The curious lovechild of horror, fantasy and chicklit

Author, graphic novelist and journalist Shweta Taneja's latest offering Cult of Chaos (Harper Collins India) is a curious book. It is a new kind of cross-breed, much like the oddball and imaginative creatures in the fantasy universe that she creates, right from the freewheeling and powerful female tantrik — Anantya Tantrist — to the host of rakshasas, minor demons, supernatural bladesmiths, serpentine potion makers and mysterious half-breed cops and forensic experts. Melding humour with horror, fantasy with chick-lit, the occult with technology and ancient myths and legends with a modern and urban vibe rooted in Delhi's posh farmhouses and crowded back alleys, the author has created a genre bender which is a fast paced and racy page-turner. Taneja's first full-fledged novel was The Ghost Hunters of Kurseong — a comic-ghostly caper for tweens and a training ground of sorts for this book, which is the first of her occult mystery series featuring Anantya Tantrist.

The chapters boomerang between the horrific and violent sacrifices and murders to some outright humorous oddball apparitions of the night, from apparently normal dates in a posh central Delhi restaurants to glamorous Page 3 parties showcasing filmstars and supernatural freaks.There are elements of a baroque excess about some of the set pieces in the book as a supernatural canvas unfolds across a very real Delhi life populated with all manner of supernatural creatures or 'sups', tantrics of various clans, rakshasas, daevas and many other half-breeds and undefined creatures from the various planes that are visible through Anantya's magical 'septifocals' and allow her to view what is unseen by regular human eyes.

There are some truly inspired creatures like the gnarled ancient tantrik Guru B with his great labyrinthine library of marvels and a taste for peacock meat. Then there is Kaani the blademaker who belongs to a tribe that has mastery of death and is a creation of pure genius. There are the absurd denizens of the Bedardi Bar who look like they would be perfectly at home in a Guillermo Del Toro visual spectacle. Shweta Taneja's brand of horror features generous doses of humour, plenty of high-octane action sequences, spell-casting duels (imagine Harry Potter & company going native), gizmos drama, romance and even a teensy bit of fashion thrown in. Above all, Cult of Chaos launches the newest crime fighter on the block who has shades of Nancy Drew, Lizbeth Salander, Miss Marple, Modesty Blaise and Trixie Beldon. At the same time she is her own peculiar person. Anantya is a curious character who piques one's imagination as much as the book itself. Armed with mantras for every occasion, this beedi-smoking, outcast rebel child of a detective has an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth and a knack to summon up the oddest supernatural sidekicks and minor demons to do her bidding. She straddles the worlds of darkness, light and all the supernatural things that lie in between with the preoccupations of a young 20-something free-spirited and independent young woman complete with raging hormones, an eye for vintage clothing and accessories and a taste for the heady soma. She can kick ass like no other and find a way out of the toughest spots with her ability to cast spells to match the occasion, summon spirits from the darkest circles of hell and give two hoots for order, propriety or hierarchies that other members of her order seem bound to.

The mystery itself follows the usual tropes, twists and red herrings and it is not the final resolution that leaves you feeling satisfied, rather it is in the telling of it. That and a spunky and irrepressible heroine and Taneja's mini mythopoeia with its assortment of 'sups', its parallel universes that lie beneath the cracks and around the bends of very real city like Delhi that makes Cult of Chaos a darned good yarn.

(This piece appeared in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 21 April, 2015)

Suniti Namjoshi: the fantastic fabulist

I met Suniti Namjoshi on a stormy evening last month at the Bowring Institute in Bangalore over cups of strong filter coffee. In town for the launch of her first ever picture book, Little i, published by Tulika Books, the London-based author was full of stories, especially about how she started writing for children—quite by accident and in part inspired by her niece Aditi, who is the inspiration behind her Aditi series.

“I was tired of taking her books about pink and blonde kids, so I typed up a story about an Indian girl and set it in surroundings that would be more familiar to her,” says Namjoshi, “This became Aditi and the One-Eyed Monkey, my first ever book for children which was actually published many years later.”

The funny part is that when nine-year-old Aditi read the story, she solemnly declared, But, this is not about my childhood, It’s about yours! “And she was bang on,” Namjoshi agrees. “In the story, I had written in places and characters who were derived from my own growing-up years.”
The second Aditi book also happened by chance after Namjoshi went for an event to the Blue Gate Fields Junior School in London, UK. “It was the strangest thing. There I was in front of a sea of brown faces in a school in London and all the children were thrilled to see me because I looked like them and I had also written a book about a character who was just like them,” she recalls. “They wanted Aditi to come to them and so I wrote Aditi and the Thames Dragon.” It was often such odd twists that caused the series to grow, and the places that Namjoshi visited, along with the things she liked—computers and the cyberspace, for example—wound their way into the books.

Little i is the latest instalment from Namjoshi’s imaginarium—a clever, whimsical and “stroppy little character” who is actually a runaway computer programme from an earlier book, Beautiful And the Cyberspace Runaway. Little i is a symbolic representation of the mathematical imaginary number, a little hat-tip to the self and a small but extremely important alphabet who keeps wanting to assert herself as the writer spins a witty and playful pictorial fable around her. On being asked for the nth time about her affinity with the fable, Namjoshi elaborates once again: “What the writing starts off with is an image, and a set of lines. These images start talking to each other and following their own inherent logic. Then begins the hard part of cleaning it up till it finally begins to sound right and the end result, whether it be a fable, a poem or something else, is something that takes shape through the process of writing. For example, when I think of a character like Little i who is a runaway computer programme, I try and think of what she would want to do now that she is outside the computer and in the real world. I figure that she would probably like to make friends and play. That is exactly what she goes about doing, stealing their vowels, and having some fun.”
She is as nimble with her language in a picture book like Little i as in the beautiful love poem, "All the Words", from the Flesh And Paper collection.
All the words have leaped into the air like the cards/ in Alice, like birds flying, forming, reforming, swerving and rising, and each word/ says it is love.

Images that leave an impact, whether from Shakespeare or a comic book, all contribute to Namjoshi’s fables. “I didn’t choose the form or the animal characters, they just came together from the debris of images, stories and poems floating about in the bottom of my mind and from what forms the rag and bone shop of the heart,” she says.

Her fables, she says, mean something entirely different for different people. And it is children who often have the power to observe things that adults miss (remember the child who points out that the emperor is stark naked in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes?).
"The Monkey And the Crocodile", one of her representative fables in The Feminist Fables, is a story that could be read on many levels by different kinds of readers. In it the monkey which lives on a jambu tree protected by her crocodile friends has a perfectly safe and charmed existence. However, bored by the sameness of her life, she wants to see the world, or at least the source of the river. Although she is warned by her friends about the beasts in the big bad world, she persists and sets off on her travels. When the monkey returns, several years later, she is bruised, battered, missing an eye and rather worse for the wear. On being asked about her condition she mentions the beasts and it is a telling statement which reveals that they looked just like her friends. While at the most basic level, and especially to a young reader, this could be a fable about the dangers that a girl might face in the outside world after leaving her friends behind, there are far deeper layers of gender inequality, abuse and iniquity that would be revealed to a more mature frame of reference.

Namjoshi herself has experienced several contexts in her life. She was born in a small town in Maharashtra, educated in an American school in Mussourie, and worked as a young officer in the Indian Administrative Service. Shocked at the imbalance of power in her country, she realized the necessity of subverting this equation. But, as she put it, she “wasn’t good enough” to bring in that change as a government official. So she turned to writing and her journey thereafter spanned three continents and 46 years away from her original homeland.

Home is now a nebulous concept for the writer, as she grew up in India, was given Canadian citizenship, and meanwhile lives and teaches in Exeter, UK. As she writes in Goja: An Autobiographical Myth: “I belong to India and to the West. Both belong to me and both reject me. I have to make sense of what has been and what there is”.

Namjoshi explains that this feeling of rejection is often due to the inability to fit in. And she describes it through her inimitable and wry humour. “Once, a fellow graduate student asked me whether I had smoked grass and I said that I hadn’t and, in an attempted jibe at coolness, had instead told him how I had tried to smoke rolled-up cabbage leaves in the past,” she says. “Needless to say, our versions of grass were entirely different.” At her poetic best, she describes the difference between the two cultures as the difference in the ephemeral shades of light in the afternoon.

Namjoshi writes herself into many of her stories, such as "The Conversations Of Cow" to "Saint Suniti And the Dragon". “There are different ideas behind each casting of myself,” she says, “If Sant Tukaram and other Bhakti poets can do it so why can’t I? I use this technique to question the existing norms at my own expense without attacking anyone else or gender stereotyping.”

It is this sense of humour that pervades her interactions as well. From joking with the photographer about the fact that there is finally a new picture to replace the existing one on the Internet (which, she says, makes her look like as though she owns precisely one red top) to cracking jokes about her age, Namjoshi is as full of lightness as her stories.

It is perhaps fitting that our meeting draws to a close with a striped tabby elegantly picking its way across a red shingled roof of the Bowring Institute in the fading light. It stops us in mid-sentence. To my mind, this unexpected image could well be the beginning of a new story for this extraordinary fabulist of our times.

This story appeared in the HT Mint Lounge on 27 September, 2014

The Unsettling Beauty of a Dark City

Delhi by night is dangerous, threatening, seething with discontent. There is something almost otherworldly about its tree-shrouded neighbourhoods and deserted multi-lane roads cast in the chiaruscuro shades of the sodium vapour lamps glinting through unruly amaltas trees. This is the real city that provides the context for Avatar Singh's literary city where crime, history, power, violence, beauty and death reign supreme. Published by Fourth Estate, this genre-straddling work is aptly named Necropolis and reveals a side of the city where the dead are never quite gone. The book which is at once an ode to a city as well as a vindication of its shortcomings is a city novel like no other. And who better to write this than Avatar Singh, the Dilliwallah who knows its numerous nooks and crannies and their varied secrets and offerings. As editor of Time Out's very first Delhi edition, he encouraged people to go out and explore the city and find its many stories in its many mohallas.

One of the reasons Avatar Singh succeeds in his crazy literary experiment of a book is the deftness with which he juxtaposes types, characters and styles. He pits poetry against hard-boiled crime fiction, a literary ethos with genre exercises and history with news from the sensationalist urban rags. Necropolis is both an episodic novel as well as a collection of short stories linked through their common protagonists, antagonists and fictional landscape.

It is perhaps fitting that its cover features the forbidding yet enticing image of a dark purple rose — an image that is morbidly fascinating as a symbol of a strange and almost decaying beauty. It is also apt that a murder is announced in the first three lines of the book followed up by a detailed description of the dead body especially its most unusual feature — "Around his throat was a necklace of fingers". This finger collector or Angulimaal is one of the recurring characters in the novel — a mysterious young man whose face is always shrouded by a kaffiyeh — and whose actions remain cryptic as he plays nemesis as well as informer to DCP Dayal with equal ease.

DCP Sajan Dayal is our unmistakable hero, a Dilliwallah to the boot with a hint of an old-world tehzeeb, a love for Ghalib and in his own words "a chowkidar with a taste for history". He is an anomaly of sorts — an original denizen in a city of migrants, a well-bred and upright police officer — both characteristics of a rare and vanishing breed. He is well aided by Kapoor, an older and legendary police officer with a longstanding if violent reputation of dealing with criminals, and Smita Dhingra, a fresh IPS recruit who struggles with her experiences as a woman law enforcer in a city which "isn't famous for treating its daughters well." This trio form the crime fighting protectors of the city, its last defence against an endless anarchy.

Their milieu is made up of other shadowy creatures of the night ­— the lycans, the vampires, the drug dealers, the kidnappers, the rapists and the murderers as well as the other equally dangerous creatures who roam the corridors of power by day and act as puppetmasters controlling the fates of its 25 million odd inhabitants. Into this mix is thrown the novel's most pivotal character, an anthropomorphic representation of Delhi through her various pasts and presents, her muse and her burden — the irresistible Razia. She is all charm and romance and poetry. She personifies night and time and in all her endless ages, she is both a victim of the city as well as its vigilante defender. It is her passionate relationship with DCP Dayal, her omnipresence across the pages and crimes that make her fascinating. In one of her first encounters with the DCP, there is an inspired exchange of words between the duo:

“These girls call me Razia. I don’t know why.”
“It fits. Delhi’s own Sultana. Regal, powerful.”
“Dead, too, these past eight hundred years.”
“A blink of the eye in this city’s history, surely.”

Singh fuses fantasy with gritty realism. His exploration of the city noir is deliberate as he traverses the length and the breadth of this heaving metropolis capturing the stench of the Yamuna, the decrepit evil lurking in the carefully tucked away urban slums, the fragrant beds of hollyhocks and rows of silk cottons in Lutyens Delhi, the mirrored ostentation of South Delhi's nouveau mansions, the anonymity of its migrant workforce, the staggering power of its elite and the shadow of the crime that lurks at every corner of the various Delhis encased in each other like Matryoshka dolls.

He scratches at the raw surface of a shared history to reveal the crimes wrought by time and finds no healing balm even as his crusaders race to stop the marauders who threaten to destroy all. He takes the reader through the different textures of the city through its changing seasons and neighbourhoods. His novel is the chronicle of an unforgettable and unusual love affair with Delhi, a city where the possibility of romance exists near the darkest pools of hell.

A loopy and lesser edited version was published in the New Indian Express Bangalore on 24 March, 2015

A Young Woman in Search of a Husband

A self-confessed funny girl, Itisha Peerbhoy’s debut novel, Half Love Half Arranged is definitely funny, laced with familiar characters and an easy urban vibe that is immediately recognisable. It is the tale of 30-year-old Rhea Kanwar — a single Punjabi IT professional who lives with her parents — and is as plagued by her unchanging single status as she is by the impending threat of her ‘boobs racing towards her toes’. About ten kilos over the ideal weight for the prospective bride, Rhea is on a husband hunting mission spurred on by her mother who is our very own homegrown Mrs Bennet, obsessing about the perfect match while running her household and the lives of her three daughters with an iron fist.

If one uprooted Bridget Jones from a very cerebral London sort of a life to a Punjabi household and replaced the dishy suitors with prospective husbands 1 to 3, one would arrive at an approximation of Rhea Kanwar. Except here, the obsession seems to be with finding a husband rather than Mr Right and so much so that towards the end, the book spirals into a crazy race towards the mandap with pretty much anyone who will agree to be there. While this is the disappointing and regressive plot point in an otherwise light and sparkling work of "chicklit", Itisha’s story still retains its fizz and underlying humour. A quick, frothy and light read, Half Love Half Arranged could have done with some brevity as the twists tend to wear thin by the last 50 odd pages of the book and a part of you wants to shake Rhea’s ample frame and ask her to wake up to the 21st century with its suffragettes and the bra burners rather than regress into an imitation of a 19th century Victorian heroine, despondent without a man in her life.

For someone who is independent, strong-willed and otherwise pretty smart and spunky, Rhea ends up in a pile of Pimms-fuelled simpering silliness ever too often. Rhea’s adventures with Pammi Auntiji’s esoteric marriage bureau, her all-girl Vodka fuelled bitching sessions, her camaraderie with her sisters and some spicy dollops of love, sex and dhoka, make this an engaging and light-hearted read without devolving into the stuff of diabetes inducing pulp that seems to have become the mainstay of commercial romantic fiction in India.

The first generation torchbearers of chicklit included the path-blazing wit of Anuja Chauhan, the quirkiness of Advaita Kala and the effervescence of Swati Kaushal. Thereafter, there seems to have been an imaginative void and Itisha Peerbhoy brings some hope to this tired genre, infusing it with a new spark and creating winsome characters for today. While these are women who are unabashed about the choices the make and make no bones about the merit of a good roll in the hay and boast a wicked sense of humour to boot. Peerbhoy’s singular flaw is perhaps her hurry to acquiesce to the fact that a single woman in possession of a brain and a will must be in want of a husband.


This was published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 3rd March 2015

Bound In Laughter, Love and Arrack

The Amazing Racist opens on a hot tropical day in Colombo, Sri Lanka. There is a tropical storm brewing in the distant horizon as well as one far more deadly, simmering in the office of Thilak Rupasinghe, top litigation lawyer and former president’s counsel, a protective and dominating father and a man with a diminutive stature but a persona so towering that he could literally frighten away cancer. In the momentary calm before the storm, Eddie Trusted, a rather bewildered English schoolteacher, waits in the verandah burping curry and watching the minutes vanish in the buildup to one of the most significant moments in his life — as he is about to ask this much feared patriarch for the hand of Menaka Rupasinghe, his daughter — a mere seven weeks after he has landed in the country.
Plagued by the effects of spice on his digestive tract, the weather on his constitution and the chaotic traffic on his stress-prone disposition, Eddie is an outsider in more ways than one. And yet, unable to resist the charms of the veritable Sri Lankan goddess Menaka, he finds himself falling so deeply for her that he is ready to marry her and make this little politically fraught island country his own. But first of all, he has to pass the many tests laid out for him by his future father-in-law with a fairly anti-colonialist bent of mind and a distaste for the white man and his imaginary 21st-century burdens.
Chhimi Tenduf-La’s The Amazing Racist (Hachette India) is a rollercoaster ride through the life and times of two men, divided by the colour of their skin, age, cultural traditions and opinions, and brought together by their unusual circumstances, a whole lot of whiskey and the girls in their lives. Their interactions are less meetings and more like mini battles fraught with manic car rides, liver-melting arracks, sparks and tension, racist jokes and the ghost of deportation lurking around the corner. Eddie Trusted and Thilak Rupasinghe are polarised ends of a cultural spectrum forced together by the headstrong and free-spirited Menaka.
The author’s skill lies in his telling of this simple and straightforward tale with generous shots of humour, wit and sensitivity. From laugh-out-loud moments to politically incorrect jokes, from the black humour of human foibles to a witty look at the innards of the modern family mechanism, from the curious frailty of traditional bonds to the poignancy of unlikely and resilient bonds, the book chews its way through human relationships in all its myriad hues.
Chhimi Tenduf-La, who has mined some of his personal experiences in order to bring this world to life, is a fresh and promising new voice on the literary landscape. With a British mother, a Tibetan father and a  Sri Lankan wife, the author certainly knows a thing or two about cultural cross-connections. Also, having spent enough time in Colombo, he had the unique vantage point to write this story with its motley cast of characters dealing with this strangely functional and dysfunctional city.
Set against the backdrop of an ancient-modern country ravaged by war and yet somehow getting on with all the motions of ordinary life, The Amazing Racist teeters away from deeper political issues presenting a light-hearted fictional universe with just the occasional real-life reference slipping through. Unlike hardened semi-fictional narratives of war and terror, this book soars free of the political baggage of its nation and tells a funny, accessible and charming story about a family and its oddball denizens. And the best part is that it doesn’t take itself terribly seriously as it sets out to expound exactly why every character finds himself or herself a place they can call home in Sri Lanka or the “best country in the world”. 

This was published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 10 February, 2015

Where the God of Small Things Lives

While The God of Small Things created ripples in the world of literature way back in the nineties, I waited 13 years to read Arundhati Roy’s magnum opus. Today, my copy of the book is a memory of my holiday, tattered and misshapen and stuffed with stubs, pressed petals and brochures about god's own country.

For me, The God of Small Things was my faithful friend through my journey in the backwater state of Kerala. It was my travel guide, my food bible and my local encyclopedia of trivia. It was a compendium of magic words that brought the backwaters alive with an epic tale. Although the book released way back in 1997, I waited for many summers and winters to pass in order to find the perfect moment to read it. In between jobs and having liquidated all my meagre savings in order to go on a holiday, I decided to embark on my first solo trip in India. This is also when I decided to read the book.

As a woman in India, travelling alone on public transport itself can be daunting, thus a single female holidaymaker is a rare and unheard of species rarely dotting the tourist map. Yet, I persisted, having known gentle people from the state, eaten great food and heard about the remarkably low statistics of violence against women, I was convinced that Kerala was where I must go. The only companion I had was the book. And it managed to transform my ordinary holiday into an imaginary universe. The God of Small Things seemed to appear to me at every twist in the roads of Kerala. I expected the land to be no different from what Arundhati Roy described:

“...by early June the southwest monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across flooded roads. Boats ply in bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways...”

As my aircraft descended rather bumpily towards the tarmac at the Cochin International Airport, the first thing I saw through the tiny window was a lush, deep-green sea below me. Gradually miniature trees and fields and foliage appeared. Then came the discernible coconut trees waving their heads, and then came the first streaky droplets of rain forming patterns on the outside of my window. Filled with trepidation, I felt strangely comforted by the rain. I had just started reading the book and was at the point when the whole family made a trip to watch The Sound of Music one afternoon. This ended up being a pivotal moment in the book that foreshadowed later tragedies and small and large betrayals. I left the airport humming old tunes from the Hollywood classic just like Estha, one of the fraternal twins who make up the cast of characters that populate the family home at Ayemenem. As I collected my bags, my thoughts still scattered all over wondering whether cinemas like Abhilash Talkies still existed in 21stand versatility of the Keralite mundu after witnessing the ease with which the men all round me irrespective of age and body types showed off their legs. I now also had a mental picture for Velutha, the untouchable antihero of sorts who impresses in his mundu and white shirt as he marched in a party demonstration with a red flag.

I was also thinking about how the afternoon sky would change it colours at random as the sun played hide and seek with the clouds. A few afternoons later as I saw the sky turn red with an impending storm, I remembered another red sky that Rahel (the other twin) sees through her cheap red plastic sunglasses which gradually turns to a sickly orange as her brother Estha is abused by the creepy Orangedrink Lemondrink man.

As I travelled through the banana-fronded backwater country to the secluded Phillip Kutty’s farm set on a manmade island in the middle of an exceptionally large canal off the Vembanad Lake, I realized that I was just a few kilometers from Roy’s Ayemenem and in a little town just like it. Just like the book, this too was a place where life happened on the backwaters. Thus my first ride on a country boat or vallom to see the rising moon was a moment enhanced by Roy’s lyrical poetry. I dipped my hand in the waters and the words came to life.

“It was warm, the water. Greygreen. Like rippled silk.
With fish in it.
With the sky and the trees in it.
And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.”

I spent the balmy nights reading the book out on the porch of my room overlooking the silver waters of the backwaters by the light of a single lamp casting its yellow pool in the darkness and bringing all the silken winged moths to my door to die. I could smell the brooding air of the of Ayemenem. I could hear the fluttering of Pappachi’s moth. My heart ached for Ammu. Just like it ached for the young widow Anu Mathew (the owner of the wonderful homestay that I was staying in). She was a brave and feisty lady who was fulfilling her husband’s dream all by herself. Her farm, where I spent three lovely days, radiated all her family’s warmth and reflected the hopes her husband had for the place before he suddenly passed on.

All these thoughts played into my understanding and love for the book. As I ate homemade banana jam for breakfast, I thought of the Paradise Pickles and Preserves run by Mammachi and the strange consistency of banana jam/jelly. I learnt about the history of the Syrian Christian community through the food that I gorged on every day. I learnt about the produce of the land through Anu Mathew and her mother-in-law over shared conversations on the dinner tables. In the dark hours of the night, Arundhati Roy’s magical prose brought me closer to the land I was passing through. She gave me a language to tell my story about Kerala to the world. I am glad I had waited to read it all these years for now I remember it like no other. The characters in this book gave me a few oddball companions on solitary walks and the story itself became a bookend for my own journey into this beautiful country ruled by the god of small things.

This was published in the New Indian Express, Bangalore on 25 September 2014

A 'Scrumdiddlyumptious' Treat

Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory published in 1964 is something that has percolated through a myriad storytelling sessions and assumed a permanent spot in the collective memory of generations of children who have come of age in the last five decades.

Set against the unusual backdrop of a mysterious chocolate factory, this curiously dark and often bittersweet tale is in equal parts fantasy and fable and above all a story with startling original content that has captured the imagination as no other.

Adapted variously into films, musicals, games, radio and stage productions, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has rarely been out of the public eye for long and its characters have become a part of the cultural iconography of our times inspiring dinner menus, tea parties  and of course candy. The real-life Willy Wonka Candy Company which is currently owned by Nestle actually manufactures goodies like the Everlasting Gobstopper which was first imagined in the pages of the book. Then there was the magnificent televised feast inspired by the book created by world-renowned chef Heston Blumenthal who called Willy Wonka his "sixties childhood hero" and went on to recreate a magnificent Lickable Wallpaper.

Based on the real-life spy-thriller tactics employed by rival chocolate companies in order to steal each other's latest innovations and Dahl's own love for candy, Willy Wonka's chocolate universe is one that is as fascinating as it is terrifying. With taffy trees that grow jelly apples, mushrooms that spurt whipped cream, a boiled sweet boat that takes the crew down the chocolate river, this is truly a magic landscape. However, it is also one where danger lurks in the sweet depths and holes and crevasses open up swallowing the greedy and the proud — the veritable bad eggs of the group — and send them off to a sorry unsweet end.

The tiny Oompa Loompas from Loompa-Land who work in Willy Wonka's factory, enamoured by the chocolate and glad to have escaped the predatory Whangdoodles, Hornswogglers and Snozzwanglers from their own land, judge the bad kids with a song and dance and are oddly gleeful at their odd transformations.
The odd childishness of adults like Willy Wonka himself and the rather adult observations of the very astute Charlie Bucket make this a book that turns conventions on its head, subverts established norms as well as presents the majority of children as well as adults as not very pleasant or likeable characters. Apart from this, the unmatched imagination, colour, drama, poetry, humour and unforgettable cast of characters in this book has the power to hold any child in its thrall.

Timed perfectly with its fiftieth birthday, two previously 'lost' chapters of the book were published only last month, thrilling legions of fans, researchers, academics and a whole new generation of 21st century children whose love affair with candy continues unabated. Among other things these chapters show more of Willy Wonka's marvellous inventions like the The Warming Candy Room where —
"There's an amazing machine, a bit like the gum machine we know, but it produces these extraordinarily hot sweets that you're only supposed to eat one of."
 And like all his extraordinary candy that come with certain warnings, this one is no different and promises to delight those who show restraint and punish the greedy with consequences that verge on comic horror. Thus those who gorge on the hot candy, overheat and need to be locked away in refrigerators in remote corners of the factory for a long, long time. Similarly the characters (and these newly published chapters reveal that Roald Dahl originally included ten children in the party) who trespass on the forbidden areas of the Vanilla Fudge Mountain, where hunks of fudge are constantly being pried and taken away also meet a sorry fate. They fall into the 'pounding and cutting room' and —
"into the mouth of a huge machine. The machine then pounds it against the floor until it is all nice and smooth and thin. After that, a whole lot of knives come down and go chop chop chop, cutting it up into neat little squares, ready for the shops."

This is the perfect bookend to a year which is full of celebrations for fans both old and new. The publishers as well as the Roald Dahl Trust have a whole range of goodies lined up which include the launch of a new Roald Dahl Audio App, A West End musical production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka inspired desserts by star chefs, Golden Ticket trails at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, a Dahlicious Dress Up day in schools across the UK later this month,  and fifty fundraising sky-diving folks dressed up as Oompa Loompas!

When I found out about these new chapters, I felt like doing a little jig just like the 96-year-old Grandpa Joe did when he found out that Charlie had won the Golden Ticket and an entry into the magical factory. It is true for many of my generation that fifty years later, this book is still a scrumdiddlyumptious treat to be savoured one page at a time.

This was published in the New Indian Express, Bangalore on 23 September 2014

The Fragrant Tale of Biryani

(A version of this article appeared in Food Lover's Magazine Oct-Nov '13 issue)

Since rice is a staple in vast swathes of the subcontinent and is also abundantly available, it assumes great significance on any table both plain as well as in its fragrant avatars as biryanis and pulaos. Although these dishes are ubiquitous today, they have evolved through history and been influenced by the varied foreign influences, rice is no different. Well-cooked rice is an essential part of any meal, either as the basic carbohydrate component or the centrepiece of the table as a biryani or pulao. In both cases, the type of rice used, its cooking time, texture and aroma determines the flavour of the entire meal.

The journey from an 8^th-century caliph’s court in Persia to a 16^th century Mughal war camp to the modern day biryani chains in every city in India, is a tale of conquests, travels and trade relations.  The biryani and pulao or pilaf piggybacked its way into India on the backs of the foreign cooks that accompanied the various merchants, traders and foreign invaders. They were assimilated into the culture in different parts of the country depending on the availability of ingredients, local tastes and the variety of rice that was popular in the region. The earliest biryani can be traced to the 14^thcentury when Timur or Tamerlane, Babur’s ancestor visited India on conquering raids and probably introduced this particular Persian dish into the native cuisine. It was in the Mughal Emperor Akbar’s kitchens that the Indian biryani was born. As Lizzie Collingham writes in her book on the history and culture of Indian cuisine, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerers:

Akbar ensured that the central Asian culture and Persian influences melded with Hindustani culture to create a Mughlai culture which was a synthesis of all three. The same process of synthesis went on in the kitchens. Here the delicately flavoured Persian pilau met the pungent and spicy rice dishes of Hindustan to create the classic Mughlai dish, biryani.

 Travelling across India, one will find a local variant of biryani and pulao in nearly every state of the country. From the long-grained saffron laced goat meat biryani made famous by the Nizams’ kitchens in Hyderabad to the short-grained spice and dry fruit laden Thalassery biryani popular all along the Malabar Coast, there is a nuanced difference of texture, spice levels and cooking techniques that make the biryani a unique and much debated over dish wherever you go. The basic difference between the biryani and pulao lie in their cooking styles rather than ingredients. While the biryani uses the technique of layering parboiled rice and meat and then cooking them in the dum style (cooking by sealing the dish to trap the flavours), the pulao is cooked together with spices, vegetables and/or meat. This is also known as the kachchi or raw style and many debates range over whether a rice dish cooked in the kachchi style is biryani or pulao.

It is a well-known fact that the elegant and flavoursome Basmati is the favourite of biryani makers across the country. Not only does it add to the aroma and texture, it also forms the aesthetic bridge between the local pulao and its sophisticated relative from the city, the lovely biryani. It is this basmati that is the main element in biryanis as diverse as the Calcutta-style biryani with its potato and egg component as well as the Bangalore biryani with its coriander and mint accents. The basmati rules the roost whether it is in the Nizami speciality from Hyderabad or the Awadhi Dum Pukht biryani from the famous chefs of Lucknow. Unfortunately, although the Basmati might be the chosen rice, it is fairly expensive and cannot be the stuff of daily home-cooked meals. There are other cheaper and local varieties of rice that have been adopted to make different types of biryani. The most famous among these is the Kaima or Khyma rice used to make the popular biryani of the Malabar region known as the Thalassery biryani. The medium grained Sona Masuri rice available in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka is often used a substitute for Basmati while making biryanis and pulaos and many feel that this version is gentler on the digestive tracts.

Apart from biryanis, there are a number of classic pulaos from various parts of the country which get their unique flavours as much from the local ingredients as from the rice used. Jadoh, a Khasi delicacy from Meghalaya uses short grained rice called Joha which is then mixed with spices, fresh ginger, garlic and meat (usually pork) to create a tasty and wholesome staple which is eaten in households and available at nearly every street corner in specialized Jadoh stalls. Bengalis around the world swear by the delicately flavoured Bengali Mishti Pulao or Sweet Rice made with the incredibly fragrant short-grained Gobindobhog rice which is cooked with peas, cashews, raisins and sugar, ghee and whole spices and coloured yellow with turmeric. This pulao is usually cooked for feasts and festive occasions and is delicious on its own or as an accompaniment to spicy meat and chicken dishes or lentil curries.

Whatever be the rice, one thing is certain that the dish complements its maker and each brings its unique flavour to the pot. Pratibha Karan in her introduction to the bestselling cookbook, Biryani (2009) writes about the striking alchemy between biryani and rice –

The magic of the biryani is the way in which rice is transformed into something ambrosial – absorbing the rich flavours of meat and spice, scented with the dizzying aromas of saffron, rose, jasmine or screwpine; the white grains taking on a gem-like mien.

Cooking by the Book

The frayed, oil-stained, food-encrusted pages of the book are testament to the first baby steps.

Rohini Singh's The Foolproof Cookbook: For Brides Bachelors & Those Who Hate Cooking is an old trusty companion, the proverbial bible for me and a million other novices. It is perhaps one of those rare books whose little red sticker which proclaims "over a million copies sold" is entirely believable. This was a gift from my mother when I left home for college. She told me to use it well and I did. The book taught me how to adjust the flame, boil, blanch, chop,  grind, garnish, steam, deep fry, pressure cook. It taught me 
more about the metric/imperial system than the math classes in school. It it has lined the bottom of my suitcases wherever I have travelled. It has occupied the prime position on my kitchen shelf. Always within reach. Always within sight.

My initiation rites into the kitchen were completed with  some minor tragedies, a few drops of blood, plenty of spillage and smoke, and one dog-eared, turmeric-stained page with the recipe for a punjabi chicken curry or Surkh Kukkad.
The book became a permanent fixture in the lovely little kitchen of our rather lavish rooftop college pad. We (me and my flat mates) never had enough utensils, we never had enough raw materials and we never had that much food. But we had the book. We had enthusiasm. We had hungry boys living in hostels who would always land up with a couple of headless birds and we would cook. Like old women in a community kitchen, we would gossip, chop onions, shed tears, share stories, smoke, drink, chat, and bond over the open pages of this book. We would dream about our futures balanced precariously on the rim of the gas cylinder, inhaling the aroma of the spices. We ate many birds over those three summers. 
The book would automatically flip open to that page made heavy by all the grease embedded into the paper. In those days the recipe was an adversary to be cajoled, forced and attacked till it yielded something that could be consumed and in those days we would pretty much consume anything. Every dish cooked was a battle won. Every food-stained page was my victorious pennant fluttering over the bones of the birds eaten, and a little tribute to the ghosts of the dead chickens. May they all rest in peace.