The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf – Mohja Kahf
Syrian immigrant Khadra Shamy is growing up in a devout, tightly knit Muslim family in 1970s Indiana, at the crossroads of bad polyester and Islamic dress codes. Along with her brother Eyad and her African-American friends, Hakim and Hanifa, she bikes the Indianapolis streets exploring the fault-lines between “Muslim” and “American.”
When her picture-perfect marriage goes sour, Khadra flees to Syria and learns how to pray again. On returning to America she works in an eastern state — taking care to stay away from Indiana, where the murder of her friend Tayiba’s sister by Klan violence years before still haunts her. But when her job sends her to cover a national Islamic conference in Indianapolis, she’s back on familiar ground: Attending a concert by her brother’s interfaith band The Clash of Civilizations, dodging questions from the “aunties” and “uncles,” and running into the recently divorced Hakim everywhere.
The year is 340 BC. A hunted, haunted Brahmin youth vows revenge for the gruesome murder of his beloved father. Cold, calculating, cruel and armed with a complete absence of accepted morals, he becomes the most powerful political strategist in Bharat and succeeds in uniting a ragged country against the invasion of the army of that demigod, Alexander the Great. Pitting the weak edges of both forces against each other, he pulls off a wicked and astonishing victory and succeeds in installing Chandragupta on the throne of the mighty Mauryan empire.
A clerk called Coinman can’t stop jingling the coins in his pocket. It’s a simple addiction, but it’s one that comes to rule his life. His wife, Imli, an actress who’s so obsessed with her craft that she becomes her characters at home, bans coins from the house. It goes horribly wrong when his co-workers conspire in their own way, sending a number of them on previously unknown paths.
When his queen Arjumand Banu-Mumtaz-i-Mahal-the Chosen One of the Palace-died, Shah Jahan wanted to build a monument that was the image of his perfect love for her. For twenty-two years, twenty thousand men laboured day and night to fulfill the emperor’s obsession. The result was the Taj Mahal, a marble mausoleum lined with gold, silver and precious jewels.
On the surface, fifteen-year-old Sonil has come to her adored grandmother’s house on a small island off the coast of India to mend her shaky health. Secretly, however, she longs to find out why her mysteriously distant mother agreed to have her sent away as a child.
