THE STORIES OF OUR LIVES – IN ENGLISH

By DR VICKI BISMILLA

Growing up in the British school system we were exposed to many novelists, playwrights, and essayists, but none of them Indian like ourselves.

This is an ongoing refrain even today for minority students who do not see themselves in the literature they are taught in school.

I was recently invited by a dear friend to attend Toronto’s Motive Crime and Mystery Festival and met two wonderful Indian novelists, Harini Nagendra and Vaseem Khan.

Harini Nagendra’s recent novels The Bangalore Detectives Club and Murder Under the Red Moon are delightful, light approaches to the age-old detective novel. Her lead detective, Kaveri Murthy, wife of Dr. Rama Murthy, is a clever mathematician and inveterate fan of famous mystery writers like Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. She applies her keen observation skills and determination to unravel clues to help police solve murders in the 1920s amidst the flagrantly snooty British Raj occupiers. I enjoyed ‘being in Bangalore’ with Kaveri and her small team of eager problem solvers, in the backdrop of heady South Indian aromas (Harini Nagendra provides recipes too!) and lush greenery that tug at my heart. 

Vaseem Khan’s novel, The Lost Man of Bombay, on the other hand, grabs your attention right off with a brutal murder scene and keeps you holding your breath throughout this excellent and riveting page-turner. His use of language is exquisite, his similes bringing a smile to the reader’s face even as we are gripped in a greed to know what lurks around the next corner. Every chapter brings an unexpected twist that I had not foreseen. This is not a formulaic detective story, with personalities and plot lines predetermined by police procedure. This story gives you a punch in the gut several times and knocks your expectations for a loop! The main character, Detective Persis Wadia, digs a place of favour in the reader’s mind despite and perhaps because of her rough character edges that Vaseem Khan has so deftly woven. And supporting characters, every one of them, play an important part in the unravelling. I bought his book at the festival and did not know this author’s previous work, but I will now go back and read his Malabar House precursors and Baby Ganesh Agency series with great expectation.

Meeting these two authors reminded me that there are brilliant Indian writers who write outstanding fiction and non-fiction in English. I am not a fast or as voracious a reader as my friend, but I like to have a novel on the go all the time. Over the years I have read the works of gifted Indian writers from Rabindranath Tagore to present day shining bearers of his torch.

Of the Four Booker Prize-winning Indian authors, I have not yet read Kiran Desai’s work and I have not enjoyed Salman Rushdie’s novels nor Arundhati Roy’s. But I immensely enjoyed the fourth Booker prize winner Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.

Like the other winners, he deals with the struggles of human existence in the worst social conditions. Through Balram Halwai, the taxi driver, we see volatile depictions of struggling and crime-ridden communities in teeming cities. Aravind Adiga exposes the underbelly of daily life in India. But doesn’t every country have an underbelly?

Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace is set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885 and tells the story of Rajkumar, an impoverished boy who works his way into creating an empire out of Burma’s lush forests of teak. When Burma’s royal family is thrown out of the glass palace, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the queen’s court, whose love will shape his life. Amitav Ghosh is indeed a phenomenal storyteller. I could not put this book down. From Burma to Malaysia to Calcutta to the Nilgiris through Goa, the sweeping saga took me on a breathtaking journey. My heart was hooked to the baby in the boat, the brothers, the royal family... just all of them! Not surprisingly, every review I have read has echoed the praises of this phenomenal writer.

Shauna Singh Baldwin is a Canadian American novelist of Indian descent. Her 2000 novel What The Body Remembers won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and her 2004 novel The Tiger Claw was nominated for the Giller Prize. In What The Body Remembers we meet Roop, a young girl who is to become the second wife of a wealthy Sikh landowner whose first wife could not bear children. The relationship between Satya, the first wife and Roop is complex in one of the most troubled times in India’s political history. This meticulously researched and beautifully written novel brings to life the tragedies of the India/Pakistan partition, the Great Trunk Road and the lives destroyed by the politics of the time. It leaves the reader viscerally shaken.

Her novel, The Selector of Souls is again, very well researched. This book, a continuation of What The Body Remembers, is beautifully written and heart wrenching. From the fate of innocent female babies to the plight of women in the male dominated, soul destroying hierarchy that has always plagued Indian culture, the author weaves a story that held me spellbound.

The Tiger Claw was written in between the above two books. As a child I had heard through adults in the family about Madelaine, the British spy whom they had got to know through a radio serial (we had no television at the time.) Much younger Shauna Singh Baldwin first heard about the spy at an espionage themed restaurant in Milwaukie called The Safe House.

This true-life story is about Noor Inayat Khan, code-named Madelaine, a British spy in Nazi occupied France during the second world war. This is a moving story about the extreme risks that spies undertook on behalf of the allies in order to defeat the Nazis. Once again, Baldwin’s research is meticulous. A British Muslim woman working in the French underground during WWII – intriguing and human, this story of love, patriotism, prejudice, heroism, and sacrifice is an engaging read.

Anuradha Roy’s novel The Folded Earth tells of a young woman who tries to make a new life for herself in the foothills of the Himalayas having left a private tragedy behind her. But even in this small community, politics and intrigue conspire to make her life difficult. I enjoyed this book and was engaged in following Maya’s journey after she was widowed at such a young age. The supporting characters are deftly portrayed, and I found myself wanting to read more after the end. I couldn’t put the book down.

In addition to outstanding Indian writers there are many more diaspora Indian writers whose novels are phenomenal.

The better-known diaspora Indian writers would be authors like V.S Naipaul, Rohinton Mistry and M.G. Vassanji.

Another diaspora writer was the late Aziz Hassim who set his novels among the vibrant Indian community that arose from ancestors who were enslaved by the British and brought to Africa as labourers.

In The Lotus People Aziz Hassim guides his readers meticulously through four generations of two remarkable families. The steel nerved Pathan, Yahya and his trusted Bunya friend Naran arrived in South Africa in the 1800s during the Raj. Indians were brought to South Africa as indentured labourers, and many came as passenger Indians to eke out a living in business.

This sweeping saga takes the reader from Yahya and Naran’s struggles to survive at first, and then to their children and grandchildren’s resolve to defeat the demonic Nazi trained apartheid government forces that killed non-whites without conscience.

The climax of the story brings us to the young children of these families and their friends a hundred years later, in the twentieth century, who fought for South Africa’s freedom.

They waged their war from their classrooms and the streets of South Africa with iron-fisted determination. Aziz Hassim’s characters are startlingly real and for those of us who grew up in apartheid South Africa, every moment of this page-turner is like we are there – smelling the aromas of the cooking pots, jiving to the music, laughing at the street slang and holding our breaths during the tense times when the raw tensions of the bloody encounters with the state police gangsters leave us so angry we want to lash out.

But it is the tenderness of the relationships between and among the characters who stand together through incredible odds that keep us hooked until the last word of this masterful novel.

These wonderful writers may not be given a chance to be read in western classrooms, but we as desis in the west, must find the works of fellow desis and Indian writers and read them.

We will be so glad that we did.