By Imayam

For the teacher is one of those whose education and exposure to the wider world have kept his caste consciousness from diminishing his self-confidence. A place name for him is just an address. Not so for the girl, who is one of the few in her community to have made it to that middle school full of ‘other’ children from ‘other’ villages. Ironically, her name turns out to be Arivoli—the Light of Wisdom. Her parents have given her the name of the literacy movement—Arivoli Iyakkam—of the 90s, which drew people from every nook and corner of Tamil Nadu to raise the literacy level to 85.5 per cent. But Arivoli did not do away with the caste system. On the contrary,


Reviewed by: Vasantha Surya
By Gauri Shankar Raina. Translated from the original Kashmiri by Pankaj Bhan

We are introduced to many of the travellers on the journey from Jammu to Srinagar, initially bickering but later on settling into a familiar rhythm of many an Indian trip. We witness some charming encounters in the wistfulness of Swaroop Nath, a recently retired government employee, who eavesdrops on a burgeoning romance between a young footballer Ashfaq Dar and a girl visiting her maternal uncle and his wife on her own for the first time. Swaroop Nath, clearly a romantic, moves to a seat behind his allocated one to allow both to talk freely.


Reviewed by: Maithreyi Nandakumar
By Nanjil Nadan. Translated from the original Tamil by S. Thillainayagam

Tormented by his failure to get a job and left with no option but to pursue the hereditary occupation of farming, he mocks at the incongruity of his own situation in a series of questions such as ‘Did I learn Kepler’s laws, Sangam poetry, Shelley, Byron, Pilgrim’s Progress, Manonmaniam, King Lear and Macbeth…only to weed our field?’ This is followed by another series of questions, queries, commands and comments that he would hear all the while from fellow farmers. (Nanjil Nadan is well-known for the way he piles on details to achieve an incremental effect.)


Reviewed by: T Sriraman
By Jeyamohan. Translated from the original Tamil by V. Iswarya

The former has a story line that will sound familiar to readers of Malayalam fiction revolving round ancient joint families (tharavad) with rivalries, vengeance, curses and mental illness running in the family for generations. It is a dark world of collective guilt which has its roots in the feudal past of rampant criminality and treachery which refuses to be exorcised, despite retellings in every medium from folk-ballads to celluloid dramas.


Reviewed by: EV Ramakrishnan
By Ravi Shankar Etteth

An interesting one titled ‘Shhh’ is about his grandmother who handed him a spiky shell before she died. She, the wife of one of the native officers in the Malabar Special Police, along with her small daughter, had gone out of curiosity to see Gandhiji. There were milling crowds but all he did was to raise his finger to his lips, and everyone went silent. The soldier who was on guard came and stood in front of the lady at which the crowd felt disturbed. She bent down and picked up something. Gandhiji caught her eye and signalled that she should leave. The crowd parted and she went home.


Reviewed by: Ahana Lakshmi
By Sakyajit Bhattacharya. Translated from the original Bengali by Arunava Sinha

She is an investigative journalist who writes a column on closed cases. The case she has picked up this time is of the murder of Amitava Mitra, a popular poet of his times. The prime accused was the dead man’s friend Arun Chowdhury, but he was released for lack of evidence. The case has remained unsolved and lies buried in police archives for the last four decades.


Reviewed by: Aruna Chakravarti