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The Grammar of My Body

Subverting an ableist India’s expectations from a disabled person to be ‘inspirational’ and an ‘underdog who made it’ despite their illness, Abhishek Anicca writes about everyday stories of living with disability and chronic illness in this memoir-in-essays. With piercing mindfulness and radical vulnerability, Annica writes sparse and compelling essays on the self, questions of care and dignity, dating and navigating desire as a queer-disabled man, self-hatred, moving about with a crutch, chronic pain and shame, the chilling lack of representation in the media and reflections on nearing death. Conversational and informal, truthful and unflinching, Anicca’s wry and urgent essays in. The Grammar of My Body compel the reader to become at once distant from and proximate to their inner experiences.

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The Great Flap of 1942

The Great Flap of 1942 is a narrative history of a neglected and scarcely known period―between December 1941 and mid-1942―when all of India was caught in a state of panic. This was largely a result of the British administration's mistaken belief that Japan was on the verge of launching a full-fledged invasion. It was a time when the Raj became unduly alarmed, when the tongue of rumour wagged wildly about Japanese prowess and British weakness and when there was a huge and largely unmapped exodus (of Indians and Europeans) from both sides of the coastline to 'safer' inland regions. This book demonstrates, quite astonishingly, that the Raj cynically encouraged the exodus and contributed to the repeated cycles of rumour, panic and flight.

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The Meat Market by Mashiul Alam

OUTSTANDING SHORT FICTION FROM ONE OF BANGLADESH’S MOST INGENIOUS WRITERS. In the village of Modhupur, the new mother Julekha’s breasts dry up, but to everyone’s consternation, her little baby finds a dog to suckle on; Allah’s angel gives little Khobir fifty takas to buy sweets but his gambling father snatches the money away; journalist Jamil spirals hearing that all communication has been cut off in his hometown of Roop Nagar after a girl is gangraped, hacked, cooked and eaten by young men; Modhu, a penniless farmhand, leaves for Dhaka to drive a rickshaw two weeks a month, while his wife is actively wooed and seduced by his neighbour; Aminul Islam gets slaughtered at a butcher’s shop in broad daylight on protesting the spiking of pure lamb meat with sheep and goat-meat. Bordering on hyper-reality, leading Bengali writer Mashiul Alam’s stories hold up a mirror to Bangladeshi society. He effortlessly crosses over into the surreal, which at times, as a means for us to cope and sustain, serves as an escape from the blatant, daily horrors of reality, or turns the reader into a spectator witnessing heightened versions of plausible macabre events. Some stories disrupt our complacency while a few others are immensely tender—but all of them intensely political and rendered in sharp, precise prose. The Meat Market is a dazzling collection marking the arrival of a world-class writer for those who read in English.

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The Portrait of a Secret

"What can a patriot do when he has to make the choice between self-preservation and love for his country? As India’s Chief of Intelligence, Amitabh has spent a career battling India’s enemies, domestic and foreign. Now, in the winter of his illustrious career, he is faced with his most daunting challenge yet - averting a nuclear strike against his homeland that he knows very little about - except that it is coming. As Indian intelligence works feverishly to uncover the truth, Amitabh’s path crosses Kamal’s, a senior IAS officer, who is investigating the theft of two priceless paintings from India. Even as they work together to accomplish their missions, the paintings reveal a secret thought to have been lost in the fires of partition. The discovery unleashes a global battle between the RAW, the ISI and the CIA, as each scrambles for control over a secret that would permanently swing global geopolitical power towards them. Innocent lives and intelligence assets built over decades are ruthlessly sacrificed for something far more valuable - control over the Indian sub-continent. Everything is at stake till one man is forced to make an impossible choice - one that will decide the fate of the world."

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The Scent of Fallen Stars

A scholarly loner and a musical prodigy come to India for answers, over twenty years apart… In 1995, thirty-six-year-old Will arrives in newly liberalized India. Smarting from the collapse of his academic dreams, he finds little fulfilment in his well-paying telecommunications job or the social confines of New Delhi’s expat community. One monsoon night, he encounters young, enigmatic Leela, who blazes into his world and unleashes a storm of passion and devastation that will alter it forever. Twenty-three years later, Aria lands in the city on a quest to find the mother whom she believed to be dead. Estranged from her convalescing father, her journey leads her to unravel the mysteries of her parents’ story and her mother’s life—from her childhood in an orphanage to a doomed love affair and finally, the remote shores of asceticism. As she searches for answers and a sense of belonging, Aria stumbles upon lost worlds, haunting memories, and the explosive secret that torpedoed her father’s life, the reverberations of which will be cataclysmic for her own.

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This Land We Call Home

In 1871, the British enacted the Criminal Tribes Act in India, branding numerous tribes and caste groups as criminals. In This Land We Call Home, Nusrat F. Jafri traces the roots of her nomadic forebears, who belonged to one such ‘criminal’ tribe, the Bhantus from Rajasthan. This affecting memoir explores religious and multicultural identities and delves into the profound concepts of nation-building and belonging. Nusrat’s family found acceptance in the church, alongside a sense of community, theology, songs and carnivals, and quality education for the children in missionary schools. The family’s conversion to Christianity in response to caste society highlights their struggle for dignity. Parallelly, we see the family’s experiences during Gandhi’s return to India in 1915, the Partition, the World Wars, the Emergency and the prime ministers’ assassinations. In a way, this is a story like and unlike the stories all of us carry within us―the inherited weight of who we are and where we come from, our tiny little freedoms and our everyday struggles and, mostly, the intricate jumble of our collective ancestry. Nusrat pays homage to her foremothers, the first feminists, and her forefathers, the ones who tried hard to fit into a caste society only to be disappointed, eventually choosing alternative faiths in pursuit of acceptance.

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This, Our Paradise

Srinagar, 1986. A Kashmiri Pandit family has just moved into their new home. The patriarch Papaji is a clerk in a food cooperative and his wife Byenji is a homemaker. The narrator is their eight-year-old grandson who spends his days playing cricket and climbing the tang kul in the garden. Everything is rosy till 1989. But then, propelled by ISI and the Jamaat, a secessionist movement rises and changes everything. Lolab valley, 1968. After years of prayers, a boy named Shahid is born to Zun and her husband. He grows up in a society where corruption and unemployment are rife. The trajectory of his life changes when he meets Syed Sahab ― an Islamic theologian and rabble- rouser, who wants to overthrow the Indian state. The stories of both families intertwine tragically. In both cases, the boys are at the mercy of forces much larger than them. Both lose their Kashmir, in different ways.

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The Great Flap of 1942

The Meat Market by Mashiul Alam

The Portrait of a Secret

The Scent of Fallen Stars

This, Our Paradise

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