Reviews & Musings

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.