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In My Hands Today…

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The Inscrutable Americans – Anurag Mathur

An engaging look at the clash of Indian culture and an America that is both harsh and exhilarating to a smart but naive foreigner, Gopal arrives in America from a small town in India prepared for study but decidedly unprepared for the cultural differences he encounters. This delightful novel chronicles the religious, vegetarian Gopal’s comic adventures and misadventures in the land of hot dogs, Coca-Cola, neon lights, and explicit advertising.

Gopal’s frequent frustration with the language and his shocked reaction to certain curious American customs are amusing and pertinent. From his first rude encounter with an alarm clock that sends him ducking for cover to his blushing mishap with his appropriately named American friend Randy, Gopal’s experiences prove to be a lesson for all on the often contradictory customs of America and Americans.

Through his battles with sometimes subtle racism, his own insecurity, and his family’s directive that he will be severely judged should he dabble in America’s enticements, Gopal retains a gentle dignity and surprising shrewdness, arousing the affection of friends, colleagues, teachers, and most of all, readers.

In My Hands Today…

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The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie

The ground shifts repeatedly beneath the reader’s feet during the course of Salman Rushdie’s sixth novel, a riff on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set in the high-octane world of rock & roll. Readers get their first clues early on that the universe Rushdie is creating here is not quite the one we know: Jesse Aron Parker, for example, wrote “Heartbreak Hotel”; Carly Simon and Guinevere Garfunkel sang “Bridge over Troubled Water”; and Shirley Jones and Gordon McRae starred in “South Pacific.” And as the novel progresses, Rushdie adds unmistakable elements of science fiction to his already patented magical realism, with occasionally uneven results.

Rushdie’s cunning musician is Ormus Cana, the Bombay-born founder of the most popular group in the world. Ormus’s Eurydice (and lead singer) is Vina Apsara, the daughter of a Greek American woman and an Indian father who abandoned the family. What these two share, besides amazing musical talent, is a decidedly twisted family life: Ormus’s twin brother died at birth and communicates to him from “the other side”; his older brothers, also twins, are, respectively, brain-damaged and a serial killer. Vina, on the other hand, grew up in rural West Virginia where she returned home one day to find her stepfather and sisters shot to death and her mother hanging from a rafter in the barn. No wonder these two believe they were made for each other.

Narrated by Rai Merchant, a childhood friend of both Vina and Ormus, The Ground Beneath Her Feet begins with a terrible earthquake in 1989 that swallows Vina whole, then moves back in time to chronicle the tangled histories of all the main characters and a host of minor ones as well. Rushdie’s canvas is huge, stretching from India to London to New York and beyond–and there’s plenty of room for him to punctuate this epic tale with pointed commentary on his own situation: Muslim-born Rai, for example, remarks that “my parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear…. You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice, but even if so, that’s a cup from which I’d happily drink again.”

In My Hands Today…

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Narcopolis – Jeet Thayil

Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid’s opium room the air is thick and potent. A beautiful young woman leans to hold a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her dark eyes. Around her, men sprawl and mutter in the gloom, each one drifting with his own tide. Here, people say that you introduce only your worst enemy to opium.

Outside, stray dogs lope in packs. Street vendors hustle. Hookers call for custom through the bars of their cages as their pimps slouch in doorways in the half-light. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. There are too many of them to count in this broken city.

Narcopolis is a rich, chaotic, hallucinatory dream of a novel that captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.

In My Hands Today…

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Lajja: Shame – Taslima Nasrin

The Duttas – Sudhamoy, Kironmoyee, and their two children, Suranjan and Maya – have lived in Bangladesh all their lives. Despite being part of the country’s small Hindu community, that is terrorized at every opportunity by Muslim fundamentalists, they refuse to leave their country, as most of their friends and relatives have done. Sudhamoy, an atheist, believes with a naive mix of optimism and idealism that his motherland will not let him down…

And then, on 6 December 1992, the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in India is demolished by a mob of Hindu fundamentalists. The world condemns the incident but its fallout is felt most acutely in Bangladesh, where Muslim mobs begin to seek out and attack the Hindus… The nightmare inevitably arrives at the Duttas’ doorstep – and their world begins to fall apart.

In My Hands Today…

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The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery – Amitav Ghosh

From Victorian lndia to near-future New York, The Calcutta Chromosome takes readers on a wondrous journey through time as a computer programmer trapped in a mind-numbing job hits upon a curious item that will forever change his life. When Antar discovers the battered I.D. card of a long-lost acquaintance, he is suddenly drawn into a spellbinding adventure across centuries and around the globe, into the strange life of L. Murugan, a man obsessed with the medical history of malaria, and into a magnificently complex world where conspiracy hangs in the air like mosquitoes on a summer night.