Not a lot is going right for Taran Sharma. First, he stole his annoying brother’s necklace and ran off into the night. Then, his family got taken hostage by spindly creatures of the dead. And to top it all, he’s just been charged with a mission by Lord Ganesha himself! Now, in order to rescue his family from the hands of the preta, he has to undertake a journey more fantastical than he can begin to comprehend.
As Taran embarks on an epic voyage that may lead to disastrous consequence, he realizes that having faith, especially in himself, might be harder than he was led to believe.
Dive into a riveting adventure to the Veiled Lands, replete with evil Naga armies, mythical creatures and a supervillain who will stop at nothing to reach the elusive Gateway of Moksha in Ganesha’s Temple.
**
Ganesha closed his eyes and raised all four of his hands. Particles of light appeared from thin air. They formed images in the centre of the room, and then began shimmering, swirling into new images. Taran saw human figures eating, dozing, bathing, riding horses.
‘Many thousands of years ago, gods and goddesses ruled happily over a vast world called the Veiled Lands. It was a spiritual world filled with an energy that forms the spiritual core of all life. We call this prana.’
Ganesha focused his kind, brown gaze on Taran.
‘The Veiled Lands are very simply an old earth, and its beings as old as this world itself. They have seen endless cycles of destruction and rebirth, existing far longer than you can imagine.
Ganesha’s Temple || Rohit Gaur
‘In the Veiled Lands, through prana, came the first beings of light and dark—a duality exists wherever life forms. Dyaus the Sky Father and Prithvi the Earth Mother created Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu, as well as many other devas like Surya, Agni, Indra, Varuna. These devas went on to create spirits and magical creatures, who lived peacefully together. Some devas turned into asuras, who are demons and titans. I could go on for years if I had to narrate the lives of every single deva and asura.’ Ganesha waved his hand as though turning a page in a book.
From the light particles over Ganesha’s head, new images appeared. One of the figures, snake-like and menacing, was pictured standing over a fallen deva, a staff raised above his head. Taran stared in fascination.
‘Vritra,’ Ganesha said soberly. ‘Once a deva, Vritra grew ambitious and power-hungry and sought to conquer his brethren. He attempted to overthrow the peaceful order, dominate the other devas and asuras, and rule the Veiled Lands by himself.
‘His rebellion was unsuccessful and the other devas, pitying their brother for his vanity, vowed to exile him from the Veiled Lands. They decided to create a parallel world for asuras like him, which lacked all prana. They had to combine all their powers in order to create such a world, and that powerful spell also created the Bare Lands—the world you now inhabit, Taran.
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant: the sidewalks around her house, parks, bridges, piazzas, streets, stores, coffee bars. We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother, mired in a desperate solitude after her father’s untimely death. In addition to colleagues at work, where she never quite feels at ease, she has girl friends, guy friends, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. But in the arc of a year, as one season gives way to the next, transformation awaits. One day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will change. This is the first novel she has written in Italian and translated into English. It brims with the impulse to cross barriers. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.
Here is an excerpt from the book Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri:
The city doesn’t beckon or lend me a shoulder today. Maybe it knows I’m about to leave. The sun’s dull disk defeats me; the dense sky is the same one that will carry me away. That vast and vaporous territory, lacking precise pathways, is all that binds us together now. But it never preserves our tracks. The sky, unlike the sea, never holds on to the people that pass through it. The sky contains nothing of our spirit, it doesn’t care. Always shifting, altering its aspect from one moment to the next, it can’t be defined.
Whereabouts| Jhumpa Lahiri
This morning I’m scared. I’m afraid to leave this house, this neighborhood, this urban cocoon. But I’ve already got one foot out the door. The suitcases, purchased at my former stationery store, are already packed. I just need to lock them now. I’ve given the key to my subletter and I’ve told her how often she needs to water the plants, and how the handle of the door to the balcony sometimes sticks. I’ve emptied out one closet and locked another, inside of which I’ve amassed everything I consider important. It’s not much in the end: notebooks, letters, some photos and papers, my diligent agendas. As for the rest, I don’t really care, though it does occur to me that for the first time someone else will be using my cups, dishes, forks, and napkins on a daily basis.
Last night at dinner, at a friend’s house, everyone wished me well, telling me to have a wonderful time. They hugged me and said, Good luck! He wasn’t there, he had other plans. I had a nice time anyway, we lingered at the table, still talking after midnight.
I tell myself: A new sky awaits me, even though it’s the same as this one. In some ways it will be quite grand. For an entire year, for example, I won’t have to shop for food, or cook, or do the dishes. I’ll never have to eat dinner by myself.
I might have said no, I might have just stayed put. But something’s telling me to push past the barrier of my life, just like the dog that pulled me along the paths of the villa. And so I heed my call, having come to know the guts and soul of this place a little too well. It’s just that today, feeling slothful, I’m prey to those embedded fears that don’t dissipate.
Dust and ash engulf the land, dry rivers snake the earth and a phantom darkness looms over everyone. As most of India reels from this environmental catastrophe, water replaces oil as the most valuable commodity and cities get infested with gangs and powerful religious figures.
In this dystopia, the hi-tech Millennium City, which is inhabited by the rich, overlooks the quarters of the poor. Millennium City gives rise to a form of technology that manufactures artificial humans in laboratories.
Born in one such lab, Haksh does the forbidden: he falls in love with Chhaya, a human.
A coming-of-age novel about violence and transgression, Darklands is about one thing above all: love-both all-consuming and redemptive. Here’s an excerpt from this dark tale of love.
**
He woke up, dreaming of sheep. They were everywhere. Atop a hillock, cascading down a brook, their curly white fur gleaming in the soft, wintry sun. And then, with a slight flutter of an eyelid, they were gone. What surfaced was the wasteland, corroding away in the harsh morning sun. It was still early morning, but the sun was already severe. Through his half-open eyes, still very heavy with sleep, Easwaran tried to look. The dust and ash had begun to swirl across the barren landscape. Some people were up from their sleep, while some had wrapped their tattered blankets around their heads, trying to evade the daylight. Easwaran tried to gauge what time it must have been. Probably still seven. But in the vast, desolate landscape, time and its precise classification had become vestigial rituals of an age that no longer can be. It was reduced instead to a rough probability. As was everything else. Life even. His son was still in the blanket, but Easwaran knew he was wide awake. The infant was still asleep close to him. From a bit afar, towards the edges of the makeshift camp, the lanterns were giving up the last of their flames. Set against the glowing daylight, these tiny flames seemed pathetic, like a puny space rover approaching the cosmic infinitude of Jupiter. But the flames stayed, pale and almost invisible, but intact nevertheless. No one in the camp seemed to mind.
Aakash walked softly over to Easwaran, a cold rifle gleaming in his hand. His face was taut and visible from a distance. Well, at least to Easwaran, it seemed hardened. As if laughter hadn’t meandered on the soft pastures of his face for a long time now.
‘There’s trouble,’ Aakash said, crouching unevenly near the man. ‘Apparently, that Phanai’s lad is missing.’
‘Is it what I fear?’ Easwaran remarked. He was up by now. Granules of dust and ash were on his face, but he seemed unperturbed by this.
‘Could be. But no one knows. I saw him last night, quiet and all by himself, as he normally is. More than anything, he seemed safe.’ Aakash regretted the moment he said this and he even anticipated what Easwaran’s reply would be.
Darklands || Arnav Das Sharma
‘Nothing is safe,’ Easwaran replied, his eyes turning away from Aakash and towards the desert landscape that stretched before him and all around and shimmered like a hot metal freshly pulled out of industrial fire.
‘I was thinking of telling Eaklavya that we need a search party. We should look for him, no?’
‘Look for him where? Where do you think he could go? How many nooks and crannies and undiscovered lanes do you see here? It’s a damned wasteland.’ Easwaran tasted the bitter trickle of bile rising in his mouth. He thought he had accepted his fate and along with it, everyone’s. He thought that he had stopped caring. For that was the only way he could make sense of it all. But he was clearly wrong, it seemed.
‘What else are we supposed to do then?’ Aakash asked. Easwaran knew he could not answer that—he didn’t have an answer. He chose to keep quiet. The infant woke up crying. He picked it up and began cradling it in his arms. He recognized those to be peals of hunger. But he also knew he could do nothing about it.
Making Excellence a Habit is a behind-the-scenes account of a person honoured internationally for delivering path-breaking care to hundreds of thousands of people with diabetes. While hard work, passion and focus emerge as winning lessons, delicate and tender learnings from Dr Mohan’s life, such as empathy or spirituality, are not forgotten.
Here is an excerpt from the book that talks about success stories of people with diabetes.
Making Excellence A Habit || Dr V. Mohan
Many people with diabetes believe that because of their illness, they cannot achieve their ambitions. Of the two most common forms of diabetes, type 2 and type 1, the former can be treated with tablets, diet and exercise, although some individuals may need insulin at some point in their life. Type 1 diabetes, on the other hand, is a more severe form of the disorder where insulin injections are needed from the beginning, and often several times a day, in order to maintain good health. I have seen that when people develop type 1 diabetes (or even type 2 diabetes, for that matter), they often tend to give up. Their family also thinks that they are doomed to a life of mediocrity, devoid of any ambitions or success.
Doctors, too, unknowingly, reinforce this mindset. We were taught as students that if somebody is fifty years old and has had diabetes for twenty years, their arteries and blood vessels would be seventy years old. We therefore recognize what’s referred to as the ‘chronological age’, which is the actual age of the patient, and the ‘biological age’, which is the age of the arteries. In the case of people with diabetes, almost every study has shown that diabetes decreases the lifespan of an individual. Statistics show that in both men and women between seven to eight years of life are lost due to diabetes. Currently, the average lifespan of an Indian is sixty- seven years for males and sixty-nine years for females. Hence, for Indians with diabetes, one would expect that the average lifespan would be around sixty years for both males and females. By this calculation, one would assume that it would be almost impossible to find an elderly person with diabetes in India. Only 0.001 per cent of India’s population today are nonagenarians, that is aged ninety years or above. Hence, finding a ninety-year-old person with diabetes in India would be an absolutely rarity.
While these statistics are well established, they’re not necessarily true, and moreover, there are a lot of exceptions to the rule. Over the last few years, we have been noticing at our centre that our patients with diabetes, presumably due to better control, are living longer and longer. In 2013, I published a paper to show that patients with type 2 diabetes could live for forty or fifty years despite their diabetes. This paper was published in the prestigious American journal Diabetes Care and became a landmark paper. My colleagues and I were pleased that we as Indians were the first to report on the long-term survival of patients with type 2 diabetes.
After we had submitted the paper, Dr William Cefalu, then the editor of Diabetes Care, visited me in Chennai. Dr Cefalu told me that he was delighted to receive our paper and wanted to learn more about the survival among people with type 2 diabetes. Dr Cefalu then suggested that we have, as a control group, patients who were ‘non-survivors’, that is, had not survived for forty years. I mentioned to him that this would take time, as we would have to painstakingly match the ‘survivors’ and ‘non-survivors’ from our large electronic records. He gave us additional time to do it, and once we were done, we submitted the paper again to the journal. The paper was an instant hit—and was the first in the world to demonstrate the long-term survival of patients with type 2 diabetes of more than forty years duration.
In fact, when I received the Harold Rifkin Award for Distinguished International Service in the Cause of Diabetes from the American Diabetes Association, Dr Cefalu was present at the ceremony. I walked up to him and asked him whether he remembered me. Dr Cefalu smiled and said, ‘Why do you think you are receiving this award?’ By then, Dr Cefalu was the chief scientific officer of the association and, despite his high position, he hadn’t forgotten my paper in his journal. ‘That paper of yours was definitely one of the highlights of your career,’ he said. I agreed. I was humbled to receive the award, and even more so because I was the first diabetologist from India to have been chosen for the award.
However, in that study we did not take the age of the patients into consideration—only the duration of diabetes. Only recently have we started looking at our electronic medical records again to see how many patients lived very long lives. This time, our study showed that 325 of our patients with type 2 diabetes had survived beyond ninety years of age. This meant that if one applied the formula taught by our teachers, the biological age of these patients was unbelievably long. By now, I have several patients who have crossed ninety-five years of age and are approaching their hundredth birthday. I have also seen my first patient with diabetes cross the coveted hundred-year birth-anniversary mark. This man was the former vice chancellor of two universities and has had diabetes for almost sixty years. This means his biological age would be 160 years!
To understand the fundamentals of what makes a person achieve meaningful success, get your copy of Dr Mohan’s Making Excellence A Habit
It isn’t always easy to be a woman. As our little girls grow up, we’d love to have them mentored by some of the strong women, with strong voices who aren’t always brought to the limelight. There is so much the women before us have done to bring us where we are – and it’s important we teach our girls – and boys – that women are as strong as men….if not stronger.
Here is a list of books for children to celebrate women, this Women’s Day
The Girl Who Chose by Devdutt Pattnaik
‘You are bound by rules, but not I. I am free to choose.’
Two thousand years ago, the poet-sage Valmiki wrote the Ramayana. It is the tale of Ram, the sun-prince of Ayodhya, who is obliged to follow family rules and so makes no choices.
India’s favourite mythologist brings you this charmingly illustrated retelling of the Ramayana that is sure to empower and entertain a new generation readers.
The Daughter from a Wishing Tree by Sudha Murty
The women in Indian mythology might be fewer in number, but their stories of strength and mystery in the pages of ancient texts and epics are many. They slayed demons and protected their devotees fiercely. From Parvati to Ashokasundari and from Bhamati to Mandodari, this collection features enchanting and fearless women who frequently led wars on behalf of the gods, were the backbone of their families and makers of their own destinies.
I Need to Pee by Neha Singh
Rahi simply loves slurping refreshing drinks, and so she always needs to pee. But boy, does she hate public loos! Travel with the cheeky Rahi and read all about her yucky, icky, sticky adventures in this quirky and vibrant book about the ever-relevant worry of having a safe and clean toilet experience.
Manya Learns To Roar by Shruthi Rao
Manya badly, badly wants to be Shere Khan in her school play. The Jungle Book is her favourite film and she knows all the lines. She’s sure she’ll be a superb Shere Khan.
But not everyone thinks so. Her classmate Rajat is always making fun of her stammer. Her English teacher thinks its risky to let her get on stage and her principal seems to agree.
The more anxious Manya gets, the worse her stammer becomes. Will Manya lose her dream role? Can she overcome her fears and learn to roar?
Angie Thomas’ new book Concrete Rose returns to the site of her previous work, The Hate u Give, where the narrative events are catalysed by the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager. We’re returning to Thomas’ books, which are inspiring and necessary, delving into conversations around race, friendship, activism, and giving us characters that are unforgettable. Here is an excerpt from The Hate u Give:
A commotion stirs in the middle of the dance floor.
Voices argue louder than the music. Cuss words fly left and right.
The Hate U Give||Angie Thomas
My first thought? Kenya walked up on Denasia like she promised. But the voices are deeper than theirs.
Pop! A shot rings out. I duck.
Pop! A second shot. The crowd stampedes toward the door, which leads to more cussing and fighting since it’s impossible for everybody to get out at once.
Khalil grabs my hand. “C’mon.”
There are way too many people and way too much curly hair for me to catch a glimpse of Kenya. “But Kenya—”
“Forget her, let’s go!”
He pulls me through the crowd, shoving people out our way and stepping on shoes. That alone could get us some bullets. I look for Kenya among the panicked faces, but still no sign of her. I don’t try to see who got shot or who did it. You can’t snitch if you don’t know anything.
Cars speed away outside, and people run into the night in any direction where shots aren’t firing off. Khalil leads me to a Chevy Impala parked under a dim streetlight. He pushes me in through the driver’s side, and I climb into the passenger seat. We screech off, leaving chaos in the rearview mirror.
“Always some shit,” he mumbles. “Can’t have a party without somebody getting shot.”
He sounds like my parents. That’s exactly why they don’t let me “go nowhere,” as Kenya puts it. At least not around Garden Heights.
Concrete Rose is a return to Garden Heights, seventeen years before the events depicted in The Hate U Give. It is a fierce and inspiring account of what it means to grow up as a black man in the United States. Here is an excerpt:
“That trifling heffa! And I don’t mean Iesha,” Ma says. “I mean her momma!”
Ma ain’t stopped fussing since we left the clinic.
At first I thought Iesha and Ms. Robinson stepped outside. Nah, they left. One of the nurses said she pointed out they were leaving the car seat. Ms. Robinson told her, “We don’t need it anymore,” and shoved Iesha out the door.
We went straight to their house. I banged on the doors, looked through the windows. Nobody answered. We had no choice but to bring li’l man home with us.
Concrete Rose||Angie Thomas
I climb our porch steps, carrying him in his car seat. He so caught up in the toys dangling from the handle that he don’t know his momma left him like he nothing.
Ma shove the front door open. “I had a funny feeling when I saw all them clothes in that diaper bag. They shipped him off without a word!”
I set the car seat on the coffee table. What the hell just hap- pened? For real, man. I suddenly got a whole human being in my care when I never even took care of a dog.
“What we do now, Ma?”
“We obviously have to keep him until we find out what Iesha and her momma are up to. This might be for the weekend, but as trifling as they are…” She close her eyes and hold her forehead. “Lord, I hope this girl hasn’t abandoned this baby.”
My heart drop to my kicks. “Abandoned him? What I’m supposed to–”
“You’re gonna do whatever you have to do, Maverick,” she says. “That’s what being a parent means. Your child is now your responsibility. You’ll be changing his diapers. You’ll be feeding him. You’ll be dealing with him in the middle of the night. You—”
Had my whole life turned upside down, and she don’t care.
That’s Ma for you. Granny say she came in the world ready for whatever. When things fall apart, she quick to grab the pieces and make something new outta them.
“Are you listening to me?” she asks.
I scratch my cornrows. “I hear you.”
“I said are you listening? There’s a difference.”
“I’m listening, Ma.”
“Good. They left enough diapers and formula to last the
weekend. I’ll call your aunt ’Nita, see if they have Andre- anna’s old crib. We can set it up in your room.”
“My room? He gon’ keep me awake!”
She set her hand on her hip. “Who else he’s supposed to keep awake?”
“Man,” I groan.
“Don’t ‘man’ me! You’re a father now. It’s not about you anymore.” Ma pick up the baby bag. “I’ll fix him a bottle. Can you keep an eye on him, or is that a problem?”
“I’ll watch him,” I mumble.
“Thank you.” She go to the kitchen. “‘He gon’ keep me awake.’ The nerve!”
I plop down on the couch. Li’l Man stare at me from the car seat. That’s what I’m gon’ call him for now, Li’l Man. King Jr. don’t feel right when he my son.
My son. Wild to think that one li’l condom breaking turned me into somebody’s father. I sigh. “Guess it’s you and me now, huh?”
I hold my hand toward him, and he grip my finger. He small to be so strong. “Gah-lee,” I laugh. “You gon’ break my finger.”
He try to put it in his mouth, but I don’t let him. My fingernails dirty as hell. That only make him whine.
“Ay, ay, chill.” I unstrap him and lift him out. He way heavier than he look. I try to rest him in my arms and sup- port his neck like Ma told me to. He whimper and squirm till suddenly he wailing. “Ma!”
She come back with the bottle. “What, Maverick?”
“I can’t hold him right.”
She adjust him in my arms. “You relax, and he’ll relax.
Now here, give him the bottle.” She hand it to me, and I put it in his mouth. “Lower it a little bit, Maverick. You don’t wanna feed him fast. There you go. When he’s halfway through it, burp him. Burp him again when he’s done.”
“How?”
“Hold him against your shoulder and pat his back.”
Hold him right, lower the bottle, burp him. “Ma, I can’t—” “Yes, you can. In fact, you’re doing it now.”
~
Two beautiful, urgent reads that will stay with you.
The evening prayers in the ashram are over. Cowbells tinkle sweetly in the distance. The residents of the ashram sit in a circle, their eyes fixed on Shyam, who has promised them a story as sweet as lemon syrup. And so Shyam begins.
While on some evenings he tells them of his boyhood days, surrounded by the abundant beauty of the Konkan, on others he recalls growing up poor, embarrassed by the state of his family’s affairs. But at the heart of each story is his Aai-her words and lessons.
Narrated over the course of forty-two nights, Shyamchi Aai is a poignant story of Shyam and Aai, a mother with an unbreakable spirit. Here, we are sharing an excerpt from the book where Shyam reflects on the relationship between his parents and how they had both taught him important life-lessons.
**
It was Bhau’s custom to go to the temple after he finished his puja at home. That was the signal for us to lay the plates for lunch. We would serve everything else before he came back except for the rice. When we saw him coming, we would call out, ‘Bhau’s here, Aai. Bhau’s here. Serve the rice.’ Bhau would bring back holy water from the temple. We would have that and then settle down to lunch.
That day, Aai had made a dish from sweet potato greens. She used to make tasty dishes from the leaves of all kinds of vegetables like pumpkins and ladies’ fingers. She would say, ‘Anything can be made to taste good if it’s tempered with a couple of spices and the right amount of salt and chilli powder are added.’ She was right, of course, because whatever she made did indeed taste good. The culinary deity seemed to dwell in her fingers. She would pour her heart and soul into everything she made.
However, that day was a little different. There was no salt in the vegetable dish she had made. With all the work she had to do, she had simply forgotten to put it in. Bhau didn’t mention it, so we didn’t either. Bhau’s self-control was unbelievable. Every time Aai offered him another helping of the vegetable, he would say, ‘This is excellent.’ He neither added the salt that was served on his plate nor asked for any. Aai said to me, ‘Don’t you like the dish? You’re not eating it the way you normally do.’ Before I could answer, Bhau cut in with, ‘Now that he has started learning English at school, he’s not going to enjoy these rustic vegetables.’
Shyamchi Aai || Sane Guruji
‘Not at all,’ I protested. ‘If learning English is going to do that to me, I don’t want to learn it. Please don’t send me to school.’
Bhau said, ‘I said that only to make you angry. When you get angry, I know all is well with the world. You like jackfruit, don’t you? I’ll get one tomorrow from Patil Wadi. If I don’t find a tender one, you can have the pods boiled and spiced.’
Aai said, ‘Yes, please get one. We haven’t had jackfruit in a long time.’ Bhau went out to the verandah for his routine walk and prayers. After that he spun yarn for his sacred thread. The spinning disc was made of clay. The house rule was that all of us should know how to spin yarn.
Aai had finished clearing up and had now sat down for her lunch. I was sitting nearby. She took her first mouthful of the vegetable and discovered it had no salt. ‘Shyam, there’s no salt in this dish. None of you said so. Why didn’t you tell me? How could you eat this saltless dish?’
‘We said nothing because Bhau said nothing,’ I replied. Aai was very upset.
‘How did you eat this?’ she kept asking. ‘No wonder you didn’t have much. Otherwise you would have single-handedly finished half the lot. You like your vegetables. I should have known then. But what’s the use of saying it now?’
Aai was full of remorse for her mistake. She believed we should always give people the best we can, whatever it is. She felt she had been careless, not paid enough attention, lost her concentration on the job. She had done wrong and she refused to forgive herself.
Bhau had said nothing because he hadn’t wanted to upset her. She had spent so much time at the hearth breathing in all the smoke and fumes just to make food for us. Why find fault? Why not accept what was made as tasty? Bhau believed it was wrong to hurt the person who had cooked for you.
‘Friends, it is for us to decide who the finer human being was. Was my father the finer human being because he ate an unsalted dish as if it were the best he had ever eaten in the belief that it was better to control one’s tongue than hurt another’s feelings? Or was my mother the finer human being because she was upset over serving us something that wasn’t perfect, asked us why we hadn’t complained and wouldn’t forgive herself for her mistake? According to me, both were fine human beings.
Our culture is founded on self-control and contentment as well as on doing work as perfectly as possible. I learnt from my parents that we should aspire to both these virtues in life.’
Everyone in Jakar knows that Karma has always defended his village from monsters. But suddenly his friends and neighbours are angry with him and accusing him of crimes he knows he didn’t commit.
Karma suspects he has a doppelgänger who is terrorizing the town, but no one believes him. His friends Chimmi and Dawa and even his mother do not seem to trust him.
But with every monster in Bhutan suddenly turning up in Jakar, will he be able to stop his adversary in time?
Karma Vs The Evil Twin is the third book in the Karma Tandin, Monster Hunter series. Set in Bhutan, it is a rollicking adventure that will keep you riveted till the very end!
**
When I got to school the next morning, half of my classmates stayed far, far away from me. The others clustered around me and glared. I stood at the edge of the assembly ground, trying to look normal and succeeding in looking awkward.
Chimmi pushed his way through the crowd. At least he wasn’t glaring. ‘Karma,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t think people are happy with you.’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ some kid parroted.
That was when the shouting started. ‘Psycho!’
‘Hoodlum!’
‘Why would you do that?’
As more and more students joined in on the shouting, I found out all the horrible things that I’ve supposedly been doing. According to the angry mob, I pulled up flowers from flower beds. And broke guitars. And threw mud on family dinners. Uh.
‘That wasn’t me,’ I said over and over, but no one was listening.
Principal Ngawang charged on to the crowd. ‘Step aside,’ he said. ‘Get ready for assembly. Don’t start arguing.’
The crowd grumbled a bit, but they split up anyway.
I breathed a sigh of relief. At least the principal had my back.
Then he glared at me.
Gulp.
‘If I hear you pull one more prank against this school . . .’
Great. Even he thought I was destroying everything.
‘I won’t,’ I told him.
‘Thank you.’ And he marched back inside the building. For emphasis, he slammed the door shut behind him.
The words ‘Karma wuz here’ were spray-painted on the wood. He didn’t see it. Yet.
This was a major mystery, the kind that only happened to people like me. Someone was pretending to be me. Someone was trying to take over my life.
A large microphone poked me in the face. ‘What the . . .?’
Do you have any comments?’
Karma VS The Evil Twin || Evan Purcell
That was Priyanka Subba, our school reporter. She was the president of the newspaper club, and she took her job very, very seriously.
‘Hi, Priyanka,’ I said. ‘You look . . . different.’
She glared at me. ‘Yeah. I’m not wearing my hair in pigtails.’
‘Oh,’ I said. That explained it. She always wore her hair in two long pigtails, one on either side of her face. Now, her hair was pulled back, tucked on to the back of her kira.
‘I wonder why,’ she said sarcastically. She pulled up the side of her hair, revealing that someone had cut off one of her pigtails.
‘Looks . . . good,’ I said.
Her mic hit me in the face again. I think it was intentional. Clearly, she thought I had given her the unfortunate haircut.
‘Nice save,’ Chimmi whispered loudly. I forgot he was even there.
‘Listen, Priyanka,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, but . . .’
‘Don’t apologize,’ she said. ‘Don’t say anything. I’m a reporter, remember? I’m impartial.’
Like I said, veeerry seriously.
‘Which brings me to my next story. Here.’ She handed me a photo. It was blurry, but it showed our school’s new recycling project, and it showed a boy trying to destroy it with a crowbar. The boy looked exactly like me.
The project was a giant metal structure that sorted paper and plastic waste on to bins. It was a special initiative funded by the government, thanks to a proposal from our science teacher Mr Pempa. Every student at Jakar Higher Secondary School helped out to make this happen, and now some kid was trying to destroy it with a crowbar.
Priyanka put the mic right against my bottom lip. ‘Comments?’
The boy in the photo looked like me (a lot), but I knew it wasn’t me.
‘That could be anyone . . . with my exact height and build and hairstyle.’ When I said it out loud, I realized how lame it sounded.
‘Yeah,’ she muttered. ‘Anyone.’ She handed me a second picture of the incident. This time, the mystery boy was looking directly at the camera.
Indian civilization is an idea, a reality, an enigma. In the riveting INDIANS: A Brief History of a Civilization, Namit Arora takes us on an unforgettable journey through 5000 years of history, reimagining in rich detail the social and cultural moorings of Indians through the ages. Enlivening the narrative with the idiosyncratic perspectives of the many famous foreign travellers who visited India over millennia, local folklore and his own inimitable insights, Arora guides us through six iconic places-the Harappan city of Dholavira, the Ikshvaku capital at Nagarjunakonda, the Buddhist centre of learning at Nalanda, enigmatic Khajuraho, Vijayanagar at Hampi, and Varanasi.
Read on for a glimpse into the exciting churn of ideas, beliefs and values that unfolded among our ancestors through the centuries.
INDIANS || NAMIT ARORA
Still, the lack of loud and clear indicators of war or standing armies, so commonplace in other civilizations, is a striking feature of the Harappan Civilization. Further, Harappan cities have not revealed monumental, or even humble, temple structures, a great puzzle for scholars. There aren’t any equivalents of the temples and pyramids of ancient Egypt or the ziggurats of Mesopotamia. Some say the Great Bath of Mohenjo-Daro had a religious purpose but this is highly speculative. Or perhaps the Harappans built religious shrines and large sculptures from perishable materials like wood. In any case, while there are hints, we have no clear sense of Harappan gods and rituals, or whether they had any temples or priests. Scholars have offered divergent interpretations of seals with possible religious content: a handsome seven-inch sculpture of a man named ‘priest-king’, who could well have been an aristocrat; a seal named ‘proto-Shiva’ that depicts a multi-headed, seated figure in a yoga-like pose, one of ‘several other yogi images in the corpus of Mature Harappan materials’; another seal that shows a female (deity?) standing under a Bodhi tree with its heart-shaped leaves, a figure kneeling before her in supplication and seven standing figures watching them; other seals that depict mysterious objects and rituals before a unicorn; the swastika motif appears often; some female figurines have a paste-like substance along the middle parting of their hair; a stone object in the shape of a phallus has been identified; two terracotta male figurines have erections; a small terracotta object in Kalibangan resembles the familiar Shiva lingam. All this is very tantalizing. There can be little doubt about cultural continuities. Harappan beliefs clearly shaped later religions of the Axial Age in the subcontinent. Quite possibly, Indian ideas of meditation and even renunciation have Harappan origins. But it’s difficult to draw firm conclusions about this, or about what the Harappans themselves believed, at least until the script begins to speak. Scepticism is essential: The deciphered Mayan script revealed how wrong many scholars were about the beliefs they had attributed to the Mayans (such as being peaceful). The Harappans did not build monumental sculptures, such as of kings or gods, as did the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians. This doesn’t make them any less complex than others, writes Possehl, rather it’s an alternative way in which a civilization, with a ‘highly complex sociocultural system, has expressed itself’. They did make fine miniature art, as in seals and beadwork. And while their figurines aren’t notable for their artisanship, they still evocatively depict their people ‘in great variety, with many poses: sitting in chairs, lying on beds, holding babies and animals, kneading bread, and other things that people do to round out their existence,’ writes Possehl. Animal puppets, in which a bull might shake its head or pull a cart, reveal a playful sense of humour, perhaps designed to amuse children. There are some fantasy creatures too, but ‘on the whole, the Indus peoples in their art, as in other aspects of their lives, come across as people with a practical bent, a tendency to deal with and represent the real world as they [and we] see it’. That said, what jumps out as the Harappans’ greatest monumental work is the city itself, a marvel of urban design and engineering, city- wide sanitation systems that include the first indoor toilets in the world and sophisticated water management. ‘Probably not until later Roman times did people devise so many clever construction techniques to deal with comforts and discomforts related to water.’ They also excelled at shipbuilding and long-distance trade—another reason to think that they had centralized authority and bureaucracy to mobilize labour, develop trading networks and organize long-distance shipping expeditions. Harappan cities of the mature period (2600–1900 bce) had some walled neighbourhoods with larger buildings and better provisions, suggesting that an elite class resided there. But not everyone agrees. There is ‘no justification’ or archaeological support for this presumption, says archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. In fact, in certain stages, the ‘citadels’ in Dholavira and Mohenjo-Daro were hubs of artisanal– industrial activity. There is no evidence of royal palaces; homes differ in size and provisions but not by much. Sanitation and water wells were available to all. Based on the bones of the dead, the rich and the poor seem to have enjoyed similar access to nutrition. Their burials too display a narrow range in their sizes and types of funerary objects. However, as noted earlier, burial practices may have varied across individuals, or social groups. That the Harappans had a social social class hierarchy is clear enough. What’s remarkable is that this hierarchy seems so much flatter than in other ancient (or modern) civilizations.
You left your jokes and funny faces in my mind. You left our secrets and your knitting behind. I’m still sad. I’ll always be. I love you times infiniteeeeeeeey. You don’t mind that I can’t rhyme. I don’t know how to end this, will someone help me?
To help Swara, you’d have to dive into her world during the lockdown. Feel the almost-nine-year-old’s heart break as she loses her favourite person ever, Pitter Paati. Swara pursues clues to find her, but stumbles upon a crime instead. VExpectedly, no one believes her.
Will Swara and her VAnnoying friends from the detective squad find the Ruth of the Matter in time?
Told with humour and sparkle, When the World Went Dark is a compassionate story about finding light in the darkest times of our lives. Here’s an excerpt from the book wherein Swara is trying to understand why the rules of the world around her have suddenly changed.
**
The times were dark, alarming, threatening. Clouds of fear kept people bolted and barred into their own homes. You couldn’t open a window to draw in a deep breath. You couldn’t trust anything that anyone else had touched. In fact, if you remember, you couldn’t even put a toe out of your front door.
Swara should know because she tested it out.
Ruth was the one who’d thrown her the challenge. She claimed to be her best friend, although you might doubt it after this. They lived in apartments opposite each other and often they sat cross-legged on their doormats and chatted, yelling to and fro. It was Ruth who said, ‘Swara, you cannot put even a toe out of your door.’
Swara scoffed at this. ‘Why? What if I do?’
‘Try and see. It is banned! There is a high-tech app that will make your toe shrivel up and fall off.’
If you’ve been almost nine, like Swara was, you knew what absolutely had to be done if thrown down such an outrageous challenge. Swara quite naturally, had to still her beating heart, hold her breath, kick off her chappal and wiggle her big toe an inch out of her open door. It did not fall off and land on the doormat. It stayed firm on her foot.
‘You are full of lies, Ruth!’
‘I am not. I am the Ruth, the whole Ruth and nothing but the . . .’
‘Fine, but my toe is fine too. It is my toe, the whole toe and nothing but the toe.’
‘It will not be. Keep watching it. Over the days, it will turn red, purple, black and then fall right off. Just you
wait.’
Swara retreated, scared. And since then began to watch the toe for signs.
The times were like that as we’d mentioned. Dark, alarming, threatening times.
And then, of course, holidays were declared— out of the blue! No waking up to a screaming alarm clock, or drinking milk while sleepwalking, or pulling on the uniform and buttoning it down wrong, or running down to catch the yellow school bus and missing the favourite seat.
When the World Went Dark || Jane De Suza
Like most kids, she spent the first week playing, eating, sleeping and like most kids, got fed up of it all. Nothing fun was on the Allowed List. No playing downstairs, no eating out, no meeting friends. To add to her dismay, her toe sported a smallish reddish spot one morning, which turned as white as a sheet (just a saying). She held her toe in one hand and hopped over to Appa, who examined it and opined that it was a harmless insect bite and would disappear soon.
‘My toe? My toe will disappear?’
‘No, Swara, the red spot will disappear.’
What was high up on the Rotten List was that she couldn’t meet her favourite person in the world, her paati. Not Madurai Paati, her father’s mother, but her Pitter Paati who lived on the outskirts of Bengaluru. In the same city and not meetable! VStupid (Very Stupid)! Everyone was locked down—Pitter Paati, Thaatha, Anand Maama, Maami and the twins. The whole city was locked into their houses. The whole world, too, from what the TV showed. You could see people in Italy singing and waving while hanging over their balconies. Swara made a point of letting Ruth know that no one’s arms were turning purple, shrivelling up and falling off.
She video called Pitter Paati many times a day, to show her a new poem, the suspicious red-spotted toe, the view of no one on the streets outside, a line of ants creeping towards the dustbin, her fake moustache, anything actually. PP was always interested in whatever Swara was up to.
