Principles of Prediction by Anushka Jasraj

Title: Principles of Prediction
Author: Anushka Jasraj
Publisher: Context Books
ISBN: 978-9389648713
Genre: Literary Fiction, Short Stories
Pages: 192
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

If you have to read one short-story collection this year (of whatever is left of the year), make it this one. Jasraj’s prose sets you free. Her characters expose their wounds and are proud of them. Her characters love and hate in equal measure. They read Tolstoy and kidnap elephants. They mourn. They celebrate the mundane. Some run away from their husbands, with lion tamers in search of a better life. A storm is coming and there’s inner turmoil, and then the question of sadness.

Anushka Jasraj’s collection of short stories are bewildering, fantastical, ordinary, and always connect with the reader in strange ways. Her writing is as though a hand is reaching out to you and taking you places you’ve only dreamed of. You give in and you’re in for a ride. Her characters tip-toe around life – some waiting for a dead mother’s list to be read, while others are caught between politics and love, with violence always in the distance.

Principles of Prediction is to be savoured at various points of time in the day, with copious amount of cups of tea. There is melancholy tinged with wit. There is the observation of day-to-day coupled living with technicolor dreams. There are men, women, and children caught in relationships that don’t make any sense and here they are, merely living. Read this collection for all of this and more. You won’t regret it.

February 2020 Reading Wrap-Up

 

Wanted to read more than I read in January 2020. Ended up reading one book less. So, February ended with 12 books read. 10 seen here as two are lent to other people.
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Here’s hoping March 2020 will be kinder and more will be read, thanks to the International Booker 2020 shadow panel and the Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist 2020. February was great with a book about love, of Delhi and its poems, of Allende and the Spanish Civil War, of a graphic novel about the Khmer Rouge, of Offill’s take on climate change with a story seeped in domesticity of life, of love and loss in Dear Edward and more. .
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Here is the list read with my ratings:

1. Amour by Stefania Rousselle (5)
2. A long petal of the sea by Isabel Allende. Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson (5)
3. Year of the Rabbit by Tian Veasna. Translated from the French by Helge Dascher (5)
4. Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue by Akhil Katyal. Illustrations by Vishwajyoti Ghosh.
5. Chhotu by Varud Gupta and Ayushi Rastogi. (3)
6. The book of Indian kings (4)
7. Weather by Jenny Offill (5)
8. How we fight for our lives by Saeed Jones (5)
9. Snow, Dog, Foot by Claudio Morandini. Translated from the Italian by J. Ockenden (4)
10. Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano (5)
11. Letters of Note: Love. Compiled by Shaun Usher (4)
12. Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (5) .
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So, this is my list of February 2020 reads. What about yours?

Like Blood On The Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems by Akhil Katyal. Art by Vishwajyoti Ghosh

Title: Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems
Author: Akhil Katyal
Art by Vishwajyoti Ghosh
Publisher: Context
ISBN: 978-9389152258
Genre: Poetry
Pages: 164
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

It isn’t easy for people to read poems. There is something about this genre that either works for some and doesn’t at all for others. What works for me is the brutality of a poem – the sweet sharp pain, and the after effects of reading a poem. A poem that etches itself on to your heart, is something I look for. Constantly. Unknowingly even. The one that arrives silently and works its way to my heart.

Like Blood on The Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems is a collection of old and new poems by Akhil Katyal. I read this collection in one day – in a gulp. I hurried through it, without letting go. I rushed through it and yet knew words, sentences, and emotions that spoke to me. I recognised them because we all go through the same – yet we feel we are different and so different from each other. Poetry makes you see the similarities, and smile or weep or both in good measure.

Katyal’s poems are about love, longing, a paean to the city of Delhi, to its streets and signs, its small shops and crooked lanes, its monuments, and corners where lovers meet. His poems make me want to go to the top of my building terrace and scream out loud. They make me want to yell and be heard. He writes of lovers – of you and I. He writes of silences – the ones that hang in the living room as we drink cups of tea and hope someone messages or the phone rings. He writes of a better world, a better country where the voice is held high and we all come together. Katyal writes of humour, he writes of the people on the margins – the ones who live in shadows and yet make themselves seen in ways unknown to the world.

Reading Katyal is to be hopeful. His poems make me believe that it is possible to find love, even if it doesn’t go anywhere. Katyal’s poems have a structure, and then they don’t. They meander and roam free like cats. They have a life of their own and that is made very clear right from the very beginning. Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s art is complimentary because it also tends to not follow any pattern or norm. The art reflects Delhi – Akhil’s Delhi – the Delhi that couldn’t be anywhere else but in Delhi. Of cable wires in the air, of pigeons seated on tombs, of the Delhi metro and people who inhabit it day after day, and also of Bombay and how he sometimes yearns for the sea. The art reflects Ghosh’s Delhi of Delhi Calm, of the Delhi in today’s time and world, of Delhi protesting against everything and standing out.

I wrote of a love gone by in the margins of this book. I found myself scribbling alongside Akhil’s words. I also found myself teared-up when he speaks of love and longing and loss and Hoshang Merchant, and then of JNU, of the Delhi Queer Pride, and all things that make us and we become or unbecome as we live.

I am not going to ramble anymore. All I am going to say is read this collection. Read it. Reread it. Read it. Reread it. Fin.

Here’s my playlist for Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems: 

• Aaye Kuch Abr by Atif Aslam (Coke Studio)
• Faasle by Kaavish and Quratulain Balouch
• Aaja Re More Saiyaan from Coke Studio
• Shaaman Pai Gaiyyan by Naseebo Lal
• Jaana by Zoheb and Nazia Hassan
• Aise Hijr Ke Mausam by Chitra Singh
• Ek Chaand from the movie LOEV
• Babul Mora
• Ronay Na Diya
• Dilli 6
• Rehna Tu Hain Jaise Tu
• Kissi Ko Bhi Toh Mukkamal
• Jinhen Naaz Hain
• Raah Pe Rehte Hain

January 2020 Reading Wrap-Up

The start of the year has been great. I wanted to read 20 books. Ended up reading 13. Not bad though, out of which two were graphic novels and one a picture book for children (seemingly). .

Books read transported me to so many lands and made me explore my own stance on issues and life in general. From a story of a marriage to a story of how a movie on Manto was made to a novel on racism in modern-day America to a book on Dara Shukoh, I’m quite pleased with the diverse reading. At the same time, it so happened organically that I ended up reading 12 books by women and 1 by a man. Also, thank you to all the publishers who sent these books.

Here are the titles with my ratings:

1. A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid (5/5)
2. Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim (5/5)
3. Exquisite Cadavers by Meena Kandasamy (4/5)
4. I Remember Beirut by Zeina Abirached (5/5)
5. Jaipur Journals by Namita Gokhale (4/5)
6. All my Goodbyes by Mariana Dimópulos (5/5)
7. Manto & I by Nandita Das (4/5)
8. North Station by Bae Suah (5/5)
9. The Beach at Night by Elena Ferrante (5/5)
10. Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (5/5)
11. Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (4/5)
12. So All is Peace by Vandana Singh-Lal (5/5)
13. The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India by Supriya Gandhi (5/5)

This is my list. What have you read this month that has got you excited or made you want to recommend it to everyone you know? .

Exquisite Cadavers by Meena Kandasamy

Title: Exquisite Cadavers
Author: Meena Kandasamy
Publisher: Context, Westland
ISBN: 9789388754842
Genre: Literary Fiction, Novella
Pages: 112
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

I do not know where to begin talking about this book. There is so much going on in this book – love, hate, fights, religion, a book about a young couple navigating love and hate in London, about migration, and how we are in the modern world. Or rather how we perceive love, and its failings (if any).

Exquisite Cadavers is about a young couple, Karim and Maya. Karim is a filmmaker who has left his house in Tunis, and made his house in London with Maya, an English woman, who is battling her demons of an almost absent father, fighting with giving up cigarettes, and is confronted by a pregnancy she isn’t quite sure of.

The book is very cleverly divided into the actual novella and in the margins the thoughts of Meena as she was writing the actual book. Sometimes it just feels that the novel is meta and the thin line between reality and fiction is blurred to the point of it not being recognised. Pieces are stitched – revealing one layer after another. While one column speaks of Karim and Maya, the other speaks of the author’s creative process, her life, and the horrors occurring in India (yes, she speaks of the current ruling party and what followed).

Meena’s life on the left – from seeing her friends killed and arrested to becoming an activist herself is a stream of consciousness that shouldn’t be missed. The rage and anger is perhaps what we need in large doses, given the times we live in. At the same time, the domestic tale of Karim and Maya is extremely engaging, till the two very cleverly meet at the end of the book.

Exquisite Cadavers is a book that needs time to brew and seep, till you pick it up and look at it by taking sides. You need to take a side, and stay there. This book demands that when it comes to marginalia – you cannot sit on the fence. It is an experimental novella unlike any other that I have come across and it will make you question, ponder, mull, and understand where you come from.