It’s never too late for love

"When life offers a dream beyond expectations, it’s not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end."

BUSY years in service keep unhappiness at bay. With every upward step in service, there comes a rise in power and perks—power to order people, to be waited upon, to be listened to—but after this golden phase comes retirement and this time, it’s author Mohinder Singh’s turn.

The 75-year-old retired bureaucrat now has to come to terms with the loss of power and position. Time has come for him, too, to sit in a corner and analyse how life has gone so far. Beginnings, ends, and mid-points of decades now have become even more significant as times to sum-up, in case time runs out soon for him?

The Twilight Years, as the name suggests, is the story of a retired IAS officer who has enjoyed all the good things in life, and now fears retirement.

Spared of a life-threatening illness, financial disaster and other major calamities, Mohinder’s life is an aggregate of good luck as well as bad luck—satisfactory 35 years of government service, rapid promotions, no setbacks and comfortable living quarters in pleasing surroundings. An enviable garden, good health, a stable marriage—something that every couple has to save for, anticipating their old age. Both sons successfully launched into the world, understanding daughters-in-law and likeable grandchildren.

And post-retirement, he has this feeling of a failed life, 75-year-old and not accomplished one single act of consequence. His plans of opening a bookshop or doing consultancy work seem unpromising, so he decides to write autobiographical fiction. But what Mohinder wants at this time the most is the company of his wife, the one who stood by him for 50 years through the thick and no little thin.

Like, as they, say life is not fair most of the times, it comes as a rude shock to Mohinder when three days before his golden wedding anniversary, his 67-year-old wife, otherwise meticulous about her health, suffers a stroke in sleep and part her ways leaving him to his destiny.

Time, the greatest healer, seems to work less in this age and the ability to deal with the loss is perhaps no less significant than the loss itself. Journeys, as they say, are the midwives of thought. A few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane or train.

The unexpected death of his wife gives him no time to be prepared. Mohinder experiences numbness and refuses to cry. He grieves loneliness more than the death.

But with time, just like his younger son, Jogindar, for whom it was not easy to understand how it feels to be old and unwanted, had predicted at the time of his mother’s death: "Who knows, he may fall in love again. Acquire a mate. Give him a second chance to find lost love. He’s young at heart and fond of female company. Has money and property."

And Mohinder’s life takes another turn when he is expecting the least, as he falls in love with Gyan, a teacher at his wife’s school. Who says retirement is just an end, a closing, it can also be a new beginning for someone who finds new love at 77!

Dark history

WHEN the rain becomes just a beady fringe around the trees, the sun explodes in the sky, turning Missamari cantonment in Assam into a bright crayon drawing, and the children tumble out of homes to reclaim their front-yards, Reema sees her Ma looking at them, with a sad, half-finished smile. As if they have something that she has either lost or misplaced somewhere. She never sees her smile too much. Life for her is a puzzle halved into life and death, and she has never been able to decide which piece she wants.

Reema learns from her Ma to "smell grief before it struck". Just a day before, when the school sky littered with balloons and silver stars, she announces to Ma, "It will all go waste. It will rain tomorrow." Monsoon is officially over, but it rains and even though Reema knows it beforehand, she can not bear to see the limp festoons or the gauzy triangles and furling red, paper snakes dying prematurely in mud. She knows that they have to die, because everything dies, beautiful things and loved things. For her it is risky to love anything too much and it is too silly to take anything for granted. Even the officers’ mess, with its equanimity of luxury, good manners and fearless happiness, can’t lull her into contentment.

Reema is certain that Missamari’s air, pulsing with soft, mellow miracles, is not for her or for her Ma. She often wishes to tell people around that nothing is permanent and that happiness is something which they will always leave behind and go somewhere else.

Perfect Eight, an autobiographical fiction written by journalist Reema Moudgil, has a dark and depressing, contemporary history and romance that find its way here along with separation. It’s a tale of travel, discovery, twists and turns. The writer begins her journey from Lahore during Partition. She witnesses her mother’s life torn apart by hate and bears it like a burden.

The writer lives out her own destiny in the seclusion of a tea estate at Annaville that belonged to her aunt and her childhood love, Samir, who only understands passion.

Travelling from Lahore to Kanpur to an Assamese cantonment to Patiala to Ambrosa to Bangalore, through floods and fires and communal riots, Reema’s Ma repeated a lesson to her, which she had taught herself as a little girl: "It did not matter one way or the other, life never asked for one’s opinions. It did not recognise a woman’s desperate love for a house with sun-lit, flower-filled balconies. It would mercilessly go in a direction it had preconceived for itself." She sits this time in a train with acceptance and the few belongings she had brought from Missamari, and remembers another departure from happiness, many years ago, but this time she is relieved, as she thinks she is not travelling with "strangers".

A sense of displacement and its accompanying baggage is what goes around throughout. Nursing the scars of Partition is what Perfect Eight, two halves running into each other, is all about, an emotional insight into a woman’s life.

Life in a metro

THE title Neti, Neti has its roots in Hinduism, and in particular Jnana Yoga and Advaita Vedanta, which refers to a chant or mantra, meaning "not this, not this", or "neither this, nor that".

Neti, Neti is perhaps the most-fitting title to a story of a 25-year-old Sophie Das, who like many others, gives into the urban pressure and migrates from Shillong to Bangalore in search of work, freedom, fun, and much more.

She is in Bangalore for a year when the novel opens, working for a US-based company that outsources subtitling of DVDs (dialogue-transcribing, background sounds for the hearing-impaired) to India.

Life in Bangalore is faster-paced than Sophie’s life in Shillong was. Her boyfriend Swami, to whom she tries to introduce one of her favourite books, R. K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends, works in a call centre and keeps American time.

When people talk about hill towns, they imagine them as holiday destinations; they imagine them as places that offer a brief respite from reality and that’s why adorable. They imagine them as a collection of views and things to do. But, that was not the case with Sophie when she confides to herself about the things she missed most about Shillong. The Elephant Waterffalls or the green Umiam Lake were nothing to her compared to waking up early on a winter morning when in love with someone who hadn’t noticed.

Bangalore to her possessed a great zest for ‘ugliness’, too much seems to be going on at once here. She often felt that every one just wanted to obscure the view, bolt out the sky and erase the gaps. The city, according to her, not just proliferated but kept reproducing itself and thus, felt that no one could ever reach anywhere here.

Sophie has learnt to content herself with the minor things, including the smell of flowers coming from pushcarts late in the evening, the view of a palm tree from an open window, the corners of certain pubs and pleasure of seeing one’s things neatly arranged in a room. She also comes to term with why several people create islands of their homes and find it to be the life’s greatest pleasure simply because they need a place they can fashion in their own image as the city is not the place.

She now understands why everyone who lives in high-up, magical places must come down into the "real world" and mingle, but now she knows for sure how difficult it is to experience this, as there is something that is calling her back all the time.

Leaving all that was so wonderfully fixed in its place for her free-spirited friends from office, call centres, pubs, night streets, shopping malls, rock concerts, etc, and yet not feel affectionate to either of the two places was confusing her.

Neti, Neti is a journey of a grown-up girl, who wants to experience every thing in life, but life’s blind curves keep defining an outer limit of her world.

Spooky tale

THERE are voices asking him where he is going. There are those that ask him to leave Goa. There are voices that laugh in his face and others that sob uncontrollably. Once, in the dark of a powerless dusk, he sits in candlelight, trying to get on with his story. He hears a soft voice full of mischief: "Come, let’s dance. Let’s rush out of the window and dance!"

To escape from troubles at home in Kerala, Raja decides to follow his heart. Straightening his body against the heavy rain, he decides to challenge the waves and experience the truth. The desolate landscape, a wasteland of wetness, the rain, a diagonal arc on the back of the wind, an empty horizon, barely able to stand, but he refuses to give up and challenges the entire world and comes to Goa, where he encounters "Maria".

Raja Prasad, a novelist, is in search of a story for his next book, while fighting with the failure of his previous one, he shifts to ‘Maria’s Guesthouse’ here, and this is where he has an affair with a young girl, even as he learns the story of another love, from another time. But the events of the past find their way into the present. As he settles down to write his second novel, Raja stumbles on to the mystery surrounding Maria’s death. And in the process he uncovers secrets of his own.

The developments in ‘Maria’s Guesthouse’ not only affect Raja’s life, but also those around him. There is something about ‘Maria’s Room’ which isn’t obvious. This is not a room that has been used; there is a musty smell and dampness in the sheets, older than perspiration. A sensation of "whiteness", although nothing in the room is actually white—an apprehension of purity or luster when all around is just dust and squalor. Even with the eyes firmly shut, "whiteness" percolates.

Raja is psyched by the knowledge of being in Maria’ room, something has passed into him, changing him in some strange manner. It’s a transparency that renders the room’s inner life open to him with clarity. The introduction of the Deneuve has triggered off some weird ethereal reaction in him. He tries to curb his dread with the weight of this insight.

Maria’s Room is a tale of love and memory of the drunken Fritz and the inscrutable Milton, the delectable Lorna and the frail Ruma. It is the story of how Raja meets and falls in love with Maria. His relationship with Maria brings out her past and also merges his past with the present, thereby reminding him of everything he has left behind.

Maria’s Room is a novel-within-the novel, which takes a clear shape and solidity along with Raja’s understanding of the world within and outside. It is about Raja’s journey to uncoil the coiled and then coiling it up again.

"Give me a dream. And then make it come true" explains the novel best, as it revolves around dreams in different stages.

Reality check

TEACHERS call it the idiot box; youth call it the tube; parents call it an addiction; granny, a lifeline, but there are only a few who call it a livelihood. It’s a story of behind-the-television scenes, where fiction meets the reality.

Reality TV shows in India are still on a blossoming stage and mostly include the ‘desi’ versions of reality shows broadcast abroad. What’s amazing is the fact that despite the "copycat" attempt, reality TV is gaining a lot of popularity in India, bringing a sigh of relief to the audiences who are tired of Ekta Kapoor’s saas-bahu dramas. And with this new trend comes an end of the "emotional saga", as "reality" finally finds its place in the Indian mindset.

Omkar Sane’s Coming Soon. The End is an insight into the real TV industry. It brings forth the voyeurism and exhibitionism prevailing in our society. The book revolves around four friends, each of whom works for a different TV channel. Bass is the girl who joins a music channel after advertising, but her passion (music) goes awry as soon as she realises that music is played only between commercial breaks in music channels. Crass is the guy in general entertainment, who despite knowing the TV industry well doesn’t know why he is part of it. Grass works as a freelancer producer after he quit a kids’ channel. Farce works in a news channel and always has all the gossip about everyone. News, the sort that didn’t matter, comes naturally to him.

They all meet in a bar to catch up and a stranger Mass joins them to learn about how the industry functions. After all the vital discussions, the myth called television now has a different image in Mass’s mind, as he comes to know about how much TV channels understand their "mass", their understanding of rural audience which is negligible as their coverage. They go to a village only for sensational stories like deaths of farmers or Maoist attacks. They measure society by the views of the urban elite. For their talk shows, they bring celebrities, ad gurus, socialites, editors, writers, politicians, etc., who only talk in "stylish" English, but now the "mass" understands that it’s all about Mont Blanc using Gandhi’s image.

All in all, the trick of the trade is simple, every emotion—fear, guilt, suspicion and happiness—becomes a commodity and commodities become stories o n screen. Commodities are created and sidelined in no time in the television industry and the book exposes the truth behind the empty castle of today’s TV world.

Gory tale of survival

FEAR continues to haunt the lives of those who resisted the storms of "hate and divide" with compassion and courage in Gujarat. Even a firecracker sends people scurrying in terror. A cricket match between India and Pakistan creates only dread, as it raises for them the spectre of a possible riot.

Every festival, Hindu or Muslim, is no longer an occasion for festivities, it’s only dark memories of brutal violence that has become an integral part of the life of an estimated 200,000, people whose homes were destroyed, reducing them to a status of a refugee in their own homeland.

Mander, a former IAS officer, was among the very first people to take stock of the gravity of the situation in Gujarat, when a storm of engineered sectarian hatred broke out and raged for months in the state in 2002. He realised that the people of Gujarat had survived not a savage riot but a "state-sponsored" programme, which was "systematically planned and executed" to target the minority community.

Disappointed with the role of state authorities, who "refused" to reach out with resources to support people to rebuild their lives, the unsympathetic attitude of his colleagues, and shocked to see the plight of survivors in the relief camps, he resigned from the civil service and began to work directly with survivors of the Gujarat tragedy.

Fear and Forgiveness gives an account of how everything was planned, how minority localities were electrocuted, how places of worship were damaged and how the state government turned hostile against a segment of citizens merely because they worshipped a "different" God.

The author writes about the climate of fear and hostility, as well as the economic and social boycott. This book is a saga of survivors who suffered without hope, security, homes and livelihoods. Mander tells the untold stories of most extraordinary human courage—Rabiya of Ratanpur village, whose shops were burnt by her neighbours, lives with the hope that one day her village people will call her back and another of an activist who walked several kilometers to explain through her song what she aspires: "A new religion which teaches people to be human."

The writer describes those people who risked their own lives and those of their families to save others and help the betrayed people rebuild their lives. He narrates the horrific burnings in Godhra and explains how important it is for the survivors to understand that neither did the cycle of hatred begin in the railway compartments of Godhra and nor will it end in the killing fields of Gujarat. He provides that the difficult and troubled path to reconciliation must involve a fair challenge from the local to the highest levels to bridge the gap between separated groups in order to heal the old wounds. This book draws our attention to the flaws in our judicial and social systems and upholds that "forgiveness is the attribute of the strong" and the only way to move ahead.

Magical Love Story

A debut fiction by Suman Hossain, A Guy Thing is the story of an IITian, Sahil, who is a dreamer and has the courage to follow his dreams. He wants to break the norms at IIT, Delhi, and change the clich`E9, which he has heard from girls that "IITians are nerds".

Sahil, unlike any other IITian, is busy ‘exploring’ the best moments of his life in Delhi—he is enjoying his hostel days, blind dates, night-outs, porn videos and much more, but it’s his magical love story that takes him to a different world and makes all the difference in his life. Surrounded by shadows, in search of a lost enemy, Sahil’s dream love is following him. Oblivious of destiny’s plans, Sahil is now taken over by the chanted beauty who is like a shadow of swords in the devil land that comes prepared for destruction.

Within a month and after a few dates, Rida, his ladylove, becomes his world that now centers around Orkuting, SMSing and dating. Sahil, who made fun of his friends for chatting online, on the mobile for hours, is now following the league. Deeply in love, Sahil is aiming high to set trends and is now sure of his love for Rida, which can turn around his life for better. Rida’s letter is now a painkiller for Sahil and makes him realise a lot of things about love.

Discovering Rida is not even over and the hell breaks loose upon Sahil once again in the crowded Sarojini Nagar market, where he had experienced the minimum distance between life and death durbomb blast. But this time, it is no escape for him as Rida leaves him alone and disappears in the busy market. He receives nothing else except an SMS, saying that she will never meet him again and if he ever tries to meet her, she will kill herself.

His world comes to a standstill and he starts hating the books that promised to help build his career. His miseries are far from over as one of his hostel mates, Anjan, hangs himself to death. Sudden and strange death affects him deeply and here comes the turning point in the novel when he spots a book, which he had gifted to Rida, on Anjan’s windowsill. Sahil now decides to put an end to all the mysteries surrounding him, including Anjan’s death and the most baffling enigma called love.

However, you just have to read the novel to figure out for yourself how he had created an agonising situation for himself for absolutely nothing and how he comes out of it after meeting Rida’s father. On the whole, the novel is a good, entertaining read and offers a peep into hostel life.