Celestial Bodies
Jokha Alharthi
The two books I loved this year were Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi and Sita Under the Crescent Moon by Annie Ali Khan.
Winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, Celestial Bodies packs the stories of sisters Mayya, Asma and Khawla, of Mayya’s husband Abdallah ibn Sulayman, motherless son of a slave-owning merchant traumatized by his father’s personality, and of their families into its 256 pages. Alharthi’s people bring alive the social transformation of Oman. For an Indian reader, these stories are at once foreign and familiar. They reminded me of conversations with older relatives that revealed forgotten family rituals, distasteful caste customs, and ill-fated pairings. A wonderful book.
I hadn’t heard of Annie Ali Khan until I began reading Sita Under the Crescent Moon. Two chapters in I Googled her hoping to make contact. Alas, she had been dead a year. I wanted to ask her if the book was a travelogue as it follows women on pilgrimages to Sufi shrines at Mango Pir, Hinglaj, Thatta, and Sehwan Sharif in Pakistan; if, with its fantastic descriptions of dhamaals, it was an examination of ecstatic religiosity; if it was a plea to nurture the syncretic traditions of the subcontinent as the pilgrims worship the memory of Sita, that doomed paragon of virtue. It is all of these and it is more. It is a cry against the limited lives of women in the cultures of the region. Sita Under the Crescent Moon is a moving, infinitely rewarding read.