FIVE BOOKS YOU MUST READ

ALL ABOUT H HATTERR BY GV DESANI

If you haven’t read Hatterr, put down this paper and order it now. This is an amazing book for its time; it is self-reflexive, ironic and sophisticated. It reminds one of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. You will revel in a language at once strange and also frighteningly familiar: this is how English is spoken in India and this is how it does not show up in most novels. Sterne never had a successor but the brilliant hybrid Hatterr found one in Saleem Sinai and all the other hybrids Rushdie dreamed up over the next few decades in his all-colour hundred-spice literary dreamerama.

MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN BY SALMAN RUSHDIE

When Saleem Sinai bumped his nose and bled, we were all blooded. The book won the James Tait Prize and the Booker Prize, and then the Booker of Bookers, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the prize. The Empire was now indeed writing back. Here was a boy out of Bombay, whose bum had been numbed by a bench in a school here, and there he was writing as if the subcontinent still flowed rich and hot and curried through his veins. It is still a novel I can go back to and which rewards reading each time. Other favourite: The Moor’s Last Sigh.

SWAMI AND FRIENDS BY RK NARAYAN

This RK Narayan because the others are just a little too innocent for me, it’s as if the south Indian village of Malgudi never knew a caste atrocity. But with Swami and Friends, I can relax and I can enter fully into the world of a little boy whose friends are Mani the Mighty Good-for-Nothing and Rajam, captain of a cricketing eleven and Samuel the Pea. Narayan was a fine writer, perhaps too fine a writer for how savage an Indian village can be but he got the world of the male child perfectly.

THE SHADOW LINES BY AMITAV GHOSH

Were Amitav Ghosh not such a fine novelist, he would have been a great writer of non-fiction. It is possible to read In an Antique Land as a novel, so sure is his hand. (Which should answer the question of the other favourite). The Shadow Lines asks a fundamental question: how do we become who we are? And how can we find out? How can you know a city like London before you have been there? (Your cousin Tridib told you about it, everyone’s chachi Enid told them about it.) And how do you understand the nature of violence?

FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN BY ANITA DESAI

Nanda Kaul has a certain vision of old age: she is going to spend it on a mountain, she is going to work it all out. But life has other plans for her which show up in the form of a catalytic converter, her grand-daughter Raka. This is a novel about relationships and its silences are as potent as its words and its metaphors. (Other favourite: Baumgartner’s Bombay)