Lady with the cats

Women of the Tagore Household (Penguin, Rs 499) by Chitra Deb is the modern Bengali classic, Thakurbarir Andarmahal, rendered into English by Smita Chowdhry and Sona Roy. The Tagores of Jorasanko, teeming with geniuses, had a decisive influence on the cultural life of Bengal. Apart from celebrated male figures like Rabindranath, the family included extraordinary and eccentric women like Swarnakumari (Rabindranath’s elder sister), Mrinalini (his wife) and Kadambari (his sister-in-law). Through her painstaking research, Deb unearths the life and times of these women, some of whom are alive today, and their rich but unsung contribution to art, literature, music, theatre and to women’s movement in modern Bengal. A richly layered and rivetting text, it should have been translated much earlier.

MADONNA OF MUMBAI CATS AND OTHER STORIES (Har-Anand, Rs 250) by Sadiqa Peerbhoy grips your attention with its title, which belongs to the opening story of the collection. As cryptic as its title, this fascinating tale is told in a lively but controlled manner, though the conclusion is not hard to predict. These stories are set in Mumbai, some going back to the time when the city was still Bombay, and grow around small neighbourhoods abuzz with a hundred little conspiracy theories. In a typically Indian set-up, the neighbours are impossibly nosy, quarrelsome and often absurdly suspicious of one another’s motives. Peerbhoy has an ear for dialogue and a feel for prose, over which she has admirable control. She observes closely, and can insinuate sinister motives underlying what looks routinely everyday. If she harnesses her creative energies to make up more complex and layered plots, she is likely to mature into a confident writer.

THE HOUSE OF FEAR (Random House, Rs 195) by Ibn-e Safi occupies a pre-eminent position in the little-known canon of crime fiction in Urdu. Born in the late 1920s, Ibn-e Safi wrote immensely popular stories in the 1950s. An inventive writer, he was an equally amazing human being, as is evident from the delightful introduction written by his son, Ahmad Safi. Translated by Bilal Tanweer, this volume includes a couple of bizarre little mysteries solved by the flamboyant Ali Imran, who, with his odd sartorial taste and an odder sense of humour, is a rather unlikely sleuth.