An alumna of Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi, and an MBA from IIM Calcutta, Swati Kaushal is the bestselling author of five highly acclaimed novels. Her book, Piece of Cake, is a romantic comedy set in the corridors of corporate intrigue with a heroine and a plot sparkling with mischief and a ton of attitude
Here’s an excerpt from this ‘desi Bridget Jones’ novel.
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TGIwasF.  
I’m not really your manicure-pedicure-facial kind of girl, but the past few days of sun and sand had been rather hard on the epidermis, and my face was ready to give up on me.
God bless the folks at Femina and their compulsive sampling; the ‘Mud spa treatment five-minute masque’ (with natural papaya, grapefruit and cucumber) that came with last month’s issue seemed just the thing. I smothered the pistachio green paste all over my face and neck and waited for ‘new and improved’ ancient science to work its wonders. An encouraging coolness spread across my features, followed by a promising firmness. No wonder women swore by the stuff; it sure beat sticking your head in the fridge and pulling at your cheeks, besides being a lot cheaper than a visit to a spa too! (I remember going to one of those beauty boutiques a couple of months ago with Radha; she’d paid five hundred rupees for one hour with the ‘special thermal pack’; a lava-like substance that had solidified in many crusty layers on her face and had come off whole, like a hollow Egyptian mummy.)
I studied my face in the mirror as I waited for the masque to do its stuff. A guy in Class 11 had once told me I was beautiful. I’m assuming it was hormones, or my Chemistry notes.
It’s not that I’m ugly; in fact I like most of the way I look. It’s just that I wish I didn’t have a big forehead, long nose and extra wide lips in that slightly non-Julia Roberts kind of way. And also my sideburns. I could definitely do without them. I turned my head sideways to check their current length, winced, and turned my head back around again.
At least I had good eyes. On the bigger side like everything else, but intelligent; and they looked especially arresting popping out from the green icing around them. And my eyebrows, and the way they never need threading; I especially like that. In fact not bad, all told, if only there were something I could do with the ears. I squeezed out the last of the green paste from the sample sachet and quickly covered them with it.
My ears are a social embarrassment and cause for deep personal anguish. I have no lobes.
I remember a visit to an ear-piercing salon, many years ago, when the entire staff had buzzed excitedly about my ears, in the manner of scientists around a rare specimen measuring and marking with special finely calibrated rulers to find a spot to pierce. In the end they’d recommended I forget the whole idea.
I’m assuming God used up so much material super-sizing the rest of me that he ran out of stuff to throw on the ears, so he just sort of wrapped up the job with comical miniatures, tucked them behind manly sideburns and hoped no one would notice. Of course, it didn’t work. People notice all the time; my ears are bigger draws than cleavage.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it were just a case of size and appearance. What really distresses me is that I am also tone-deaf. I love music, but my ears just don’t get it. Ever noticed how musicians tend to have nice, big ears with extra-large ear lobes that hang and quiver delicately at the ends, like they were specially designed to pick up variations on even a hundredth of a note? Well, mine have yet to acknowledge the differences between a do, re and mi and I have watched The Sound of Music a thousand times. And I’m sure things would have worked out with Rajiv, back in Class 12, if it hadn’t been for the time I got carried away and tried to sing ‘With a little help from my friends’ in his ear..

In 1963, a human skull was discovered in a pub in Kent in south-east England. The skull is a troublesome relic of both anti-colonial violence and the brutality and spectacle of British retribution.The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 offers a critical assessment of British imperialism that speaks to contemporary debates about the legacies of Empire and the myth of the ‘Mutiny’.
Here’s an excerpt.

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As a havildar, Alum Bheg received a pay of 14 rupees per month, double that of ordinary sepoys, and this had been the rate for more than half a century, even as the prices of commodities increased over time.After 16 and 20 years’ service, sepoys would receive an extra bonus of one or two rupees per month, which according to one Indian officer, made a big difference: ‘A prudent sepoy lives upon two, or at utmost three rupees a month in seasons of moderate plenty; and sends all the rest to his family. A great number of the sipahees of our regiment live upon the increase of two rupees, and send all their former seven to their families.’ A substantial part of their salaries were indeed sent back to the sepoys’ villages, as Sleeman explained: ‘They never take their wives or children with them to their regiments, or to the places where their regiments are stationed. They leave them with their fathers or elder brothers, and enjoy their society only when they return on furlough. Three-fourths of their incomes are sent home to provide for their comfort and subsistence, and to embellish that home in which they hope to spend the winter of their days.’

The close link to a particular region and the ties between the sepoys and the villages, was an outcome of the unique recruitment practices of the Bengal Army as they had developed over the past century. As the East India Company became increasingly involved in politics during the second half of the eighteenth century, the nature of British rule in India gradually assumed all the trappings of a sovereign power. The Company was thus transformed from primarily a trading venture to a colonial state in its own right, which by 1818 derived most of its income from land revenue rather than trade. In order to maintain and expand its territorial possessions, the Company depended on local Indian soldiers led and trained by British officers along European military principles. At the time, however, the British were still an emerging power and had to compete with both Indian and European rivals, who were also offering similar service to local soldiers. Before the advent of the ‘civilising’ impulse, much of the Company’s legitimacy as a state power was, in fact, derived through the continuation of pre-colonial practices, which included the establishment of an army of high-caste Hindu sepoys. Out of sheer necessity, the Company in Bengal thus tapped into the military labour market of northern India and relied on existing networks of patronage and caste-ties to recruit peasant regiments directly from the zamindars or landholders of Awadh and Bihar. Accommodating high-caste usages and practices within its regiments was an effective means by which the East India Company could become an attractive and legitimate military employer in India during this period. The Company thus managed to establish a loyal base of recruitment by employing the rhetoric of high-caste status as well as the promise of regular pay and pension. The British recruited directly from the villages of Awadh and Bihar, and when sepoys returned from furlough, they would bring younger family members back to their regiment as prospective recruits. This dynamic reinforced the links between the regiment and the village and meant that parts of the Bengal Army functioned as a sort of extended kinship network. The end-result was a uniquely homogeneous body of sepoys in the Bengal Army, composed mainly of high-caste Brahmins, Bhumihars, and Rajputs.

The religious identity and social status of Alum Bheg and his fellow sepoys, however, did not simply pre-date colonial rule or reflect Indian traditions that were then merely adopted within the Bengal Army—the social status of the sepoy was itself a product of service within that army. A number of the religious and social identities linked to military service, the status of which was taken more or less for granted by 1857, had actually only emerged during the preceding century and were thus ‘invented’ traditions rather than timeless castes. The decline of the Mughal Empire had caused significant political and social turmoil, but it had also enabled groups such as the Rajputs and Bhumihars, or so-called agricultural Brahmins, of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, to establish a high-caste status through military service. This entailed a combination of the warrior ideal with the ritual purity and social privilege of Brahmins, and the observance of strict dietary rules associated with priestly Hinduism. At the same time, the indigenous military labour market was becoming increasingly constricted as the British, with the help of the sepoys expanded their sphere of influence. By 1818, the Company had established an effective monopoly of power on the subcontinent, having defeated or pacified most rival Indian states that would otherwise have provided employment for thousands of Indian troops. The Bengal Army, which constituted the military force throughout the newly ceded and conquered territories in north India, provided the perfect frame within which the reinvented high-caste military traditions of the Bhumihars and Rajputs could be formally institutionalised. It presented the sepoys with the opportunity to improve and secure their new-found status and by endorsing and encouraging the high-caste status of the sepoys, the British were better able to control their troops and ensure continued support from the local landowners in the regions that supplied recruits.

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