If Douglas M Knight Jr’s attempt was to make us feel the same fascination that the world felt as it watched Balasaraswati dance, then he’s succeeded to quite an extent. The author, who also happens to be the dancer’s son-in-law, is in a unique position to tell us not only what Balasaraswati had to say about her art, but also what her family, friends and close collaborators had to say. The author states right at the beginning that it isn’t his intention to start a discussion about the social circumstances which formed the background for Bala’s rise. Luckily, he hasn’t completely shied away from presenting relevant facts about the dancer and her family: the Devadasi system that formed the structure for the hereditary artistic families, the matrilineal family system and the methods through which knowledge and learning was transmitted within these families. To many, however, what will be most interesting will be the account of how after many years of prestige in the courts of kings, the traditional dancers were looked at suspiciously and were accused of prostitution; a charge which Balasaraswati, among others, fought hard against. Indeed, it is to this dancer’s credit that through her sheer grace and proficiency, and the great reverence with which she treated music and dance, she managed to convert many opposers of Bharatanatyam into ardent supporters.

Balasaraswati’s remarkable journey began when she was four years old: her family noticed her passion for dance when the young Bala would hop and jump along with a mad mendicant who would show up dancing at the house everyday. The book takes us through her initiation into the art by her teacher Kandappa Pillai, her first public performance and her first performance in North India. She was rapturously received by the audience, and also met the legendary Uday Shankar, who helped pave the way for her international prominence. Balasaraswati went on to be one of India’s most famous dancers and audiences around the world were mesmerized by her performances.

Image via Wikipedia

But this isn’t a book that just charts Balasaraswati’s progress: it also delves deep into the history of Bharatanatyam, a dance form that would have been lost to Victorian morality, if it hadn’t been for a few dancers who held out against the way of antipathy towards them.  Knight’s research is in-depth and makes this an invaluable book for those interested in the dance itself. It is also of great value to people who want to know more about the history of Carnatic classical music, as music and dance were twin strands to Balasarswati, and Knight has made sure that readers know that. Particularly delightful for me, as a reader, was Knight’s pen portrait of Vina Dhanammal, Bala’s grandmother and the Grande Dame of Carnatic Classical music at the turn of the century.

Also commendable is the wealth of images used in this book. I particularly liked two: one which shows the old style of performance, with the musicians standing with the dancer, and moving along with her on a small stage. This was before Kandappa Pillai introduced his new format for Bharatanatyam performances, which included the musicians being seated on one side. Another lovely image was that of a teenaged Bala with her close friend, MS Subbalakshmi. The two girls, in an act of rebellion against the rigidly controlled environments they were brought up in, had arranged to have this picture taken of themselves wearing pajamas and smoking cigarettes.

Image via Wikipedia

Perhaps my only problem with the book was that sometimes it felt like there was too much information. This is not an easy book to read: certainly not something you can hope to read over a weekend. It requires great focus, especially when reading passages such as the one below:

“There is some controversy withing the families closest to Kandappa Pillai about the degree to which his approach to bharata natyam was revolutionary, and whether or not he altered the Tanjavur Nattuvanar family style. Within a hereditary syle, diversity is the result of unity. As example of the difference in perspective this creates is the way Thanjavur K.P. Kittappa Pillai, Kandappa Pillai’s cousin, responded when asked about the differences between the Pandanallur style and the Thanjavur style. Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai, Kitappa Pillai’s grandfather, lived with his family in Pandanallur, and the Thanjavur style is named for the practice in the Thanjavur court codified by Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai’s grandfather and great uncles.”

I had to go over this passage and the ones that follow it a couple of times before I could get it. Perhaps its the result of reading just fiction, but a highly academic, non-fiction book such as this takes a little extra effort. However, its safe to say that this is a book well worth the effort.

*This review is a part of the Book Reviews Program at BlogAdda.com. Participate now to get free books!

**This review does not form part of the Mt. TBR Challenge or the Chunkster Challenge, since the book has only 325 pages and is something that I recently received.

Related articles

• Balasaraswati: Her art and life (thatandthisinmumbai.wordpress.com)

There’s nothing more shocking to a bookworm than the revelation that lots of people get by without reading books. How does that happen, you ask? I have no idea: I’m a bookworm, you see, and people’s ability to not read is something that I simply can’t comprehend. If you know someone like me, I’m sure you’ve been told how indispensable books are to leading a fulfilling life; how they’re the best companions you can have. When its cold outside, you wrap yourself up in blankets, place a thermos full of hot chocolate at your elbow and read. When it’s sunny outside, you sit on your balcony or porch with a cool drink in a glass and read. When you’re alone, you read because it alleviates loneliness. When you’re surrounded by people, you read because it’s one of the few solitary pleasures left in life.  No matter what situation you find yourself in, a good book is an indescribable comfort.

Feeling as I do about books – that they do more than just furnish rooms – when I saw this post by Cassie over at Books and Bowel Movements, I thought it would be fun to answer these questions myself. These are the original questions for a book worm. You might also want to see how other bloggers – bookgrrl and Her Library Adventures - have answered them.

Imagine you sit in front of a fireplace. You read and beside you there is a cup with something hot in it. What would that be in your case: tea, coffee or hot chocolate?

A few years ago,  suppose I might have said ‘hot chocolate’, because that is the drink one associates with a cozy fireplace scenario. However, since I started drinking green tea a few years ago, I’ve discovered how much more refreshing it is. It doesn’t weigh me down and helps me stay alert and I certainly would want to stay alert while I read a book.

If an author gave you the chance to rewrite or to change the fate of a book character, who would you chose?

I think I would give the Little Mermaid her voice, two legs and her prince. I agree that the story will no longer be as romantic or poignantly beautiful as the original, but at least the poor sweet thing will be spared a lot of pain.

Did your parents read stories to you when you were little? if yes, are there any special ones you remember the most?

No, nobody read me stories as a child. However, my maternal grandmother used to tell me stories from Indian mythology.

What do you like more the smell of old antiquarian books or the smell of new fresh ones you just bought?

Old books come with so many stories, not just the ones that are printed on their pages. I love that about them, and I think their unique smells say a lot about who’s touched them and where they’ve been. For me, personally, old books have a lot more appeal because they remind me of the time I discovered my grandfather’s collection of old books. It was one of the best afternoons of my life.

You get the opportunity to chose between two secret talents: either to be able to make things come to life through reading them or the gift to read yourself into a book. Which one would you like to have?

I think I would like to read myself into a book. Then I can always get back to the real world when I want to. I’m not sure it would be easy to get a fictional character back into their world – what if they liked it here too much?

Do you have a favorite children’s book or a favorite fairy tale?

Knock Three Times by Marion St. John Webb. Not a lot of people seem to have heard of this one. It’s one of the most thrilling and chilling books I read as a child, and certainly better than much of the tosh that Enid Blyton churned out.

Someone would talk to your friends and ask them to compare you to a book character. With whom do you think would they compare you?

Probably Arjun (from the Mahabharata). I’m in a permanent state of doubt.

Tell me the name of a writer whom you would like to have as a friend.

Orhan Pamuk – he’s so articulate and knowledgeable about his craft. Just like I could keep reading his books, I think I can keep listening to him talk. I’m sure I could learn a lot from him. Also Stephen King and Margaret Atwood: they seem like the witty, straight-talking type and I love people like that.

You can hide in a written down world for only one night. Into which world do you escape?

I think I would read myself into the world of PG Wodehouse. I would risk meeting aunts as fearsome as dragons and potty old dukes, but then I would also meet delightful idiots like Bertie Wooster and Freddie Widgeon and that irrepressible schemer, Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge.

Something terrible happens: you have to flee to an unknown place and all you can take with you are three books of all the ones you own. Which three ones do you put into your bag?

Weekend Wodehouse, because I know I’ll get depressed and I’ll need cheering up. Other Colours by Orhan Pamuk because that’s the textbook I would follow when I need to understand literature and its many purposes. The Mahabharata, because that’s a thousand stories in one and it never gets old.

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• Exploring the Human Condition with Book #18 Orhan Pamuk’s Other Colours (congenitallydisturbed.wordpress.com)

Image via Wikipedia

In a recent interview he gave to Omnivoracious,  Haruki Murakami says, sitting in the lounge of an airport in Hawaii, “… the airport’s security check is definitely an Orwellian world, an extreme dystopia. If you don’t take off your belt, remove your shoes, put your chewing gum through the scanner, raise both arms and turn around, you can’t board the plane. In response to this, none of the airport personnel give you a word of thanks. And we have to pay such high air fares… When the real world operates this way, why would you have to write a ‘dystopian novel’ that goes even farther?”

The world, it would seem, has got weirder and weirder since we first started suspecting that fact may just be stranger than fiction. This is a world where the poor in one part of the world are dying of obesity because they can’t afford basic nutrition, while in one of the world’s largest democracies, not only are infants starving to death, but tonnes of grain lies rotting in warehouses because the government cannot decide how to distribute it. The Blackberry is used by protestors in one country to topple a tyrannical regime, while the same gadget is used in another country by rioters to plan and co-ordinate looting sprees. In this world only the most absurd forms of protest can express our disgust for the mess we have gotten ourselves into.

One would assume that after years of dealing with the absurd, the illogical and the frankly dangerous, we would all be inured to them. But as each day passes, and a new height of absurdity is breached, we continue to shake our heads in disbelief. The most recent such act of stupidity would be the Madhya Pradesh government’s Govansh Vadh Pratishedh Vidhayak – anti-cow slaughter law – which allows raiding of any premises on the assumption that cow slaughter is likely to take place, or beef is likely to be stored or transported. It doesn’t take an idiot to see how this law could be misused to harass minorities in a state that doesn’t exactly have a great track record in protecting them.  So now anyone who slaughters the cow or its progeny, or transports them to slaughter or stores beef will face seven years in prison. This, when the punishment for defiling a place of worship under the IPC is imprisonment for two years or a fine or both.

What this whole business reminds me of is Syed Muhammad Ashraf’s wonderful novella The Beast. I read a recently translated version (a great job by Musharraf Ali Farooqi) late last year, and as I read reports of MP’s new legislation I was stuck by the similarities between fact and fiction. In The Beast, the powerful Thakur Udal Singh makes a pet of Neela the blue bull so that the fearsome animal can protect him and his ill-gotten wealth. As the bull runs amok through the village, goring whoever and whatever lies in its path, voices rise against him. The blue bull must be destroyed. The Thakur, however, plays a card that can trump the strongest of protests. He plays on people’s religious sentiments and tells people that since the blue bull is a relative of the holy cow, killing him would be tantamount to kill the cow herself. His real motive, of course, is to continue using Neela as an instrument of terror and protect himself and all that is his.

What’s to stop us from believing the same about the government of Madhya Pradesh? As Javed Anand writes in his piece Using the Cow, “Cow protection laws may be justified on religious grounds. But the provision of stringent punishments in BJP-ruled states clearly points to the communal dimension.”  I should go back and correct myself. The MP government’s act isn’t one of stupidity; it seems to be a cunningly calculated move and perhaps that is why, it needs to be watched out for even more.

In Ashraf’s novel, the Thakur’s ploy backfires on him and the finale is a bloody reminder of the fact that instruments of terror have a way of boomeranging on their creators. I hope the result in Madhya Pradesh won’t be quite as gory, but it wouldn’t be so bad if one of the Holy Cows came and bit these Apostles of the Bovine on their backside.

Cover of The Eagle's Throne

I’ve spoken before of my inability to stop buying books. The result: a veritable mountain of Books To Be Read Sometime in the Near or Distant Future. How appropriate then, that there’s something called the Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2012 being hosted by Bev over at My Reader’s Block. I’m signing up to read at least 25 books from the TBR pile, so climbing Mt Vancouver, I will be.

Books from Mount TBR that need to be tackled are:

Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Sea of Poppies/River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

The Scar by China Mieville

A Severed Head/The Black Prince/The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller

The Eagle’s Throne by Carlos Fuentes

2666 by Roberto Bolano

The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffeneggar

The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

The Stranger at the Palazzo by Paul Theroux

The Journals of John Cheever

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Baulsphere by Mimlu Sen

Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron by Jai Arjun Singh

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingslover

The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

The Naive and Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk

The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

Also, since at least six of the books I have listed above qualify as Chunksters (450 pages or more of adult literature), I figured I might as well take on the 2012 Chunkster Challenge being hosted by Wendy and Vasilly at Chunkster Reading Challenge. With this post, I hereby commit to the Plump Primer level of commitment, which means I need to read at least six fat back-breakers. Yes, y’all please feel free to laugh at me when I have managed to finish just one chunkster by the end of the year.

Related articles

• Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2012 (booksandboston.wordpress.com)

Cover of The Museum of Innocence

I’m wondering…is it worth it? Making New Year Resolutions, I mean. I was 10 books short of my 2011 resolution to read 52 books within the year. 42 isn’t really a bad number…some of the books were long and tedious (Such a Long Journey), while others were complex in the extreme (The Museum of Innocence). Mostly though, they were all very rewarding and I certainly don’t feel awful that I couldn’t meet the challenge I had set for myself. Better luck this year, I suppose.

Anyway, in order to bring 2011 – The Year in Reading to a proper conclusion, I provide the list of books which I did complete, but which I didn’t get around to writing about.

1) The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

2) The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

3) Treasure Island by RL Stevenson

4) On Writing by Stephen King

5) The Female of the Species by Joyce Carol Oates

6)Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence

7)The Beast by Syed Muhammad Ashraf

8)Inez by Carlos Fuentes

9)My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead edited by Jeffrey Eugenides

10) Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder

11) Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan

12) A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle

And yes, 52 books is the goal this year too. The book I’m currently reading, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami is a carry-over from December 2011, but I think I’ll count it as the first book of 2012. Is that fair?

The above story is that of Neeta Naik, a Shiv Sena corporator who had encouraged her husband to join the underworld, and who was later killed on his orders. Naik is just one of the many remarkable women portrayed in Mafia Queens of Mumbai – bootleggers, drug baronesses, murderers and police informers – whose stories are little known to the larger public. And yet, many of them such as freedom fighter turned bootlegger Jenabai played a key role in the development of the Mumbai underworld. Stories such as hers are whispered in the bylanes of Dongri, Antop Hill and Kamathipura, and are rarely reported in the mainstream media which has usually focused on the stories of the big male dons like Dawood Ibrahim, Vardharajan Mudaliar, Haji Mastan, Chhota Rajan and Arun Gawli. Neither do they find expression in cinema, which has seen some fine films like Company and Satya being made about the Mumbai mafia.

With this book, veteran crime journalist S. Hussain Zaidi, along with Jane Borges, seeks to examine the psyche of these female criminals. This is not a glorification exercise, the introduction clearly states, but one can’t help feel a sneaking admiration for these women who coolly faced down policemen, ran smuggling empires and gave assassination orders. It can’t have been easy for them, and in some cases, such as those of Sapna Didi and Neeta Naik, the end was grisly. A few of them, such as Gangubai Kathewali of Kamathipura, were victims who eventually became the system’s biggest champions, while others, such as Sujata Nikhalje and Padma Poojary were crafty, ambitious women who sought  power and wealth through illegal means. But none of them, the authors point out, can be considered “blank slates written upon by dangerous male mafia members”.

The stories, many of which seem apocryphal, have been pieced together from police records, interviews with family members, neighbours and journalists and newspaper reports, as well as one-on-one interviews with the subjects themselves, whenever possible.

It’s mostly written in a dry, workmanlike prose which works well with the authors intention of not sensationalizing the content. However, stories like these – thrilling and utterly page-turning, despite the lackluster prose – deserve something more purple. In fact, the authors have intermittently attempted a more ‘thrilling’ style of writing, especially when they hand over the narrative voice to their subjects or their associates and this is when the book really packs a punch. The story of Sapna Didi, narrated by Hussain Ustara, is one such – it has all the drama of a Bollywood masala film, and Ustara the narrator, does it full justice.

I would highly recommend this book for those who want their world-view challenged, as well as to those who’re simply looking for a thrilling read.

This review is a part of the Book Reviews Program at BlogAdda.com. Participate now to get free books!

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• Book Review: Mafia Queens of Mumbai: S. Hussain Zaidi (talkingtails.wordpress.com)
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These aren’t excuses. I know there isn’t one that I can offer. After all, it doesn’t take me very long to write a post, edit it and then publish it. What does take time, however,  is getting started, and often I end up convincing myself that if it isn’t a cracker of a start, it’s better to put it off till later.

Today’s post is about Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I’ve been wanting to write about it for very long, ever since I read it way back sometime in July or August. It’s one of those few books that affect you so deeply that you linger on in their world, long after you’ve turned the final page. Questions nag at you, doubts nibble away at the edge of your consciousness and although unspeakable things have happened over the course of the story, you realise that it’s a world you long to be a part of. There is great beauty in there, terrible and terrifying though it is. You know there’s a price to pay, but you also know that you’re willing to pay that price.

It is with ruminations along similar lines that Richard Papen, the narrator, opens The Secret History. He wonders:

““Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now i think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”

Richard’s big weakness – his willingness to turn a blind eye to the ugly side of otherwise beautiful things – becomes the reader’s biggest weakness as well. Richard is a skilled narrator and through his eyes we view with wide-eyed wonder the Hampden College in New England, and especially, the small intimate community of Classics scholars on campus.

Richard, who is from California, would love to have had a trust fund and ancestors who came over on the Mayflower. Instead, he comes from a solid middle class background. He’s so embarrassed by this that he invents a glamorous LA background and showbiz friends. Not that it helps him get a place in the eccentric Julian Morrow’s exclusive Classics course.  However, Richard manages to ingratiate himself with the students, and eventually Julian himself, and soon finds himself sitting alongside as colourful a cast of characters as he could have hoped for.  There are the twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay, “with epicene faces as clear, as cheerful and grave, as a couple of Flemish angels.” There’s the loud, cheerful, and vaguely vulgar Edmund ‘Bunny’ Corcoran.  The most “exotic” of the lot is Francis Abernathy, with his elegant clothes, while the leader of the group is Henry Winter: built big enough to be an athlete, but a confirmed academic. He is perhaps the sharpest mind in the group and is initially distrustful of Richard. Eventually, he proves to be a firm and loyal friend.

Richard is so much in love with his new friends, that he often blinds himself to their less loveable qualities. We fall in love with this group too and perhaps envy them their lives spent in pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. It’s the ultimate luxury.

But all unpleasant things must come to the surface sooner or later. The catalysing event in The Secret History is a Bacchanal that the students perform, and it  goes horribly wrong. It’s the beginning of a slippery slope, as secrets and betrayals pile up, and we come to the awful death that is mentioned in the story’s Prologue. Richard watches helplessly as the people he worshipped simply go to pieces and by the end, yet another tragedy delivers the fatal blow to friendships that once seemed unshakeable.

Image via Wikipedia

This is one of those books that will keep you awake way past your bedtime. It isn’t merely the suspense. This is a ruminative, meditative sort of book and one of the main ideas that it broods over is the idea of youth infatuated with its own possibilities. The students are young, intelligent and beautiful; they’re also the archetypal intellectuals. Hubris mixes with curiosity to disastrous results, as the group falls in love with an idea and tries it out in real life as some sort of ‘intellectual experiment’. (In some ways, they reminded me of Brandon Shaw and Philip Morgan, the brilliant but seriously flawed antagonists of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. They decide to prove their superiority by committing the “perfect crime” and one of the concepts that guides their actions is Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman.)

And yet, despite the awful things that the six friends in The Secret History end up doing to each other, the overall tone is one of regret, not horror. You, the reader, are already emotionally invested in the characters, so lovingly have they been created, and you’re in love with their world of academia and ideas. When they all drift apart in the end, all you want is for them to forgive, forget and get back together again.

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• Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt (theeclecticreader.wordpress.com)

However, the setting is the only thing remotely mundane in Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X. The plot is perhaps one of the most devious that I have ever read and the twist at the end (you know there is one), whops you on the skull with its simplicity and brilliance.  It is a massive bestseller in Japan where it sold over 2 million copies since it was published in 2005, and has even been made into a cult film. The English translation which released early this year, then arrived to many elevated expectations, and I can safely say that they have all been met.

This is the story of a single mother Yasuko and her daughter Misato, living next door to a high school mathematics teacher, Ishigami. Their tranquil existence is turned upside down when Yasuko’s ex-husband Togashi turns up at her workplace and follows her home. She tells him to go away, he refuses and matters quickly escalate to the point where mother and daughter find that they have a dead man in their living room. It’s not a situation they feel equipped to deal with, but fortunately their neighbour Ishigami knows what to do. Until now, they have barely exchanged any words with each other, but the quiet, reclusive math teacher seems to have a crush on Yasuko and that makes him help her, rather than turn her in to the police. He has what seems like a foolproof plan, one that is designed to hold up against relentless police interrogation, should Togashi’s body be discovered and identified.

But of course, Ishigami’s genius comes up against the vast intellect that is Manabu Yukawa, a physics professor and friend and ‘consultant’ to Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police. Kusanagi himself is no bungling Scotland Yard-type cliché – he’s smart and intuitive. How well does Ishigami’s story hold up against the combined power of the Yukawa and Kusanagi? It is this question that makes this novel such a compulsive page-turner.

This novel, apart from the stunning denouement, is remarkable for two other things. One is the fantastic Ishigami – a man who has clearly done something criminal, and yet you find yourself rooting for him. You wonder why you’re rooting for this man, because apart from the unconditional help he seems to be offering his neighbours, he’s not a traditionally appealing character. He’s middle-aged, alone, ugly and lacking in social skills. He’s a classic loner, and sometimes his attraction to Yasuko borders on the obsessive and then you begin to wonder: is he the protagonist or the antagonist? This delicious ambiguity about Ishigami and his motives keep you powering through the novel.

In fact, nobody’s motives are ever really clever in this novel, and that is the other remarkable thing here. The Devotion of Suspect X is a wonderful example of how a writer can make human behaviour, and not the crime itself, the crux of the mystery. There’s no percentage in focusing on the crime in a whydunit of this type: we already know who did the crime. That is why it becomes important to focus on how people involved with the crime behave and why. So here, we wonder – are Ishigami’s reasons for helping Yasuko truly selfish or does he expect a quid pro quo? Why does Yasuko let a relative stranger take control of her crime and in effect, allow for the possibility of blackmail in the future? Why does Yukawa refuse to help the police even though it’s clear he knows exactly what happened? The murder itself is merely an excuse to understand human behaviour.

This is a really fast read – if you’re anything like me, you’ll stay up late and finish it in one sitting. Even if you aren’t usually the type to read thrillers or mysteries, I would recommend this book to you. See if it doesn’t keep you awake past bedtime!

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• The Devotion of Suspect X, By Keigo Higashino (independent.co.uk)

Gerald Candless wasn’t all that he claimed to be. He was a Booker Prize-winning, best-selling author, but he certainly wasn’t the man everyone thought he was. This shocking fact is unearthed when his daughter Sarah starts working on a memoir after his death, in Barbara Vine’s The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy. She isn’t the only person making discoveries about Gerald, though. His widow, Ursula, too is beginning to get some insight into why her marriage to him was, in private, such a colossal failure.

A mysterious past is a great hook for a suspense novel, and Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell, in fact) is very clever at unspooling the story at a deliberate but compelling pace. There are many things about Gerald that strike the reader as odd; for instance, his obsession with having a large family and his unhealthy devotion to his two daughters. Also mystifying is his total disregard for his wife. He doesn’t physically or verbally abuse her, but he emotionally cripples her. After the birth of their second daughter Hope, he completely stops having any intimate relations with her. He makes it obvious that he looks on Ursula as an inferior. It’s strange, because the reader might find Ursula to be on the passive side, but she’s never bad or undeserving of love. Perhaps, if her husband had shown her some support and love, she would have blossomed into a more vibrant personality.

But the worst thing that he does is turn her daughtesr against her. Not by telling them things about her, no – that’s not his way. Children are sensitive and they pick up behavioural signals so easily. Sarah and Hope see their beloved, indulgent, story-telling daddy treat their mother like she doesn’t matter and they do exactly that. Ursula feels hurt at first, but eventually she achieves some emotional distance. By the end of the book, Hope is no longer on speaking terms with her mother, but it’s not like Ursula cares. She has moved on.

Sarah, meanwhile, is working hard to uncover information about her father’s early life, a period she knows shockingly little about. Her initial sleuthing brings a startling fact to light: her father wasn’t always Gerald Candless. He adopted the name sometime just before he published his first book. What his original name was, who is family were and where they come from, and why he completely abandoned his former life – these are the questions that Sarah must find answers to.

Ruth Rendell (Image via Wikipedia)

I must confess that when I picked up The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy, I had no idea who Barbara Vine is. I am a whodunit fan, but I have so far limited myself to Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and a few random authors. It was only later that I found out that Barbara Vine is Ruth Rendell. I had read a Rendell mystery back when I was 14 or 15, but it had disturbed me so deeply that I quickly blanked out even its name. And of course, I never picked up another Rendell, which is sad, because I believe I’m made of sterner stuff now and should be able to deal with the level of psychological perversion and brutality that exist in her novels. (I’m also the same person who was so devastated by the first season of Dexter that I refused to watch the next few seasons for a good long time. Yes, I’m that sensitive, but that’s a story for another day.)

Anyway, the blurb on the back intrigued me. The book kept me up way past my bedtime on more than two nights in a row, and it had been a long time since that had happened to me. I found that although Rendell likes to dwell on details, she does so in an unobtrusive manner. She’s a master of atmosphere and mood. I found myself raging against Gerald, and even after I had guessed his secret and felt some sympathy for his situation, I found it hard to forgive him for ruining another’s life. In fact, the characters are all pretty compelling – and unsavoury in different ways — and I found myself reacting strongly to all of them. I wanted to shake Ursula out of her stupor, I wanted to yell at Gerald and I really, really wanted to give Hope a good slap across her pretty face. Sarah, I found, is the most bearable of the lot, as she’s the only one who shows some willingness to adapt her long-held notions. She realizes that her idolized Daddy was a person beyond the man who had always been there for her. She even manages to feel sympathy for her mother and discovers that she herself is quite the intellectual phony. These are all massive changes, but Sarah holds together well and comes across as the most mature character in the book. She’s easily my favourite thing about the book.

I also liked how sensitively Rendell has dealt with homosexuality in this book. It’s a big subject here – the key to the whole plot, in fact – and much is written about how homosexuals were vilified or put in prison for trying to pursue a lifestyle of their choice. You’ll guess by the end in what way it affects Gerald, but what will keep you going is the need to find out why.

Now the things that I didn’t like: I found it hard to believe that Gerald was such a good writer that he impressed both critics and the public. Excerpts from his books open each chapter and they’re insipid, to say the least. One example is this:

“It is an error to say the eyes have expression. Eyebrows and eyelids, lips, the planes of the face, all these are indicators of emotion. The eyes are merely coloured liquid in a glass”

Or read this:

“A man believes everything he reads in the newspapers until he finds an item about himself which is a web of lies. This makes him doubt, but not for long, and he soon reverts to his old faith in the printed word.”

The tone in these is stiff and rather ponderous. It’s a tone one expects to find in a novel of Victorian vintage, not in one that was published, and found great success, in the 60s and the 70s. It’s clear that while Rendell has found her own authorial voice, she finds it difficult to imitate or imagine another author’s voice.

Another thing which didn’t sit well with me was the bizarre subplot with Sarah and Adam Foley, who have brutal, degrading sexual encounters in parking lots and anonymous hotels. Sarah seems to enjoy wearing all the black leather and velvet and dark make-up, but what is the point of it all? Is it to show us how shattered and rudder-less Sarah is after her father’s death that she enjoys being abused and insulted by a man and then having sex with him? Perhaps, but I believe that not everyone who enjoys S&M is seeking to subconsciously punish themselves. In that sense, the use of S&M becomes a cliché, and a bad one at that.

I also disliked the end, when editor Robert Postle reads Romney’s manuscript and figures out that it is written by Gerald about himself.  Would it be that easy for an editor – no matter how close he was to one of his star writers – to know that? I’m not sure and that is why I think it would have made more sense for him to have rubbished the manuscript as a poor imitation of Gerald Candless’ work.

So would I recommend this book? Certainly, since it contains some riveting psychological explorations and is quite brutal in how it exposes human behaviour. It’s a nice, fat book with plenty of meandering explanations and ruminations, but don’t be put off by them. It’s a very, very fast read and perfect for a weekend at home.

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• Ruth Rendell: Interview (telegraph.co.uk)

Once they arrive, though, the new immigrants find that there might be more to the Meluhans’ generous invitation.  When Shiva’s throat suddenly turns blue after he drinks a medicinal concoction, the reaction of the Meluhans is baffling, to say the least. He is immediately venerated as a Saviour, the ‘Neelkanth’ of legend who has arrived to save the Meluhans from disaster. Because, as it turns out, Meluha is not as perfect as it seems: the neighbouring kingdom of the Chandravanshis has evil designs on it and has teamed up with the evil, deformed Nagas to carry out terrorist attacks within the country. Shiva is initially reluctant to believe that he could be the Neelkanth and tries to convince his hosts of this. By the end of the book, however, he has fallen in love with the beautiful Sati and has come to have great faith in the ways of Meluha. He is convinced of his duties towards his adoptive country and even though he’s still squeamish about the heroic status bestowed on him, Shiva acquits himself well when hostilities break out between the Suryavanshis and Chandravanshis.

However, the situation is more complicated than Shiva, or we the readers anticipate, and it is when he’s revealing the complex relationship between the two kingdoms that Amish really shines. I had started reading this book believing that I knew how it would all proceed, and it was a pleasant surprise to find that Amish had worked hard to ensure that the story would go along unexpected lines.  In fact, the greatest compliment that I can pay this book is by saying that I am very eager to start reading the second book in the trilogy, The Secret of the Nagas.

The Pashupati Seal (Image via Wikipedia)

There are two things really that work in Amish’s favour. One is the complete mystery surrounding what we call the Indus Valley Civilization, which flourished between 3300 BC and 1900 BC, and our fascination with it. Excavations have revealed the striking uniformities through the length and breadth of the geographical area covered by it, and massive public structures as well as grid planning of the cities and a comprehensive drainage system. There’s also evidence that inhabitants traded with the Mesopotamian civilization and that they had developed a sophisticated system for weights and measures. But we have no idea who these people really were and where they came from and how they achieved such marvellous heights of civilization. We know they had developed their own script, but we have no way of deciphering those weird symbols. They must have had some sort of religion and culture, but again, we’re at a loss to know what these were. And the biggest mystery of all is – what happened to this once-great civilization? All evidence suggests that it came to an abrupt end, but we don’t know what that is. Amish has cleverly used this blind spot in Indian history to speculate and has created the fictitious kingdom of Meluha. He’s done a splendid job of it too, using our existing knowledge about the period, such as the almost obsessive-compulsive attention to uniformity – down to the bricks used across the geographical area –  and the platforms on which many of the cities seem to have been built. He’s embellished history with myth, taking chunks out of Vedic narratives and transposing them into a much earlier period. His contention is that it’s quite possible that the Vedic gods worshipped by ‘Aryan’ immigrants from Central Asia and Europe were actually historical figures from the Indus Valley Civilization. In fact, some historians have speculated that the mysterious figure, seated cross-legged, found on a seal from the era, is the prototype for Shiva. This ‘Pashupati’ seal, as it is called, is often furnished as prime evidence by those who believe that the Indus Valley Civilization didn’t die; it just transformed in nature.

The other thing that has worked well for Amish is our love for the pot-smoking, tandav-dancing, dreadlocked Lord Shiva. He’s often described as the ‘Rockstar’ of the Gods, for his unapologetic disdain for civilized conduct. His hair is a matted pile through which even the river Ganga wandered for seven years before she could find a way down to earth, and his body is smeared with ash. He is the leader of ghosts, demons, witches and other outcasts and his only garment is a tiger skin draped around his waist. But he can also be benevolent, should his disciples pray long and hard enough. He’s a powerful deity and is considered by many to be the Supreme God, or Mahadev.

Amish has taken this fearsome personality and turned him into a human being who is a little impulsive and not quite soignée, but who is approachable and has his heart in the right place. And there starts the trouble. The heroic, brave, intelligent, handsome and lovelorn protagonist of The Immortals of Meluha is a pale shadow of the Shiva we worship. For Lord Shiva, heroism means casually drinking a poison that threatens to destroy the world and not worry much when his throat turns blue. He’s also the same God who beheaded his father in a fit of rage and then wandered the earth as a beggar, driven insane with guilt, until he found salvation in Varanasi. For Meluha’s Shiva, guilt comes from not helping a woman in trouble.  The latter is not any less heinous, but you can see which would be the sin that animates legend.

Shiva and Parvai (Image via Wikipedia)

And then we come to the topic of love, of course. While Meluha’s Shiva is a lovelorn Romeo, Lord Shiva of myth and legend is the Heathcliff who lets nothing get between him and his woman. His volcanic passion and consuming love for his consort Parvati is scary, to say the least, but it’s equally fascinating. In fact, one of my favourite Shiva stories goes that the Gods are worried that Shiva’s honeymoon with Parvati is going on for too long – many months, in fact. It is this passionate, eccentric Shiva who has been turned into a ‘normal’ human being for the Shiva Trilogyand I’m not entirely happy about it. Do we really need to ‘normalize’ a personality whose very appeal lies in his eccentricities of mythic proportions and wildly swinging moods?Ultimately, Meluha’s Shiva is little more than an assembly-line hero and his coming of age is not particularly convincing. We never really see this Shiva struggle. Right at the start of the book, we’re told that he’s fighting the Pakritis, but after one brief battle, this part of his life is closed for good. Thereafter, his growth as a person is limited to accepting the fact that he could, after all, be the Neelkanth. Does he learn anything new about his strengths and more importantly, his weaknesses? Not really. Even his love story is a poor imitation of the epic love that Lord Shiva had for Parvati. Riddled with clichés about how his life would be empty without her, Shiva comes across more like a schoolboy with a massive crush, than as a grown man who feels an overwhelming passion for a grown woman. Frankly, I have seen better romance in Yash Raj Films.

Of course, like I said before, Amish is capable of throwing the occasional curve ball, and I’m hoping that in the Secret of the Nagas, he has fine-tuned his interpretation of Shiva, and brought in an unexpected touch. I would hate is if someone as gloriously mad as Lord Shiva were to be translated into a less convincing fantasy fiction hero than Bilbo Baggins.

Related articles

• Immortals of Meluha (Shiva Trilogy #1) (mightypens.wordpress.com)
• The immortals of Meluha: A review (thatandthisinmumbai.wordpress.com)
• Book Review : Immortals of Meluha (merrymusing.wordpress.com)
• The Immortals of Meluha (mychocolethandbag.wordpress.com)