Category: reading

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C is for Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Born 1956

After two
days of delving in the past I fast forward to current times and pick a modern
day favourite, an Indian American this time and a lady yet again.. I really
hadn’t realised I preferred women writers with women protagonists.

Today it is
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni the author of the award winning The Mistress of Spices.
She has authored over a dozen books including novels and short stories as well
as some poetry. Her subjects are often Indian American immigrants. Her books include Arranged Marriage (short stories), Sister of My Heart, The Vine of Desire and Oleander Girl among others.

India to
America

She was born
in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and after finishing her graduation she moved to the
United States. It wouldn’t have been easy for her there and she took up various
small jobs to put herself through college – ‘menial and minimum wages’ is what
she terms them. However had she not moved, she just might not have become a
writer at all

On being a
writer

In her blog
she says, “In India, growing up in a traditional family, I had never considered
being a writer.” In America she came across other immigrants like her. She
identified with their struggles, struggles to fit into this new country yet to
keep their values intact at some level. And that’s where she started weaving
her stories and her first book ‘Arranged Marriage’ was born. Some of her stories
have a nagging melancholy, I don’t particularly are for, but they do paint a vivid picture of immigrants.

My favourites

I love the quaint
mix of India and America she serves up in her novels. I enjoyed The Mistress of Spices. That mix of magic and exotica coupled with
human longings and failings made for a compelling read.

However my absolute all time favourite is the one novel that doesn’t talk of immigrants. It is The Palace of Illusions –  a retelling of the Mahabharat, from a woman’s
perspective. Banerjee simplifies the epic once more talking of human failings and human relationships.

Her protagonist Draupadi is a princess ‘born to destroy’, the ‘ill-fated’ one. Yet how strong she is – a woman who refused
to take the name Draupadi (from her father’s name Drupad) and preferred to call
herself Panchali (after the kingdom of Panchal, where she was born). That must
have been quite a rarity in those days when women spent their lives in the shadow
of their fathers, brothers, husbands or sons. Forced to marry five men instead of the one she truly loved she strives to be a good wife to each. I loved her special relationship with Krishna too – his cool responses to her heated ones. She is passionate and outspoken, rash and vengeful too. Yet you cannot but fall in love with Banerjee’s Panchali.

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PS: I have
to add just a tiny bit about my other favourite ‘C’ author – the lady from
Nigeria Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Interestingly her latest novel Americanah
also deals with the issue of immigrants to America. Talk about connecting across
continents!

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This post is part of the April A to Z
Challenge, 2014 for the theme AMAZING AUTHORS.

Also linking to the Ultimate Blog Challenge.

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B is for Bronte

Today it’s B for Bronte and I pick Charlotte Bronte (of Jane Eyre) over her sister Emily (of Wuthering Heights). Plenty of comparisons have been made between the sisters and I side with Charlotte simply because I prefer Jane’s level headedness to Catherine’s waywardness.

If Austen’s works lacked emotion here was an author who could most certainly not be blamed for that. Jane Eyre is proof enough. Whether it was Rochester passionately in love, enough to hide away his first wife or Jane herself who hears his impassioned cries across the miles – oh yes passion there’s a plenty.

Her life in her books

Charlotte drew heavily from her life while writing. At 8 she and three of her sisters were sent to the Clergy Daughter’s School in Lancashire. She hated it there. Two of her sisters died there of Tuberculosis. This school makes an appearance in Jane Eyre as the Lowood School. Her experiences as a governess became Jane’s too.

Charlotte, Emily and Anne..

.. made for quite a literary threesome. After Charlotte and Emily were brought back from the school, the girls read at home. They created an imaginary world and wrote about people who lived in that world. The three were all accomplished writers and poetesses as well. They even financed and published a book of poems together under the names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell – keeping the same initials as their real names.
Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre under the same pen name, Currer Bell. The book was an instant success. She wrote three other novels – Shirley, Villette and The Professor – and some poetry, however none was as popular as Jane Eyre.

Her heroine was a plain Jane

Charlotte felt very strongly, that it wasn’t right for the heroine to always be beautiful. Her sisters insisted it was impossible to make a heroine interesting if she wasn’t beautiful, Charlotte vowed to prove them wrong. Said she, “I will prove to you that you are wrong; I will show you a heroine as plain as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours.” And so Jane was made plain (and named ‘Jane’!) yet how enchanting was she! Like Austen’s heroines she too was no weakling demanding to be judged for who she was rather than where she came from.

On Austen

Charlotte was critical of Jane Austen’s Works saying they lacked ‘heart’. She mentions as much in one of her letters in 1850, “The passions are perfectly unknown to her,” says she.
So pick your favourite now.. Charlotte, Emily or good old Austen – Jane, Catharine or Lizzy – Rochester, Heathcliff or Darcy?
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Tomorrow dear readers, for the letter C, I jump forward in time and pick a contemporary Indian author. Guesses, anyone?

This post is part of the April A to Z Challenge, 2014

Also linking to the Ultimate Blog Challenge.

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A is for Austen

Jane Austen

1775 – 1817

Can a book written in the
19th century find admirers in the 21st?… two hundred years later? Sure, if
Austen is anything to go by. And so I let Jane Austen kick off my A to Z
challenge. It was a tough choice from among greats like Ayn Rand, Aldous Huxley
and more recently the controversial yet highly enjoyable Amy Chua.
But when I let my heart choose it has to be her.

Isn’t it unbelievable that
she was first published in 1811 and we’re still reading her and enjoying her
novels?

The beginning

Jane came from a large family of six brothers and two sisters. She was born at Steventon, a small village in North Hampshire England. Apart from a few years at Oxford when Jane was just 8, she spent all her life within the circle of her family. Even before she hit her teens she was writing short plays and stories. At about 14 years (1789) she had made up her mind to become a professional writer. However her first novel, Sense and Sensibility (earlier known as Elinor and Marianne), went into print some 12 years later, in 1811. 
Her other works include, Pride and Prejudice (earlier titled First Impressions), Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
Like regular women of her times and like her heroines as well, Jane could play the fortepiano (an early version of the present day piano), was a decent enough seamstress and could dance pretty well too.

Jane, the romantic

Strangely enough for someone whose romances are so popular Jane never married. She did have one not-quite-proper romance with Tom Lefroy a law student. However they were both penniless and his family had him sent away. They never saw each other again.
She received a proposal of marriage too, the only known proposal. Though she accepted it, she later withdrew her acceptance. The reason is not known. However later in a letter to her niece who had asked for advice on a relationship, Jane told her not to commit as “… Anything is preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection“, she cautioned. 
Sounds so much like Lizzie from Pride and Prejudice.

Finally..here is why

I love Austen

.. for her wit

It’s not the laugh out
loud kind of thing. It’s way more subtle and unexpected. It’s an ironical kind
of wit that makes you smile sentence after sentence.
Check out these gems.. 
Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure
Or Mr Darcy’s 
I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.

..for her heroins

They follow their heart.
They’re strong and passionate yet gentle and sensitive. I wonder how that went
down with the gentry two hundred years ago but it sure sits well with women of
the 21st century.

.. for her plots that always end happily

I’ve always maintained I’m
a sucker for happy endings. I love that ‘All is well’ feeling by the time her
books wrap up.

.. because her books are still
relevant

I can certainly vouch for
India in this regard. How becoming an old maid is considered such a horror (Maybe
not by the woman herself, quite like Lizzy in Pride and Prejudice, but by her
family, her relatives, her neighbours and her neighbour’s neighbours). Not for
nothing is she Helen Fielding’s (of Bridget Jones fame) favourite who famously
said.. “Jane Austen’s plots are very good and have been market researched over
a number of centuries, so I simply decided to steal one of them. I thought she
wouldn’t mind and anyway she’s dead.” In a sense Austen in the mother of all modern day chick-lit. (Yikes I hate that term, so! Makes women sound like hens).

On the other side are her
critics who maintain..

…her novels lack
‘passion’.

Well she did skim over
that bit but then I’m sure she never intended to write sexy books. (She would
probably be reaching out for her smelling salts hearing that Fifty Shades was
inspired by her Pride and Prejudice). 

… she suffered from a
narrow vision 

because she only drew upon the small society she lived in for inspiration.
Yet, how well she did it! And that her heroines could think beyond what was expected of them, speaks
of her broad mindedness.

So which side are you on?

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This post is part of the April A to Z Challenge, 2014, for the theme AMAZING AUTHORS.

Also linking to the Ultimate Blog Challenge.

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Arranged Marriage

When her mom had thrust that picture in her hand casually asking, “What
do you think of him?” she had no clue it would become the most important face
in her life. “He’s okay”, she had said matching her mum’s tone even though her
heartbeat had climbed up a notch. Then that weekend she met him for coffee.
Even in that short hour she had felt at ease because he had seemed completely at ease despite the whole ‘arranged
marriage’ rigmarole.
Yes she liked him, she had told her mum. She really did.
A month later after a few phone calls and dinners with him she’d
found herself engaged. And another few months later here she was.. Married. A
Married Woman! She vaguely remembered reading a book by that name, a book that
didn’t have nice things to say about marriage. Quickly she banished those
thoughts.
That’s what she’d done since the day of her engagement- banished all thought of what marriage would be like. Mercifully she barely had had much time
what with completing the shopping and finishing her work assignments before she
went on leave.

She sat in her new home while her new husband pottered around in the kitchen. He had offered to make tea while she refreshed herself after the long road journey. All those feelings, long suppressed, seemed to have woken up now and were
clamouring to be recognised. Nervousness, excitement, happiness,… and DREAD. A wave of homesickness
hit her.. Hard. And the dread!
How did I get myself into this? An educated, independent
girl like me.. in an arranged marriage? For godsake who goes in for an arranged
marriage these days? How much do I really know this man? She asked herself.
What if he turns out to be an alcoholic, a wife beater or worse?.. she was alone.. all alone with this stranger.
Jerkily she got up from the sofa upsetting the bottle of water at
the side table. Crash!!!! The bottle went crashing down taking with it a bunch
of knick knacks. “Are you okay?” he called out from the kitchen. “Yes”, she managed to
croak, her words stuck in her throat.
She bent down to pick up the bottle and there under the bed sat a
carton full of books.
Playboys! OMG he’s into porn! she thought. Shaking guiltily, she pulled out the
carton. And there, in neat rows, she discovered…. her own bookshelf.
All her favourites..
Love story, Man Woman and Child.. He was a romantic! Jonathan
Livingstone Seagull- a rebel and a perfectionist, Bill Bryson – So he liked
travel and he liked humour. Then Joseph Heller, Ayn Rand.. Oh she did like him.
Her eyes glistened with tears of relief.
‘Chai garam.. he sang
out from the doorway. She looked up hastily to find him balancing the tea tray
in one hand while three boxes of biscuits were piled up in the other supported
by his chin. “I didn’t know which ones you’d like so I brought all,” he said
with a boyish grin.
“You okay?” he asked as he saw the look on her face.
“Yes, I’m fine,” said she smiling shyly as she moved to help
him with the tray. She knew she would be fine.

Day 3 ‘The Write Tribe Festival of Words’ (8th – 14th December 2013) prompt is Books. For some mindblowing entries from super talented Write Tribers go here.

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Ah! The smell

“Bye papa”, said she valiantly trying to control her tears.

“Bye beta. We’ll call,” said her dad releasing her reluctantly from his hug.

She watched him leave with a sinking feeling. ‘Why oh why did I come here!’, she wondered trying to dig out a sliver of enthusiasm that had carried her all the way from her small sleepy hometown to big bad Mumbai. She had job offers back home but she had wanted to test new waters, to work where her writing would speak for itself. How sure of herself had she been. How arrogant!

And look where she’d landed — in an alien land, alone.

She walked back to her room and sat down by the solitary window that overlooked the road. The hostel was silent with the eerie silence of a place normally bustling with activity. She wished she had come on a weekend when the other girls were around.

Other girls! What would they be like? Would they accept her? ‘Will I ever fit in?…’ she wondered, ‘..in this lonely desert full of people?’ The melancholy threatened to overpower her. ‘This is what you wanted,’ she reminded herself sternly, giving herself a quick mental shake.

‘I should unpack,’ she thought, before the melancholy could turn into a full blown panic attack.

She pulled at one of the cartons with uncharacteristic impatience. It fell apart and her books spilled out in a heap. She remembered how she and her sister had bickered about the ones she should bring with her. ‘That one’s my favourite.’ ‘No, you can’t take that one either, you gave it to me’.. ‘..this one’s only mine’. How difficult it had been to segregate shared possessions.

Idly she flipped open a book. ‘This book belongs to me (and not to my sister)‘ she’d written on the first page. A smile tugged at her lips as she hugged it, inhaling its scent. Ah the smell of old books! The smell of home.

She reached out for another one. ‘May life never leave you disgruntled. May you always remain gruntled’. This, from a Wodehouse fan. Her smile widened. The smell of laughter!

Then a third one — ‘May the magic never end,’ said the Harry Potter and was followed by a list of names that spilled onto the next page. Her entire class had pooled in to get her the set. This one smelt of friendship.

Smiling now, she reached out eagerly for another one and almost laughed. ‘Here’s your copy now may I have mine back?‘ it said. She remembered how she’d shamelessly clung to this one wanting to read it over and over till her friend had gifted her a copy. The smell of shared love.

And then another — ‘To the most fantastic Singleton, from all of us Smug Marrieds’. She remembered this one so well – a gift from her senior colleagues when she’d wrapped up her summer internship. She’d spent the month running a hundred meaningless errands. All the while she’d plied them with her articles hoping, yet never believing they’d even read them, till one day she’d seen her byline. Her first ever!  Ah the smell of hope and acceptance and love.

Gently, she picked up the books returning them to the carton. No longer was she lonely. She was home with the smell of her books.

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