We’ve got a live one!

We’ve got a new inductee for the Exotica Hall of Shame. This Chicago Sun-Times review of a new Chicago pop opera called Sita Ram is out to set some kind of density record for exotica-spew on Desilandia (thanks, WGIIA):

Adding to the spicy flavor are Scott C. Neale’s brilliantly colored street signs of India, Mara Blumenfeld’s curry-tinted costumes (many imported from India), Chris Binder’s deft lighting, plus shadow puppets and exotic instruments. There are moments when it feels like you are watching a traveling troupe that has set up shop in the center of an Indian village, and you half expect a cow or water buffalo to wander through. [Link]

I see that Jai Uttal is involved in this project. Say no more.

“Sita Ram” is the creation of director-writer David Kersnar and Grammy-nominated composer and co-lyricist Jai Uttal… [Link]

Hedy Weiss, you are dead to me

Related posts: Sakina’s Restaurant, Anatomy of a genre, M-m-me so hungry, Buzzword bingo

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Marina Budhos reading today in Manhattan

Author Marina Budhos tackles the post-9/11 immigration crackdown in her new young adult novel Ask Me No Questions (thanks, Pooja and SAJA). She’s reading today in Manhattan at 6:30pm (note corrected time). Here’s the blurb:

For fourteen-year-old Nadira and eighteen-year-old Aisha, these are the words that define their lives. Nadira and her family are illegal aliens, fleeing to the Canadian border – running from the country they thought would one day be their home. For years, they have lived on expired visas in New York City, hoping they can realize their dream of becoming legal citizens of the United States. But after 9/11, everything changes. Suddenly, being Muslim means being dangerous. A suspected terrorist. And when Nadira’s father is arrested and detained at the border, she and her sister, Aisha are sent back to Queens, and told to carry on, as if everything is the same.

But of course nothing is the same. Nadira and Aisha live in fear they’ll have to return to a Bangladesh they hardly know. Aisha, once the academic star, falls apart. Now it’s up to Nadira to find a way out.

Budhos previously wrote The Professor of Light, House of Waiting, and Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers:

Jhumpa Lahiri and Marina Budhos

Marina Budhos was born in Queens, New York, the child of an Indo-Guyanese father and a Jewish-American mother who met in the 1950s when her father worked for the Indian Consulate in Manhattan…

She was a Fulbright Scholar in India, during which she wrote about the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India for The Nation. She has also covered international news for Ms… [Link]

… Marina Budhos’s second novel, The Professor of Light, [is] a vivid account of a young American girl’s troubled relationship with her brilliant but disturbed Guyanese-Indian father.

Born and raised in New York City, Budhos is the great grand-daughter of indentured laborers who left India for Guyana about a hundred years ago… [Link]

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Sakina’s Restaurant

This NYT essay is a 5fer: mangoes, mehndi, curries, spices and cooking all in one piece (thanks, WGIIA). Brilliant marketing, Ms. Jaffrey! It’s not only King of Fruit, it’s Queen of Clichés and Hermaphrodite Bastard Child of Book Marketing.

mangomehndimayhem — sorry, sari

This essay itself is interesting, not really exotica — it’s about the fruit literal, not a metaphor:

The aim in India had always been to get sweet, melt-in-the-mouth, juicy mangoes with as little stringy fiber as possible… When these same mangoes entered Florida in the 19th century, they were mainly dismissed as “yard” mangoes. Too soft for shipping, they were considered lacking in commercial qualities. So all the fiber that had been bred out of them over thousands of years was bred right back, giving America the hard, pale rocks we see in stores today…

What America will be getting is the King of Fruit, Indian masterpieces that are burnished like jewels, oozing sweet, complex flavors acquired after two millenniums of painstaking grafting… One generous tree in Chandigarh bore about 30,000 pounds of mangoes every year for 150 years until it was hit by lightning…

A customs inspector, possibly noting my shifty eyes, asked me quite directly, “Are you carrying any mangoes?” … The mangoes were confiscated. This would have been bearable had I not been able to peep through a slight crack in the customs office door…

The officers were cutting up the mangoes and eating them. That hurt. [Link]

No, friends, desis, countrymen, lend me your ears for the text ad at the end. This PR placement shills for a mango-spice-curry memoir by everyone’s favorite actor auntie, mother of Sakina:

Madhur Jaffrey is… the author of “From Curries to Kebabs: Recipes from the Indian Spice Trail” and the forthcoming memoir, “Climbing the Mango Trees.” [Link]

Related posts: Mmmmmmmangoes!, Anatomy of a genre, M-m-me so hungry, Buzzword bingo, Sick of spices, Indian enough, Sailing the Seas of Cheese

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Spy Princess

A new book to be released on March 1st (in the U.S.) will detail the life of Noor Inayat Khan, a spy of South Asian heritage (her father was Pakistani) that worked for the Allies during WWII:

The life and times of Noor Inayat Khan – a descendant of Tipu Sultan and the only Asian secret agent to work for the Allied forces during World War II – have been captured in a fascinating new book to be launched on March 1.

The book, titled “Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan” (Sutton), is authored by journalist Shrabani Basu, the London-based correspondent for the Ananda Bazar Patrika Group.

Based on extensive research and interviews with Noor’s relatives, descendants and friends, the book presents a graphic account of her life till Sep 13, 1944, when she was shot dead by German forces at Dachau. She was 30.

Born in Moscow, Noor was raised in the Sufi style of Islam and joined Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the war. She was one of three women in the SOE to be awarded the George Cross and was also honoured with the Croix de Guerre. [Link]

I had once mentioned Khan in a previous post. Comments following the post seemed to indicate an interest in her story. For those of you that enjoy fiction more than non-fiction, author Shauna Singh Baldwin has previously written a novel inspired by Khan’s life called The Tiger Claw:

From the author of What the Body Remembers, an extraordinary story of love and espionage, cultural tension and displacement, inspired by the life of Noor Inayat Khan (code name “Madeleine”), who worked against the Occupation after the Nazi invasion of France.

When Noor Khan’s father, a teacher of mystical Sufism, dies, Noor is forced to bow, along with her mother, sister and brother, to her uncle’s religious literalism and ideas on feminine propriety. While at the Sorbonne, Noor falls in love with Armand, a Jewish musician. Though her uncle forbids her to see him, they continue meeting in secret.

When the Germans invade in 1940, Armand persuades Noor to leave him for her own safety. She flees with her family to England, but volunteers to serve in a special intelligence agency. She is trained as a radio operator for the group that, in Churchill’s words, will “set Europe ablaze” with acts of sabotage. [Link]

Additionally, a 2001 film titled Charlotte Gray featured a title character who was a composite of women like Khan:

CATE BLANCHETT plays the title role of Charlotte Gray, a young Scottish woman who is unexpectedly drawn into a special operation with the French Resistance when her lover, a British pilot, is shot down over France.

An interesting section of the film’s website has pictures of newspaper clippings about Khan’s exploits.

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Fasting, feasting

On this unholiest of days, I thought I’d share 2.0 passages about coupling from 1.5-gen books. Lavanya Sankaran takes joy in the idea that dilly-dallying men deserve what they get in The Red Carpet:

And certainly, a convent-educated accent was an asset… This involved, primarily, keeping our knees together… Innocent of the depredations of Man (or Boy), at least until their parental duty was done. Delivered, one girl, unsullied, to the marital bed. Her price far above rubies…

For a decade, it seemed, [the bachelors] had been festooned with women, all sorts, from the cute, the silly, the please-domesticate-mes, to the independent, the fiery, the I’ll-sleep-with-but-won’t-love-yous, and further beyond, to the Plainly Bizarre. And they had frolicked and gamboled with happy abandon, and no awareness of the fate that quietly awaited them…

All those women, those sillys, those feistys, those Saturday-night mainstays, had simply vanished. All of them. Together. Birdlike, in a great migratory movement… these chicks had flown. They had married, dispersed, dehydrated. [Link]

In Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid’s East Village/Karachi romance ends more happily:

I lost my virginity in New York, twice (the second one had wanted to believe he was the first so badly)…

The scene is the East Village, a little before midnight, on the steps of a fourth-floor walk-up on Avenue A. The date is important… Halloween… So there I am, trudging up the steps… when I see this cute desi guy in a white shirt and black trousers, looking ridiculously out of place but very comfortable at the same time… He catches my eye as I pass and says “Hi,” but I ignore him, because the last thing I want to deal with tonight is some conservative boy from the homeland with nothing to say…

But at some point (you saw this coming) I find myself on the fire escape with the brown boy I’d seen before. We’re dancing, just the two of us, and his name is Ozi and he’s wickedly sexy, and what the hell, we spend the night together…

He proposed during a snowstorm in March, looking cold as only a Pakistani man in America can… Before I knew it, I was showing him off at South Asian Student Association parties, enjoying the horrified jealousy on the faces of my prim and proper colleagues. Yes, Mumtaz, that slut, had bagged herself a prince, which meant there was one less out there for them…

The summer after we graduated… we were married in Karachi by the sea. [Link]

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Seeing the in-laws

Another young Indo-Canadian bride was allegedly killed two weeks ago by her in-laws in Punjab:

Rani Sandhu

… [Rani] Sandhu, 22, died Jan. 24 while visiting her husband’s relatives [in Arayanwala, a village in Punjab]… Sandhu’s family was also told she died of a heart attack after throwing up following a bad reaction to an apple. Hours prior to her death, Sandhu called her mother and sister in Winnipeg to say she was throwing up but her husband’s family wouldn’t let her drink any water. Each time the phone call was terminated by her husband. [Link]

Brar and her family believe Rani was killed for the gold jewelry she took on her visit to introduce her daughter to her grandparents. The family believes Rani was beaten to death and cremated quickly to cover up the murder… “I was shocked to see the number of bruises on her neck and shoulders,” Bindar Brar told the Sun. “There was a large bump on her forehead and a big cut on her lip, just like she’d been beaten… The Sandhus are well-connected politically, so the police are not investigating.” [Link]

V.S. Naipaul parodied these repulsive attitudes nearly 50 years ago. Has anything changed?

Leela continued to cry and Ganesh loosened his leather belt and beat her… It was their first beating, a formal affair done without anger on Ganesh’s part or resentment on Leela’s; and although it formed no part of the marriage ceremony itself, it meant much to both of them… Ganesh had become a man; Leela a wife as privileged as any other big woman. Now she too would have tales to tell of her husband’s beatings; and when she went home she would be able to look sad and sullen as every woman should.

The moment was precious… There could be no doubt about it now: they were adults. [Link]

— V.S. Naipaul, The Mystic Masseur, 1957

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I’m Fofatlal, and don’t you forget it

Hi there!

Fofatlal Popatlal, Esq., at your service

The folks at the Mutiny in their infinite wisdom have finally chosen a new permanent blogger. I was buffing Salman Rushdie’s cuticles the other day — oh yes, he’s quite the dandy, don’t let the jacket photo fool you — when up rolled a black Honda Civic with a metallic Ganesh on the dashboard. Two brown valets built like linebackers emerged and silently unveiled their cargo. Inside there was a hard-looking guy in a pink tutu and a flattop. Instead of a moll, this guy had fourteen. They crammed into the back seat, sitting on laps, alternating like checker squares, and my personal favorite, the layover. After the molls disembarked, the guy in the tutu put on a headlamp with high-lumen LEDs. All of us were agape. The guy in the tutu looked coolly at me, snapped his fingers and incanted these magic words: ‘O no you di’nt!’ Then the big boss, the molls and the linebackers squeezed in and rolled away.

Three days later a strange transformation came over me. From dawn to dusk I had an uncontrollable urge to spew my thoughts about everything: current events, movies, bowel movements. At first I jotted down my thoughts hurriedly in red and blue, but I soon realized that out of one pen flowed only truth and out of the other only lies. In desperation I downed a fifth of Black Label and passed out drooling on my laptop keyboard. When I awoke I found that I had been typing frantically in my sleep. It was all half-baked gibberish which posted itself on the Internets.

You know what happened next. The Mutineers knew I was a perfect fit. I could no longer fluff Salman’s combover between bouts of obsessive blogging, so he fired me over the phone from South America. Padma left him for me because I had bigger glasses and he was too self-effacing.

One day the earth opened up and swallowed her whole. It all came out in the investigation: the mole-men operating the mole-machines drilling the last big tunnel in New York. In a city of fury, the gods must be appeased. The last instant of her life was captured by a photojournalist who happened by, a stricken Medusa-haired goddess teetering on heels, the pavement rent behind her. That photograph is all I have, a sepia-tinted fame, a palimpsest of privacy, her final words my name:

F-f-f-fofatlal!
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TODAY: Kiran Desai reading

SAJA and the Rubin Museum of Art present
Kiran Desai reading from The Inheritance of Loss
Today, Wednesday, February 1 at 7pm
(how’s that for notice?)

Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. between 6th/7th Aves., Manhattan [map]
$11 / $5 SAJA members
(includes admission to the museum of Himalayan art)

The novel wears the tricolor on its sleeve and savages wealthy immigrant privilege:

The Indian student bringing back a bright blonde, pretending it was nothing, trying to be easy, but every molecule tense and self-conscious: “Come on, yaar, love has no color…” He had just happened to stumble into the stereotype; he was the genuine thing that just happened to be the cliché…

Behind him a pair of Indian girls made vomity faces.

And yet she lives in…

Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971. Educated in India, England, and the United States, she received her MFA from Columbia. She lives in Brooklyn.

Related posts: The tree groom, ‘The Inheritance of Loss’

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The tree groom

Distraught after a marital tiff, an Oriya man took to a tree 15 years ago and remains there to this day:

That’ll show her

Kapila Pradhan, 45, a resident of Nagajhara village in the eastern Indian state of Orissa, left home after an apparent tiff with his wife… “However no amount of coaxing can make him leave his tree house…”

He recalls the terrifying moments when it rained persistently and the other trees in the forest fell one by one… However, more than the cyclone, it was the threat posed by wild elephants and monkeys that forced him to move to a tree closer to the edge of the forest, near a village…

His neighbours say Kapila’s wife, Tulasi, began having “illicit relations” with his younger brother Babuan. Soon after Kapila left home, Babuan moved in with Tulasi and they had a child a few years later. [Link]

The tree- or cave-dwelling renouncer of the world is, of course, a recurring theme in old-skool Hinduism. Here’s an excerpt from Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai. Life imitates art imitating life:

… in the old orchard outside Shahkot, someone had climbed a tree and had not yet come back down… The man, he said, would answer no questions… ‘Arrange a marriage for him… You will have no further problems…’

Sampath looked down at the veiled woman standing underneath his tree and felt hot and horrified… The devotees raised the girl’s rigid, unwilling form into the tree… She was encased in layers of shiny material, like a large, expensive toffee. The cloth billowed about her, making her look absurdly stout… Her sari was pulled over her head and she held the edge of it between her teeth so as to keep as much of her face modestly covered as possible…

… the girl let out a faint cry. Losing her balance and her gold slippers, she tumbled indecorously towards the ground… and landed with a dull thump…

The signs for marriage were not auspicious. [Link]

Related post: ‘The Inheritance of Loss’

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Wrist friendly reads

Now that some kind soul has reopened Anna’s post on “A Suitable Boy”, I’ll use it as a segue to write a post about a few lightweight Indian books published recently.

Siddharth Chowdhury’s Patna Roughcut is an edgy, cynical take on the life of Ritwik Ray, a young journalist in Patna. Patna Roughcut uses a fractured narrative to trace the events and people that shape Ritwik’s life – from his childhood in Patna, to Delhi where he goes to college, and then his return to Patna with dreams of writing a book. It “is a story of love, idealism and sexual awakening” – a refreshingly different theme for a desi book. Chowdhury’s prose is delightfully unadorned – the rough, untrammelled writing is just what a book like this requires. This is by far the best book out of India I’ve read in a long, long, long time.

Chandrahas Choudhury, in his review at The Middle Stage says

… the last section of the book, “Waiting for Godard”, is one of the very best pieces of extended prose I’ve read this year. […] Patna Roughcut is worth your money just for this section alone. [Link]

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