The Way Things Were – Aatish Taseer
The Way Things Were opens with the death of Toby, the Maharaja of Kalasuryaketu, a Sanskritist who has not set foot in India for two decades. It falls to his son, Skanda, to return Toby’s body to his birthplace, “a tin-pot kingdom” not worth “one air-gun salute”, fulfilling Toby’s final wish in returning his ashes to his birthplace.
This journey takes him halfway around the world, from Manhattan to Delhi, and returns him to his family, the drawing-room elite of Delhi, whose narcissism and infighting he has worked hard to escape. It also forces him to reckon with his parents’ marriage, a turbulent love affair that began in passion but ended in pain and futility.
Set at flashpoints in 1975, 1984, 1992 and the present day, The Way Things Were shows how our most deeply personal stories are shaped by ancient history and volatile politics; how the life of a country and the life of an individual are irrevocably entwined.
Aatish Taseer’s The Way Things Were takes its title from the Sanskrit word for history, itihasa, whose literal translation is “the way things indeed were.” It is both an intimate portrait of a family and a panoramic vision of the last half century of life in Delhi, with Sanskrit woven in as central metaphor and chorus. Through one man’s struggle with his inheritance, it explores the cultural schizophrenia of modern India and the difficulty of building honestly on the past.
On December 26, 2004, Rob, Paul, Matty, and Rosie Forkan, ages 8-17, lost their parents in the tsunami that devastated Sri Lanka. They faced a 124 mile trek to get home to safety. The ingenuity, and resilience they displayed was the result of their unusual upbringing.
Henna Rub is a precocious teenager whose wheeler-dealer father never misses a business opportunity and whose sumptuous Calcutta marriage to wealthy romantic Ricky-Rashid Karim is achieved by an audacious network of lies. Ricky will learn the truth about his seductive bride, but the way is already paved for a future of double lives and deception–family traits that will filter naturally through the generations, forming an instinctive and unspoken tradition. Even as a child, their daughter Shona, herself conceived on a lie and born in a liar’s house, finds telling fibs as easy as ABC. But years later, living above a sweatshop in South London’s Tooting Bec, it is Shona who is forced to discover unspeakable truths about her loved ones and come to terms with what superficially holds her family together–and also keeps them apart–across geographical, emotional and cultural distance.
Set in India’s Old Delhi, Clear Light of Day is Anita Desai’s tender, warm, and compassionate novel about family scars, the ability to forgive and forget, and the trials and tribulations of familial love.
We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them. Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family s younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longing to find his place amid the ruins of his family s new life.
Memories and Such 