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...