Through the heart of Hindustan

WITH CYCLISTS AROUND THE WORLD (Roli, Rs 350) by Adi B. Hakim, Rustom B. Bhumgara and Jal P. Bapasola is the fascinating memoir of three young Parsi men of a group of six from the Bombay Weightlifting Club, who set a precedence in globe-trotting by going around the world in bicycles. Starting in October 1923, they journeyed for over four years, going from the Middle East to south Europe, across the British Isles to America, then covering Japan and China to come “rolling home” through Bengal, Madras and Ceylon. While the authors revel in the “gay amusements” of Paris, they have nothing but scorn for the filthy Italian peasants with dirty neckties, and are repulsed by the Japanese meal of live mice dipped in honey. However, they find the biggest surprise of the trip right in their own country, in Calcutta, when only a handful of people turn up to welcome the cyclists, who had become quite famous elsewhere in the world by then. To read the book is to travel not only all over the globe but also to another time preserved in the memory of the adventurers.

MEANWHILE, UPRIVER (Penguin, Rs 250) by Chatura Rao is set in the dingy bylanes and ghats of Benaras. The fetid and sacred Ganga broods over the novel like destiny. The life of Shiva, who was abandoned on the ghats and found by the charismatic Bhyom Baba, and that of the obese, caustic, thirty-something Yamini run parallel in the story until they come together unexpectedly. For both, the river is the site where dreams and nightmares merge, shift and disintegrate, only to coalesce again. Shiva and Yamini’s feelings of loss and strangeness unite them as they valiantly swim against the tide to find an illusory place called home.

KISSING THE FROG: THE MAGIC THAT MAKES YOU MONEY (Macmillan, Rs 295) by The Brothers Middleton has an unconventional way of dealing with money matters — through fairy tales. And so we have Goldilocks, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Little Pigs, all lined up to explain different types of investment, tax advantages and hedged funds. Whatever economists and tax-lawyers might think of the book’s merit, one has to acknowledge that it requires a considerable exercise of the imagination to fit the fairy tales into treatises on financial speculation.

SÉANCE ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON (Rupa, Rs 195) by Shinie Antony are about “things that go bump in the mind”. The short stories are startling in their cheekiness and black humour. The sordidness of holy matrimony is the recurring theme in most of the stories. In “Dry-mouthed”, the wife desperately imagines her husband’s death in an attempt to make it true. She detests him because he is so annoyingly nice — “the perfect man to have children with, to plan a future with, to grow old and senile and lose all your teeth with”. The forty-year old unmarried woman in “Catnap” would love to have “a vagabond vagina and viable ovaries,” if only she had men with whom to put them to use. The irreverence of the stories reminds one of Evelyn Waugh, whom Antony thanks in the Acknowledgements for being an inspiration.

LIFE AFTER DEATH: SHOCKING TRUTH UNRAVELLED (Frog, Rs 45) by Girish Menon is indeed a revelation. The author, who demands to be taken seriously, has been doing research on biomagnetic fields for the past three years. In the course of his study, he “accidentally” detected the presence of the soul. There was no stopping him after that. If you want to know the ‘real’ reason behind a mental illness like schizophrenia, Menon will tell you that it is caused by the soul of a dead person attaching itself to a live one.