Reviews & Musings

There are some places where we learn to read long before we understand that reading is something we are learning. For me, one of those places was a pavement in Daryaganj, where, on winter Sundays, my grandfather would take me to look at books.  I must have been about ten. Delhi winters had a particular quality then, at least in my memory. The morning air was cold enough to make you want to stay wrapped up, but the sun would eventually arrive and settle over the old city with a gentleness that made wandering possible. The Sunday Book Bazaar was already busy when we reached it. I remember the smell of old paper, the dust, the crowds, and the peculiar intimacy of people sitting or crouching around piles of books, searching with the concentration of people who had come looking for something they could not entirely describe. The pavement had ceased to be a pavement. For a few hours, it became a bookshop without walls. 

“Do you have any tea?” Patrick Jane is standing in my kitchen, looking into a cabinet he has opened without permission.  “You have just walked into my house,” I say, “and that's the first thing you ask?”  He turns around, holding a tin of tea, and gives me that infuriatingly pleasant smile.  “It's a very important question. People tell you all sorts of things about themselves when you ask them direct questions. They lie, they exaggerate, they give you the version of themselves they'd like you to believe. But tea?” He taps the tin lightly against his palm. “Tea is much more revealing.” 

  "Till now, I have created stories based on lives of other people, but this time I have been so bold as to write my own. "  There is a reason Mannu Bhandari calls it an act of boldness. For a South Asian woman, writing her own story has never been a simple literary exercise. Women are raised to preserve families, protect reputations and absorb pain without leaving behind a record of it. Even those who write are expected to disguise themselves behind fiction, softening uncomfortable truths until they become acceptable. To tell the truth about marriage is to risk being called disloyal before being called honest. A woman's life has long been narrated by others. To seize the pen and say this is what happened to me is to reclaim authorship over a life that has too often belonged to everyone else.  That is why This Too Is a Story , translated with remarkable sensitivity by Poonam Saxena, matters. Not because it reveals the private life of one of Hindi literature's most bel...

I kept thinking about Beant Kaur after I finished For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died by Priya Hajela (Speaking Tiger, 2026) . She is sitting in her comfortable chair, her shawl wrapped tightly around her on winter nights, telling the family stories of those who came before her. There is something so familiar about the image that I could almost see her.  Every family seems to have someone who remembers. Someone who knows which grandfather did what, who married whom, who left home, who came back, who did not. Someone who can take a name and turn it into a story, and a story into a piece of the family itself. But what stayed with me was not about how Beant remembers. It was what she was trying to understand through those memories. 

Long before Wendy Doniger became the scholar the world knows today, she had become something far more important, a child for whom curiosity was ordinary.  Some people inherit money. Others inherit family businesses, heirlooms, or old recipes passed down through generations. The luckiest, I have come to believe, inherit questions. There are homes where books exist because every respectable home ought to have books. They line drawing-room shelves in matching bindings, gathering equal parts admiration and dust, brought down occasionally when guests arrive or when a school assignment requires them. And then there are homes where books refuse to stay on shelves. They migrate to bedside tables and dining tables, travel in handbags, accumulate on staircases, interrupt conversations, and begin new ones. They are quoted absent-mindedly over breakfast, argued over after dinner, and lent to friends with the faint anxiety that they may never return. In such homes, children learn that ideas ar...

Memory arrives through absence.  What stayed with me wasn't what Khalid Mohamed remembers about his biological mother, but what he doesn't. The story is built around gaps, missing conversations, unanswered questions, a childhood assembled from fragments. It feels like memory is less an archive and more an excavation.  Two mothers, two kinds of love.  The title initially suggests conflict, but the story resists that simplification. The grandmother and the biological mother occupy different emotional spaces. One raises him; the other haunts him. The story refuses to rank their love. Instead, it explores how a child can belong to two women in entirely different ways. 

The astrologer isn't really an astrologer.  The story opens with a man whose profession is built on performance. His forehead markings, saffron turban and carefully chosen words create authority before he has said anything meaningful. Narayan seems interested in how much of expertise is appearance. We often trust confidence more readily than truth. 

I walked into a workshop on memory as storytelling, expecting to learn something about writing. I walked out thinking about the mind.  We spent the day talking about three ideas of memory—Proustian, Bergsonian, and Philip K. Dickian. Three ways of understanding something we all possess and yet never fully grasp. I had encountered these names before in passing, mostly in literary conversations, but this was the first time I was asked not just to understand them, but to write through them. When we finally stopped discussing memory and started writing from it, the theories became something else entirely. 

  “I accepted very late that I had become a husband, it took me a long time. Nearly 10–15 years to realise that she is my wife. Before that, she was just a woman who had my children, cooked for me, and took care of the house. I had no feelings beyond that.” ( Source ) Renowned actor, singer, and lyricist Piyush Mishra said this in an interview with journalist Shubhankar Mishra. The internet responded with the kind of melancholy admiration reserved for tragic lovers. Here was a man still faithful to his great love after all these years. But I could not stop thinking about his wife.

I don’t think I have ever underlined silences the way I did while reading Eighteen Inches Apart.  I have followed Sonia Bahl’s writing long enough to know her gift is not just in telling stories, but in listening to silences, the unsaid, and the fragile tremors between people who almost touch but don’t. And here, once again, she writes in that delicate space of the eighteen inches between two hearts, a glance and a goodbye, and between what we carry and what we dare to release.  Reading this felt like sitting by a window on a slow afternoon, watching light shift across familiar objects and realizing they were never quite as ordinary as they seemed. There is warmth here, along with an ache that settles deep, like the echo of something you once lost and are only now beginning to understand. 

Floating Worlds is not interested in telling a story in straight lines. In her debut, Alpa Arora follows the rhythms of a mind that wanders, retreats, and returns, often without warning, making the reader inhabit that same uncertainty.  At its center is Ruby Khanna, a former scriptwriter, empty nester, and a woman suspended between selves. Ruby does not simply escape; she lives inside escape. Her movement between fantasy and reality is not always marked, conscious, and within her control. The novel refuses to rush into naming this as damage or disorder. Instead, it lingers in that uneasy space where the mind fractures out of a need to survive what cannot be neatly contained. Ruby’s inner life unfolds through a series of imagined scenarios, desires, and projections that slip quietly into her lived reality. These are the novel’s way of thinking.  At a time when so much fiction leans toward clarity and resolution, Arora stays with what is unclear, unresolved, and at times uncomf...

In early 2023, I made a quiet decision that did not feel significant at the time—I chose to stop reading casually, and to start reading with intent, turning towards artists I had long admired, not just to understand what they created, but to sit closer to the question of how and why they created at all.  They were not confined to a single world. They came from everywhere—writers, yes, but also singers, lyricists, filmmakers, actors—voices that had shaped something within me long before I knew how to articulate it. And what I sought in them was not inspiration in the shallow, fleeting sense, but something far more demanding: a deeper encounter with creativity itself, with the discipline it requires, the solitude it enforces, the identity it constantly unsettles, and the quiet, often invisible love that sustains it despite everything.  The process, I realised very quickly, could not be rushed. It refused to remain “reading” in the conventional sense. It became slower, heavier, a...

This month, I am carrying Difficult Pleasures by Anjum Hasan into our mentoring circle.  Not as an expert, not with answers, but with open hands. It feels like the kind of book you don’t really read alone. You sit with it. You breathe with it. You let it rearrange the furniture of your heart. All through our interactions, I keep thinking about how strange and beautiful it is to guide a room through grief while still learning its language myself. 

Quotes (From the preface)  “All theories of writing are bogus. Every writer develops his own method or lack of method and a story comes into being for some unknown reason anyhow.” – R.K. Narayan   “I liked to be free to read what I please and not be examined at all.” – R.K. Narayan  Both these lines stayed with me long after I finished the book. They feel almost like a permission slip to read freely, to write instinctively, and to not over-intellectualise the act of creation. Coming back to Narayan now, while consciously trying to study writing, felt ironic and grounding at the same time.