Book Review: Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser

This review first appeared in the Asian Review of Books on 22 September 2013

Questions of Travel opens with an intriguing line, “When Laura was two, the twins decided to kill her”, and pulls you in. Why was the child thus marked, and did she survive? 

Laura Fraser’s mother succumbed to breast cancer soon after she was born, linking her thus in her twin brothers’ minds to her demise. They hatch a plan to kill her through accidental drowning by making sure to open the safety catch on the swimming pool gate. But Laura survives the splash to be brought up in the care of elderly aunt Hester who “had spent the first seven years of her life in India, from which misfortune her complexion, lightly polished beech, never recovered”.

Nevertheless, Hester has been places, as evinced by her sky-blue travel case, the repository of souvenirs from her travels in the Continent. And she is happy to regale Laura with elaborate stories from each of those trips, recalling in magnificent detail all that was beautiful, while glossing over inconveniences such as “the unspeakable filth of Greek public lavatories”.  No surprise then that Laura is hooked to the idea of travel from an early age.

Questions of Travel is Michelle de Kretser’s fourth novel, following the much-acclaimed The Lost Dog that was longlisted for the Booker in 2008. As the title suggests, this book is an exploration of travel, what it means in an increasingly connected world, what it throws up in its wake and what it reveals to us of our own selves in the process. 

The narrative begins in 1960s and traverses to 2004, covering almost half a century of travel and concomitant reflection. It is told from the points of view of two people, the white Australian Laura Fraser and the Sinhalese Sri Lankan Ravi Mendes, in alternating chapters. While Laura is keen to leave her tidy Ozzie perch, spread her wings and discover the world, Ravi’s country is increasingly wrecked by sectarian conflict and a contingent of fleeing emigrants. 

There is a stark contrast between the two stories: Laura leads a hippieish existence where everything is up for grabs while Ravi’s life is rooted in his family and birth place but increasingly imperiled by ethnic strife. De Kretser is a wordsmith, stringing her words such that they throw up vivid images, bring a quiet smile frequently to the lips and deliver many Ah-ha! moments. The narrative is constructed in short chapters with short sentences which give an instagrammatic feel to the text, a here-and-now telling of life through images, an online photo-sharing rendered via text. The effect is both magical and disconcerting; you want to sink your teeth into the story but you are distracted by some riveting imagery, and then, some more. 

Perhaps this construct is an ingenious storytelling technique for a novel about travel, a series of linked snapshots. However, it has the effect of distancing the characters – we are very aware of watching a story unfold and never become one with the characters until midway through the story when boom! a terrible murder tosses Ravi straight into the mayhem of Sri Lankan ethnic politics. 

Ravi is an easier character to empathize with. Defined by his relationships – with his mother, sisters, wife, son, his efforts to comprehend the terrible twin tragedy life has thrown at him are etched with verisimilitude. Ravi gets a much sought after opportunity to seek asylum in Australia – will he able to start life anew in a fresh land unburdened by the horrors of his past? Will the travel of a thousand miles help shed the baggage of loss and free him from fear?

Laura, meanwhile, comes across as a stereotypical hippie who gets to know a new place by sampling its cuisine, its sights and its men. (In contrast, when Ravi lands in Australia, he familiarizes himself with the place by walking for hours.) Her rather voracious appetite for each of these lands her a job with a travel guide, thus completing the virtuous circle. Laura’s life is the more instagrammatic of the two protagonists, the images supplanting the emotional heft of this story. To this reader at least Laura, despite her witty observations and keen eye, remained a bit of a cipher. 

Questions of Travel is a strange beast, a bit of a chimera – it is packed with engaging anecdotes, glimmers with insight and wit, yet it disorients with its rapidly shifting tracks and leaves one slightly cold. Travel, especially in today’s global world, has questions and implications for each one of us. What is foreign or new when we have already consumed it before in countless images? Will the first sight of Eiffel Tower leave a new traveler slightly underwhelmed because the glossy images promised more? What is home when travel allows us to pack our bags and seek a new one wherever we may desire?

De Kretser tackles some of these questions in this baggy yet light novel – I wish she had wrestled with more might. Ultimately, Ravi Mendes decides he doesn’t want to naturalize and returns to his native Sri Lanka. Laura, meanwhile, wings her way back to Australia, timing her return with care. “Six months later, what still struck Laura were the hats, the babies in sunglasses, the Factor 30 sunscreen, the little kids on the beach in neck-to-knee cossies… The planet’s ills came home in six words: Australians were afraid of the sun.” Does travel then hold up a mirror to us? 

With Ravi and Laura both returning to their native countries after their peregrinations, perhaps the writer is suggesting that the purpose of travel is to help us reassess and re-love our own homes. 

Book Review: The Hope Factory by Lavanya Sankaran

This review first appeared in the Asian Review of Books on 12 August 2013

The Hope Factory is Lavanya Sankaran’s debut novel after her acclaimed short-story collection, The Red Carpet. The novel is set in Bengaluru, erstwhile Bangalore, better known to the outside world as India’s Silicon Valley. The city is home to Infosys, India’s pioneering software company, and a growing multitude of corporations that provide outsourcing services, telemarketing, business consulting and software engineering. It has been at the forefront of India’s economic development—concrete buildings supplanting fields, multistory residential complexes elbowing out leafy bungalows—besieged by lagging infrastructure and widening income inequality. Such a city is rife with stories.

The novel begins with Anand in his office at Cauvery Auto, a company he has assiduously built over the years, nervously anticipating the arrival of his largest customers. They are to bring with them representatives of the Japanese parent company on a factory tour. If all went well, Cauvery Auto could end up supplying the international market, a welcome prospect as Anand is looking to grow his business. Acquiring land for industrial development was increasingly difficult in the city but Anand is hopeful of organizing something. 

At home, his whimsical wife Vidya rules with the help of three domestic helpers, one of which is Kamala. Maneuvering between the shenanigans of the cook Shanta and the other helper Thangam, Kamala must accomplish her chores without upsetting Vidya-ma, swallow the occasional scolding and strive to provide for her son Narayan and keep him off the streets and in school.

The Hope Factory tells its story in two voices through alternating chapters. One voice is that of Kamala, the domestic worker and single mother, struggling to make ends meet on her meager salary. The other is the voice of Anand, industrious entrepreneur, dedicated father and flustered spouse looking to maintain marital harmony in the face of an overly obtrusive father-in-law and a wife whose whims match the volatility of teen fashion. 

While Kamala and Anand are separated by many markers—social and economic—they are also strivers, both hopeful that their individual endeavours will pay off with a more prosperous future. Anand’s hopes are tied literally in his plans for the new factory while Kamala is vested in providing her son with higher education, a factor that will lift him out of their penury.

Sankaran is a competent writer moving fluidly between the urbane Anand and the anxious Kamala. Not that Anand does not have his anxieties. He has risen from a humble background, his wife is increasingly distant from him, his father-in-law is a social bully content to flaunt his “connections” in Anand’s face, the landbroker appears shifty and Anand spends restless nights wondering if he’ll be able to procure the land he needs to expand his factory without which Cauvery Auto’s overseas venture will be aborted.

Adding to Anand’s travails is the arrival on the scene of Kavika, an old female schoolmate and friend. Kavika has returned home after a long foreign stint, with a child, no discernible husband, and allusions to a mysterious past. With her cropped hair and easy manner, Kavika is a counterpoint to Vidya, a fact that Anand seems to appreciate and mask. 

Anand’s demeanour around Kavika harks to an adolescent crush that he never outgrew. Moreover, Kavika shows much enthusiasm for Anand’s venture compared with the lackadaisical response of his wife; will the mutual interest develop into something more? Matters get complicated when Vidya appears just as smitten by Kavika, opting to cut off her hair and favouring the handicraft clothes that Kavika wears. The growing friendship between the women throws Anand into Kavika’s presence frequently, something he anticipates with a guilty pleasure. The triangle as a narrative hook unspools slowly.

Meanwhile, Kamala has been advised that if her son is to succeed he must study in a private school, the government run school being a dud. Her big worry is that she cannot afford her son’s education in a private school even as the shack she rents appears ready to be seized for property re-development. But Kamala is a plucky woman who knows how to seize the bull by its horns. Years ago, when thrown out of her house after her husband’s death, she managed to leave her village, fend her way to a big city like Bengaluru and find employment—all with an infant suckling at her breast. She decides to approach Anand-saar for a solution to Narayan’s education.

The Hope Factory proceeds at a leisurely pace for a major part of the novel, Sankaran focusing her eye on the minutiae that bring the narrative alive: the quibbles of the household staff, the zeal of Anand’s employees, the flipflops of the real estate broker, the frequent whims of Vidya, the loving interaction between Anand and his two children. The storytelling evokes R. K. Narayan, the Indian writer who chronicled the intricacies of ordinary Indian lives with a sharply observant yet compassionate gaze.

However, the last one-third of the narrative cranks up as the land deal Anand is pursuing gets embroiled in the quagmire of politics, and the crisis at Kamala’s landlord’s heightens. Anand has won the order from the Japanese but he is yet to acquire the requisite land. In what seems like a departure from the methodical, precise man he has been presented as Anand indulges in chicanery of the kind that would put his flamboyant father-in-law to shame, and saves the day for his factory, his workers, even Kamala.

Sankaran’s prose is richly satisfying, her characters fully fleshed, yet I wonder how much of their struggle will stay with me. One question this reviewer couldn’t help asking was what would have happened if the messy tangle of land-politics-people had unspooled further, the writer forsaking succumbing to a tidy resolution?

The kernel of the novel is an erstwhile sleepy town scrambling for metropolis status, engendering a messy sprawl in its wake—rather than a gasp of recognition at the mirror held to view, it evokes deja vu. A pity, as there is much to admire in the book, just nothing new.

Book Review: Sita's Ascent by Vayu Naidu

This review first appeared in the Asian Review of Books on 24 April 2013

The epics have stayed alive in India through a vigorous tradition of oral telling. This tradition has also cast the Ramayana into several avatars, the story being reinterpreted by region, language, caste in South and Southeast Asia. R. K. Ramanujan, a renowned scholar of Indian literature, in his essay titled “300 Ramayanas”, recounts myriad retellings of the epic, many of which contrast with the Valmiki Ramayana that most Indians are familiar with. In a South Indian folk account it was Ravana, the King of Lanka and Rama’s antagonist, who births Sita through a sneeze. The Thai version gives centre stage to Hanuman, the monkey King—Hanuman being considered a more colorful and empathetic character than Rama.

What is common to the retellings is that they are coloured by the homilies and virtues of the particular community within which they have evolved. For instance, the Jain telling of the Ramayana present Rama as a Jain who doesn’t slay his enemy since it is against Jainism to take life. In a Tamil version of the epic Sita is the warrior who goes to battle against Ravana.

Sita’s Ascent is a novella by Vayu Naidu who runs a namesake storytelling company out of London. This debut is a revisiting of Sita, the heroine of the Hindu epic Ramayana and the wife of its hero, Rama.

Vayu Naidu’s retelling is an attempt at “a reimagining of the idea of woman as goddess” by weaving the narrative through the point of view of multiple characters in the epic who were close to Sita. Dr Naidu, who has researched Indian oral traditions, was fascinated by “the inspiration that is Sita—an exiled queen, an expectant mother abandoned and left alone, undaunted by the extraordinary circumstances that are thrust upon her by the husband she continues to love”.

Sita is the dominant female role model that Indian girls are brought up on. Her values of unyielding loyalty, steadfast devotion and unconditional love despite hardships hurled at her by a patriarchal system are seen as ideal attributes for the Indian woman.

The Sita in this novella is a fully realized character, a woman who speaks her mind, who is confident of her inherent female strengths. Yet she doesn’t break the mould of Valmiki’s Ramayana, content to raise her sons in a hermitage until they are ready to face their father, King Rama.

Some other characters, though, are explored afresh. Lakshmana, Rama’s younger brother who accompanied him in exile, is vulnerable as he reminisces his causal role in the ultimate war. Soorpnakka, Ravana’s demoness sister, is self-aware as she indulges in “that curse that humans have—self-reflection” as she takes us into the mind of her demon brother and his intense desire for Sita’s love.

The notion of Sita’s “ascent”, her refusal to undergo another “test of fire” to prove herself is tided over entirely in this retelling .That she escaped the wheel of time and ascended to the abode of Gods by refusing, in the end, to acquiesce isn’t explored. The narrative ends abruptly with Sita reaching for the Heavens without confronting her husband.

The gang-rape of a young woman in Delhi last December has forced into the public a debate on the role of women in a traditional society caught in the whirlwind of economic change. With that perspective, Sita’s Ascent must be seen as adhering to the mainstream retelling of the Ramayana where Sita, despite all her endurance and strength, remains a woman who must bear her fate with fortitude—an unchanging archetype that Bollywood, the Indian film industry, has leveraged profitably over several decades. So while the book is worth a read, certainly for its attempt to flesh out the archetypal Sita of the most popular Ramayana retelling, ithowever falls short by not “revisiting” the epic at a time when the land of the birth of the epic is embroiled in a vigorous ongoing debate on the role of women in a changing India.

Vayu Naidu mentions in a note to the novella that “the function of memory as a metaphor for ‘re-membering’ a dismembered story because it is told to us infrequently and in parts, and for experiencing culture through its epic characters”.

Wasn’t it time then in a contemporary retelling to have Sita battle for the right of a woman to be an individual in a system content to consign her in perpetual roles—daughter, sister, wife, mother?

Book Review: Noon by Aatish Taseer

This review first appeared in the Asian Review of Books on 17 December 2011

Noon by Aatish Taseer

17 December 2011 — “Write what you know” is an oft-touted writing maxim that could apply to Aatish Taseer’s work, three books – two novels and one memoir – in three years, all of which pivot on a search for identity. However, in Taseer’s case, it could equally be a matter of writing what he doesn’t know for his books grapple with the gaps in his life. As the narrator Rehan Tabassum in his third book Noon says: “…if everyone has a book in them, mine cannot be that kind of book (with a beginning, middle and end). The gaps in my life were too many, the threads too few.”

Aatish Taseer was born to an Indian Sikh mother and a Pakistani Muslim father. Growing up in a pluralist India, estranged from his politician father, his first book Stranger to History is as the subtitle says, a son’s journey through Islamic lands. In The Temple-Goers, his first novel, he turns his gaze upon contemporary India and its rapacious society in the wake of the country’s economic boom. Noon, the third in the triptych, melds his partitioned halves with four disjointed stories, two each set in India and Pakistan.

We meet the narrator Rehan Tabassum in a train as he’s journeying to meet his estranged father for the first time. It is 2006, an earthquake has ruptured Kashmir and the Jhelum river has risen to flood villages in the valley.

The first of the four stories in Noon rewinds sixteen years when a young Rehan has returned with his mother from London and the single parent is trying to establish herself in Delhi. An ambitious lawyer, she searches for an apartment even as young Rehan resists—he enjoys being cosseted by his grandmother and a burglary in a classmate’s house ratchets his fear. The house-hunting travails lead to shared confidences. When Rehan queries about his absent father, his mother suggests he give him a kick when he meets him.

“He didn’t give us anything? No car? No house?”

“Not a tissue to wipe my face on.”

A second story starts off in the years before India’s economic liberalization and ends in 2002, by which time the erstwhile privileged elite had lost to the economic czars emerging in the wake of fiscal reforms. What is intended as an observation of a transforming society becomes a long-winded yarn with no fresh insights.  

Taseer has received high praise from V. S. Naipaul, a writer whose work has also been shaped by a search for identity, and it is in the last two stories that Taseer’s scrutiny turns incisive. “Notes from a Burglary” is a tragicomic account of a theft in a Delhi farmhouse, whereupon the household staff is arraigned by a swarm of policemen who deploy their caste-related knowledge and an interrogation technique that involved a “studied mixture of boredom and cruelty” to psych out the burglar. Rehan, the son of the mistress of the farmhouse, and on a study break from the U.S.A., discovers contradictions within himself as police thrash the servants in search of answers and Rehan, though principally against it, is complicit in the act.  “A protective screen of encoded privilege made injustice, and especially cruelty, of the most casual variety, appear always as the work of others.”

The final story, set in the country of his father, is an insightful romp into the treachery and politicking within a family that finds a parallel in the country at large. Taseer picks at the disingenuous lies that masquerade for political cause in Pakistan. A black and white picture of a self-immolation in a daily is headlined thus: “Youth sets himself ablaze on discovering his name has Sanskritic origins”.

Noon is book-ended by images of violence, a theme that runs through the stories that have been cobbled into a novel. However, to merit being called a full-fledged novel, this collection of interlinked short stories and novellas would need more threads, as Rehan would agree.

What's Behind The Rise of Indian Pop Fiction?

Have you read any of the following books:

 - Chankaya's Chant

 - The Immortals of Meluha

 - The Secret of the Nagas

 - Any of Chetan Bhagat's books

or wondered what is behind the sudden escalation in popularity of popular fiction in India?

My essay in the Asian Review of Books examines the rise of Indian pop-fiction through the lens of the bestselling Shiva Trilogy by Amish Tripathi. I shall be uploading the essay on my blog soon - meanwhile, read it at

Asian Review of Books

A preview:


Once upon a time a blue-necked man descended from his home in Tibet with his warriors to a city in Indus valley in order to save it. Thus goes a popular folklore from Jammu and Kashmir, the northernmost state of India. In his bestselling Shiva trilogy, Amish Tripathi, an investment banker-turned-writer, transposes Lord Shiva of mythology into the valley of Srinagar, gives him a thoroughly modern makeover and brings him, cussing and swearing contemporaneously, into our present world.

Lord Shiva is a revered God in the Hindu trinity whose popularity is pan-Indian. Known as the Destroyer, he has a softer side to him as well: in his avatar as Nataraja, he can dance the bells off the ankles of the most proficient dancer. For a God, he is sufficiently layered: he puffs chillum, a pipe for smoking cannabis that the Rastafarians made popular in the West. He is also a superb warrior, skilled in the use of weapons and hand-to-hand combat, and a heroic leader of his people. To cut a long story short, Shiva was ready for a writer to spring him into the 21st century in his metrosexual avatar—Tripathi has done just that.

Book 1 of the Shiva trilogy, The Immortals of Meluha, has sold over 100,000 copies since its launch in 2010 and Book 2, the recently-released The Secret of the Nagas, is currently on the bestseller lists in India. In a market where less than half a decade ago English-language bestsellers were books that sold 5000 copies,the phenomenon of English-language fiction selling in the tens and hundreds of thousands has blown apart the glass ceiling for publishers.

The question naturally arises: what is Tripathi doing right?

Read more at Amish Tripathi’s Shiva Trilogy and the Rise of Popular Fiction in India

Enjoy!