Shreevatsa Nevatia’s How to Travel Light is a candid take at his life after he was diagnosed as bipolar at twenty-three, and how he struggled for a decade, fighting a cycle of depression and euphoria.
Here are a few lines from the book which display this struggle:
Combat your inner anguish with this book.
Tag: Penguin India
The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, An Excerpt
Cyrus Schayegh in ‘The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World’ traces how a Eurocentric world economy and European imperialism molded the Middle East from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.
Here is an excerpt from the book.
“I dreamed I was in Jerusalem.” Thus start dozens of entries in the diary of Khalil Sakakini, a Palestinian educator and intellectual born 1878 in Jerusalem, during his stay from the fall of 1907 to the summer of 1908 in New York City and Maine. By day he works in America; he barely makes ends meet, translating Arabic texts for a Columbia University professor, proofreading for a local Arabic journal, sweating in a paper mill. By night he crosses the ocean; he visits his extended family, including his best friend, Dawud Saidawi, other friends and neighbors. Particularly after Dawud’s death in January 1908 his longing is dark; his dreams often plummet into anxiety, horror even. And almost without fail the place that gives his dreams their shape is his hometown.
The family house is center stage. In April 1908 Sakakini dreams that “I entered the house and asked about my mother and was told she had died, then I asked about my brother Ya‘cub and was told he had died, then I asked about Shafiq and was told he had died and about Na’ifa and was told she had died, and I started to slap my face in despair, shouting oh mother, oh brother, oh Shafiq, oh Na’ifa.” Around the house twist and turn the alleyways of Jerusalem’s Old City. Soon after hearing of Dawud’s death Sakakini writes that “I was in Jerusalem, walking in the Christian Quarter, opposite our shop, . . . When I got to the steps of Dayr al-Rum, women descended in a procession ordered in rows, in the first row girls wrapped in a white shawl, but their cloths and headscarves black and their forearms bare, behind them four rows of elderly women, all of them drowning in black.” Beyond the Old City stretch new neighborhoods and buildings. Shortly before Dawud’ death, Sakakini dreams that
I was walking from place to place looking for Dawud, on my way I met the teacher Ya‘qub Andria, then I suddenly met [Dawud] and anxiously greeted him and he greeted back. He carried a bolero on his shoulder and wore glasses. We walked together, I asked how he was and he answered me: like shit. We walked a bit further until we reached the train station and he said: hurry before the train leaves, and started to dance as fast as lightning and jumped onto one of the roofless wagons and before I got to [it] the train moved, tearing through the land with tremendous speed and I almost succeeded in jumping on the wagon but could not and I waved at him and bode him farewell and told him wait for me at the next train.
There is no way to ascertain one true interpretation of these dreams, a fact compounded by our inability to tell Sakakini’s dreams from his accounts thereof. Take the last dream. At its start, is Sakakini walking through a vague dream-world- Jerusalem or is he in particular places but does not care telling? And why does he meet the teacher just before seeing Dawud? We cannot know. Besides, are not these Dreams unexceptional, timeless even, and hence useless to the historian?
Not quite. Sakakini’s dream accounts are part of diary entries; in return, these form part of a larger range of texts like letters; hence they have contexts and in this sense are open to interpretation. Many letters are for Sultana—a neighbor’s daughter, beautiful, and an educator and Greek Orthodox like him—with whom Sakakini fell madly in love the summer of his departure. They are always emotive and often come with more than one tear. (Sultana is more down-to- earth: “What’s this, Khalil?! Do not make crying all-consuming business!”) And in these letters as in Sakakini’s dreams, Jerusalem is the arena. At its center is, again, the family’s house. In the last letter that Sakakini gives Sultana before leaving, he implores her “remember me when you visit the house, stand in your window that overlooks our house and say ‘peace be upon you, oh Khalil.’” And beyond the house extend, again, the city and its environs. Sakakini asks Sultana “to visit as often as you can our beloved rock” in the Shaikh Jarrah neighborhood, and recalls the day “we . . . with my sister Milia walked on the road of the Mount of Olives and I felt like gaily striding on the peak of my happiness.”
Was the geography of Jerusalem that of Sakakini’s longing, then? Put awkwardly, was “the local” all that mattered to the emotions of somebody who crossed an ocean and “went global,” as it were?
Yes and no. “The local” was key to Sakakini’s emotions; it grounded them. But just like the “real” Jerusalem of bricks and stones started spilling beyond its old walls by the mid-nineteenth century, the Jerusalem of Sakakini’s dreams and love was not walled in. It was not simply local.
And the way it was not simply local was neither indistinguishably commonplace nor sakakinesquely idiosyncratic, but specific enough to tell us a thing or two about the time and place the writer lived in.
By the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Jerusalem started interacting with the world in ways both new and transformative. (Outside worlds had of course been present in this city holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims for millennia.) While the center of the Ottoman Empire—Istanbul— was not very present in its provinces from the late 1600s, from the mid-nineteenth century a new era of state formation bound center and provinces closer together. European powers, too, became more active. Interacting with these changes, Jerusalem’s ties with its rural surroundings grew stronger. All these changes found reflection in Sakakini’s Jerusalem, including that of his dreams. He may have dreamed of Dawud racing away on a train not simply because he was afraid to lose him but because Dawud—his very best friend—had moved from Jerusalem to Jaffa. From here, a French company had built a railway to Jerusalem in 1892. And it was here that Sakakini met Dawud for the last time, as it was in this port city that he commenced his maritime journey to America.
Marvellous Thieves, An Excerpt
Paulo Lomas Horta in ‘Marvellous Thieves’ introduces the poets, scholars, pilgrims and charlatans who made unacknowledged contributions to Arabian Nights.
Here’s an excerpt from the book.
On March 25, 1709, a visit by Antoine Galland to the Paris apartment of his friend Paul Lucas yielded a discovery that would shape the literary legacy of the first French translator of the Thousand and One
Nights. Lucas, a collector of treasures for the court of Louis XIV, was well known for his travels in the Middle East, and his apartment was recognized as one of the marvels of the French capital. Listed in early eighteenth- century guidebooks as a place to view antiquities and other rare objects from Greece, Egypt, and Asia Minor, it drew scholars, collectors, and curiosity seekers of all kinds. Over the course of his journeys in the Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire, Lucas had amassed enough medallions, coins, engraved stones, and gems to fill six rooms.
The herbier in his apartment contained some 3,000 varieties of plants taken from foreign locations, and the droguier was equally impressive. One visitor to the apartment in the 1730s described a remarkable sculpture of the goddess Ceres that Lucas had acquired in Athens forty years earlier. Ten feet tall, the figure was made of Oriental jasper and plated with bronze, and in Paris she enjoyed the company of many other bronzes from Greece, Macedonia, and the Levant, as well as two Persian sculptures of nude sages at prayer. Among such historically valuable pieces, stranger artifacts were scattered: petrified mushrooms, seahorses, and mummified birds encased in bronze.
Arriving at this cabinet of curiosities in 1709, Galland found an even greater treasure awaiting him: a young Maronite traveller from Aleppo by the name of Hanna Diyab who, he reported, “[knew] some very beautiful Arabic tales.” While Lucas may have viewed Diyab as just another Oriental curiosity to be displayed at the French court, Galland saw in him a solution to a frustrating predicament. After translating all the stories in his incomplete Arabic manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights, Galland was in need of more, and he had now found a storyteller who could fill the gap. In a sequence of twelve meetings between May 5 and June 2, 1709, Diyab related sixteen fantastic stories to Galland, who chose to add ten of these to the final three volumes of his French version of the Arabian Nights. Th ese storytelling sessions were the origin of some of the most famous of the Arabian Nights tales— including “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “Prince Ahmad and the Fairy Peri- Banu”— and represent a lasting contribution to a story collection that has taken its place in the canons of world literature.
It was not the first time that Galland had benefitted from the curiosities collected by Lucas. Despite his lack of respect for Lucas’s abilities as a scholar, Galland found his collection of coins very useful in his own numismatic research, and he tried to gain access to lists or drawings of these from common acquaintances when his younger colleague was unwilling to share. Just as Galland borrowed coins to add entries to his numismatic dictionary, he would borrow Diyab to add stories to his version of the Arabian Nights. Considering his impact on the first French edition of the Arabic story collection, the Syrian storyteller could be judged the most valuable curiosity Lucas ever brought back from the Levant.
Since the publication of Les mille et une nuits, Galland’s French version of the Arabian Nights, in twelve volumes from 1704 to 1717, Galland has been credited as the first “author” of the collection in European letters, and as a crucial contributor to the emergence of the “Oriental tale” in French. Not only did he translate the 282 nights of stories in his Arabic manuscript in elegant Parisian prose, but he is credited with making a more substantial contribution to the story collection by lovingly adopting and adapting the tales that he heard from Diyab in 1709.
These stories, called the “orphan tales” because (with one exception) they have no known Arabic manuscript source, are seen as central to Galland’s achievement as a translator of the Arabian Nights. In this portion of his story collection, Galland’s work was no longer simply translation or adaptation; it represented “creation.”
Jean- Paul Sermain, one of the editors of the most recent edition of Galland’s Les mille et une nuits (2004), states the case most persuasively. He argues that Galland, working from his sparse notes on Diyab’s oral per for mances, created tales of ordinary characters caught up in extraordinary predicaments. Drawing on French literary conventions, he invented dialogues and descriptions and gave narrative coherence to the tales. Characters were developed with more sympathy, and moral lessons were highlighted. In the hands of Galland, the orphan tales of Diyab spoke of the superiority of the hero of humble origins and the need to behave decently in difficult circumstances. To fill out his meager notes, the French translator drew on his scholarly knowledge and his own travels of the Orient to imagine the fabulous details of voyages, palaces, and magical objects. Sermain argues that these orphan
tales teach the reader how to read the Arabian Nights as a whole. In the space between the French fairy tale and the Arabic story cycle, Galland seemed to fashion a new genre— that of the “Oriental tale.”
Shobhaa De talks about risks and her pretty exhilarating life, An Excerpt
Shobhaa De’s writing exudes an empathy that has turned several of her books into life manuals for generations of Indians. Her keen wit spears and spares none, least of all herself. Her book ‘Seventy and to hell with it’, she says is a gift to herself for entering into the seventh decade of life.
Here’s an excerpt from the book where she talks about risks and her experiences with them.
Here I am, looking back on seven decades of a life that has been pretty exhilarating. Yes, of course I have messed up. But even those mess-ups have taught me vital lessons—in survival, coping, collapsing, undoing, rejoicing. Most of these lessons have come from allowing myself to be open to everything life is throwing my way—good stuff, bad stuff, indifferent stuff. This is what I frequently tell my children when they are despairing. If you remain yourself and stay receptive to what’s happening around you, you will pickup signals that will provide most of the answers you seek.
Perhaps not instantly, but the answers will come.
When I was a teenager, I used to take every aspect of my life for granted, without questioning what was going on around me. In a way, this attitude protected me and spurred me on to take crazy chances, often with my life. I thought nothing of jumping in and out of rapidly moving local trains which I took to and from school. Of course, I was showing off my daredevilry, since there was always a crowd at Churchgate station. But those adrenaline-fuelled seconds when I tried to
make it inside the compartment without losing my footing gave me such a rush it made that lunatic risk very attractive. Today, I can ask myself, ‘What on earth were you thinking? Or proving?’ I still don’t have an answer that satisfies me. Perhaps I was testing myself. All I know is, danger and dangerous situations still attract me. I have never opted for ‘safe’ when there was ‘risky’ staring at me. It’s a personality trait, or a character flaw. God knows. Show me two scenarios, one that is controlled and the other that’s insane, and I’ll instinctively opt for the latter. This worries my husband and children, but deep within, even I know half of this is nothing more than posturing. Confronting fear is just a part of it.
I am in the process of identifying my biggest fears as I key this in. What do most human beings fear the most? I’d say it is loss. Loss of a loved one, loss of face, loss of security, loss of health, loss of identity, loss of mental and physical faculties. Loss of one’s own life. From this abbreviated list, I would say, for a wife and mother, there can be no greater loss than the loss of a child and spouse. Nothing prepares you for it. Nothing can. Sages advise us to start gearing ourselves up for such an eventuality from the time marriage vows are taken to that dreaded moment you are forced to come face-to-face with tragedy. Meditate, they tell you. Pray. Ask God to provide succour. Does any of this help you to deal with a wound that can never be healed? I don’t know. I hope I am never tested. But it is this fear of losing a beloved that is at the root of all other fears. As a child, you fear losing your parents. As a grown-up, you fear losing your child. Conquering this fundamental fear is what drives us to face other fears.
When I think of all those reckless stunts I performed in school and college (most of which were unknown to my trusting parents), did I stop to think what the repercussions would have been on so many lives had something terrible happened to me as I hung out of a fast train, tempting fate
every second day? I continued to ride racing bikes down crowded roads, clinging on to the handle of a public transport bus for additional speed. I crashed cars that didn’t belong to me when I was grossly underage, after persuading the children of the owners to steal the car keys. I lied about my adventures in local trains (ticketless travel being the more innocent one) to my mother, who believed I was at a school picnic when I was actually bunking school and loitering on distant beaches. What if any of these silly jaunts had backfired? Point is, they didn’t. I was fortunate.
Risk-taking is something I enjoy immensely. It comes naturally to me. I like stepping into the unknown and seeing where those steps take me. This is true whether it involves love and romance in my youth or professional choices later in life. My decisions were mainly impetuous (‘immature’ is how my father described them) and spontaneous. Where did this behaviour pattern come from? Certainly not from my home environment, which was conservative, conformist and solidly, comfortingly middle class. I appreciated anarchy and chaos far more than control and comfort. This troubled my parents a great deal, and I must have given them countless sleepless nights during those restless years when I couldn’t wait to get out into the big, wicked world, the one beyond my traditional Maharashtrian home, and taste the myriad exotic flavours waiting to consume me, in Turkey, Brazil, Japan, just about anywhere. But where was I stuck? At home!
Three Exhausting Weeks, An Excerpt from ‘Uncommon Type’
‘Uncommon Type’ marks the debut as a writer of the award-winning actor Tom Hanks. This delightful collection of seventeen short stories dissects with great affection, humour and insight, the human condition and all its foibles.
Here’s an excerpt from the book.
Anna said there was only one place to find a meaningful gift for MDash— the Antique Warehouse, not so much a place for old treasures as a permanent swap meet in what used to be the Lux Theater. Before HBO, Netflix, and the 107 other entertainment outlets bankrupted the Lux, I sat for many hours in that once- splendid cinema palace and watched movies. Now it’s stall after stall of what passes for antiques. Anna and I looked into every one of them.
MDash was about to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, which was as big a deal for us as it was for him. Steve Wong’s grandparents were naturalized in the forties. My dad had escaped the low- grade thugs that were East European Communists in the 1970s, and, way back when, Anna’s ancestors rowed boats across the North Atlantic, seeking to pillage whatever was pillage-able in the New World. The Anna family legend is that they found Martha’s Vineyard.
Mohammed Dayax- Abdo was soon to be as American as Abdo Pie, so we wanted to get him something vintage, an objet d’patriotic that would carry the heritage and humor of his new country. I thought the old Radio Flyer wagon in the second warehouse stall was perfect. “When he has American kids, he’ll pass that wagon on to them,” I said.
But Anna was not about to purchase the first antique we came across. So we kept on hunting. I bought a forty- eight-star American flag, from the 1940s. The flag would remind MDash that his adoptive nation is never finished building itself— that good citizens have a place somewhere in her fruited plain just as more stars can fi t in the blue field above those red and white stripes. Anna approved, but kept searching, seeking a present that would be far more special. She wanted unique, nothing less than one of a kind. After three hours, she decided the Radio Flyer was a good idea after all.
Rain started falling just as we were pulling out of the parking lot in my VW Bus. We had to drive slowly back to my house because my wiper blades are so old they left streaks on the windshield. The storm went on well into the evening, so rather than drive home, Anna hung around, played my mother’s old mixtapes (which I’d converted to CDs), cracking up over Mom’s eclectic taste, in the segues from the Pretenders to the O’Jays to Taj Mahal.
When Iggy Pop’s “Real Wild Child” came on, she asked, “Do you have any music from the last twenty years?”
I made pulled- pork burritos. She drank wine. I drank beer. She started a fire in my Franklin stove, saying she felt like a pioneer woman on the prairie. We sat on my couch as night fell, the only lights being the fire and the audio levels on my sound system bounding from green to orange and, occasionally, red. Distant sheet lightning fl ashed in the storm miles and miles away.
“You know what?” she said to me. “It’s Sunday.”
“I do know that,” I told her. “I live in the moment.”
“I admire that about you. Smart. Caring. Easygoing to the point of sloth.”
“You’ve gone from compliments to insults.”
“Change sloth to languorousness,” she said, sipping wine.
“Point is I like you.”
“I like you, too.” I wondered if this conversation was going someplace. “Are you flirting with me?”
“No,” Anna said. “I’m propositioning you. Totally different thing. Flirting is fishing. Maybe you hook up, maybe you don’t. Propositioning is the first step in closing a deal.”
Understand that Anna and I have known each other since high school (St. Anthony Country Day! Go, Crusaders!). We didn’t date, but hung out in the same crowd, and liked each other. After a few years of college, and a few more of taking care of my mom, I got my license and pretended to make a living in real estate for a while. One day she walked into my office because she needed to rent a space for her graphics business and I was the only agent she could trust because I once dated a friend of hers and was not a jerk when we broke up.
Anna was still very pretty. She never lost her lean, rope-taut body of a triathlete, which, in fact, she had been. For a day, I showed her some available spaces, none of which she wanted for reasons that made little sense to me.
Debunking Myths of Staying Abroad
In How May I Help You, Deepak Singh chronicles his journey as an Indian immigrant in the United States of America. Even though he had an MBA degree, all he could do was to a minimum-wage job in an electronics store. As the days pass, he confronts an alien culture, experiences racism and observes the crushing reality of being poor.
Here are five quotes that debunk the myths of living abroad:
Aren’t these quotes eye-openers?
Revisiting the Past in order to Recapture and Relive it!
By Anuja Chandramouli
People are always curious to know why I have opted to write persistently in the genres of mythology and history, some going so far as to insinuate that it is most fuddy – duddy of me to do so, mistakenly assuming that it has neither the oomph factor nor the glam quotient. Those inclined towards calculation are convinced it is the financial aspect of writing about controversial topics in current times where people are working themselves into a tizzy over stories blasted out from the past that sets my creative registers ringing. Well-meaning readers are always trying to persuade me to give up on ancient, dusty tales and churn out a torrid contemporary romance or lurid pulp fiction convinced that it is the only way to get Hollywood head honchos to sit up, take notice (not Harvey Weinstein, thank you) and hand me the golden ticket to instant fame and fortune. As for me, all I can say is that I tend not to analyse the nitty gritty of my literary choices and it is somewhat scary how impulsive I am when it comes to these things. If pressed though, I would say that the real reason I do what I do is incurable wanderlust.
That is right. I am afflicted with a wicked case of wanderlust! I have always been consumed by an intensely strong desire to travel and see everything there is to see not just in the known Universe but whatever lies well beyond the ken of all things documented and experience things that nobody has before. Ever since I heard about them, I have been ridiculously resentful of the likes of Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Hiuen Tsang for obvious reasons and even every astronaut or cosmonaut who has been space hopping when it seems most unlikely that I will ever get the chance to do the same. However, if there is one thing to be learned from the objects of my envy, it is that there is no time like the present to pack up and go where the path leads without allowing yourself to become uncomfortably bound by circumstance. So I do just that, even if it is in my own head, and then before I know it, I am soaring on the wings of my thoughts to parts unknown, in search of adventure and in the thick of a treasure hunt for ancient truths in the shifting sands of time.
Thanks to the limitless capacity of a restless, insatiably curious mind, it is possible not only to take off wherever you wish to go but to inaccessible regions that are beyond the reach of the marvels of technology. Armed with little more than a few dusty tomes and a hyper imagination it is possible to dive deep into the past, tumbling pell-mell into the hidden caverns of history, floating like a sliver of a ghost into the shadowy, magic strewn realms of myth and legend, or gambolling aimlessly in the wildest outposts of pure fantasy with fairies and monsters. Every nook and cranny of this marvellously meandering journey is usually crammed with nuggets of all things intriguing, and it is always exciting! You never know what you will unearth, what or who you will run into or where you may land up even if you have mapped out the path with a specific destination in mind.
Having indulged in this mode of travelling often enough, I can confidently extol its many virtues, not the least of which is that you don’t have to put yourself through the tortures of crowded popular tourist spots where you get jostled while standing in interminable queues, heckled by obnoxious folks or be forced to endure fellow travellers in confined spaces where children howl and too many subject others to their flatulence and other gross bodily eructations. Thankfully there need be no narcissistic posing or incessant selfie-taking either. Why bother with capturing the moment when you are actually living it up in the moment and creating indelible memories to be ever treasured and shared with all who are willing to relive your travels through your words?
Writing in history and mythology is like clambering up Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree to explore the wondrous lands beyond. Thanks to my passion for my chosen subjects, I have held Arjuna’s hand as we explored the fabled, wondrous landscape of his life against the staggering backdrop of the Mahabharata; taken a rollicking ride into the very heart of desire and its tantalizing dark side with Kamadeva ; experienced the all-encompassing power of Shakti, the Divine Feminine; rooted about in the realms of death and damnation with Yama’s Lieutenant; unravelled the puzzle that is Kartikeya, the Destroyer’s loveable son; caught up with my childhood crush Prithviraj Chauhan, celebrated his triumphs and cried over his tragic losses; and watched in mute horror as Padmavati burned…
My work is something that has my unconditional love even when I am tempted to throw it all away with its attendant frustrations, solitary travails, rich rewards, pitiful returns and crushing insecurity. Still, when I am not feeling hopeless, I will remain ever grateful for the precious gifts that are words and stories, which has enabled me to transcend the limitations of a cruel world and go wherever the heart leads. And people wonder why I do what I do!
About the Author
Anuja Chandramouli is the bestselling author of Arjuna: Saga of a Pandava Warrior-Prince, with Kamadeva: The God of Desire, Shakti: The Divine Feminine and Yama’s Lieutenant. She is an accomplished storyteller who is regarded as a one of the well-known names in mythological fiction.
‘We That Are Young’, An Excerpt
Preti Taneja in ‘We That Are Young’ recasts ‘King Lear’ in fresh, eviscerating prose that bursts with energy and fierce, beautifully measured rage. The novel revolves around Devraj, founder of India’s most important company, who on retiring demands daughterly love in exchange for shares.
Here’s an excerpt from the book.
It’s not about land, it’s about money. He whispers his mantra as the world drops away, swinging like a pendulum around the plane. The glittering ribbon of the Thames, the official stamps of the Royal parks, a bald white dome spiked with a yellow crown, are swallowed by summer’s deep twilight. The plane lifts, the clouds quilt beneath it, tucking England into bed to dream of better times. It is still yesterday, according to his watch. He winds the dial forwards. Now it is tomorrow, only eight hours to go.
He’s landed the window seat with the broken touchscreen: it’s either in-flight information or Slumdog Millionaire, the last movie he ever took Ma to. They went on release weekend. The entire line of people had been brown so for once Ma didn’t hunch in his shadow as if his jeans and camel coat would protect her, explain her. Instead they had the same old fight about Iris, and as he bought toffee popcorn she began to sniff: she said she was catching a chill. She kept up the sniffing as the credits rolled over the entire cast line-dancing on the set of an Indian train station. When they got outside he thought she’d been crying. He put his arms around her: her head was the perfect place for his chin to rest. He asked her if she liked the movie, she said she didn’t at all. It was not real India, except for the songs.
It’s been a long haul from JFK to the LHR stopover. He’s half shot with the comfort of Johnnie Walker, knows it’s not the best but he appreciates the label. It feels bespoke to him, like a child in a gift shop who finds a mug with his own name on it. No gift shop in America has a JIVAN mug so he borrowed JON, and that’s been it since he did this trip the other way. Thirteen-years-old: sold on leaving India by the promise of his first time in the air.
Forward, forward, he wills the plane, drumming his hands on his tray-table, earning himself a sideways glance from the woman wedged into the seat next to him. She’s using her iPhone (4) to photograph the back page of the in-flight magazine: Ambika Gupta: offering you the miracle of advanced Numerology: a digit for your future. She pokes the man on her other side: Sardarji in a blue turban, matching jersey stretched over his belly, stitched with a white Number 5. Dude looks like he’s birthing quintuplets under there. She smiles at him, sits back in her seat. There are thin red lines traced all over her hands in fading bridal henna as if she’s been turned inside out, painful, beautiful, the pattern of her is all paisleys. Her ring is a platinum band with a square cut white diamond and her bag is Longchamp like all the pretty-pretty girls have; navy waterproof with brown leather trim, but small, the cheapest. Don’t you know, pretty girl, that no bag is better than trying too hard? She’s flicking through the magazine: ads for Marc Jacobs, Charlize Theron, flicks to the gadgets, flicks to the movies, clink-chimeclink go the red glass bangles stacked up her wrists.
It sounds like the overture to Ma’s practice music. Played for her to dance Kathak, with precision, while Jivan kept time. Fist thumping into palm, Dha-din-din-dha. His memories are coloured by her last months – Ma, fading from brown to yellow, a bruise that would not heal against the hospital white. Dha-din-din-dha became her fingers beating lightly on his temples – blurring into the rattle of her breath towards the end – the background hum of the plane’s engine in his ears. They are cruising high over the mountains of who knows where.
He pulls out his own magazine. The cover is a cartoon illustration – a tiny brown body topped with an oversized head. Under a halo of white hair, two puffed cheeks blow out candles on a vast birthday cake the shape of an udder. India, sprouting with the turrets of heritage hotels, factory chimneys. Cars race off its surface, bolts of cloth unfurl, tigers hunt goats through spurting oil rigs. The orange headline shouts: Happy 75th Birthday Devraj Bapuji! The spotlight falls on the wily old face. This man, on this cover, on this flight – this is what Ma would have called a sign.
Meet the Deities from Hindu Mythology
The Hindu mythology comprises of many deities who are worshipped in many forms across India. We all have heard stories about them and have been fascinated about by them. Award-winning author Sudha Murthy in her new book, The Man from the Egg brings together fascinating tales of the most powerful gods from the ancient world.
Here are a few of those deities:
How many of these deities did you know about?
Six Science(Ish) Facts from Movies That Will Surprise You
Covering movies from 28 Days Later to Ex Machina, Rick Edwards and Dr Michael Brooks take the readers on a joyous ride through astrophysics, neuroscience, psychology, botany, artificial intelligence, evolution, and plenty more subjects that are invoked by your favourite movies.
Here are six facts that will blow your mind:
The Martian
Jurassic Park
Interstellar
Back to the Future
Planet of the Apes
Interstellar
Fascinating, isn’t it?
