Tag Archives: Literature-Fiction

The interplay between Anuradha, Vardhman and Nandini is central to this lyrical, melancholic novel and its complex exploration of love and life. Shanghvi’s prose is lush, poetic and enchanting in its use of imagery, painting vivid pictures in a story that resonates with the bittersweet music of life’s most enduring truths. The Last Song of Dusk does not offer any easy resolutions as it meditates on the fleeting nature of beauty and the inevitability of loss, told through the lives of characters who are as flawed as they are compelling.

Within this circularity are trapped endless stories of the people Chandrakant comes into contact with, who teach him lessons in both life and music, and also of people he never meets, only hears about. The story moves back and forth in time, from Chote Ustad to Bade Ustad, Jaffar Ali Khan, and from there to his Ustad, Sajjad Hussain, who, in turn, had been a disciple of Ustad Muhammad Jafri, the originator of the Karachi Gharana.

To most Indians the grisly murder and its aftermath story may appear, given the preponderance of similar stories in contemporary times, as another run of the mill. But this is where Chakravarti intervenes to read an otherwise ‘routine’ crime in a most intellectually insightful and sensitive way. His novel analysis, most importantly, brings in the volatile urban political and spatial-temporal context of 1970s-80s Delhi to understand not only the specific crime committed against the Chopra teenagers but also reflects on, among others,

The title story captures a tableaux moment when Bhagyalakshmi emerges. The baby elephant not only leaves its mahout out of breath but also splashes water on Pratibha, Sashi and Indira, who are on a trip without informing their families. The exuberance of the baby elephant matches the first taste of freedom by the young women. The story, ‘A for Apple’ highlights the longing of a young boy to taste the luscious apple that is printed in his textbook. When he does manage to steal some money, buys an apple and eats, it becomes a moment of disappointment. In an act of repentance, he buys flavour-rich guavas to share with his family.

The richly textured sections on semi-urban and rural Bangladesh are remarkable for visual details. Imagine this: A ‘gora’ missionary holding a bundle of dirty clothes is lowering himself gingerly into a scum-covered pukur to wash himself and his garments. The steps are broken and slippery and a large, cheering audience of locals is shouting instructions! Here is another

In between the tidy frame is a story well worth telling—of the unique socio-political situation of Goa that made possible a wide variety of relationships between people of different communities—Hindu Indians, Catholic Indians, Portuguese whose ties were with Europe, and descendants of Portuguese extraction who were as much sons and daughters of Goan soil as the Indians.

Among the protagonists of the novel are dwellers of Zamin Par, occupants of Zamin Andar and spirits of Zamin Upar, all of whose comings and goings have been inextricably woven together into the narrative. Intertwining the humdrum of daily human existence are stories of the superior knowledge or comprehension of prophesies, extrapolations, curses, and spells cast by supra-terrestrial peris

It is in these moments in the book that Dhingra’s extraordinary writing skills manage to transfer the olfactory effects experienced by her, for the readers to vicariously savour through her descriptive details about the fragrances.

Set in Nepal and its borderlands before the arrival of the internet, the novel begins by describing the marriage of a fourteen-year-old Meena with Manmohan, a twenty-one-year-old Nepali boy she has never met. The narrative documents Meena’s problematic marital journey and her diasporic life.

Death, the time and manner of its arrival, how it transforms people and their lives, and the ways in which each person deals with his/her loss, grappling with guilt, regret, questioning—is almost a character as it moves through the pages, forcing the reader to confront those very feelings of loss

The book also gives hindsight into the shrinking spaces in academic institutions and the rise of Right-Wing politics in India. This is demonstrated when the narrator’s student Salman is killed for his love affair with a Hindu woman. Pat, who runs a signature campaign for his justice, has been charged by the police for doing so.

Incidentally, the novel is one long narration, with no chapter divisions. It is also significant that there are very few dialogues. We see and hear everything through the stream of the narrator’s own consciousness, though he repeatedly complains that his story is controlled by others.

Well one may ask, what is this naïve eulogy on spiritual journeys? Is this reviewer not aware of the corrupt practices of big and small ‘spiritual’ establishments of this land? She is. As she is aware of the universal need for compassion and goodness.

The novel is premised on the inner lives of three eponymous and devoted women on the Coromandel Coast during British imperialism. Their intertwined lives along the Coromandel coast aim to recover and reframe the personal and public lives of women in the subcontinent, especially during the British colonial period.

Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much. To stop writing would kill me. I’d never be able to walk through a bookstore without fingering the spines with longing, wondering at the lengthy editorial process that got these titles here and reminiscing about my own.

At one point in Rimli Sengupta’s debut novel A Lost People’s Archive (2023) the ghost of the novel’s protagonist Shishu laments that Indians never kept archives unlike Romans and Chinese

Mallika’s memory loss of three days. From there on we are led on a voyage of perspectives, and each of them showcases the richness of the inner lives of these characters.