Ruth among the alien corns

COMPANIONS OF PARADISE (Headline/ Review, £ 6.00) by Thalassa Ali claims to be “a glorious historical novel of a woman torn between two cultures”. The novel is set in Kabul in 1841, and is about the experiences of Mariana Givens in the “intriguing [and] dangerous city”. Those who have read Sushmita Bandopadhyay’s Kabuliwalar Bangali Bou, would find themselves in familiar terrain here, with certain differences as concessions to the fact that bou in this case is an Englishwoman married to a Punjabi Muslim exiled in Kabul. Along with towering Afghans possessing a sense of honour as formidable as the mountains surrounding their lands, one will find here mystics lurking in the lanes lined with shops that sell exotic kukris and Persian daggers. The Afghans live up to the stereotype of being volatile and brash, when they flare up in the face of exploitation, predictably at the hands of British officials. Mariana plays her part by being divided between two traditions and saves the day armed with an Oriental heart and an Occidental intellect.

IT HAPPENED IN INDIA (Rupa, Rs 99) by Kishore Biyani is the autobiography of the man who created “the story of Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Central and the great Indian consumer”. Biyani is helped in scripting his success story by Dipayan Baishya. People who dream of making it big one day would no doubt find the story inspiring, given the fact that Biyani almost single-handedly started the chain of super-markets that have now cluttered every major city. Biyani himself seems to have been motivated in his venture by the likes of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Paulo Coelho, and Anthony Robbins, whose sayings he quotes in the beginning of his chapters. However, one cannot but exclaim in bafflement when Mother Teresa is quoted as saying “Give till it hurts” in the epigraph to the chapter, “Business of Life”, since this is not quite the philosophy one would associate with malls like Pantaloons. Perhaps it is the purchaser who is meant to be edified by it.

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA: THE LIVING VEDANTA (Penguin, Rs 375) by Chaturvedi Badrinath startles the reader in the very first line of the Acknowledgements by stating that “Women had a central place in the life and work of Swami Vivekananda”. The line sets the tone of the work which, to its credit, is the very opposite of a hagiography. It is an exploration of the man behind the iconic image, the man who could serve delectable dishes and deliver lectures on the most abstruse philosophical topics with equal ease. One of Vivekananda’s letters to Mrs Hale, his ‘Mother Church’, quoted here, ends with “This nonsense of the world. Shiva, Shiva, Shiva”. It seems uncannily close to the “Shantih, shantih, shantih”, coming after “Hieronymo’s mad againe” in T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land.

History OF CENTRAL ASIA (New Age, Rs 495) by Rahula Sankrityayana covers the time period from the Bronze Age (2000 BC) till the reign of Chengiz Khan in 1227 AD. It is history written interestingly, with a number of anecdotes to supplement the facts. The idea of enlivening the narrative with pictures seemed to have occurred to Sankrityayana on arriving at the very end of the book. So the chapter on Chengiz Khan is suddenly graced by a very poor reproduction of the ruler and that of a Mongol cart. The statutes laid down by Chengiz Khan, known as the Yassa, are recorded in detail. The rule forbidding one “to bathe, or wash one’s clothes in running water when there is a flash of lightning”, might have been approved by the king of Bombagarh.