Faredoon (Freddie) Junglewalla is either the jewel of the Parsi community or a murdering scoundrel. Freddies mother-in-law, Jerbanoo, thinks he is planning to do away with her, but Freddie has always been a pragmatist: if the old woman were to die (be murdered?) the body would have to be placed on the open-roofed Towers of Silence, in keeping with custom, and that would never do. Insurance fraud and arson, however, are well within Freddies repertoire???in fact he thinks he has invented the idea, so advanced is it for India, in 1901. As his skills grow he becomes a man of consequence among the Parsis, with people travelling thousands of miles to see him in Lahore, especially if they wish to escape tight spots they have got themselves into.
In this wickedly comic novel, the celebrated author of Ice-Candy Man takes us into the heart of the Parsi community, portraying its varied customs and traits with contagious humour.
Catagory: Fiction
Fiction main category
Scenes From An Executive Life
A delightfully irreverent account of corporate affairs in the white collar world. From the author of the best-selling The Inscrutable Americans, comes a hilarious novel about the roller-coaster career of an enterprising marketing executive. It is the story of Gambhir Kumar, Human Resource Development Manager in the Y Corporation, whose life is never the same again after he is transferred to the Tissues and Toothpicks Division. As he travels up and down the corporate ladder, Gambhir redefines the role of the young urban professional who must strike a delicate balance between his heady ambitions and the lustful demands of his heart. The novel also features some unforgettable cameos: Gambhir’s wife Draupadi (DD to her friends), who fights the ennui of yuppie life with boyfriends in the afternoons; Kapila, Gambhir’s passionate bedfellow from the Bombay office; ‘Smiley’ Chatterjee, the adman with a three-word vocabulary; and Kumar, a self-styled entrepreneur intent on selling the sword of Gautam Buddha to American tourists. Scenes from an Executive Life is an immensely entertaining exploration of ambition, lust, envy and intrigue in a typical corporate set-up in post-liberalization India.
Once Upon A Tender Time
Once Upon a Tender Time, a poignant tale of childhood, is the concluding part of Carl Muller’s Burgher trilogy. The Burghers of Sri Lanka, hardy and fun-loving, produce children by the dozen-but often forget them. Carloboy Prins von Bloss and his companions are usually considered a pain in the neck by the adults they encounter as they go about the serious business of discovering the world and, primarily, the facts of life. Romps in the backyard, trysts in deserted houses and long bicycle rides to discover true love are commonplace. Also frequent are thrashings and canings as adults try to do.
Ice Candy Man
The story of the upheaval of the 1947 partition of India seen through the eyes of a Parsee girl growing up in Lahore. Through her relationships with her Hindu Ayah, the Muslim cook, the Sikh zoo attendant and the ice candy man, she shows how ordinary citizens reacted to the horrific turmoil.
Ferry Crossing
Twenty-seven engaging stories from the heart of one of India’s youngest states. The great holiday destination of India, Goa has been reduced to an easy caricature by the demands of tourism and advertising: a beautiful land by the sea peopled by a feckless, bohemian race. This anthology introduces us to the true Goa, a place rich in history and tradition where the business of living is as serious and humdrum as it is anywhere else. Included here are the finest short stories from Goa written in Konkani, Marathi, Portuguese and English, all remarkable for their rare freshness, and many marked by sparkling humour and a contagious lightheartedness. The themes vary from the touching naivete of first love, as in Chandrakant Keni’s ‘Innocence’, to the humiliation of poverty, movingly described in stories like Pundalik Naik’s ‘The Turtle’; from the amusing clash of egos among rural elite, brilliantly narrated in Victor Rangel-Ribeiro’s ‘Senhor Eusebio Builds His Dream House’, to the startling brutality inherent in everyday lives, as seen in Pundalik Naik’s ‘When an Ass Mounts a Cow’ and Damodar Mauzo’s ‘Theresa’s Man’. Simply and lucidly told, the stories in Ferry Crossing reveal a Goa infinitely more human and complex than the stereotypical image of an enormous beach resort.
Better Man
Mukundan, a middle-aged bachelor, is forced to return to his native Kaikurussi, a sleepy village in Kerala. Determined to conquer old ghosts, Mukundan decides to restore his childhood home and hires One-Screw-Loose Bhasi, an outcast painter, to oversee the renovations. A practitioner of a unique style of healing, Bhasi is intrigued by Mukundan’s unhappiness and sets about mending his troubled friend. But the durability of Mukundan’s transformation into a better man is soon called into question.
All Is Burning
Nineteen stories of rare power from the heart of war-ravaged Sri Lanka. In these stories Jean Arasanayagam brings us voices that are not normally heard: those of anonymous men and women searching for order and reason in the midst of a ruthless civil war. While many succumb to the horror of their times, there are others who discover in themselves unexpected reserves that will help them survive. Thus a young Sinhala man turns his back on an aimless upper-class existence and joins a group of Tamil refugees smuggling themselves into Germany; a woman goes out alone to see the scene of a carnage to try and find her daughter’s lover among the dead and dying; a maid returns from the rich desert city of Doha to the green half-jungle of her village in northern Sri Lanka and rediscovers happiness despite the uncertain future… In addition to stories about the effects of war and violence, this collection also explores aspects of ethnicity and individual choice in a multicultural society. All is Burning is truth-telling at its poignant best.
Yakada Yaka
Yakada Yaka is the second part of the Burgher trilogy that began with The Jam Fruit Tree When the conquering British roll out the first railway steam-driven locomotive in Sri Lanka, it causes quite a stir. The smoke-spewing, banshee-wailing, fearsome black thing hisses like a thousand cobras… and the villagers declare that this Thing is an Iron Demon-a yakada yaka. The Burghers who drive these Iron Demons have a penchant for challenging authority and courting trouble, sometimes just to liven things up in the railway outposts… and so it is that Sonnaboy and Meerwald chase a large group of villagers all across Anuradhapura, mother-naked but not much bothered by it, Ben Godlieb conjures up a corpse in his cowcatcher, Dickie Byrd single-handedly demolishes a Pentecostal Mission and is hailed as the messiah of the Railway fraternity, and Basil Van der Smaght filches a human heart and feeds it to the Nawalapitiya railway staff …and to cap it all, Sonnaboy takes French Leave to act in The Bridge on the River Kwai! ‘(Muller) tells his tale with a gentle humour often bordering on tenderness, but couched in the vigorous rugged localese. Almost immediately we find ourselves empathizing with Muller’s roistering band that sins and prays with equal zest.’ -Business Standard ‘… The Burghers …believed in living life to the hilt. Every situation occasioned wild revels, and there was nothing that could not be solved through a brawl.’ -India Today.
The Jam Fruit Tree
Winner of the Gratiean Memorial Prize for the best work in English Literature by a Sri Lankan for 1993 Hilarious, affectionate, candid and moving, this is the story of the Burghers of Sri Lanka . . . Who are the Burghers? Descended from the Dutch, the Portuguese, the British and other foreigners who arrived in the island-nation of Sri Lanka (and ‘mingled’ with the local inhabitants), the Burghers often stand out because of their curiously mixed features-grey eyes in an otherwise Dravid face, for instance. A handsome and guileless people, the Burghers have always lived it up, forever willing to ‘put a party’. Carl Muller, a Burgher himself, writes in this quasi-fictional, engaging biography of the lives of his people; they emerge, at the end of his story, as a race of fun-loving, hardy people, much like the jam fruit tree which simply refuses to be contained or destroyed.
Blasphemy
Set in South Pakistan, this controversial novel is a searing study of evil. It is the tragic and shocking story of the beautiful Heer, brutalized and corrupted by Pir Sain, the so-called man of God whom she is married to at the age of fifteen.