your brains are in your lips.” (p 40)
• “You surround yourselves with many possessions and take pride in them, blind to the fact that none of them can help you to the truth: gold does not sustain the soul, nor fatten the body; quite the contrary, it darkens the soul and emaciates the body.” (p 41) 
• “Every human desire ceases when it is satisfied, because this is inherent in nature. But the desire for wealth knows no satiety, because it is against nature. That is why you adorn yourselves with it and glory in it, regarding yourselves as superior to other men. And that is why you take as your own what belongs to everyone” (p 41) 
• “The groans of the wronged will be the punishment of the wrongdoers.” (p 43)
• “Desire is the mother of penury ... It is miserable because it never finds what it seeks, is never content with what it has, but is tortured with lust for what it does not have.” (p 45) 
• “I do not eat fish like a lion, the flesh of other animals does not rot within me, I do not become a grave of dead animals.” (pp 45 - 46)
• “He who wishes to please everybody must be the slave of everybody.” (p 51)
• from The Correspondence of Alexander and Dindimus
• “If one man would carrying a lit torch and other men were to come and light other torches from the first: it would not lose its own light.” (p 57)
• “We are not dwellers in this world here as if we expected to be here forever; rather we are sojourners, here for a temporary visit.” (p 64)
• “The only glory to be found in blindness and poverty is that blindness does not see what it lacks and poverty has no way of getting it.” (p 66)

October 2017; 104 pages

"The Burning Bride" by Manoj Kerai

This debut novel aims certainly succeeds in its aim to raise awareness about the way a marriage can be used by some people in India to extort money from the family of the bride; in 2013 over 8,000 women in India were murdered for a dowry despite the fact that dowries are illegal.

The first few pages set the scene. Avantika and her husband have all but bankrupted themselves to get daughter Uma married to Vijay, son of a wealthy and powerful family. But then Vijay's mother, Madhu, who has already pushed the cost of the wedding as high as it can go, asks for more money.

Uma, living with Vijay and his family, is trapped. She can't go back to her parents: she would be a shamed woman and never able to marry again. But she is entirely in Madhu's power. Angry words and humiliation slowly escalate into physical abuse. Even when she has a daughter, the bullying continues. And no one is talking about Vijay's first wife, or about his present girlfriend. It seems no one can help her.

Carefully plotted, the tension in this novel builds to an exciting climax.

The story is told from the perspectives of nine women. Of these, Alice, Vijay's English business partner and mistress, is a distinct voice, perpetually angry at the sexist behaviour of 'dickhead' men. But the Indian women, though they have different back stories and different issues, all seem to have the same interests (from the evidence of this novel virtually all Indian women are obsessed with food, TV soap operas, and what other people think of them) and the same voice.

This was the thing I found most challenging about this book. It is written in a very 'flat' writing style. Issues are explained and dissected very clearly, whether in descriptions or in dialogue or in the thoughts of the characters. But there is no emotional punch to the writing. For example, when Nilambari recalls drinking lassi spiked with cannabis which resulted in her being subjected to a mass rape "She realised she was naked and her body ached everywhere.  ... Nilambari let out a pained howl as the memories returned to her .... After lamenting for a while she realised she had to get away before anyone came back." An incredibly traumatic event is written up in a very matter of fact way as if by a disinterested observer in an academic journal rather than the character who suffered the events. Whilst not seeking the purple prose of a Gothic novel, I found this style rather cold. If I had woken up naked and realised I had been raped I doubt I would have been capable of thinking in sentences, let alone well-formed sentences like these.

Perhaps it is the way books are written in India.

But to an English reader the way the characters seemed to analyse their own predicaments in such a detached manner made them seem two-dimensional. Even though Madhu's back story was chronicled, including her humiliation when she was a new bride and the abortions forced on her and her terrible insecurity when she became a young widow, she still emerged as a pantomime villain. Uma had victim written all over her; the fact that she had been working as a nurse before her marriage seemed to have no impact whatsoever when she was entrapped by, among other things, her own traditional values. Avantika her mum thought only of her status in society. Amrita was the personification of vengeance. Although most of the characters changed in the way they behaved, the only character who showed signs of evolving attitudes was Vijay's sister Charu.

As a result, although I sympathised with Uma's plight, I didn't empathise with Uma.

One of the difficulties facing a book set in a foreign country is the language. There a lots of Gujerati (?) words in this book that I didn't know before, for example beti, lakh, baa, bapuji; foreign words appear on almost every page. Some authors might try to translate them, which could easily ruin the flow of the narrative, but this author allows the reader to understand them from the context and this is mostly very successful (although I did long for a translation when whole sentences appeared).

This is an intricately plotted book with plenty of tension which opens a window into the abuses which can occur when appearances matter more than being good.

September 2016; 434 pages

"The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy

This was the winner of the 1997 Booker Prize. It is set in the Indian state of Kerala where they speak Malayalam. Befitting this palindromically named language, Estha(ppen) and Rahel, two egg twins, often speak words backwards. They way children see the world through different eyes, with innocence, is captured in the author's nursery rhyme approach to language and the repetition of certain words to capture misunderstood ideas.

The book starts with Rahel coming back to India to meet her twin brother Estha who has returned from where he was sent (to be with his abusive father). Estha has returned to the family home as an elective mute. Rahel watches him and explores the past. And we become aware of a great mystery in the past that is the secret reason why the twins are traumatised and dysfunctional. A secret that involves their Baby Grand Aunt.

Sophie Mol, the daughter of their jolly fat Uncle and his English wife, died on her short visit to their home when she and they were children. At the same time something happened to Velutha the Untouchable Odd Job man. Ammu, their mother, who tried to right whatever wrong was done, has died.

I read this story with a growing sense of dread. Something terrible has happened. Something awful. I wanted to know what had happened and I hoped that discovering the truth would set the twins free, but I feared that I would learn that they were guilty of terrible things. With deft dance steps the story moves around the truth, sometimes a little nearer, weaving a spell.

And the prose evokes the colour, the chaos, and the fecundity of India. And the characters are dazzlingly real, though mythic archetypes. And the narrative is hauntingly sad.

This was a book that I wanted to rush through to find out what had happened but I wanted to read slowly and savour every word because of the richness of the language.

Wonderful.

May 2011; 340 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Between the Assassinations" by Aravind Adiga

Aravind explores the life of ordinary people in this tourist guide to the (fictitious) South Indian town of Kittur. Each character struggles to survive against poverty, corruption, and the caste system. A wealthy schoolboy explodes a bomb in his chemistry class to humiliate his teacher. A Deputy Headteacher struggles to keep his favourite pupil pure. An Oliver Twist from the villages  gets mixed up with Fagin. An old virgin housekeeper works for her master.

All of these characters have thwarted dreams; they are all defeated by the system. Their puny struggles against it are doomed. In the end, the poor are always exploited by the rich. But every character is written from the inside, with flesh and blood and hopes and needs.

A stunning chronicle of a dreadful society.

April 2011; 355 pages

"The Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai

This book won the Booker in 2006 and was shortlisted for the 2007 Women's Prize for fiction.

Sai lives with her grandfather, a retired judge, and his dog, Mutt, on a decaying estate north of Darjeeling near the Nepal border. Their cook mourns his son, Biju, who is living in New York. Some Nepali freedom fighters ("Gorkhaland for the Gorkhas") raid the house and take the judge's ancient hunting guns. Sai's secret boyfriend, her maths and science tutor, who is Nepali, doesn't turn up for their lesson...

The story starts to explain the back story, how the judge and Sai came to be living their, Sai's relationships with her tutor and the others in the village: gay Uncle Potty, Father Booty, sisters Lola and Noni. Intercut are scenes from the cook's son's life in the Big Apple as an illegal immigrant and impoverished restaurant worker. Slowly (and I found it very slow indeed) the story meanders back to the present day.

Suddenly the violence flares up and life will never be the same again...

Deftly written, with subtle observations building portraits of the characters, but in the middle bit I got extremely bogged down and found myself not caring about the characters. But the final third suddenly becomes a different book: the cosy gentility of life is overthrown and ugly chaos reigns.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God