TSUNDOKU. Eenie, meenie, me and more

Some days I feel like the title of this column — acquiring books and then not reading them — was more prophetic than I realised at the time. Currently, there are little piles of books all over our house, by the bed, across the bed, on the dining table, on the bench next to the dining table, like a trail of breadcrumbs I’m leaving behind me. There’s only one way to fight it, and that is, I’m afraid, by being generous. Often, when I leave the house, I take a book to give to a friend. I was discussing this the other day, and everyone was like, “No, how could we ever give up our books!” but I find it easy with books I’m not attached to or don’t plan to reread. It’s not quite the same wrench as giving away something you love but it’s a step to becoming closer to the person you want to be. I want to be, at any rate. This week, we’re meandering, much like my reading list, but our main theme is finding yourself; whether it’s through feminism and fashion, or the letters your mother wrote you, or being alone on a summer holiday.

Water cooler

Lately, I’ll admit, I’ve been a bit disenchanted with the Big Indian Literary Novel. They all seemed like so much work, as though the writers were putting together a story by deliberately wanting to make it an uphill climb for the reader and make it harder for you to read a book in one full sitting. But Anuradha Roy’s much-heralded new novel, All The Lives We Never Lived , revived my hope for that genre, for it is so readable while, at the same time, being so lyrical and dense with details, I could not put it down. I also have to commend the jacket designer — the days when we didn’t judge a book by its cover are long past, and this is a particularly lovely one. The story seems simple to begin with: A little boy’s mother runs away with a German man and leaves him behind, but there’s so much to delight in. Just two examples of things I loved: the boy’s name is Myshkin, from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (which is also a name I am putting aside to use for a future kitten), and the story is very loosely based on what would have happened if an artist named Walter Spies, a German who lived in Bali, had made a trip to India. But, mostly, the book is about Myshkin and his mother in pre-Independence India; and if all of those are plot points that make you, like me, want to read a book immediately, do so without hesitation.

Watchlist

Mannequin: Working Women In India’s Glamour Industry Manjima BhattacharjyaZubaanNon-fiction ₹495

Apart from collecting books, I also collect clothes, which means that my cupboard is full to overflowing, and while you can explain away piles of books by pretending to be an eccentric professor/bookworm type, piles of clothes just look like a mess. However, I do think a lot about the glamour and fashion industry, and how it sits with my feminism, and so I was very curious to read Mannequin: Working Women In India’s Glamour Industry by Manjima Bhattacharjya, a sociologist/activist/writer/researcher. The book collects Bhattacharjya’s interviews with models across India, set against a history of the glamour industry in the country, speaking of modelling as real work, not just the glamorous jet-setting life most of us imagine it to be. I had sort of vaguely realised that it was work, I suppose, before I read the book, the long hours, the hot lights, but it was only after I finished reading that I knew I was also guilty of dismissing models as just “clothes hangers” or “pretty faces”. That’s not very nice — or very feminist, might I add, so I’m recommending this to everyone who has even a passing interest in the fashion industry, in the hope that they’ll come to the same conclusion Bhattacharjya (and I!) did, that modelling is actual labour, and should be recognised as such. I wish she had also branched out to designers and seamstresses and factory workers, but there’s always room for a sequel.

Way back

Tom’s Midnight Garden Philippa PearceOxford University PressFiction₹110

I am all about Philippa Pearce these days, but I’m not sure if she is a writer who would have genuinely appealed to me as a child, or whether it was only the fact that I discovered her at an older age, and in reading the book I’d had on my shelf for so many years — Tom’s Midnight Garden — that I thought to myself, “Yes, this is how I felt when I was that age too.”

Whether it was something that would have appealed to me at that age or only as nostalgia for that age, I will never know, because unlike Tom (the little boy forced to go live with his aunt and uncle while his brother recovers from illness) I never did enter a time slip. It’s the best sort of time-travel book too; nothing is explained until the very end and, unlike the books where you step into a different world through a door (Narnia and so on), this one is unaffected by his actions.

Did I give away too much? Read it aloud to your own dreamy 10-year-old self, a million summers ago.

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan (@reddymadhavan) is the author of six books, the latest being The One Who Swam With the Fishes.

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