This is a slim book, choosing to focus on only one film: Aandhi. Made by Gulzar, it was released in 1975, a momentously significant year for India and for the Hindi film industry which sent to the theatres, one after another, movies such as Deewar, Sholay, Aandhi and Mausam, even as Emergency was declared during the month of June.
An award-winning novel raises multiple expectations, not only on its substance and style but on its linguistic strength in connecting the reader with the imagined world of possible realities. At the end, what count are the lingering thoughts the prose leaves the readers to continue to grapple with in solitude. Celestial Bodies, the first Omani novel to win the coveted Man Booker prize, ticks all the boxes on being imaginative, alluring and irresistible at the same time.
Kavitha Yaga Buggana hears the ‘call of adventure’ and books a trekking trip to Kailash, in Walking In Clouds. There is a journey slumbering in each of us, waiting for the call to come. When it does, there is nothing to do but buckle one’s shoes and go. Life at home is comfortable if a little tame with ‘pink oleander and red hibiscus’ in the garden. Mt. Kailash beckons enticingly, and Kavi and cousin Pallu had dreamed of it since girlhood days. What she does not know yet is that sometimes it is the journey taking the person, not the person the journey.
There couldn’t have been a more appropriate title for Sangeetha Sreenivasan’s tale of lesbian love, and the demons it unleashes—in the mind, and within that tenuous network of bloodlines called family. Acid is the euphoria of lovers in an embrace; it is the psychedelia of fragile relationships; Acid is the agony of separation, and the paradoxical ecstasy of unravelling, of wasting away, of turning into a shadow.
The echoes of the above sentence reverberate throughout the book. For what is chaos? That which resides inside one’s head and reaches the heart slowly but is supposed to remain hidden: not shown or shared. The short stories in this book are not supposed to jolt you out of your quiet existence nor will they attempt to. But by giving a glimpse into lives it sends across a powerful message of the various forms of ‘waiting’ that one has to live with.
The fascination with our Indian inherited legends and myths had led Malashri Lal and Namita Gokhale to edit a book a few years ago called In Search of Sita: Revisiting Mythology wherein they collected different accounts of Sita that coexist in myth, literature and folktale. Sita is one of the defining figures of Indian womanhood, yet there is no single version of her story.