Mama Gaia By Sahara Mirpuri

 

Its a moment of love and light, to experience it, to drown in it, to understand it. Sahara Mirpuri's book 'Mama Gaia' takes us deeper into the realms of life to understand all emotions, a wink at the darkness, a connection to self through laughter, to let the sadness be, till it disappears.

Lessons of life, slowly unfolds, to crystal clear images of truth. Reading this book was like reading laws of nature, where we are responsible for happiness of self and our own responsibility of understanding our emotions and in dealing with it.

The beautiful graphics by Elénore Pelluou adds colours to the story, bringing alive the narration that could enthral children and adults alike.

A must have book for every age.

Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows- Book Review

Bali Kaur Jaswal has done an excellent job of engaging the reader’s attention with a story that involves Punjabi widows.

Nikki, a young law-student drop-out, takes up the job of English tutor at the Indian Community Centre at Southhall gurudwara, where widows enroll. The women don’t know to read or write but they have bold fantasies and stories beneath their white garment. The English workshop turns into erotic story-telling club.

Nikki encourages women to share their dark secrets of longings and womanhood, The widow have great fun. Only one woman writes the stories while others relate.  The thrill begins when the stories leak out of the classroom, and are passed through emails and photocopies to the whole of Indian community in London.

At first, I was stunned to read about the erotic detail of the older women of Indian community. Such topics are taboo in our culture and we hardly hear such intimate stories. (not even amongst our close friends). I even hid the book, when I had visitors at home, fearing judgement for a single person like me seeking pleasures on a sly. 

But as the story progressed, I found Ms Jaswal cleverly weave the story of sex, murder and mystery into most interesting plot that captivated me till the last page.

A hilarious book, enjoyed reading it.

Book Review: ‘Echoes From The Vortex” by Monika Pant

This is one book that I enjoyed reading, especially her soul-stirring poems and snippets of the flashback stories told in italics.

There is deep insight and philosophy discussed as the author writes her memoirs during the days she spent fighting the life threatening disease of Ovarian cancer. She writes:

 “My suffering has given me an opportunity to rise above it and make me value life as never before, of making it into a triumph. It’s a chance rarely given to humans.” 

She further adds: “Tears are necessary to become strong. It washes the heart of the pain and makes one accept it better. It makes space for hope and strength. It is not a sign of weakness but one of coming in terms with one’s lot.”

She is particularly offended by people who come and mouth concern and talk about her suffering as though it were fireside tale. She feels the least one can do is to 'keep quiet' and give respect to the suffering individual instead of making light of their situation.

In between her narration there are poems. I enjoyed reading all her poems that are written with great sensitivity; her poems have a soul and deep meaning.

 In a poem on ‘Springtime Fancies’, she writes:

“The bleakness does not end

With the chill of winter

Nor does the heat of summer

Make the passion simmer

The rain does not quench any more

The thirst of man

Spring does not reconstruct

But we still reap what we sow”

The book is quite interesting. We learn to know her more intimately through her relationship with family members closer to her, her moments of bliss, her fears and her inner struggle to cope with her disease with optimism and hope.

As I flip through the pages, one by one, my heart reaches out to the author and I begin to respect her even more for what she is.

The Signature of All things – Elizabeth Gilbert

Just finished reading 500 pages narrative story spanning over more than 100 years during 18^th and 19^th century of an intelligent, single, plain-faced woman who spends her lifetime understanding the creation of mankind through study of botany, mainly Mosses.

The book is divided into five parts.

The first part of the book takes us through the adventures of Henry Whittaker, a plant thief whose boyhood punishment is to send him off to far off place in a madcap voyage of Captain Cook. He returns to make a successful career importing exotic plants to America.

The interest is aroused from first few pages itself. Alma Whittaker is born in rich family to an intelligent mother whose first prayer on seeing her child is that “she grow up to be healthy and sensible and intelligent, and would never form associations with overly powdered girls, or laugh at vulgar stories, or sit at gambling tables with careless men, or read French novels, or behave in a manner suited only to savage Indian, or in any way, whatsoever become the worst sort of discredit to a good family.”

The prayers are answered.

Alma is the person; we begin to love as the story unfolds. During her childhood, she is tireless, uncomplaining and curious to understand the ways of the world.  “she made a habit of chasing down information to its last hiding place, as though the fate of nations were at stake in every instance” Not only did she have clever parents but she also had the entire estate of White acres and the proper resources to explore at her will that helps sharpen her vision towards mysteries of life. Her father advises her to always be self-sufficient and to always have one final bribe. “You must always carry enough gold on you to buy back your life in case of kidnapping. Sew it into your hems, if you must, but never be without money.”

At 16, she chances upon a book ‘With A Grain Of Salt’ that makes her mild jolt wildly. She makes frequent visits to the binding closet to fulfill her sexual longings. The repeated details of her visits to blinding closet and her acts of  masturbation are unnecessary and just lengthen the story.

She is over-shadowed by the beauty of her adopted sister Prudence, who marries their tutor, Arthur Dixon and her best friend Retta Snow marries George Hawke, the person whom she secretly loved. What I fail to understand is why she cannot find a husband to love her? What has physical looks to do with love? Disappointed, she says “Let us be honest with ourselves. Who will ever put a ring on these fishwife’s hands of mine? Who will ever kiss this encyclopedia of a head?”

Though this novel veers into far-fetched, even stranger territory in its second half, we continue to root for our heroine. Alma marries Ambrose Pike, a younger man, an eccentric orchid illustrator. He tells her of the work of Jacob Boehme, "a sixteenth century cobbler from Germany who had mystical visions about plants...who believed in 'the signature of all things'...namely that God had hidden clues for humanity's betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth."

Sadly, the sex-less marriage fails and she send him off to Tahiti to her father’s Vanilla plantation to save her from embarrassment. When he dies under mysterious circumstance, she follows his footsteps to uncover the truth about Ambroise rejection of her. In Tahila, she lives a simple life with just one goal to finding the truth.

Eventually Alma finds her way to Amsterdam, where she rekindles her relationship with her mother’s Dutch family and becomes the master of mosses at the Botanical Gardens.

Elizabeth Gilbert has done a lot of research, her facts on voyages of Captain Cook, on biology of Mosses and the demography of 19^th century is visually elaborated.

The narration is interesting although most of the other characters are weird with strange habits and even stranger names. We have Arthur Dixon, who “gave every inclination of being a man, who had been born sitting up, wearing tight-fitting waistcoat and wool breeches, holding a dense book, and sighing unhappily. If he had urges, where and where did he release them?”  We have Prudence, who lives in utter penury, we have fluttering Retta snow, Reverend Welles of unplumbed depths, Tomorrow Morning, the hero of the natives of Tahiti, etc

Nevertheless, the tale is riveting making the book unputdownable and when you reach to the last page of the book, you want to read some more…

Just one reading is not enough, I am going to read it again

The Oath Of Vayuputra

I could not go for the launch of this book at Peddar road, but had watched it on U-tube and was surprised to see the crowd that waited to enter the store. Never in my life have I seen a book launch of such magnitude. Amish said that during book launch of his first book, there were only his family members and few friends had been forced to attend the event, his wife had distributed the questions to be thrown at author during the book reading, but popularity of those two books had changed his status and now he was known as one of the most sought out writers.

I, like thousands others, was waiting eagerly for the third and final episode of Shiva Trilogy.

I had liked the first two parts too. I had written the review of ‘Immortals of Mehula’ and ‘Secrets of Nagas’ on my blog

At the end of part two of Shiva Trilogy, I was left with questions such as:

What evil is he talking about? How can we destroy evil when it does not exist by itself? Good and evil, two sides of the coin, he must visit Panchavati, the city of Nagas to know the secret.

Shiva did reach Panchavati, I had eagerly waited for evil to emerge, making wild guesses of putting face to the evil, was it really Nagas? If it was not Naga then who was evil?, Then suddenly it is revealed that Somras, the powerful magic potion, which was good at first, had turn to evil and it had to be destroyed. Then the journey to seek the help of Vayuputra began to put an end to evil by destroying people who would not stop using Somras.

The third part, however, did not excite me as much as the other two parts did. Maybe my expectations were too high.

However, I did like the narration of the last fight of Sati. This excerpt made me sit at the edge as I read through the pages of her final fight:

“Swuth didn’t approach Sati with both his curved swords. That would have been unfair according to the rules of Aten, since Sati had one sword hand. He held the sword forward in his hand. As he neared Sati, he started swinging the sword around, building it into a stunning circle of death just ahead of him, moving inexorably towards her. Even as Swuth’s sword whirred closer, Sati began to step back slowly. She suddenly thrust her sword forward quickly, deep into the ring of the circling blade of Swuth, inflicting a serious cut on the Egyptian’s shoulder. She pulled her sword back as rapidly, before Swuth’s circling blade could come back to deflect her sword. He’d never met anyone with the ability to penetrate his sword’s circle of death.”

The book title says ‘Oath of Vayuputra’ but what oath? And Vayuputra (isn’t that supposed to be Lord Hanuman) has less than 100 pages of fame.

The read is easy flow, so even though I had put away after reading 200 pages of more brutal war and long sea travelling, I did return back to finish the book. 

The book did have the elements of surprise, joy and pain.