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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
On January 21, the 52-year-old oncologist, researcher and writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and his colleagues introduced to the world some of India’s first cancer patients to be treated with T-cell therapy. T-cells, which develop from stem cells in the bone marrow, are an essential part of the immune system and normally kill virus particles and infected cells. When genetically modified, emerging science shows they may be used to treat advance cancer in patients for whom chemotherapy has stopped working. In an interview to the Magazine, he talks about his new book, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human (Penguin), the T-cell clinical trials in India and why the treatment for depression should not be just about pushing Prozac and Paxil on patients, but undertaking talk therapy.
Seafarer and British literary writer Jonathan Raban passed away last week in Seattle, which he had made his home. The writer of books like Bad Land, Passage to Juneau, Coasting, that saw him take a boat around Britain, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, which documented his move to America, told Granta magazine in an interview that he felt he was “tarred by the brush of outsiderdom” ever since he was sent off to boarding school when he was 11 years old. This trait, he said, was useful in all sorts of ways, and it helped him see the world with more clarity.
In reviews this week, we read a one-of-its-kind ‘disability’ story, a lived experience of neurodivergent people and the difficulties they and their caregivers face, Pico Iyer’s new book looking back at his years of travel, Anchal Malhotra’s first work of fiction and more. We also interview Tanvi Srivastava, who has translated an Indian teenager’s diary on her eventful years in Japan during World War II and her time at the Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose.
Books of the week
A toddler with a prosthetic foot in her playroom.
In This Kind of Child: The ‘Disability’ Story (Westland Books), K. Srilata recounts the struggles of families who have neurodivergent children. Her daughter had some learning difficulties and was rejected by a school as it had no place for “this kind of child”. Srilata began homeschooling her and soon realised that there were several others like them, families which were quietly building their lives and a support ecosystem even as the majority of the population continued to be unconcerned and preoccupied with worldly events. In her review, Nalini Ramachandran writes that some of the stories deftly illustrate that neurodivergent persons can lead independent lives and are capable of carving out for themselves a distinct identity. “To those who see their life reflected in that of the protagonists, the book offers solace by highlighting that there is a competent, inter-dependent community out there… To those who belong to the larger nonchalant population, the book has one basic message: be kind.”
Review of K. Srilata’s This Kind of Child: The ‘Disability’ Story: The invisible people
In his new book, The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise (Hamish Hamilton), Pico Iyer sifts through a lifetime of journeys and makes some personal discoveries. “After years of travel, I’d begun to wonder what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict — and whether the search for it might not simply aggravate our differences.” The stops on the narrative’s itinerary include Tehran,
Pyongyang, Srinagar, Colombo, Belfast, Koyasan, Varanasi and bring forth different biographical details. In her review, Mini Kapoor writes that Iyer’s life story is familiar to his readers, and episodes are recapped at different points — his childhood in an English boarding school; his parents, scholars of Indian origin, in the U.S.; the fire in his home in California that turned to ash all his earthly possessions, including handwritten notes, and the pivotal place in his personal journey that this catastrophe marked; his Japanese wife; his proximity to the Dalai Lama. “It is eventually a very personal discovery, in initially bewildering Varanasi, that makes Iyer’s journey whole, and he quotes a Zen master, ‘The struggle of your life is your paradise’.”
Review of Pico Iyer’s The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise: A journey of discovery
In her first work of historical fiction, The Book of Everlasting Things (Harper), which Anchal Malhotra spent five years writing and researching going through Partition archives, spending time on the ground in both India and Pakistan, the protagonist, Samir Vij is desperate to preserve the past. Blessed with an acute sense of smell, he can pick up scents of a person and distil the story of his or her life. His talent earns him an apprenticeship at his uncle’s perfume shop in Lahore. It is 1937, and it’s where he is drawn to Firdaus Khan with her fragrance a blend of vanilla and charcoal. On the surface, writes the reviewer Avantika Shankar, the book is a tragic love story of a Hindu boy and Muslim girl falling in love in the 1930s and then separated during Partition. But Samir then undertakes another journey, to uncover the story of his uncle who had fought in France during World War I. “Malhotra’s mastery lies in her ability to cut through the shroud of political debate and get to the core of the human heart.”
Spotlight
Species that live in coral reefs — a page from the book.
In her new book, The Book of Vanishing Species (Bloomsbury), Beatrice Forshall draws attention to 69 threatened species with her intricate engravings and prints. In the introduction, she writes: The vulnerability of the species we endanger, their inability to speak for themselves, is what first made me want to make engravings of them. In an interview with Janaki Lenin, Forshall said she worked with a team at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to feature the endangered species in her book but it was difficult to narrow it down and so she chose the stories that were most moving or if the species were being overlooked. Asked what gives her hope for the future, she said, “One thing that gives me hope is what we saw over the pandemic. If you leave nature alone, it can recover.”
At 17, Asha-san lived her dream, that of meeting Subhas Chandra Bose and joining the Rani Jhansi Regiment of the Indian National Army (INA). As Lt. Bharati Asha Sahay Choudhry, the young girl, living in Japan, learnt how to shoot and what it meant to fight for a country she had never seen but wanted to serve like a true patriot. The memories of Asha-san’s (as she was respectfully called in Japanese) struggles and sacrifice would have been lost in the pages of her diary if she had not herself translated it into Hindi in 1973. Half-a-century later, her grand daughter-in-law, Tanvi Srivastava, has translated the Hindi diary into English as The War Diary of Asha-san: From Tokyo to Netaji’s Indian National Army (Harper). In an interview to Soma Basu, Srivastava says the book is not just a simple memoir. “It is rich in history. I researched for accuracy of events mentioned in the book. The Hindi text was dense. I simplified it and allowed the language to flow in present tense to make it riveting.” Asked if being a family member made her task difficult, she said: “I was lucky that I could spend time with Asha-san, (now 95 years who lives with her son Sanjay Choudhry in Patna) as she narrated lot of other anecdotes.”
Asha-san at the Rani of Jhansi regiment
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- In A Matter of the Heart: Education in India (Westland Books), a collection of essays, the CEO of the Azim Premji Foundation, Anurag Behar, takes readers to schools in the remote villages of the country where the right to education is in constant struggle with the need for survival.
- Based on their experience of mentoring students, Mukesh Sud and Priyank Narayan have come up with six things required to succeed at work in their book, Leapfrog: Six Practices to Thrive at Work (India Viking). It includes grit, patience, humility and discipline. A good worker also nudges oneself to make better choices, they argue.
- When a 40-something film professor returns to her alma mater to teach, it is more than her unsettling emotions that are drawn to the fore in Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You (Fleet).
- In Hell Bent (Gollancz), the sequel to the paranormal fantasy novel Ninth House, Yale University students Alex Stern and Pamela Dawes must break every rule to save their friend from purgatory.
