THE RIDE OF HIS LIFE

Dante’s Indiana by Randy Boyagoda, Biblioasis, $22.95. We last met Prin in the delightfully named Original Prin.

The second in the planned trilogy takes off from where we left him, shell-shocked and injured in a bomb attack in the Middle East.

He’s trying to re-enter the world he left behind – that of a professor at a Toronto University, a family man – but it’s not easy.

His wife calls him an astronaut.

Not the hero returned, but the guy still out there, orbiting. I told her that it didn’t feel that way to me. I told her, in fact, that it felt like I’d fallen to earth. A hard fall.

Someone who wishes to hire him to promote a theme park describes him thus:

“Look, you’re a believer but you don’t swing your rosary around and you can read a footnote without sounding like a footnote. A Catholic professor, but not too much of a Catholic professor.”

So, a man who has lost his moorings.

And his family.

Molly left in July with the children. To stay with her family for the summer. She took their winter clothes.

The professor in him can’t help but correct the grammar of his therapist.

“So that I can keep sleeping under the bridge?”

“Well, not literally, obviously.”

“That’s not what literally literally means,” I said.

Dante’s Indiana is, like the first book, about Prin’s adventures in a world that is crazy and chaotic for a man of faith. And it is, also like the first, real, yet surreal. Hugely funny, yet poignant. 

Prin meets a diverse cast of characters. From ruthless entrepreneurs to anti-racism activists to a man who was unable to have the conversation about drugs with his teenage daughter to a Sri Lankan who runs a gas station in small-town Indiana.

At one point, Prin attempts to explain Dante’s Inferno to someone. It’s a universal story, he says, and the way universal stories work is that we can all find our experiences in these stories. Many of us will find our stories reflected in Boyagoda’s work, we’ll meet people we know.

Each is a stand-alone book and yet I find myself waiting for the third to binge-read all three!

Fun fact: I learn that limbo has its origins in Catholic theology. In the fourth canto of Inferno, limbo is described as “a place with no tears, no pain, just an eternal life of hopeless longing”.

CROSSING THE LINE

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara, McClelland & Stewart, $32.95. First Bahadur goes missing. Then Omvir.

Nine-year-old Jai, a big fan of reality police shows, sets out with his friend Pari to try and locate their missing friends. Then Aanchal disappears. And Runu didi, Kabir and Khadifa.

Jai casts himself as the detective-in-chief, but soon realizes that “Pari is Feluda and Byomkesh Bakshi and Sherlock. I’m only an assistant, Ajit or Topshe or Watson-type”.

As the tension and fear builds in the settlement of tin-roofed huts that sit in the shadow of glittering high-rises, Deepa Anappara deftly steers her readers through market lanes crammed with too many people, dogs and rickshaws, past stalls that smell of sizzling oil, below a smoggy sky that doesn’t let sunlight through, all the way to the end of the purple metro line. Drawing from real incidents and a spate of disappearances in metropolitan India, she traces the unfolding of tragedy through the eyes of a child. An indifferent police force, child-snatchers who force children to beg or into prostitution, communal tensions, she describes them all.

Words and expressions in Hindi such as hafta or basti may require those unfamiliar with the language to refer to the glossary. However, at six pages long, it is perhaps a sign of too many of these. There are also words in English that without context might be confusing. Such as Jai and Runu didi’s father calling their mother his liver. Jigar or kaleja in Hindi being a common endearment but how much sense does it make in English?

That quibble apart, everyone, even the peripheral characters, are etched in fine detail.

Always a melancholic man, his father, knee-deep in debt, waited for certain ruin with the patience of a heron standing still in murky water.

DEFINING THE OTHER

Life and Culture in Northeast India by Dipti Bhalla Verma and Shiv Kunal Verma, Abbeville Press, $73. Featuring more than 300 photographs and a dozen detailed maps, this hardcover edition is more than just a stunning coffee table book.

Dipti Bhalla Verma and Shiv Kunal Verma take the reader on a tour of the eight states of India’s northeastern region. Connected to the rest of India by a slender “chicken’s neck” of a land corridor that runs along the Himalayan hills north of Bangladesh, it’s a forgotten land. One doesn’t find much written about them even in the Indian media except when a rebellion or an insurgency breaks out or an election campaign is in progress. It’s “over there”, so near, yet so far away in people’s consciousness. It’s the exotic – almost foreign – other.

Bhalla and Verma bring this land and people alive in this interesting (and hard-to-hold-heavy) edition. They trace the history of the major population groups and offer insights into the many cultures that make the region so unique and captivating.

An essential volume for anyone interested in the peoples and places of India’s northeast. Makes one want to go there on a long holiday after we are through with the pandemic.

RIVER OF DREAMS

Magdalena River of Dreams by Wade Davis, Alfred A. Knopf, $39.95. Travellers often become enchanted with the first country that captures their hearts and gives them the license to be free. For Wade Davis, an award-winning, best-selling author and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence for over a decade, it was Columbia.

In Magdalena, he brings to life the story of the great Rio Magdalena, illuminating a region often in the news for all the wrong reasons.

He writes of his travels on the mighty Magdalena, and of the people he meets along the way, of their character which is informed by an enduring spirit of place and a deep love of a land that is home to the greatest ecological and geographical diversity on the planet.

People like Hector.

Like so many Columbians I met along the Magdalena, Hector found his peace by letting go of the past and looking only to the future. The entire focus of his life today is the forest of native trees that long ago flowered in his dreams.

“One never bathes in the same creek,” he explained, “for the water is always new, and so too is the man.’

Both a corridor of commerce and a fountain of culture, the wellspring of Colombian music, literature, poetry and prayer, the Magdalena has served in dark times as the graveyard of the nation and yet, always, it returns as a river of life.

The man who gave us fascinating reads such as The Wayfinders and Into the Silence braids together memoir, history and journalism in this.

FROM THE ASHES

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, Riverhead Books, $35. After years of watching out for her younger siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, Isma is now free to accept an invitation from a mentor in America, free to resume a long-deferred dream.

And yet, she can’t stop worrying about her headstrong sister and their brother, who disappeared in pursuit of his own dream, to prove himself to the dark legacy of the father he never knew. When he surfaces half a globe away, Isma’s worst fears are confirmed.

Secrets and family loyalty can both bind lives together and spin them out of control.

Those who loved her earlier works like Burnt Shadows and A God in Every Stone will find this a riveting read.

BY HIS SIDE

Terry Fox and Me by Mary Beth Leatherdale and Milan Pavlovic, Tundra, $21.99. Terry Fox and Doug Alward met in elementary school where Terry barely made the basketball team – he was the smallest in the group! But he practised and practised, and with Doug’s help, earned a spot on the team. Over the years, the two friends supported, challenged and helped each other become better athletes and better people. They reminded each other to take it one step at a time.

Doug was by Terry’s side every step of the way: when Terry received a diagnosis of cancer, when he was learning to walk – then run – with a prosthetic leg, when he was training for the Marathon of Hope, and then during the actual marathon.

Written from Doug’s perspective, this is a beautiful story about the boy who became a Canadian hero and caught the world’s imagination and about the value of friendship.

TEEN REVIEW

By RIDA AKHTAR

We Are Okay by Nina LaCour, Penguin Random House, $14.99. We Are Okay is a bittersweet story.

Marin, who has run away from California, tries to handle her grief at her dorm in New York during a college break. She is a college student who seems “off” to many people.

As she navigates through love, sadness, new beginnings, and hard endings, the reader is with her every sorrowful step of the way. Her emotions in this book are very real and intense.

As the seasons change and through flashbacks that are brought by Mabel, her best friend from California, we get an understanding of who Marin really is and what she has gone through.

Nina LaCour, winner of the 2018 Michael L. Printz Award, does an amazing job of making it feel like we are in the dorm with Marin. She uses symbolism with themes of winter, snow, etc., wonderfully.

I have learned – from John Green – that grief is something that also demands to be felt. It demands to be acknowledged and has to be dealt with if someone wants to continue with his or her life. Grief is not something we can ignore, it catches up to us and its emotions can be a hefty weight. This book has taught me that it is okay to take some time to heal until we are okay again.

• Rida Akhtar is a Youth Volunteer at Brampton Library.