God told me to strike at Al Qaida

Secrets and lies: The true story of the iraq war (Politico?s, ?4.99) by Dilip Hiro is a detailed chronicle that Noam Chomsky describes as ?deeply informed and perceptively analysed?. Hiro?s account has two epigraphs, both Bushisms of a more serious kind. The first is called Top Secret, and is the president?s words to the Palestinian prime minister on June 4, 2003: ?God told me to strike at Al Qaida and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.? (Some would be reminded here of the biblical Abraham, and some of the Yorkshire Ripper ? depending on the state of their faith.) The second is called Top Lie, and is spoken by Bush on July 14, 2003: ?The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, Did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, Absolutely.? Hiro has written extensivesly on west and Central Asia, Iran, India and on Islam in general. This book appends a detailed chronology of Baathist and Occupied Iraq, and a list of Iraqi WMD, ?alleged and found?, according to which only one 10-year-old vial of Strain B of Botulinum toxin has been found in an Iraqi scientist?s domestic refrigerator.

Sultana?s dream and padmarag (Penguin, Rs 200) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain is a long-overdue modern edition and translation of two seminal Indian texts written by a ?sensitive, humane, pragmatic and ambitious visionary? who also happened to be a Bengali Muslim woman. Sultana?s Dream (1905, in English) and Padmarag (1924, in Bengali) are feminist utopias, the latter rendered into English for the first time here by Barnita Bagchi, who has also written a lucid introduction to the volume. Rokeya?s sophisticated, delightful and intellectually complex writing form a brilliant counterpart to her pioneering work in women?s education and emancipation in undivided Bengal.

Babyji (Penguin, Rs 295) by Abha Dawesar is a significant new novel by this Delhi-born writer now living in New York. It is written with courage, clarity and complexity, grips the reader through its relentless exploration of a young girl?s sexual awakening and fluidity. Anamika is at the centre of a love trinagle involving a lower-caste servant and an educated, older divorcee. She also begins a serious amorous dalliance with the most popular girl in school, the father of her best friend and the local bad boy, never flinching from radical questions about morality, gender roles and social rank in modern India. Opening paragraph: ?Delhi is a city where things happen undercover. A city where the horizon is blanketed with particulate pollution and the days are hot. A city with no romance but a lot of passion. You ask how passion without romance is possible? The same way sex without a nightlife is possible. Delhi churns slowly, secretively. What emerges is urgency.?

A shorter life (Chatto & Windus, ? 5.20) by Alan Jenkins is a slim volume of poems by a fairly reputed English poet. The dedication asks, ?What did I long for if not to make amends,/ The rock-pool?s slop of brine, the sandcastle?s brackish moat,/ The pond where an unhappy child launched his little boat?? And it answers itself: ?Too late, all the dead in the river are my friends.? Most of the poems are memorials to dead parents, especially the poet?s mother, friends, lovers and poets. They are all thickly allusive, some of them like literary collages bringing together Rimbaud, Laforgue, Douglas Dunn, and the medieval Latin poets. A tired volume about love and loss.