TSUNDOKU. Towards uncharted seas

“April,” said TS Eliot in The Waste Land , “is the cruellest month.” Maybe that was so for him, in a cold country, with a cold climate, “breeding lilacs out of the dead land”, but in Delhi, it’s July. Deceptive grey skies make you think of coolness, and soft, soothing rain, but when you step outside, it’s like bathing in soup. Winter is still too far away, high summer is over, so we’re left with the stillness of waiting for a few drops of rain to bring relief.

I may be stuck in Delhi during this contradiction of a month, but I realised my thoughts were flying free and far away. This month’s theme is travel — of a sort. Whether it’s a gay man going on an odyssey, Mughal women travelling to Mecca, or a soldier stumbling wounded in a country far from his own, we can pretend we’re not here — wherever it is you are that is unpleasant — and we’re winging across the seas, ready for adventures of our own.

Water cooler

Daughters of the SunIra MukhotyAleph Book CompanyFiction₹699

The Mughals are way up there with the Mahabharata for capturing the imagination of Indians. Especially if you live in Delhi, where evidence of their rule is scattered carelessly all over the place. But apart from a few details — Shah Jahan was madly in love, Aurangzeb was cruel, Humayun loved to read — we don’t really know a lot more about the Mughals unless we go looking for it, and even then, the stories are so male-centric that you’d be forgiven for thinking that their daughters and wives counted for nothing more than bringing forth children. This is not the case if you read Ira Mukhoty’s blazing book, Daughters of the Sun, on the women of the zenana. She argues that thinking of them as the “Oriental harem” is doing these hidden (and not-so-hidden) women a great injustice. They stood with their men, ruling, commissioning buildings, advising, doing everything except running the country themselves. Some would argue that Jehangir’s capable wife, Noor Jahan, ruled the country in his stead. I already knew about Noor Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, but it was with interest that I read about Babur’s young sister Gulbadan, and Noor Jahan’s mother who invented the attar of roses, as well as Shah Jahan’s oldest daughter Jahanara, beloved by the people, who lived a busy single life ruling from her women’s quarters. An engaging and brisk ride through several generations of the Mughal rulers told through the eyes of their women, I recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in that era of Indian history.

Watchlist

LessAndrew Sean GreerHachetteFiction₹499

The recent Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, a slim blue book called Less, is devastating in its simplicity. The premise: A writer decides to avoid his ex’s wedding by accepting all the random literary festival, prize ceremony and strange teaching post invitations he has received. In a terribly matter-of-fact way, the novel tells you that Arthur Less, the protagonist, is gay, and his partner is a man marrying another man. Less is sort of famous for being with a very famous (married) poet in his younger days. With all the talk about 377, this is the perfect book to read for it deals with homosexuality as a by-the-way and not the central focus of the book. It’s also a little meta since Arthur Less, who has written a novel that is a gay take on the Odyssey , is accused of being too self-loathing as a gay man, and here we have a novel which is an Odyssey as well as an Eat, Pray, Love , but instead of finding yourself, you come to terms with what you are. I adored it — how it was both dense with detail and as light and fluffy as a cake.

Wayback

The English PatientMichael OndaatjeBloomsburyFiction₹389

What can I say about The English Patient that you don’t already know? You know the story, you’ve probably seen the movie or heard of the book. The plot: a badly burned man is convalescing in an Italian monastery during World War II. That’s as bare bones as I can make it, but it just won the Golden Man Booker, the Booker prize of Booker prizes, given to someone who had won the prize in the last 50 years. Maybe I’ll just quote from Ondaatje’s acceptance speech and hope you’ll read the book if you haven’t already, and re-read if you already have. I plan to. “I’ve not read The English Patient since it came out in 1992 and I suspect, and know more than any one, that it remains cloudy with errors and pacing,” the author said, “And at the back of my mind I keep recalling one of my favourite remarks, that Erik Satie made when asked about the fact that Ravel had turned down the Legion of Honour: ‘It’s not enough to have refused the Legion D’Honneur. The important thing is not to have deserved it in the first place’.”

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of six books, the latest one being The One Who Swam With The Fishes;

Twitter @reddymadhavan

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