The year 2011 wasn’t as good as 2010 for originality of subject and style in storytelling. There was a hand-me-down feeling when compared to the year before, which saw remarkable debuts by new Indian voices: Sonia Faleiro’s zealously pursued, carefully crafted investigation in Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars; the brevity and wit of Samanth Subramanian’s fishy tales in Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast; and, in fiction, Rahul Bhattacharya’s The Sly Company of People Who Care, a love story set in Guyana, written in prose of controlled, mesmeric melody. All three went on to win critical applause or prizes.
This year it will be interesting to see the results for two first books that also stretch the limits of long-format reporting narratives. A Free Man by Aman Sethi (Random House, Rs 399) follows Ashraf, a daily-wage labourer and his drug and alcohol-fuelled cohorts in a decrepit part of Old Delhi. The account of faceless members of the vast migrant workforce labelled “unorganised labour” – the masons and housepainters we deal with every day but don’t know – unfolds with gripping, unsentimental clarity.
British-Indian science reporter Angela Saini’s Geek Nation (Hachette, Rs 499) casts a net wider than Sethi’s micro-world; her nine journeys, a combination of sharp personal observation and an uncluttered style, examine why advances in Indian science and technology have failed to help the indigent majority (even though the book is optimistically subtitled “How Indian Science is Taking Over the World”). Why do two Indians still die of TB every three minutes? Are IITs and BPOs dominated by nerdy clones? Is a venture like Lavasa an unworkable Utopian model?
Journalists were the undisputed darlings of the publishing world in 2011. Two brisk-selling memoirs of life on Grub Street, Lucknow Boy by Vinod Mehta (Penguin, Rs 499) and JS and the Times of My Life by Jug Suraiya (Westland, Rs 495) can be swallowed, gulped or choked over, almost as companion volumes, on a dull weekend. They cover the same decades, talk about some of the same people and contain paeans to pet pooches, though the political skulduggery of one is counterpointed by the subversive tone of the other.
Discounting the jaded plotlines and formulaic writing of new cult fiction such as Chetan Bhagat’s Revolution 2020 (Rupa, Rs 140) and Sidin Vadukut’s God Save the Dork (Penguin, Rs 199), the best novels came from elsewhere in the subcontinent. The eponymous heroine of Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (Random House, Rs 499) is a feisty, darkly comic “low-caste” Christian nurse in a Karachi hospital, wooed by a muscular, gun-toting operative who provides “valet parking for the angels of death”. Their chaotic union reflects a metropolis scarred by political violence, gangsters and ethnic persecution, and the disturbed mental illness ward of the hospital. In his signature satiric vein Hanif conjures a world teetering on the edge of madness.
The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam (Penguin, Rs 499), a coming-home novel set in mid-1980s Bangladesh, is a portrait in miniature of the decay and drift engulfing an educated middle-class family. Maya, a doctor working in the villages, returns to Dhaka, to find a mother dying of cancer, a brother consumed by the bigotry of faith, and friends’ lives shadowed by corruption, political instability and the war of liberation. The second in a trilogy, Anam’s characters are deftly drawn, her writing nuanced. Like the nation itself, will Maya find balance and redemption from squandered hope?
But if the best books are those that friends continually demand to borrow, or the family wants to read first, then the three enduring titles of the year – each difficult to better as biography, illustrated history and cookbook – would be Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer prize-winning The Emperor of Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (HarperCollins, Rs 499), Neil MacGregor’s The History of the World in 100 Objects (Penguin, Rs 799) and Travelling Diva by Ritu Dalmia (Hachette, Rs 499).
Happy holiday reading!
