SIDDHARTHA GIGOO

Siddhartha Gigoo is a Commonwealth prize-winning author.

Ibegan the year by resolving to counter its pace by cultivating slowness. Reading, therefore, was done primarily to slow the pace of time and to reflect upon the times. In Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1967), one glimpses a world stripped of all humanity. ‘We have figured out a new way to burn people,’ says an inmate put in charge of a crematorium in a death camp by the Nazis. Then, Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1979) destroyed me. ‘For us, history has stopped,’ says Levi. George Saunders’ Booker-winning ingenious novel, Lincoln in the Bardo taught me a thing or two about craft. The sentence — The moon shone down brightly, allowing me a first good look at his face. And what a face it was — is possibly the best literary sentence of the year.

In Arvind Gigoo’s Gulliver in Kashmir Gulliver travels to Kashmir and sees ‘the dual nature of man, the marriage of opposites and contradictions, the proximity of love and hate, the distance between old compassion and new callousness.’ Gulliver gets to meet the Buddha and hear a retelling of the Fire Sermon. ‘And some among them wrote books which nobody read,’ observes Gulliver.

Mir Khalid’s Jaffna Street, a haunting memoir of growing up in downtown Srinagar in the 1990s, explores the irreconcilable paradoxes of human existence in Kashmir. The book profiles the old city and its residents with their infallible capacity to rise from the ashes. Tikuli’s poetry collection, Wayfaring, sheds light on what it means to not abandone the will to create beauty even in despair. Hang Kang’s The Vegetarian is keeping me engrossed these days.