Bapsi Sidhwa’s brilliant fourth novel chronicles the adventures of a young Pakistani girl in America with an enormously satisfying story and characters… The extended family of Feroza Ginwalla, a lively and temperamental girl, agonizes over the decision to send her to America for a three-month holiday. This act of apparent audacity arises from concern over Feroza’s conservative attitudes, which stem from Pakistan’s rising tide of fundamentalism. Feroza’s chaperone in America, an uncle only six years her senior, is her guide, friend, and the bane of her existence. Her relationship and adventures shape her alternatively hilarious and terrifying perceptions of the US. Feroza’s family in Pakistan, meanwhile, is in delicious turmoil over the possibility that American ways will ruin her…
Catagory: Literature & Fiction
How to Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia
Cast in the mould of a self-help guide to getting rich, this is the extraordinary story of a young boy, born into a poor family. As the years pass, he moves to a slum in the city, gets a brief education, flirts with militancy, and then, hungry for advancement, sets up a bottled water business, the ultimate symbol of the modern South Asian city-a place where nothing works but everything can be had at a price. But as he leaves his past behind, one thing remains
constant and true-his love for the girl he met as a teenager.
Journey To Ithaca
Sophie and Matteo are young and in love, sharing a dissatisfaction with their bourgeois Italian upbringing. Naturally, like so many other young Westerners in the sixties and seventies, they go to India. But the realities of life in an ashram ignite their differences; Sophie wants to be a tourist and go to Goa and eat shrimp, which Matteo scorns, seeking the ‘real’ India. Pragmatic Sophie is disillusioned by the hardships they encounter, while her husband, who yearns for spiritual fulfillment, sees only the purity of ascetic life, leading him to Mother, a charismatic guru.
Trying to reclaim an ailing Matteo, Sophie embarks on a new journey in search for a different truth; that of Mother’s mysterious past. Soon, she finds that the immortal has a history of her own; born in Cairo, she was once Laila, a dancer who toured the world before coming to Bombay to search for ‘divine love’. What each of the three people discover, on their individual quests, is at its heart that ancient truth: that wisdom is found in the journey itself.
A stirring, profound exploration of emotional exile, of sacred and profane loves, Journey to Ithaca is a masterful novel.
Seventeen And Done
Rinki has everything she needs to go crazy with: bickering boys, a bitchy grandma, boring books and the Biggest B of them all, Board Exams. Rinki and her wolf pack are back in action and they have company in the form of Google (Mr Know-it-all) and Adit (Mr Goody Two-shoes). At last, Rinki has her wish fulfilled. She has two boys fighting over her, er, mostly with her! Meanwhile, Rinki’s brand new grandmother, Mausiji, is raising hell at home. Her dad (lucky fellow!) is away in Coimbatore and it’s all up to Rinki to cool tempers down. At school, things are no better. Board Exams are looming large and Princy is making her feel smaller than ever. Her grades are shrinking and her waistline is growing. School life is about to get over, but not before things get a lot more crazy. Read the next instalment in the Rinki series and discover why turning seventeen is no walk in the park!
Cracked
Ever since my mom was murdered, I’ve been completely alone. I live in the shadows, because there’s no one like me. I have no choice because I have to fight the Hunger, the Hunger that drives me to hunt people and eat their souls. And I have to fight it if I want to stay out of the darkness.
WHO AM I? I’M MEDA MELANGE. WHAT AM I? I DON’T KNOW-BUT I’M NOT HUMAN. AND NOW, I FINALLY HAVE THE CHANCE TO FIND OUT.
I, Lalla
The poems of the fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded, popularly known as Lalla, strike us like brief and blinding bursts of light. Emotionally rich yet philosophically precise, sumptuously enigmatic yet crisply structured, these poems are as sensuously evocative as they are charged with an ecstatic devotion. Stripping away a century of Victorian-inflected translations and paraphrases, and restoring the jagged, colloquial power of Lalla’s voice, in Ranjit Hoskote’s new translation these poems are glorious manifestos of illumination.
Starry Nights
Aasha Rani, the ravishingly beautiful ‘Sweetheart of Millions’, makes one fatal career-move: she falls in love. Aasha Rani, the unrivalled number one of Bombay cinema, seems intent on ruining her career-and her life-blinded by a scorching passion that threatens to destroy everything she has attained. Aasha Rani’s story is that of a vulnerable, small-town girl whose scheming mother pushes her via a never-ending orgy of blue films and PBI – Indiscriminate sex into the crass PBI – World of Bombay cinema, teeming with vicious, preening stars and near-stars and insecure, high-society celebrities: Akshay Arora, the reigning stud of 70mm and the object of Aasha Rani’s desire; Sheth Amirchand, the Don of Bombay’s underPBI – World, under whose hallowed sheets her career is sealed; Kishenbhai, the small-time distributor, who gives her her first break, and his heart; Sudha, her younger sister, whose envy and hate of her sister’s success make her Aasha Rani’s worst enemy.
Miracles
DO MIRACLES REALLY HAPPEN?
Sixteen-year-old Trisha is hugely embarrassed by her hip mom who rides around on a monster motorbike called Smelly Beast. But along with her exuberant little sister, Shivi, they make for a quirky threesome, as Trisha adjusts to a new school, explores her talent for singing and falls head over heels for Akshay. Trisha’s happy-go-lucky world suddenly comes crashing down when a fatal illness befalls her mother. She struggles to make the transition from a carefree teenager to a responsible adult, hoping that some miracle will magically set things right. Poignant and deeply sensitive, Miracles is a heart-warming coming-of- age story of a feisty young girl’s struggle against her fate.
The Middleman
1970s Calcutta. The city is teeming with thousands of young men in search of work. Somnath Banerjee “1970s Calcutta. The city is teeming with thousands of young men in search of work. Somnath Banerjee spends his days queuing up at the employment exchange. Unable to find a job despite his qualifications, Somnath decides to go into the order-supply business as a middleman. His ambition drives him to prostitute an innocent girl for a contract that will secure the future of Somnath Enterprises. As Somnath grows from an idealistic young man into a corrupt businessman, the novel becomes a terrifying portrait of the price the city extracts from its youth. Sankar’s The Middleman is the moving story of a man torn between who he is and what he wants to be. Stark and disquieting, the novel deftly exposes the decaying values and rampant corruption of a metropolis that is built on broken dreams and morbid reality. The evocative prose and vivid imagery in this first-ever translation successfully capture the textures of the Bengali original.
Mirror City
It is 1973. A newly independent Bangladesh is collapsing under the weight of impending famine, unemployment and political corruption. In the midst of this upheaval, Uma, a Bengali from Calcutta, moves to Dhaka with her husband Iqbal. As the young woman learns to make the new city her home, she faces upheavals of her own. Iqbal is a changed man; their mixed marriage raises too many eyebrows; and the charged atmosphere in Dhaka makes it impossible to trust anyone. Uma has never felt so utterly alone in her life, until she finds herself unexpectedly falling in love.
Mirror City brilliantly captures the turbulent early days of Bangladesh, the slow breakdown of a marriage, and a woman’s search to find herself. Nuanced, atmospheric and full of drama, this is an utterly compelling novel.