BOOKWORM
A SLEUTH IN A SARI
The Bangalore Detectives Club by Harini Nagendra, Constable, $19.99. I’ll be honest, I picked up the book because it’s set in Bangalore. Old Bangalore of the leisurely pace, cool, “air-conditioned weather” and tree-lined boulevards – not the city that’s now called Bengaluru and is like any hot and bothersome overcrowded, traffic-jammed Indian metropolis.
In Harini Nagendra’s Bangalore of the 1920s we meet Kaveri, the smart, math-loving young woman who has just recently married the UK-returned Dr Rama Murthy, MBBS.
Her first day in Bangalore she had been unable to rest and did not fancy sitting in silence with her new mother-in-law, nervously drinking cardamom tea and praying silently she wouldn’t let out a burp and say the wrong thing.
That’s on page 5, and I hit a stumbling block. A tea drinker in a coffee-suffused old southern town? Really? But I am glad I decided to soldier on as I wandered around Kaveri’s old Bangalore. Her quiet housewife’s life changes the night of a party at Century Club, a place I have visited and now learn that it’s so called because membership there was restricted to 100 in those days. At the party, Kaveri escapes to the garden to find some peace and spots someone lurking in the shadows. Soon the place is a murder scene and Kaveri’s curiosity leads her to launch a private investigation to find the killer.
Kaveri is scientifically minded. Her husband Ramu encourages her interest in science and mathematics and ambition to pursue a college education. He teaches her how to drive, unheard of in those days of conservative orthodoxy. He even makes the morning coffee for her on a weekend.
‘Shhh. Uma aunty will hear us, and then the news will be all across the neighbourhood. Rama Murthy’s wife makes her husband give her coffee every day; the shameless woman.’
Ramu is the quintessential feminist, a rarity, those days. With his help and support from inspector Ismail, who is in awe of her sharp mind, Kaveri painstakingly traces the killer’s steps, even visiting a brothel and patiently suffering an English memsahib’s mercurial temper.
Sleuthing in a sari isn’t hard after all, she discovers. And leads the admiring inspector through the threads of clues and Bangalore’s enchanting landmarks...until, at last, the killer is found. That’s the mark of a good crime novel, I think, where the killer is right there in plain sight.
Nagendra has included recipes for some of Kaveri’s favourite dishes mentioned in the story.
With the sleuth is in a sari, I should have seen that coming.
• Catch Harini Nagendra in person at Motive, the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ (TIFA) Crime & Mystery Festival, June 2-4. Info at festivalofauthors.ca.
THE WHEEL OF LIFE
The Earthspinner by Anuradha Roy, HarperCollins, $31.99.
I’m bowl
And I’m platter
I’m man
And I’m woman...
The slim volume about how a potter’s and young girl’s lives intersect opens to the words of Kabir, translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.
These days, when letters come from home with news that no longer includes me, I feel as if I am on a moving train and they are on another one travelling alongside, so that I catch a glimpse of Tia and Amma and for a moment, despite the noise, nothing moves, we look at each other from our separate windows.
A young student in England, alone and homesick, seeks comfort in a pottery studio, letting her mind wander back to Elango, who eschewed a college education to create with clay.
For whom terracotta was the only medium.
“Break it whichever way you want, it’s the same all through.”
She recalls the many stories he told the children he ferried to school in his autorickshaw. A time of innocent play, and a ghastly encounter on a dark highway that brought a rescue dog into their lives.
Moving between India and England, The Earthspinner breathes new life into ancient myths, giving allegorical shape to the war of fanaticism against reason and the imagination.
“Today, I wonder at the certainty in these people that their world would heal in a matter of weeks. Were they hiding from the full horror of what had happened? It was not going to be a matter of weeks or even years... My father would have said change was the work of the earth spinning, spinning as it always had.”
Fans of Roy’s All the Lives We Never Lived as well as those new to her writing are in for a treat.
SCENTS AND SENSIBILITY
Scent of a Garden by Namrata Patel. Lake Union Publishing, $16.99. Asha “Poppy” Patel, a perfumer in Paris, is forced to return to her roots in the hotel industry in California.
Her circle of family and friends back home includes “the bas” or her grandmother and her best friends’ grandmother, who, along with other seniors in Napa Valley form the boisterous Nanis of Napa.
Who are determined to help her regain her sense of smell that she lost after contracting COVID. Commence Operation Incense over endless cups of masala cha and Gujarati snacks!
It’s a colourful cast, but my favourite has to be Leela, Asha’s paternal grandmother.
They couldn’t pass by Starbucks without Leela being irritated by their chai and turmeric lattes. And Deepak Chopra was never to be mentioned in her presence.
India Lockdown was just one of the television series that chronicled life during and after the pandemic, but this is the first book that incorporates the loss of smell in a book, and that too in a perfumer’s life!
Imagine the anguish of someone who buys bunches of blooms to help assuage bouts of homesickness then losing her sense of smell. And picture a hero who is laid-back, gentle, funny, seemingly in no hurry to pursue success.
Family drama, childhood friendships, a former love, and loads of desi cooking meld in a delicious potpourri of a book!
A HOLE IN MY HEART
From Ash to Ashes by Krishma Tuli Arora, Apprentice House Press, $18.99. A tragedy in Mira Singh’s life has left her devastated.
No one in her family knows how to deal with the situation that they aren’t willing to acknowledge may have been caused by their own deeply ingrained fear of “what will people say”.
Having immigrated to the US herself when she was five, Krishma Tuli Arora brings a personal insight into the highs and lows of growing up in an immigrant family.
On the pressures to conform to the parents’ views of what is good while attempting to make a space for oneself in the world outside – all the while imagining what it would feel like to look like a typical American girl, to enjoy the freedom others enjoy. And on the role faith plays in guiding one home.
Sikhism taught me that we are more than the mind, because we can trick our mind – we can observe our mind thinking; therefore, we are beyond the mind.
This is a book with its heart in the right place, a heart that is grappling with a hole where a sibling used to reside.
We could not contain him, his scent, his body, his essence...He slipped through our fingers.
FEATHER FORECAST
The Girl Who Loved The Birds, Joseph Dandurand, illustrated by Elinor Atkins, Nightwood Editions, $15.95. The third in a series of Kwantlen legends by award-winning author Joseph Dandurand, this children’s story follows a young Kwantlen girl who shares her life with the birds of the island she calls home.
She gathers small sticks that the birds come and take – just enough for their nests.
She grows into a young woman tending to the forest and the birds around her, sharing her piece of bread or fish.
Time passes and she is now an old woman who has lived a full life and will soon walk over to the other side.
She walks to the forest, sits down and looks up to the sky, and all the birds come and sit beside her.
As dawn breaks, the birds are gone, as is the old Kwantlen woman.
On the other side, she is welcomed by all the birds of the world.
A tender tale that celebrates wisdom and recognizes our interconnectedness.
PLAY AND LEARN
Cardboard Activity Lab by Jemma Westing, DK, $26.99. Costumes and castles, gifts and games, puppets and pirate ships. Art projects with household cardboard that young readers can wear, share and play with.
TEEN REVIEW
By RIA JIMMY
Dear Friends by Lisa Greenwald, Katherine Tegen Books $21. Dear Friends by Lisa Greenwald is an inspiring novel about friendship and being open to change not just around you but in you.
Eleni’s best friend, Sylvie, has suddenly decided to end their friendship and move on by making her own friends.
Crushed by this breakup, Eleni turns to her diary for answers. That is when she realizes how many of her past friendships have ended in similar situations. She embarks on a mission to regain those bonds so everything can go back to the way it was.
What I really liked about this novel was how relatable it was. I could really relate with Eleni when all she wanted was someone she could talk to as she felt she didn’t fit in with her group. I enjoyed the diary entries. The book included some from the past as well as some from the present. It was nice to see her feelings at those particular moments. The diary entries go more deeply into her feelings and make it easier to visualize what’s going through her mind.
Overall, Dear Friends by Lisa Greenwald is a novel that takes a girl back to her middle school days with all the drama, and, in the end, finding who you are amidst it.
• Ria Jimmy is a youth volunteer at Brampton Library.