Rain Must Fall by Nandita Basu is such a beautiful read! I devoured it in one sitting, and I loved it.Anya, Rumi's best friend, asks whom Rumi would like to go on a date with. Rumi makes the mistake of being honest and saying 'you'. After all, you can be truthful with your best friend, can't you? And it isn't really as if Rumi has a romantic interest in Anya; it was just a game. Wasn't it? Maybe not. Because gossip and cruel jokes begin on the school group. Soon, Rumi discovers that neither parents nor schoolmates can accept the idea of a non-binary individual. Schoolmates think it's a joke, and Rumi's parents think therapy is the "solution".Away from it all, in a small town, Rumi discovers and befriends a ghost, Rain. Both Rain and Rumi are trapped, alone and misunderstood. As human and ghost get to know each other better, Rain begins to remember snippets of his life, and … [Read more...]
Postbox Kashmir
From the moment I came across Postbox Kashmir by Divya Arya, I knew I wanted to read it. The title, the cover and the subtitle - 'Two Lives in Letters' - everything appealed to me. I knew little about the book, and the little I did know was gleaned from random social media posts. Soon after I started reading it, I knew that it was a book for keeps.We're inundated with information. Sometimes, with a mild sense of panic, I realise that details of events I've quickly researched have become hazy again. For instance, I knew about the exodus of Kashmiri pundits, but vaguely. When I read Paro Anand's Nomad's Land, I read up about the history of Kashmir once more, but my research was cursory at best. Dates and details slip by, especially when we don't contextualise facts. What was happening in Kashmir when the Babri Masjid was demolished? Did the protests at Shaheen Bagh have any effect on … [Read more...]
My Year in Writing – 2020
I'm beginning to write this post on a day when I received a miserable royalty report for one of my books for the year 2019-20. Yet, the year 2020 has been all kinds of wonderful in terms of publishing for me. So many of my projects have seen light of day, though they have suffered for it too, thanks to the pandemic. With ecommerce, distribution and retail taking a blow, perhaps it was not a great year to have books release. But how can I not be happy to see my work out there? Poetry Creatures of the Dark Published by Oxford University Press Buy Roots 5 January 2020 brought me my first publication of the year, and it was a first in many ways. It was the first time I had something published in a textbook, the first time I could download an app and watch an animated video of my poem, and the first time … [Read more...]
Daddy Come Lately
Priya knows that her father is dead. She is a 'post-humorous' child, as she calls herself until her mother gently corrects her, saying that it is 'posthumous', not post-humorous - and that she isn't posthumous anyway. Her father is alive, and has just found out that he has a daughter. Worse, he wants not only to meet her, but also to get to know her. And Priya, man-hating as she is convinced she is, knows that this spells bad news.Characters leap out of the pages of Daddy Come Lately, and so many of them are wonderful! Priya is (mostly) a fun character. There is one bit towards the end of the book where she behaves a little more melodramatically than I would like, but that takes little away from how real she is. Mr Sarkar, aka Dad the Bad, is a wonderful character, and that makes me wish I had written this post in time for Father's Day. An independent, no-nonsense dad, he … [Read more...]