THANK GOODNESS FOR BOOKS IN THE TIME OF SOCIAL DISTANCING

Be My Guest by Priya Basil, Canongate, US$ 20. More than Priya Basil’s personal relationship with food – though it is a lot about that, too – more than the place of food in our lives and in our communities, more than even the significance of feasting and denying food through the ages, Be My Guest is a series of free-flowing, wide-ranging reflections on the meaning of hospitality and generosity in its many manifestations.

While Peter Singer’s book, The Life You Can Save, inspires her to donate one per cent of her income to charity every year, she adds that We’re suspicious of not only those who take, but also those who give too much. Criticism is implicit in the words we have for such people: scroungers or do-gooders.

It is as though Basil has invited readers to be privy to her innermost thoughts and feelings while sharing her favourite food-related stories and experiences with them. Eyes bigger than stomach, her mother would sigh, writes Basil, when she demanded more and then some more of her favourite dish, kadhi. The refrain also epitomizes the conspicuous consumerism in our societies, she says.

Could it be otherwise in a system premised on the false conviction that our existence as we know it depends on the continuity of one thing alone: economic growth. Our appetites must keep increasing to propel the economy.

She describes her grandmother Mumji’s obsession with feeding people – and for keeping her recipes secret, even from her own daughter. A little later, she is describing how the Lebanese and the Israelis battled over the most authentic hummus. She writes of how food, how it is prepared and how it is consumed, brings people together and also divides them. Of sharing her nanny’s food in Kenya while the parents were at a party, or the taste of roasted corn purchased from a street vendor – things she wouldn’t normally be allowed to enjoy as one ate with some people, not others. How the fault lines of prejudice ran deep. That while her father would enjoy the cuisine at a close Muslim friend’s home, the children were always warned against becoming “romantically attached to a Muslim, or a black person, or a white (in that order)”.

Years later, as an adult, Basil would confront the “leftovers of prejudice” in herself on a street in Berlin following an unpleasant run-in with a stranger. The recent national advertising campaign in India, Atithi Devo Bhava, urging locals to respect tourists elicits this response from Basil: In our times, it seems, only the stranger with money is god, worthy of a decent, dignified welcome. She compares the communal meal or langar served at gurdwaras across the world to EU’s response to refugees., both based on the principle of unconditional hospitality. Volunteers prepare and serve the meal at langars and citizens stepped up to welcome refugees into their homes following Angela Merkel’s Wir Schaffen, or we’ll manage.

Fun fact: Both hospitality and hostility “are birthed from ghos-ti, their Indo-European root, which meant host, guest and stranger – the trio of roles through which we shift all our lives”.

Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri, New York Review Books, $19.95. Amit Chaudhuri returns to Bombay, the city in which he grew up, for a book reading, certain that he will meet his old friend Ramu.

But Ramu is checked in at an intensive rehab program and not available. And therein lies the power of the novel. Chaudhuri splices together threads of his childhood, youth and adulthood with stories about this friend who is absent yet ever-present. He describes a life of privilege as the son of a corporate head, living in a posh neighbourhood, being driven to school in a white Mercedes, memberships at elite clubs and many hours spent hanging out at Nalanda, the book shop at the storied Taj Mahal hotel.

The book is an ode to the city of Bombay, with its lovingly detailed observations of streets, people, its many very only-in-Bombay scenes and experiences.

Sharmila Tagore at Nalanda, “The Faber Book of Contemporary Stories in her hand, reading, or – from the resistance she emanated delicately – pretending to read”.

Vendors of pirated books who magically appear, who assess you with a piercing gaze as they brandish Jhumpa Lahiri; and the dark girls selling unblemished mogra flowers.

So much so that at some point one begins to wonder if the friend of his youth is Ramu or the city itself. Because he appears to skim the surface, literally, of the city streets as he does a detailed, almost GPS-directions-like left here and right there. She turns right into a by-lane to return to her boutique hotel in the pathways behind Apollo Bunder. I continue up the seafront, towards the Radio Club.

Surprisingly, in Calcutta, Chaudhuri presented a much more intimate portrait of the city he visited only on family vacations.

I feel sad too – not because of my departure, but because I can never tell when I’ll see Bombay again. It’s not that I’m going. It might.

And yet, it is a quizzical, tender book in which the author seeks and fails to find copies of his book displayed at Nalanda on this visit.

He is self-deprecating, writing about people who ask, “Fiction or nonfiction?” when he tells them he is a novelist, of interviews by journalists who haven’t found the time to read his book.

The title, Chaudhuri informs his readers is from an Alice Munro story, one which he hasn’t read even while stashing it away in his memory for the possibilities it holds.

And he wants them to know that “the author and the narrator are not one. Even if, by coincidence, they share the same name”.

How To Grow Old by Marcus Tullius Cicero, translated by Philip Freeman, Princeton University press, US$ 16.95. Generally speaking, older people are broadly portrayed in one of two ways writes Philip Freeman in his introduction.

Either as all-knowing bearers of wisdom, or caricatured as old whining fools. The truth, of course, being that all old people are not wise, just as all old people are not fools.

In this collection of writings, he distills the wisdom of Cicero, providing gems such as these:

A good old age begins in youth. That the qualities that make the later years of our lives productive and happy should be cultivated from the beginning.

There are proper seasons to life. Nature has fashioned human life so that we enjoy certain things when we are young and others when we are older.

Everyone hopes to reach old age, but when it comes, most of us complain about it.

Today’s world, obsessed with the pursuit of youth, as Freeman writes, needs Cicero’s wisdom more than ever.

Fun fact: The root of the word senate, an assembly of elders, is senex, or the elder!

Fun fact 2: The malted milk drink Milo derives its name from the legendary athlete Milo of Croton. Would they have named the drink after him had they known Cicero calls the man foolish for lamenting his lack of strength in old age?

And something to think about. A farmer “plants trees for the use of another age” and that “the pleasures of growing things are not at all diminished by age”.

The Girl Who Reads On The Metro by Christine Feret-Fleury, Flatiron Books, $31.50. Christine Feret-Fleury creates an enchanting world filled with books and the people who love them.

Juliette had always loved the smell of books, especially when she bought them secondhand. New books had different smells, too, depending on the paper and glue used, but they said nothing of the hands that had held them, the houses that had been their home; they had no story of their own yet, separate from the one they told – a parallel story, hazy, secret.

She leads a perfectly ordinary life in Paris, working in real estate, dating a string of not-quite-right men and fighting off melancholy. The only bright spots in her day are the metro rides across the city and stories she dreams up about the strangers who sit reading across from her. One day, on a whim, she decides to explore a street before walking into her office. She opens a gate held ajar by, of all things, a book, and meets a reclusive bookseller and his young daughter.

Soliman introduces her to the concept of BookCrossing. “Turn the whole world into a library... You leave a book in a public place – a station, park bench, cinema – someone picks it up, reads it, then releases it elsewhere a few days or weeks later.”

Juliette has entered a parallel, yet familiar world of her own. When I read that Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is the first book she releases, and that Walden: Or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau changes the life of the staid owner of the real estate agency, Juliette enters my world.

Rain Makes Apple Sauce by Julian Scheer, illustrated by Marvin Bileck, Holiday House, $24.99. While you hum April showers bring May flowers, this whimsical book will have little ones singing The stars are made of lemon juice... and rain makes apple sauce. This captured the imagination of young readers for over 50 years and is a New York Times Best Illustrated Book.

TEEN REVIEW BY YAMNA ASIM: How To American: An Immigrant’s Guide to Disappointing Your Parents by Jimmy O.Yang, Da Capo Press, $21.99. How to American: An Immigrant’s Guide to Disappointing Your Parents by Jimmy O.Yang, talks about his journey to America as a new immigrant who had a passion for Hollywood and stand-up comedy.

In Hong Kong, known as the unbeatable ping pong champion, Yang thought nothing could go wrong in his life, until he moved to Los Angeles with his family to pursue better and higher education.

New to American lifestyle, a foreigner to the language and its slang – Yang finds himself at an internal conflict with this new world.

Learning English – check! Finding friends – check! Deciding his future – check! However, should he study economics because that would please his parents as he was able to do something in his life or pursue a career in stand-up comedy, something he dreamt about and be a complete and utter disappointment to his parents? According to his father, “Pursuing your dreams is how you end up homeless”. So he should probably abandon his dreams, right?

In this book, Yang offers quite the experience on achieving the infamous American dream of fame and success.

• Yamna Asim is a grade 10 student and a member of Brampton Library’s Teen Library Council.

BOOKWORM

THANK GOODNESS FOR BOOKS IN THE TIME OF SOCIAL DISTANCING