A KING’S DIARY

The Babur Nama, translated by Annette Susannah Beveridge, Everyman’s Library, $40. Zahiru’ddin Muhammad Babur (1483-1530) has been in the headlines over the past thirty or forty years, ever since a mosque that bears his name became a contentious political issue in India.

Nearly five hundred years after his death, he is somehow at the focal point of  national angst over secularism and nationalism.

Babur left behind a colourful record of his life, written in simple and unpretentious prose. In The Babur Nama we see a poet-prince from Farghana (in modern day Uzbekistan) in search of a kingdom. His youth is spent throneless, living from day to day, occasionally stealing food, sometimes capturing a town. He took Samarkand when he was 14, but couldn’t hold it for more than four months. At 21, he seized Kabul, and this Afghan base became the springboard for his later conquest of India.

The Babur Nama is frank, almost brutal in its frankness. Babur describes a life full of fighting, riding, drinking... and romance. There’s restless energy and ambition, mixing drugs and drinks, and regrets for his failures.

It passed through my mind that never mind if one was a king-to-be – wandering from mountain to mountain, homeless and without moorings, had nothing to recommend it.

Babur died in 1530, only four years after his arrival in India. He didn’t see himself as a conquering hero, but a failure for having lost his ancestral lands in Central Asia. 

He didn’t foresee that the Mughal dynasty he founded would, in just a generation or two, become the greatest of all Muslim-ruled empires in the world with a succession of monarchs whose contributions define the very idea of India. The Red Fort in Delhi, the Fatehpur Sikri complex near Agra, the Taj Mahal and social inclusivity and pragmatism as tools of governance, to name a few.

In his introduction, William Dalrymple notes that “in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the great Mughal cities of Agra and Lahore are revealed to Adam after the Fall as future wonders of God’s creation”.

The Babur Nama is one of the greatest memoirs in world literature. In many ways, it’s also a mirror to the everyday strifes in today’s South Asia.

It’s a big book with many pages to read and, in the end, how you see the unselfconscious author – whether as an invading barbarian or as a humanist struggling with his own inner demons – is an indication of on which side of the political aisle you have chosen to take your seat.

HOME TRUTHS

Home Body by Rupi Kaur, Simon & Schuster, $22. This young Canadian poet has taken the publishing world by storm.

Her first two poetry collections – Milk and Honey and the Sun and Her Flowers – have sold over eight million copies and been translated into 40 languages. Perhaps it’s because her poems are not what first comes to mind when you think “poetry”. These are not pretty verses, or rhymes about everlasting love. Rupi Kaur’s work explores themes of love, loss, trauma, healing, femininity and migration.

Home Body, her third collection of poetry is also billed as fiction. But don’t expect to find stories.

Instead, taboo subjects are laid bare in a few sparse words, accompanied by line drawings.

I’ll be quiet when

we can say sexual assault

and they

stop screaming liar

And:

Depression is silent

you never hear it coming

and suddenly it’s

the loudest voice in your head

And:

We were always in survival mode

long after we didn’t need to be

References to being molested as a child, to misogyny, racism, to a father who drove a truck or a child embarrassed by her stay-at-home mom... these are all  achingly real. And therein lies her power to draw people closer.

After feeling disconnected for so long

my mind and body are finally

coming back to each other.

COLD PLAY

Wintering by Katherine May, Riverhead Books, $32.  Wintering has less to do with the season itself and is more about a state of mind. “The summer only disperses us,” writes Katherine May. “In winter, we find a shared language of comfort: candles, ice-cream, coffee. Sauna. Fresh laundry.”

When you start tuning into winter, you realise that we live through a thousand winters in our lives – some big, some small. Just as I was coming to the end of H’s illness and mine and was beginning to believe that life was about to settle down again, I realized that a grand winter had rolled in without my even realising it.

Helping her little son cope with issues at school she comes to the realization that “if happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too”. We are all taught to suck it up and carry on, and we pass on those lessons to our children, often failing to spot signs of real struggle.

Busy with a rewarding career, running a home and caring for her son, May had everything we think we need to be happy, but found herself in a place where things were unravelling.

The problem with “everything” is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity, with all the meaning sheared away.

A delicious, quiet read. One with gems of thoughts and ideas and ways we can care for and repair ourselves when life knocks us down.

Over and over again, we find that winter offers us liminal spaces to inhabit. Yet still we refuse them. The work of the cold season is to learn to welcome them.

I confess I give in to a little Canadian amusement (and feeling of superiority!) at others’ perception of what passes for winter (the season) in other parts of the globe. When May describes winter in Finland where her friend Paivi is from, it’s like she’s describing life on a different planet. Winters in her corner of England are so benign in comparison

The title is borrowed from Sylvia Plath’s Wintering.

Plath, as every schoolgirl knows, did not survive her winter.

POOR GRAMMAR KILLS

Have You Eaten Grandma? by Gyles Brandreth, Penguin, $19.99. In the grim television series Mare of Easttown, there’s a not-so-grim moment in which an associate wishes her a good night.

“Have a good night, Mare,” he chides himself a second later, “Not, have a good nightmare”. See what the missing comma did there?

As Lynne Truss famously showed in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Gyles Brandreth underscores that poor grammar kills.

For, with the comma MIA, the innocuous Have you eaten, grandma? becomes something grandma should be concerned about.

Don’t know if it’s, like, okay to say ‘like’?

Are your apostrophes in the wrong place?

Want to make fewer not less grammatical mistakes?

Do not despair. Have You Eaten Grandma? is the definitive (and hilarious) guide to punctuation, spelling and good English for the twenty-first century.

In one area Brandreth scores higher than the  Wren & Martin grammar books that many of us studied at school, for the venerable gentlemen would not have known what to do with Twitter.

Find Brandreth at @GylesBr.

HARD QUESTIONS

Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas, Vintage, $22. Anand Giridhardas takes us behind the scenes into a world in which the rich and powerful rebrand themselves as saviours of the poor.

They lavishly reward “thought leaders” who redefine “change” in ways that preserve the status quo.

Giridhardas asks hard questions: Why should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes?

Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the gruelling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world. His book is a call to action for all of us.

NEW FRIENDS

Someone New by Anne Sibley O’Brien, Charlesbridge, $9.99. With the children back at school, they are likely meeting new kids in their class.

Maria is from Guatemala, Jin from Korea and Fatimah from Somalia. Jesse, Jason and Emma reach out to them and learn that making new friends isn’t so tricky. They remember what it was like on their first day.

Everyone else was connected like pieces in a puzzle. I was the different piece that didn’t fit in. This is a great introduction to new ways to learn about someone new, to make new friends.

TEEN REVIEW

By MOHID SIDDIQUE

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, $37. Fyodor Dostoevesky’s final book, The Brothers Karamazov, covers a slow burn narrative that takes the shape of a murder mystery and its impact on morally grey characters.

Alyosha Karamazov is the young- est son of the family, a well-natured adolescent who is an apprentice at the local monastery.  Conflict arises over inheritance and from a love triangle involving his brother, Dmitri, his father, and the free-willed Grushenka. This sows the seeds of the descent into madness of a family affected by sensual and intellectual desires.

Varying viewpoints, ranging from faith to passion, add depth to the book that stem from interactions between individual characters.

The one true fault with the book lies in the ending, which does have emotional impact, but does not conclude every subplot and leaves the reader wanting more.

With a combination of both complex characters and themes of existential philosophy, the book just felt a lot more real than many others I have read. My favourite part was when Ivan becomes delirious and has an entire debate with his interpretation of the devil. The experience of reading this novel has me interested in other existentialist authors.

• Mohid Siddique is a youth volunteer at Brampton Library.