Inside of a dog (and its writer friend)

[My Forbes Life books column for this month]

It is generally felt that writers tend to be “cat people” much more than “dog people”. If this is true, two explanations come to mind. The first has to do with the personality stereotype: many serious writers are somewhat cat-like themselves – aloof, solitary, prone to hissy fits if something doesn’t go exactly as they’d like it to. These are, of course, generalisations – I have known some gregarious and friendly writers, and a few very social cats – but the broad point stands.

The second reason is a related one: even pampered, house-bound cats are usually lower-maintenance and less dependent on their humans than dogs are, which makes them better companions for someone who needs plenty of alone time to think about his work, or simply to stare into his computer screen for hours waiting for an elusive Muse to show up. (I have firsthand experience: it took me three days to begin writing this column, largely because of the demands made on me by a puppy we are fostering.) But this is also why it can be so interesting when authors do become close to dogs and write about them. You might get prose that is full of raw emotion, where the writer holds nothing back; or writing that is polished and distant and cat-like on the surface, but with slivers of deep feeling buried within it.

An example of the latter is in one of the finest animal books ever written, the literary editor JR Ackerley's My Dog Tulip, first published in 1956. When we look at Ackerley through a prism of temporal and cultural distance, he seems an archetype of the English man of letters of his generation: reserved, proper, perhaps a little snooty. But to read this book is to find not just a sharp, affectionate sense of humour but a startling candour. And the catalyst for this is Ackerley’s 16-year relationship with his German Shepherd, a relationship that began when he was middle-aged, but which provided him a new perspective on other creatures, on the nature of love, and ultimately on himself too.

One of the wonderful things about this slice-of-life memoir is its combining of elegant, literary writing with subject matter that is usually taboo in polite circles. Entire chunks are dedicated to Tulip’s toilet habits, and later to her sex life. At one point, shortly after making an offhand reference to a historical record of the emperor Napoleon’s “well-formed motions”, our venerable author describes Tulip’s squatting: “She lowers herself carefully and gradually to a tripodal attitude with her hind legs splayed and her heels as far apart as she can get them so as not to soil her fur or her feet. Her long tail, usually carried aloft in a curve, stretches rigidly out parallel with the ground...” But after this almost poetic description, the idyll is broken: Ackerley and Tulip are rudely set upon by a cyclist who objects to a dog using the sidewalk thus, and the elderly writer responds by letting loose some choice cuss-words. Dog-lovers everywhere, then and now, can get seriously worked up in these situations.

As Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs, points out in her introduction to a recent edition of My Dog Tulip, a remarkable thing about Ackerley’s writing is that though he leaves the reader in no doubt that he loves Tulip deeply, he never asks us to do the same; he doesn’t construct her as a protagonist with universally desirable qualities. And yet, there is so much grace and tenderness in some of his descriptions, such as the almost reverential one of watching Tulip give birth to her first litter, “licking and nosing this package out of herself, releasing the tiny creature from its tissues […] performing upon herself, with no help but unerringly, as though directed by some divine wisdom, the delicate and complicated business of creation”.

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The inimitable Groucho Marx once quipped, “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” The line is obviously funny as a non-sequitur, but Alexandra Horowitz gave it a new dimension by using Inside of a Dog as the title of her book about “what dogs see, smell, and know”. Reading this book, one realizes that the inside of a dog might really be too dark for a human being to “read”.

By drawing upon the word umwelt – used by the German biologist Jakob von Uexkull to describe an animal’s subjective inner life or “self-world” – Horowitz lays out the many ways in which we humans routinely misinterpret or anthropomorphize the behaviour of our four-legged companions; but she also demonstrates that taking a coldly scientific view of animal behaviour does not amount to discounting the higher emotions. When your dog licks your face on your return home, this behaviour may be genetically rooted in the phenomenon of puppies licking their mother’s snout to get her to regurgitate food for them; but over time, in domestic animals, this has also become a ritualized greeting that (in conjunction with other displays such as tail-wagging) clearly says “I’m glad you’re back.”

This balancing act between the rational explanation and the emotional one lies at the heart of many meaningful human-dog relationships, and it reminds me of Arthur C Clarke’s superb story “Dog Star”, which broadly fits in the “science fiction” genre (and is by one of the leading exponents of that form), but is also an intensely emotional tale about love.

It begins with the narrator, an astronaut on a space station, millions of miles from earth, being awakened from sleep by a vivid dream where he thought he heard the barking of his dog Laika. She isn’t really there, of course: the melancholy narrator then dips into his memories from years ago and tells us about how, back on earth, he adopted her as a puppy and, to his own surprise, grew enormously close to her over time. However, a devastating separation loomed: accepting a prestigious research position in a space observatory necessarily meant leaving behind his closest friend and companion. “After all, she was only a dog. In a dozen years she would be dead, while I should be reaching the peak of my profession. No sane man would have hesitated over the matter, yet I did hesitate.”

The final sentences of the story – once the narrator has returned to the present and is analyzing his dream and its aftermath – are heartbreaking, because they involve a man refusing to succumb to comforting delusion even though he so badly wants to: a scientist who, after relating a story about an unfathomably close relationship, provides a rational explanation for the “supernatural” event he just experienced. But then, in the story’s very last sentence, he allows himself to get emotional again, and the effect is stunning – a reminder of the dark and mysterious places that can exist inside of both dogs and their humans.

[Some earlier Forbes Life columns are here. And a piece about cat books is here]

Bonesetters, fish-ingesters, caregivers: some books about healthcare and medicine

[my latest Forbes Life books column]

Readers gravitate to certain types of books depending on what they are experiencing in their lives at a given point, what the old mood is like, and what they need to prioritize – escapism, profundity or some unknowable mix of both. But at times it can feel like certain books are seeking you out, pressing for your attention. In the past three years I have spent a lot of time as a caregiver in hospitals and at home, handling medical situations for family members. Two months ago, even as things escalated dramatically, the online catalogues I received from publishers seemed suddenly full of books involving either healthcare at a macro-level or intimate narratives about living with illness.

The connections got spooky at times. Just a week after my mother was diagnosed with metastatic cancer that had spread from the breast to the bones and other places, I received a copy of the Jerry Pinto-edited anthology A Book of Light: When a Loved One Has a Different Mind, opened the contents page and found my eye alighting on the title of the third story, “My Mother’s Breast”, by Amandeep Sandhu. Then, a day after my mother had a surgical procedure to repair a crack in the spine – the source of the crippling back pain that had belatedly alerted us to the cancer – I waded through a stack of books at home and found my hand on a dust-covered copy of Aarathi Prasad’s In the Bonesetter’s Waiting Room: Travels Through Indian Medicine.

One could call this coincidence, or say that my antennae were tuned to seek out this kind of literature. However, it is also true that the Medicine and Healthcare category has seen a lot of publishing activity in recent times. Among the most popular of these books – capacious, informative but geared to the general reader – are the works of the surgeon-cum-writer Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End and The Checklist Manifesto being the most recent) and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer-winning history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies. And there are other, lower-profile publications, not as ambitious in terms of prose or narrative structure, but still worthy and important.

Among these is Dissenting Diagnosis: Voices of Conscience from the Medical Profession, co-authored by the doctors Arun Gadre and Abhay Shukla as an expose of malpractices in private healthcare. Unsurprisingly, I learnt of its existence around the time I was making umpteen visits to a corporate hospital, grappling with the spirit-sapping demons of apathy, inefficiency and profit-mindedness, as well as the demands of having to be in many different places at once. The book became a companion during subsequent hospital stints, and I was tempted to wave it about each time a senior doctor passed by.

This is a neatly organized primer to issues that are seriously undermining the Hippocratic Oath and the view of medicine as an innately noble profession. These include the nexus between pharmaceutical companies and corporate hospitals (or senior doctors), the lack of transparency and accountability in the private sector, and the self-perpetuating system of commissions or “cuts” by which doctors and companies often profit at a patient’s expense. The book draws on the testimonies of nearly eighty doctors (around half of them agreed to have their names published) who were troubled about the flaws in the system. If you have spent a lot of time in hospitals, chances are you will identify with some of the anecdotes included here; if you haven’t, you might be aghast but you’ll also be better prepared to deal with a medical emergency when it does crop up. Given that most of us in such situations are under pressure to act in haste – and not always in a position to think calmly – it is useful to have read something like this beforehand.

While Dissenting Diagnosis deals mainly with modern practices – rooted in the germ theory of medicine and endorsed by internationally approved scientific benchmarks – Prasad’s In the Bonesetter’s Waiting Room takes a more wide-ranging look at the many avatars of healthcare in India. This includes a clear-eyed, occasionally sceptical but mostly open-minded examination of alternate therapies that fall under the collective term AYUSH (an acronym for Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy): treatments that most corporate hospitals would have little truck with, but which people disillusioned by exorbitant medical practices often turn to, if only to supplement Western medicine.

Prasad’s travels (this book is also a journey of discovery for someone who is of Indian ancestry but doesn’t live in the country) took her, among other places, to the Bathini Goud family in Secunderabad – practitioners of a mystical but hugely popular form of therapy that involves the ingesting of live fish whose mouths have been stuffed with herbal medicine. Here and elsewhere, the author – a biologist by profession – brings a good journalist’s seriousness to her material, even as she speculates about the usefulness of esoteric treatments: do these methods work in the same way that placebos do, with good faith and optimism as driving factors, or are there real, measurable benefits that have eluded the grasp of Western medicine?

Throughout these essays, Prasad provides a sense of her own dual value systems, as someone who has been trained in modern medicine but has also – through the influence of family and friends – stayed open to other forms of healing. This commingling of the personal with the general gives a special texture to many such books, even a work as mammoth as Siddhartha Mukherjee’s latest, The Gene: An Intimate History. Though this is nothing less than a history-cum-biography of the gene, which has so advanced our understanding of the building blocks of life, Mukherjee begins his narrative with a very personal story about mental illness in his family and his resultant obsession with genetic legacies and perils.

Which brings me back to the anthology A Book of Light. Amandeep Sandhu’s piece about his mother’s breast cancer was a reminder that even when the specifics of a case vary, many things about the daily business of caregiving are despairingly familiar. Sandhu was more intimately involved with his mother’s care on an hour-by-hour basis than I (so far) have been, but I could relate to some of the mundane details, such as the business of coping with bathroom flushes that don’t work on full pressure, or a patient’s embarrassment that can soon yield to stoicism.

Other moving pieces in this book include Nirupama Dutt’s “Mothers and Daughters” (the full scope of which is only just about captured by that simple title) and Sharmila Joshi’s poignant “The Man Under the Staircase” about a dimly remembered uncle who, because of mental illness, was confined to a secluded spot under the house’s stairway. The story’s end is heartbreaking: no photo remains of her unfortunate uncle, Joshi tells us, only her own fragmented memories and a drawing he did for her long ago – a sole indicator that he existed and had an inner life, even if it is one that most of us wouldn’t be able to identify with. If there is a single thread running through all these books, it would be empathy – both for the ailing and for the “normal” or “healthy” people who care for them.

[Some other ForbesLife columns are here. And here's a detailed review of Dissenting Diagnosis]

On Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India, and other books about cultural heritage

[From my Forbes Life column]

As a film buff, I am often appalled by how much neglect or apathy there is when it comes to India’s cinematic heritage. Important material isn’t archived, movie prints degrade over the years, and there are farcical cases such as the one where an invaluable Satyajit Ray-Marlon Brando interview from the 1960s was accidentally taped over – by our state-run TV channel, no less. When I have contacted family members of deceased directors, cinematographers or scriptwriters, it often transpires that there are no extant documents about their work, or that the family has little information or insights to share.

Things are not much better when it comes to chronicling other aspects of our cultural past, including the events and movements that continue to shape our thoughts today. Which is why one of the more heartening byproducts of the Indian-English publishing boom has been the arrival of such books, which are well-researched but also written for a general – as opposed to an academic – readership.

A recent example is Akshaya Mukul’s Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India, an excellent history of one of the country’s most influential publishing ventures, Gita Press, which was founded in 1923 by the Marwari businessmen Hanuman Poddar and Jaydayal Goyandka. Through its bestselling publications – including the monthly journal Kalyan, which has a circulation of 200,000 – Gita Press has for decades propagated an idea of India that is based on Hindu supremacy and a rigid interpretation of sanatan dharma. Mukul’s book traces how this came to be, the personalities and philosophies involved, and the complex ways in which the project intersected with the ideologies of such prominent people as Mahatma Gandhi, who had a cordial relationship with Poddar but who also decried the latter’s views on the caste system and other social ills.

So much ground is covered here – in the fields of historical research as well as analysis – that this book deserves multiple readings. One of its most stimulating chapters centres on the Gita Press’s obsession with preserving the purity of the Hindu woman and in laying out her duties and proscriptions, notably through a 46-page monograph titled Stri Dharma Prashnottari (Questions and Answers on Women’s Dharma), which took the form of a conversation between two women. In this dialogue, Sarala is the simpleton who asks questions about women’s rights and responsibilities, while Savitri – a stand-in for the “ideal woman” – gives her the answers. For instance, on the question of education, Savitri states that Western education – which can have the effect of making women question traditions – is a no-no; they should read only religious epics and texts. On the few occasions that Sarala asks a provocative question or adopts a challenging position, she is met with sophistry: when she cites cases of physical abuse towards women and wonders if husbands don’t have any responsibilities, Savitri replies that what women should be concerned with is their own dharma (stri dharma), irrespective of what men do.

All this makes for absorbing reading, but Mukul’s book reminds us that it would be a big mistake to see the monograph as an antiquated product of its time. Though first published in 1926, it is still in print, having sold over a million copies, and continues to provide “moral guidance” to generations of people – women and men – who haven’t had the benefits of modern education.

I didn’t know much about Gita Press before I read this book, but Nandini Chandra’s The Classic Popular deals with publications that I savoured as a child and still sometimes turn to for comfort reading: the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) comics started by Anant Pai in 1967. Chandra’s book, which began life as a dissertation, is notable for its analyses of the visual iconography of ACK. It includes plenty of artwork from fondly remembered old comics, but the ACK fan will feel some discomfort too, since Chandra often uses those images to demonstrate how they have subtly manipulated readers’ perceptions of mythological and historical characters, or affirmed stereotypes. Thus, the dominant male gaze is pandered to in such scenes as the one where Arjuna abducts Subhadra and her skirt is shown rising up to reveal her legs; a bullying schoolteacher – whose background we know nothing about – is drawn with a moustache-less beard, thus subliminally identifying him with Muslims (who usually figure as the “others” in these comics); Rajput women who are about to immolate themselves rather than submit their honour to invaders are drawn in a way that accentuates their voluptuousness and potential for ravishment.

If Chandra’s book made me feel ambivalent about a key aspect of my childhood, Ambi Parameswaran’s Nawabs, Nudes and Noodles: India Through Fifty Years of Advertising was a much less complicated source of nostalgia. For a boy who grew up in the Doordarshan era, the very chapter titles make the heart sing – “Ab main bilkul boodha hoon, goli kha ke jeeta hoon” and “I am a Complan girl! I am a Complan boy!” being just two of them. This book chronicles some of India’s major advertising campaigns, using them as prisms to look at the country’s sociological history: what do these ads tell us about the changing roles of women, children and elderly people, for instance? Or the ways in which we have consumed various categories of products and services, ranging from milk to junk food to wedding jewellery. Parameswaran adds the necessary personal touch by drawing on many of his own experiences from a long career in advertising.

But to return now to my preferred subject, film literature. Many books in recent months have covered aspects of cinematic history that are in danger of being forgotten – these include biographies of old-time stars (such as Mekhala Sengupta’s Kanan Devi: The First Superstar of Indian Cinema) or exercises in documentation, notably The Pather Panchali Sketchbook, which brings together all the sketches Satyajit Ray had drawn for his seminal 1955 film (the drawings were once thought to have been lost by Paris’s Cinematheque Francaise museum) and Sidharth Bhatia’s The Patels of FilmIndia, about the caustic film-magazine editor Baburao Patel, bane of many moviemakers and stars of the 1940s and 1950s.

And then there is Ziya Us Salam’s Delhi 4 Shows: Talkies of Yesterday, an affectionate collection of pieces about what it was like to be a movie-watcher in Delhi in the pre-multiplex era. There are many entertaining stories here that will leave today’s youngsters wide-eyed even though they involve relatively recent history. Such as the ones about theatres that had private boxes for burqa-wearing ladies, or the shrewd promotional strategies followed by hall-owners, who even hired special buses to fetch viewers from the railway station. This book brings alive memories of single-screen halls – or “talkies” – of the past, many of which continue to be landmarks and monuments of the city long after they ceased to be functional. Like the other histories mentioned above, it is reminder of how the past constantly interacts with and informs the present. 

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[A longer piece about Delhi 4 Shows is here]

How sci-fi cuts us down to size (and shows us what we can be)

[From my Forbes Life book column]

It takes a while to figure out exactly what Isaac Asimov’s “Does a Bee Care?” is about – short though the story is, and simply told, you might need a couple of readings to grasp its full scope. The narrative begins with a man, or a creature that has the appearance of a man, hanging around as a spaceship is being constructed. No one pays “Kane” much heed, but his presence has an effect on some people; it stimulates their minds, creating ideas that can have far-reaching consequences.

Eventually we learn that this alien entity had been deposited on earth as a sort of ovum, and that its natural process of maturity required driving a whole planet towards civilization, so that it could find the way back to its own corner of the galaxy. Driven by instinct over thousands of years, not fully understanding why these things had to be done, “Kane” lit sparks in the minds of individuals like Newton and Einstein, all with the sole purpose of facilitating space exploration. “Does a bee care what has happened to a flower when the bee has done and gone its way?” is the story’s closing line. The flower in this analogy is earth, which has thus been “fertilized”, and the knockout punch is that the things we are so proud of – our capacity for scientific thought, our accumulation of knowledge through the centuries – are incidental byproducts of the actions of this extraterrestrial “bee”.

If you have watched Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, you may see a very fleeting resemblance in the story of the apes in the “Dawn of Man” segment – where a new strain of consciousness is awakened by the appearance of a mysterious black monolith, which points primitive man towards a new future. That film was based loosely on an Arthur C Clarke story titled “The Sentinel” (Clarke later developed it into a novel as the film was being made), and anyone who knows science-fiction writing of the 1940s or 50s will know that masters like Asimov, Clarke and Robert Heinlein often took on human hubris and punctured it. They also took special pleasure in pulling the carpet out from under such ideas as patriotism. Most of them did it gently, though, and with humour.

I was thinking about this given all the talk there has been in India about nation-love, and about showy ways of demonstrating it (saying “Bharat Mata ki Jai”, standing up in movie halls for the anthem, bullying those who don’t, and so on). A lot of this has been downright absurd, but of course we don’t have a premium on this sort of thing. Consider this quote about NASA’s Pluto mission last year, which came from a White House representative: “I'm delighted at this latest accomplishment, another first that demonstrates once again how the United States leads the world in space.” It is especially amusing to see patriotism take front seat in such a context. Here we are talking about a journey through millions of miles, a vastness that makes any distance between two points on Earth look insignificant by comparison. Yet we can be parochial even about such achievements.

In Clarke’s story “Refugee”, a character reflects how odd it is that shrill nationalism had managed to survive into the space age – a time when the astronaut's-eye view should have made the artificial geographical divides on our tiny planet appear ridiculous and irrelevant. Others have expressed this thought in different ways. As Carl Sagan put it, Earth when viewed from a long way off is just a pale blue dot, incredibly fragile-looking; the sight should humble us, make us feel protective of the little rock we inhabit, and forget about the many divides we have created over the centuries.

Many people think sci-fi deals only with “otherworldly” things, not with essential questions about humanity. (This snobbery is even more prevalent when it comes to fantasy, but I’ll save that for another column.) Actually, this is one of the few genres that can remind us how trifling we are in the larger context of the universe while at the same time showing us the potential and the value of our species. The authors I mentioned above have all written beautiful stories that demonstrate the best in human nature. Asimov’s collection Robot Dreams has the incredibly moving “The Ugly Little Boy”, which centres on an organization named Stasis Inc that has transported a Neanderthal child through time and kept it enclosed in a special centre. A woman named Miss Fellowes is employed to look after the child; initially she is repulsed by its feral strangeness, by the largeness of its head, but soon she comes to see it as she would any other lonely infant: “It was a child that had been orphaned as no child had ever been orphaned before. It was now the only creature of its kind in the world. The last. The only.”

What follows is a most unusual bond, one that is headed for tragedy, given the nature of Stasis Inc’s operations; but the story ends with Miss Fellowes doing something that will take your breath away even as you realize – if you put yourself in her place – that it was the only thing she could have done. As the author points out in his introduction, the story “is only tangentially about time-travel. What it is really about is love”. This is true of much other writing in the genre.

Among my favourite stories to combine humour with the subject of what it means to be human is Clifford Simak’s “Skirmish” (you’ll find it in the Brian Aldiss-edited anthology A Science Fiction Omnibus, a book I highly recommend). It involves a newspaper reporter named Joe Crane – your average Joe – gradually discovering that small, machine-like aliens from another planet are scouting earth with the intention of “freeing” their brethren – the earth machines that are being controlled by humans. The problem for Joe, as he begins to piece things together, is that he alone is in possession of this information and has no tangible proof: if he tried to take it to the authorities, he would be treated as a drunk or a psycho.

You have to read the story to see how Joe handles this great responsibility that has fallen on his shoulders – and to see how the last line of the story (I can tell you, without any spoilers, that it is “Well, gentlemen? he said”) shows how politeness and etiquette can coexist with firmness of will, even in very strained situations. That’s one of the things that allows us to call ourselves rational, or civilized.

But as a companion piece to this affirmative narrative, I would also point you towards Bertram Chandler’s “The Cage”, which offers a much more bittersweet view of what an “evolved” species might be. “Only rational beings put other beings in cages,” goes a cynical but reasonable observation in the story. The best of sci-fi shows us how to break the cages we have built for ourselves and for others, or at least how to bend the bars. 

[Some earlier Forbes Life columns are here]

Quotes from the bestseller machine

[My latest Forbes Life column, with selections from the "Craft of the Bestseller" session I moderated at JLF this January]

If you attend the Jaipur Literature Festival – in whatever capacity, as author, journalist or star-struck reader – you expect to pick up lots of quotable quotes: erudite, highbrow ones, certainly, but a few ear-popping ones too. I didn’t have to venture far this year. During a session I was moderating, the words came at me from just two feet away. The other people on the panel were saying them, and most of the audience was cheering in response.

The session was titled “The Craft of the Bestseller” and here are two quotes – both by suave, hugely popular fiction writers – that I thought particularly intriguing:

“Solitude distracts me.”
This was from Ravi Subramanian, author of a successful trilogy of thrillers about bankers and banking. It was a part-response to a question I had asked: does the new generation of “mass-market” authors follow the accepted wisdom that writing is essentially a solitary profession? Or do they see it as more of a communal endeavour?

“I have never been a reader. I hadn’t read any book before I wrote my first novel.”
This from Ravinder Singh, whose bestsellers include I Too Had a Love Story and Can Love Happen Twice? and who was one of the festival’s rock-star-like celebrities; groupies threw themselves at him, demanded selfies, and cooed away during the question-and-answer sessions.

Before returning to these two proclamations, I should mention that I was the odd man out on this session – being not just that dreaded animal, a “critic”, but also the author of books about old cinema, which don’t have a hope of selling anywhere near the numbers that Singh and Subramanian are accustomed to. For me, “bestseller” means 4,000 or 5,000 sold copies of a book; for these writers, 50,000 copies might be perceived as a letdown. So, when I was asked to anchor the conversation, I realized it would involve playing Devil’s Advocate. I’m not a literary snob: my favourite authors include many genre writers like Stephen King, Agatha Christie and Thomas Harris, all of whom have reached very large readerships; as a film critic too, I constantly defend the value of good mainstream films, and my latest book is dedicated to viewers “who are smart enough to take popular cinema seriously”. But at the same time I’m also uncomfortable about some of the narratives that have grown around mass-market writing in India – such as the inverse snobbery on view when bestselling writers scoff at “pretentious” literary types and wonder why anyone would waste six or seven years writing a “heavy” book full of “complicated” words.

And so, during the conversation, while I was genuinely interested in the thoughts and approaches of the panelists (especially Anuja Chauhan – author of The Zoya Factor and Those Pricey Thakur Girls – whose work I rate higher than Singh’s or Subramanian’s), there was some wariness too. A few days before the festival began, I had received a publisher’s press release about the session. “The creators of the hottest pop fiction and romance in recent times,” it said, “will discuss the making of best-selling authors and the transition of an author from being the ‘khadi-clad, jhola-walla’ introverts to the current stylish (sic), and socially connected with their fans.” The phrasing, with its patronising attitude to “jhola-wallah introverts”, threw me back to my childhood days and the bullying one experienced from gregarious uncles who would say things like “Arre, what is this introvert-shintrovert rubbish? A child should be outgoing and friendly.”

Which brings me to Ravi Subramianan’s quote about solitude being counter-productive for him. A lot of his best work, he says, is done while sitting at the table with his family – wife, kids – around him, talking or laughing, and maybe with the TV on in the background. Put him in a room, alone, and his creative juices would probably dry up.

Some people might scoff at this sort of admission, especially if they don’t have much regard for the work of the “mass-market” writer who is saying it. But one would also do well to remember that writing has not always been about temperamental artists residing in ivory towers and shutting the world out. The modern novelistic form, from the 19th century onwards, may lend itself to that approach, but there has been a long literary tradition – from the bards of old to the addas of more recent ages – that has involved communal interaction, creating stories through discussion, moving gradually from oral to written storytelling.

In this context, one should note that some of the “mass-market” writers of today are co-writing books (see Durjoy Datta and Nikita Singh, for instance) or otherwise mentoring younger writers – and if done with integrity, this can mean a welcome new egalitarianism in Indian publishing. Ravinder Singh has recently worn multiple hats. He has edited an anthology titled Tell me a Story, made up of stories submitted by previously unpublished writers, about a defining event in their lives. He has also started his own imprint called Black Ink, and books published by it routinely have “Ravinder Singh Presents” on the cover, above even the name of their actual authors!

This is a notable strategy – and shows business acumen – but it also raises a question that brings me back to Singh’s Jaipur quote, mentioned earlier in this piece. Shouldn’t an author, who is also now doubling up as an editor and “producer” of books, have something of a reading history?

Singh has been upfront about the fact that he had never read a book before he wrote one (his first novel was written as an outlet for his grief over his girlfriend’s death in an accident). But perhaps “upfront” is the wrong word, since it implies being confessional; the fact is that Singh, like many others of his generation, is almost boastful about becoming a “writer” without ever having been a “reader”.

And this is discomfiting, because it is inseparable from the question of a writer’s abilities. When you start reading from an early age, not only do you develop certain standards, you also realise how much good work has already been done. And it makes you humble – it might even make you diffident about your own work, which can be a problem. But at least it prevents you from being cocky and overconfident and thinking “I think I have a great story to tell, and the world is just waiting for my book; literature begins with me.”

During our session, I asked Singh the obvious question: if you don’t read yourself, on what basis do you expect others to read your books? I didn’t get a coherent response.

[Two related posts: the end of pretension in publishing? and Chetan Bhagat and the other mass-market writers]

Little grown-ups, and other misfits

[Did this for my Forbes Life books column – around the time I was part of the jury for the children’s fiction prize at the Goodbooks Awards]
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Discussions about literature for children and young adults often pivot around the question: should young readers be spoon-fed? Do messages and morals have to be spelt out? Some parents and teachers seem to think so, but there are others who give pre-teen readers more credit and point out that the best way to engage a mind – and to provoke some thought in the process – is to tell a story really well, to make the characters and situations involving. Ideas can lie embedded within a “fun” narrative. Besides, as the writer EB White once put it, “Children are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. Anyone who writes down to them is wasting his time.” A related observation is that it makes little sense to shield children from “dark” subject matter, especially at a time when content of all sorts is so easy to access.

Having recently read a number of new young-adult (YA) books by Indian authors, I was pleased to find that many of them – some to a greater degree than others – steer clear of pedantry. Even the ones that are set in a school environment and deal with a vulnerable but intelligent child beginning to make sense of the world, working his way through notions of right and wrong, seeing a friend or classmate through fresh eyes and learning about empathy.

A good example of this is in Payal Dhar’s Slightly Burnt, which begins by cleverly misdirecting the reader: the narrator, a 16-year-old named Komal, has just had her life turned upside down, because her best friend Sahil (and she only wants them to be friends, nothing more) has said three little words to her. We think we know what those words are, but soon we discover that we were wrong; we then follow Komal on a journey to understanding and acceptance. I won’t provide big spoilers here, but this novel addresses an important subject – the marginalization of people who are unconventional in some way – with lightness. You won’t at all feel you are being preached to.

Which is also the case with Samit Basu’s delightful The Adventures of Stoob: Testing Times. If you’re in a solemn mood, you might tell someone that this book’s lesson is: It Isn’t Good to Cheat in Your Exams. But that wouldn’t begin to convey the strengths of this fluid narrative about a boy who has a rich inner life, and who is so nervous about his exams that he nearly crosses over to the dark side. In a smart demonstration that “doing the right thing” can be cool, some of the most fun passages have Stoob and his friends thinking up ways to prevent another friend from cheating during a test. The writing aside, I enjoyed Sunaina Coelho’s illustrations, which complement the text wonderfully – as in the drawing of Stoob being chased by weapon-wielding Hindi alphabets, or the hilarious one of him and his parents depicted as mythological characters from an old, melodramatic movie.

Another of my recent favourites in the school sub-genre was Shabnam Minwalla’s The Strange Haunting of Model High School. Though set in south Mumbai – with references to real-world landmarks such as Churchgate station – this book might remind you a little of Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s stories, with a supernatural twist thrown in. The characters here include a lonely girl-ghost who has been floating around the school’s corridors for over a hundred years seeking a piece of information that will put her mind at rest, a conniving deputy principal named Mrs Rangachari, and the three protagonists – BFFs named Lara, Mallika and Sunu – who set out to help the ghost even as they prepare for an inter-school production of the musical Annie.

One of the incidental themes in Minwalla’s novel – a less-privileged girl attending a posh school – is handled more directly, and a little more self-consciously, in Kate Darnton’s The Misfits, told from the perspective of an American girl named Chloe who has recently moved to Delhi with her parents. When Chloe encounters another misfit, the dark-skinned Lakshmi, who is very Indian but not of the “right class”, she gets an insight into the workings of the adult world, and gets to play savior as well. Darnton’s book is sensitive and engaging, but since it seems to have been written in part for a non-Indian readership, some of the content might feel over-expository, and just a teeny bit patronizing, to an Indian reader. (Chloe’s parents, who used to be hippies in their own youth, keep shaking their heads indignantly at the class prejudice they see around them.)

Another, breezier story about an 11-year-old girl is Judy Balan’s How to Stop Your Grownup from Making Bad Decisions, written as a series of blog entries by “Nina the Philosopher”. A few dramatic things happen here (Nina and her friend Aakash blow up the school swimming pool with stolen chemicals; her single mom has a serious accident and must also be kept from getting married to a seemingly unsuitable boy), but the overall tone is that of a chatty diary entry – Nina isn’t trying to write a thriller for us, she is simply going through life and negotiating things as they happen. In the process she shows the clear-sighted wisdom one might expect in an intelligent child, but which some adults might also envy. “People who THINK all the time should have their own rooms,” she observes, making a case for introverts who need a lot of space to themselves, even when they aren’t doing anything observably important.

At one point, Nina says she feels like she is the grown-up and her mom the teenager in the house. A more literal version of this situation can be found in Andaleeb Wajid’s No Time for Goodbyes, which operates at the intersection of YA fantasy and teen romance: after glancing at a Polaroid photo, 16-year-old Tamanna finds herself back in 1982, where her future mom is a little younger than her, and where she has to pretend to be a visitor from Australia (while dodging questions such as why the Harry Potter book she has brought along has a “2000” publishing date). A nice nostalgia trip for those of us who remember the times Wajid is writing about, this is the first in a three-book series (the sequel, Back in Time, is out too), and I’d be interested in seeing how she manages to stretch out this one-note premise without getting too repetitive.

One thing she does well is to invoke the pang of knowing that the person you want to be with may always remain inaccessible or out of bounds – in this case, literally belonging to another dimension. Looked at that way, notwithstanding the time-travel angle, this book is about the very universal “outsider” emotions that are also evoked in real-world narratives like Slightly Burnt and The Misfits.

[Other recent posts on children's/young adult books: Manan and Ela; Tik-Tik, the Master of Time]

Darkness in pictures

[My latest Forbes Life column. Earlier columns are here]

When I think of the graphic novels I have read – especially the ones with dark subject matter – it sometimes happens that a single image, just one panel among hundreds, stands out and seems to represent the tone of the whole. For instance, in Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde’s Mumbai Confidential, a noir thriller set in Mumbai’s underworld, this image would probably be the wordless “aerial shot” of two people – one of them a sweet little girl selling flowers – sprawled on the sidewalk on a gloomy night, after having been hit by a car. In Gautam Bhatia’s angry satire Lies: A Traditional Tale of Modern India, it might be the deliberately exaggerated drawing of a luxury plane that contains a swimming pool, a golf course and a shopping arcade, among other diversions. (The plane is being used by a minister who is flying over a drought-stricken area and making obligatory sympathetic noises. Poor man. Imagine having to make do with a six-hole mini-course.)

It would be hard to perform a similar exercise for Art Spiegelman’s magnificent memoir Maus, which was written as an attempt to record his parents’ experiences in the Nazi concentration camps – this is too multilayered a work to be reduced to one emblematic image. But there is a panel I noticed on a recent rereading, which reminded me of how closely sadness and humour, despair and affirmation run together in this story about human endurance in extreme situations.

The drawing shows Art’s father Vladek, having been incarcerated in a ghetto with his family and waiting to be taken to Auschwitz, coming across the dead body of the Jew who had turned informer and betrayed the Spiegelmans to the Nazis a few weeks earlier. “Hey!” Vladek tells a passerby, “This is the rat that turned my family over to the Gestapo.” It turns out that the informer had been shot after he was no longer of use to the Germans, and now Vladek is the one who ironically has the job of giving him a decent burial.

This situation in itself is a testament to shared suffering and how easily oppressors can become victims and vice versa, but the image might also make you laugh out loud, because it includes a little wink at the book’s chief stylistic device. Throughout Maus, Art Spiegelman depicts the Jews as wide-eyed mice and their German persecutors as smug, predatory cats. And so, in this panel, we have the use of the word “rat” to describe the dead man even as the drawing itself portrays both Vladek and the corpse as rodents. When people extol the virtues of the written word (text-only literature) over visual forms such as cinema or the illustrated book, it is often pointed out that great writing enables you to use your imagination, while visual depictions make it too easy. There is some truth in this, but I’m not sure how text alone – even when created by a very skilled writer – would be able to replicate the effect of this one drawing (which, as mentioned earlier, is among dozens of searing images in Maus).

The really dark graphic novels can be unflinchingly gruesome in what they do show, but they might equally achieve their effects through the power of suggestion – as the Japanese master Osamu Tezuka repeatedly does in his medical thriller Ode to Kirihito. One of the most devastating scenes here concerns the fate of a young woman named Reika, who plays the part of a “human tempura” in a crowd-drawing show involving a large vat of oil, but there is so much else to shudder at and sympathise with in this manga epic. Ode to Kirihito, is about a disease that is transforming people into dog-like beasts in 1970s Japan – the protagonist Dr Kirihito, who has been afflicted, lives in the countryside, trying to cure himself and others; meanwhile, in sophisticated city hospitals, doctors take part in corporate power struggles. In Tezuka’s hands, this premise becomes a way of exploring exactly what words like “humanity” and “morality” mean (something he achieved in a different way in what is perhaps his best known work, an eight-volume rendition of the Buddha’s life).

Some people find it hard to come to terms with sexual explicitness in illustrated books – not least because “comics” often get dumped in the children’s sections of bookstores – but there have been works, ranging from Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries to Chester Brown’s Paying for It, which do this exceedingly well, concealing subversive content beneath minimalist, placid-looking drawings. Satrapi’s story centres on teatime conversations between a group of Iranian women, who use this private time to air their troubles and use humour as therapy, and the talk progresses from relatively innocuous matters to the need to fake virginity for one’s husband if necessary. Brown’s book, set in a very different society and from a male perspective, is about his years of experience as a “john” – someone who regularly pays for sex with prostitutes – and the glimpse he got into the inner lives of these women, as well as the less savoury side of his own personality. It veers between personal epiphany and philosophical musings about love, commitment, power and control, and includes a series of endnotes where he discusses the ethics of prostitution.

It would be hard to imagine a non-pornographic film being made out of Paying for It, but one of the most gripping graphic novel-inspired films is David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, about a man named Joey who escapes a life of violence to live a quiet existence as a Regular Family Guy in a small town – and then finds his past pursuing him to the degree that his own wife and children no longer know who he really is. John Wagner and Vince Locke’s book, which the film is adapted from, can be viewed as pure pulp – it lacks the finesse of works by Spiegelman or Satrapi – but in its scratchy, black-and-white drawings there is a raw, menacing quality that fits the subject matter perfectly – not least in the hard-to-look-at scenes near the end where Joey, having returned to confront his enemies after 20 years, finds that his childhood friend Ricky had been kept imprisoned and savagely tortured for all that time, while Joey had been peacefully leading his new life hundreds of miles away.

When he stares at the battered, maimed body of his friend, Joey is in a sense looking at a distorting mirror that shows what he might have easily been if things had turned out just a bit differently. In my mind, there is an odd but resonant link between this image and the Maus one of Vladek Spiegelman gazing down at the body of the comrade who had betrayed him.

[For thoughts on another dark vision from a great graphic novel, see this post. And a long post about Chester Brown's Paying for It is here]

Clowns, MBAs, dragonflies: about a few dark allegories

[From my theme-based ForbesLife books column]

Hear the term “fantasy writing” and the images that leap to your mind may be from the Tolkien universe – The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, the mythological back-stories collected as The Silmarillion – or from CS Lewis’s Narnia, or one of the countless series inspired by them. These are settings that have been created from the ground up. Even when the things that happen in the story comment on aspects of our own world (Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials are often-quoted examples in recent literature), the reader knows that the place itself is invented.

But fantasy is a broad word. Another form is that of the allegorical narrative which is located in a mostly familiar setting but has things happening in it that don’t fit the straitjacket of “realism”. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a famous example: as far as we know, pigs don’t use human speech or organize themselves into dictatorships; yet this novella is set in our world, and most people with knowledge of the political events of the time would recognise it as a story about the Russian Revolution.

Such writing sometimes takes the form of speculative fiction set in the future, as was recently done by Shovon Chowdhury in the splendidly imaginative The Competent Authority. The India of this dystopian novel, having been comprehensively nuked by China, is run by a mad bureaucrat, and the only hope for the future may lie in going back to the past – so a group of people with special time-travelling powers set off to see what can be done to alter history. “Fantastic” as all this may sound, there are instantly identifiable figures here, such as an unnamed prime minister who comes from a long political dynasty (she is the granddaughter of a much-feared woman PM of the 1970s, if that helps) and a crude, bullying policeman.

A slimmer, less ambitious but often-potent satire is Sowmya Rajendran’s The Lesson, which takes the unsavoury facts of gender discrimination in real-world India and only mildly exaggerates them to create a picture of a society where state-sanctioned rapists coolly make phone appointments with their next victims – the women who are “asking for it” – and Dupatta-Regulators ensure prescribed standards of morality (while having fevered nightmares about an anarchic world where everyone roams around naked). The icy detachment of Rajendran’s writing is sometimes very effective – as in a scene where a woman who is to be raped on a live TV reality show is briefed about the “hot” actress who will play her in the buildup episodes – though I felt a little more could have been done with the premise, and the satire could have been more cutting.

“He feels empty. Hollow. Unreal. He feels he has no business being alive.” These words could describe some of the people in Rajendran’s book, but they are the opening lines of Altaf Tyrewala’s long story “MmYum’s”, included in the collection Engglishhh: Fictional Dispatches from a Hyperreal Nation. And they refer not to a flesh-and-blood person but to a mascot clown named Arnold, made of plastic and sitting on a bench outside a chain store. Fed up of being someone else’s puppet, he decides to get up and wander the streets.

The misadventures that follow comment on the workings of capitalism and those who become slaves to it – including conscientious objectors who end up being fence-sitters because they can’t resist an occasional dose of junk food and gassy cola – but they also comment slyly on this type of narrative. “You must be dumbfounded to see me,” Arnold tells a writer named Unnati in one scene. She shrugs her shoulders. “It’s an allegory, all sorts of things can happen in allegories. I don’t mind playing along.” As she knows, one of the characteristics of this form is that it spells ideas out for the reader – in an often simplified, pared down way – while simultaneously making inside jokes and self-referencing. 

If lazily done, this can become tedious very fast. But that isn't a word I would ever use to describe Ramiah Ariya’s funny, fast-paced novel The Exorcism of Sathish Kumar, MBA. While Tyrewala’s Arnold is, almost literally, tied down to his job (in fact, the poor mascot clown that replaces him has screws driven through his hands and feet to keep him from bolting), the protagonist of Ariya’s book isn’t much better off: as the narrative opens, Arjun is summoned by the upper echelons of management in his tech company and deputed to the mysterious “EXM” team, with a very strange list of tasks to perform – procuring gaanja, for example. The depiction of the corporate world here may remind you of the more surreal Dilbert strips, such as the ones where the geeky engineer goes to the dreaded Accounts department and meets trolls who feed him unicorn horns. Ariya's book becomes increasingly weird and fable-like as it goes along, culminating in encounters with a sorcerer who communes with the dead, a strange otherworld named Ahi, and the revelation that the true meaning of life is shareholder profit (something that most corporate slaves learn over time without ever having to go to strange otherworlds).

Franz Kafka was one of the major practitioners of a different sort of fable – the claustrophobic, nightmarish sort – and Kafkaesque was the word that leapt to mind as I read Aditya Sudarshan’s intense The Persecution of Madhav Tripathi. (An early chapter is titled “The Castle”, as if in tribute to the master of paranoia’s famous story about alienation.) Sudarshan’s novel is about a privileged man who at first seems to have the future nicely laid out before him – but after loses his bearings (literally and otherwise) while coasting down a city road, Madhav Tripathi finds himself caught in an escalating series of strange events. This story about liberals – or people who think they are liberal and sophisticated – being beset by the forces of darkness, and exposed to their own pretentiousness in the process, may be too dense for some tastes. But it is full of arresting imagery, such as an early scene, a party set at a wildlife sanctuary, where guests float about like butterflies (or perhaps like the dragonfly pictured on the book’s cover, which also makes an appearance later in the narrative). “Civilization” meets the cave in these passages, as it does in most of the other books mentioned here – and by the time you finish reading them you may no longer be sure which is which.

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[Some other Forbes columns: names and markers in Anees Salim's novels; Sita's Sister and other myth-retellings; books with twists; time-travellers; parents; writers on writing; satire; popular science; translations; doubles. And a more detailed review of The Lesson is here]

A tree called Franklin (and other names and markers in Anees Salim’s novels)

[Did a version of this piece – some thoughts on the work of one of my favourite contemporary novelists – for Forbes Life]

When I tell you that one of the funniest words I have read in a recent Indian novel is “Franklin”, further explanation is clearly required. In Anees Salim’s excellent Vanity Bagh – narrated by a young man named Imran, who lives in the Muslim colony that gives the book its title – a tree standing opposite a mosque is called Franklin, after the priest who planted it a century earlier. “The mohalla-wallahs are so obsessed with spinning yarns and naming things that they haven’t spared even this tree,” Imran tells us early in the book. But having offered this detached commentary, he himself continues to refer to the tree by its name: it isn’t important to the plot, but it is very much part of the book’s setting, so there are throwaway lines such as “we were idling our time away by Franklin”, or “he pulled over by Akbar Electricals and trudged up to Franklin”, or “under Franklin stood Mary Pinto, seriously irritated with something.” (Imagine the puzzlement of a reader who had carelessly sped-read the explanation at the beginning, or allowed his attention to drift!) What makes this anthropomorphising even droller is that other trees in the story are steadfastly referred to as just banyan trees or willow trees or salt trees.

The good-natured humour of these references aside, there is a deeper resonance to Imran’s remark about the naming or defining of things. He and his friends (Zulfikar, Zia, Jinnah, Yahya, Navaz) have the names of famous Pakistani politicians or cricket stars: “the mohalla-wallahs always named their children after people with successful professions”. As he tells his story – about growing up in Vanity Bagh, about his family and neighbours, about the sequence of events that leads to his group of “five-and-a-half men” becoming pawns in a terrorist act – he adorns the text with little things said by various people, presented as quotations, complete with their names at the bottom and their years of birth and death in brackets. If the quote is from someone about whom Imran has limited information, the dates might be missing, but the brackets stay; like this:

“The month of Ramzan is here, when the pious eat on the sly”
– the madwoman outside the mosque ( –2007)

“If this city had a WTC, they would have bombed it as well”
– Public Prosecutor ( – )

Imran’s obsession with numbers and dates (which, by the way, I can personally relate to) is clarified later in the book: “I loved memorizing digits that, when fenced by brackets and partitioned by a hyphen, became studies in longevity.” It isn’t just a fetish, it is also a way for this young man to make sense of the things and people around him by giving them finite shape and meaning and a back-story; by gathering information about wheres, whens and hows.

And at a broader level, this idea can be extended to the terrain of religion, which is an unavoidable presence in this story. Because yarn-spinning and labeling done by people hundreds or thousands of years ago has created a situation where two human colonies in the same city, located just minutes apart, might come to view each other only in terms of their singular “Hindu” and “Muslim” identities, and do terrible things if they feel threatened. (If Vanity Bagh, nicknamed "Little Pakistan", is the Muslim colony in the book’s unnamed city, its nemesis – its shadow other – is a Hindu neighborhood called Mehendi.)

In his essay collection Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, Amartya Sen notes the hazards of “a solitarist approach to human identity, which sees human beings as members of exactly one group…This can be a good way of misunderstanding nearly everyone in the world”. That each of us can be many different things at the same time, surprising others and ourselves in the process, is a central theme of Sen’s book. It is also an important undercurrent in Anees Salim’s work, over the four novels (published in barely two years) that have made him one of the most notable voices, and one of the outstanding storytellers, in contemporary Indian-English writing. Salim's last three books – Vanity Bagh, Tales from a Vending Machine and The Blind Lady's Descendants – feature lower-middle-class Indian Muslim protagonists and chronicle the minutiae of their lives, including things that get lost in the mainstream narratives and clichés about the community. He depicts cultural confusion with amazing lightness of touch, since his focus is on multi-dimensional people rather than on big statements – and because he is effortlessly funny even when telling very sad stories.

In The Blind Lady’s Descendants, the narrator Amar – a melancholy man who is writing this book as a sort of lengthy suicide note, perhaps using the written word to keep himself and his luckless family “alive” in the face of impending obscurity – is an atheist; in pointed contrast is his pious brother Akmal who earnestly tells anyone willing to listen that Neil Armstrong heard the call of the muezzin when he set foot on the moon. However, Salim doesn't present Amar and Akmal as symbols or archetypes, and the reader has to come to terms with the many nuances in the narrative. Despite my own mindfulness about generalizations, I admit to having been jolted at times. When Amar casually mentions having felt up his cousin Razia when she was 11 and he 13 (“I had slipped a hand down her silky stomach […] but she had darted away before my finger, shaped like a fish bait to enter her, reached its destination, glaring murderously at me”), it came as a minor shock, not just because this bit of offhand raunchiness marked a shift in the book’s tone, but because on some subconscious level I was still thinking in stereotypes: I was thinking of Amar as only a sensitive introvert (hence incapable of having a ribald or sexually inquisitive side) and of the characters as Good Muslims (in the sense of being respectful of bonds and distances and veils), and forgetting that they are human beings with the same impulses as anyone else. One can imagine some readers being discomfited by the fact that the grown-up Razia – a reasonably self-possessed, mature young woman – continues to refer to Amar as Brother. But feelings and equations can change over time, or exist in opposition. (Amar may pride himself on being a rationalist, but that doesn’t stop him from being spooked, and ultimately overcome, by the thought of a mystical connection between himself and an uncle who had died on the day Amar was born.)

The people in Salim’s stories are sometimes constrained by their larger identities even as they try to break away from them, and this tension is the warp and weft of their lives. Many of those quotations that dot the pages of Vanity Bagh are from films starring Sean Connery or Chuck Norris or Sylvester Stallone, and attributed to the actors rather than the characters – here is an Imam’s son living in a conservative setting, whose thoughts are shaped by movies from a country that would in many ways be antagonistic to, or suspicious of, his family’s way of life. When the Oscar-winning “king of sound engineering” (Resul Pookutty, though he isn’t named) visits the jail Imran is in, Imran’s principal motivation for wanting to meet this local celebrity is that he had shaken hands with Will Smith on the Oscar stage.

Similarly, in Tales from a Vending Machine, the young narrator – a spirited, winsome, occasionally muddled girl named Hasina, who works at an airport vending machine – reads a lot (without always understanding context) and wants to lead a modern, self-reliant life; she day-dreams about battling a terrorist who tries to “kidnap” the plane she is piloting. But she also weeps when she hears of the execution of Saddam Hussein, thinks of the Twin Towers’ destruction in terms of an exciting movie scene, with “the top of the building crumbling smoothly to the ground like a wedding cake”, and – in one of the book’s most uproarious scenes – reflexively yells “Allahu Akbar” back at the fake terrorist who has accosted her during a mock drill at the airport (all Hasina was required to do was slump over and play dead after being “shot”). Again, as so often in Salim’s work, the breeziness of this scene doesn’t mask the question it raises: in a scripted attack of this sort, why are the “terrorists” cast as purdah-wearers who shout “Allahu Akbar” before attacking?

In telling these stories about people who might mock faith and its rituals, but who are also capable of feeling defensive about their culture in specific situations (much like the hero of Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist), Salim shows how a particular world can become both a cage and a sanctuary. What happens when the boundaries of what you can and cannot do are pre-determined by authority figures in your community – and when this in turn creates a vicious circle because people on the outside are constantly judging you? In Tales from a Vending Machine, Hasina is frequently conscious of people she meets looking disapprovingly at her veil. Including a former class-teacher who is (understandably) saddened that this promising student was made to leave school at a young age… but also the painter MF Hussain (in an amusing cameo), who many on the Hindu right would stereotype as an Islamist making fun of their religion.

And so it goes. These books deal with the messy complexities of human lives, and the subtle ways in which people can both be defined and, briefly at least, resist definitions. For all the cataloguing and classifying in Vanity Bagh – all the neat attempts at ordering the world – you have to think how odd a name “Vanity Bagh” is for a Muslim colony, or “Franklin” for a tree waving its leaves at a mosque.

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[A little more about Anees Salim in this post about the Crossword awards judging process that ended with a fiction prize for The Blind Lady's Descendants. Here's a review of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. And here, only because Imran is so dismissive of Resul Pookutty, is a review of Pookutty's memoir Sounding Off]