I could have been elsewhere

My nine lives (John Murray, Rs 395) by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala begins with the intriguing sentence, “These chapters are potentially autobiographical: even when something didn’t actually happen to me, it might have done so.” Each of these nine “lives” explores an avenue of possibility, mixing fantasy and actuality, re-inventing origins, destinies, accidents and complications which always work themselves out in the same way. Born in Germany of Polish parents, and having lived in England since the age of twelve to marry an Indian architect, Jhabvala “soon felt at home wherever I happened to be, at the same time I held back, almost deliberately, from being truly assimilated”. This is an interesting experiment with fiction and memoir-writing, conducted with a sort of lucid and candid impulsiveness and eccentricity, combining an Anglo-Saxon literary sensibility, a Central European background and an Indian sense of life’s muddles. The opening “Apologia” has a grammatical error: “I may not have outgrown the common childish fantasy that one’s real parents are someone different, somewhere else.”

The cardamom club (Penguin, Rs 250) by Jon Stock invokes Norman Tebbit’s infamous 1990 Cricket Test, followed by a Trollope quote, “One is patriotic only because one is too small and weak to be cosmopolitan”. Raj Nair, ambitious and patriotic, is posted to Delhi with his first MI6 job. His cover is of a resident doctor at the British High Commission. Then his father is arrested in Britain on spying charges, and Raj realizes that he is up against a secret, colonial organization working at the very heart of Whitehall, The Cardamom Club. “But I needed a break from Britain, too, some anonymity. And in this bland no-man’s land out here on National Highway 8, near the Indira Gandhi International airport, I could listen to a Filipino band singing the Beatles and imagine, just for a moment, that I was nowhere.”

Promising picture or broken future? (Asian Centre for Human Rights, Rs 350) offers a critique of and recommendations on the government of India’s draft National Policy on Tribals. According to this commentary, the draft policy is seriously flawed and continues to employ archaic characteristics to identify indigenous and tribal peoples, and fails to incorporate the lessons learnt from the evaluations of the existing policies and programmes and laws since the president of India issued the first notification to recognize the Scheduled Tribes in 1950.

Sarpa Satra (Pras, Rs 150) by Arun Kolatkar is an elegant volume, designed by the poet himself, that contains a single long poem in English. Kolatkar, who writes in both English and Marathi, takes up the sarpa satra sacrifice in the Mahabharata, performed by Janamejaya in order to annihilate the Nagas or the Snake People. But Kolatkar’s story is told from the point of view of the Nagas. Kolatkar’s Jejuri had won the Commonwealth Poetry Award.

The diary of a space traveller& other stories(Puffin, Rs 250) by Satyajit Ray collects twelve stories featuring the eccentric genius and scientist, Professor Trilokeshwar Shonku. They originally appeared in the revived Sandesh and in Anandamela throughout the Sixties and the early Seventies. All the stories are translated by Gopa Majumdar (who has also translated Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay and Ashapurna Debi), except “Corvus”, which had been translated by Ray himself.