The memories we keep

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When I was over at my friend’s place recently as part of Navratri festivities, she proudly displayed her Kanchipuram silk saree she said had belonged to her grandmother. It is fascinating how a saree can hold so many memories — an idea at the heart of Malvika Singh’s Saris of Memory. In the book, Singh draws on her personal experiences to explore connections between people, the clothes they wear, and India’s cultures. It moves through figures such as Jasleen Dhamija, Fori Nehru, and Rukmini Devi Arundale, recounting their help reviving the country’s textile traditions.

The things around us can also help us remember someone we don’t know. My family has an heirloom called the Singapore suitcase, called so because my grandfather carried it to the city on his first trip overseas, filled with childhood photos of my father. In The Hare with Amber Eyes, on the other hand, the English contemporary artist Edmund de Waal works through his family’s fortunes and history of persecution and dispossession across more than a century, including through Nazism as well, through a set of 264 Japanese miniature carved figures.

I was looking for a book last week when a dried bougainvillea flower fell out of it. Where the netsuke figures were a way to discover someone, the flower reminded me of an old friend and many years spent having fun together, but also that seemingly inevitable drift away and some regret. These little, serendipitous moments can be fraught as well — with Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence perhaps being the perfect parable. Kemal, in its pages, held on to his lover, Füsun, by collecting the little souvenirs of their time together, but ultimately his possessive love erases all traces of Füsun’s autonomy.

The saree, the suitcase, the flower are all receptacles that we hold, that we endeavour to preserve for many more years to come. But our memories also flow out of our bodies, into the things we do together, imbuing them with a fondness they will never acquire on their own. Cooking food is perhaps the perfect example. I feel that connection when I use my mother’s recipe to make her rasam. In his piece on the late Bunny Gupta, co-author of The Calcutta Cook Book, puts it better: a recipe can only hope to survive when you make it.

Books of the week

Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon’s Maya: Seed Takes Root (Westland) is a sci-fi novel about a highly interconnected world with heavy themes about surveillance and free will. According to the authors, a board game and a film are also in the works, and that, according to Vasudevan Mukunth, has compromised the novel. He writes, “Maya doesn’t make full use of the privileges of being a novel … and refuses to transcend the franchise’s needs, including the covert preference for writing plots that can work on a page as well as on a screen.”

The beloved sports romance series Heated Rivalry by Canadian director Jacob Tierney is to be followed by a book of annotated scripts. Out on October 27, I’ll Believe in Anything: The Making of Heated Rivalry Season 1 (The Annotated Scripts) (Hachette India) will allow fans to read scripts and have exclusive behind-the-scenes content and notes on scene directions. In aninterview with Aditya Mani Jha, Tierney says, “None of us could have foreseen the scale that this has ended up achieving. It is so gratifying to see the love that viewers from around the world have expressed for Heated Rivalry.”

Malayalam writer Paul Zacharia’s new work, 50 Stories (Aleph Book Company), blends magic realism, surrealism, satire, and more in a format that often gets little credit: short stories. According to Stanley Carvalho’s review, “Conversations are held with the dead; historical figures and divine beings wander into contemporary locales; animals assume human characteristics and inanimate things come to life.”

Lal Thanhawla served as Chief Minister of Mizoram for 22 years. In Abdus Salam’s review of Lal Thanhawla: The Boy from Zarkawt, and the Making of Mizoram by Sanjoy Hazarika (Westland), Salam writes, “Lal Thanhawla also presents an intimate personal portrait of the now 88-year-old patriarch, a man who first married a Garo girl in his teens, pined for rice in an Assam jail, and drank freely when doing so was illicit. But it is a political account of the life and times of an ‘Indian nationalist and Mizo sub-nationalist’ at its core, faulting him for policy failures as much as crediting him for his long stewardship of one of India’s smallest States.”

Sociologist Maryam Aslany says in conversation with G. Sampath that she picked the subtitle of her new book, Peasants: Makers of the Modern World (Bloomsbury), because she “wanted to provoke readers who think that the peasant and modernity are opposites. For them it carries a paradox: how could a character who, in their imagination, is the opposite of modernity, be actually the maker of the modern world? I wanted to bring them face to face with their own paradox. ”

In the news

Sally Rooney’s books will no longer be sold in Britain because she plans to use her royalties to support Palestine Action, a pro-Palestinian group that has been banned as a ‘terrorist organisation’. “I have made every effort to be honest with the public about my beliefs and intentions and I am wholly prepared to accept the consequences,” she told the press.

Nightstand

Pankajam is Kalpana Karunakaran’s maternal grandmother and a fount of strength and resilience. I’m partway through A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras, a personal history of how Pankajam’s thirst for intellectual growth and a talent for making friends across cultural, and geographical, lines paralleled a newly independent India spreading its wings. Read our review here.

For complaints or compliments, you can mail me at swati.ks@thehindu.co.in. Until next time.