English Lessons and Other Stories (23 page)

Days of the Turban
by Pratap Sharma

My favourite of all Pratap Sharma's plays, novels, and films.
Days of the Turban
tells the story of Balbir from Amritsar who becomes involved with protesters who become revolutionaries, then extremists, and finally terrorists. It's written with great love, understanding, and sorrow for families in Punjab who lost so many sons in the eighties.

Come Rain
by Jai Nimbkar

A wonderfully nuanced look at cultural conflicts. Ann Palmer meets a middle-class foreign student, Ravi Gogte, in San Francisco and moves to India to live with him and his family. Ann doesn't have blonde hair, is not promiscuous, nor bothered by India's dirt and squalor. She isn't even a missionary. Ann has a stormy relationship with her husband and a number of power struggles with a very strong mother-in-law. Her efforts to understand India are skilfully rendered by Nimbkar's smooth and thoughtful dialogue.

A book that flows as well as this one could not have been easy to write.

Fugitive Pieces
by Anne Michaels

My husband David was away on a business trip, and I planned to finish
Fugitive Pieces,
the story of Jakob Beer, a Polish Jewish boy who witnesses the slaughter of his family in the Holocaust. When I couldn't find the novel anywhere, I called David to ask if he had seen it. “I hid it,” he said without a trace of shame, “because it made you cry so much.” “I cried because it was so touching and beautiful,” I said. On his return, I demanded my book, but David (genuinely!) couldn't remember where he'd put it. “It will show up eventually,” he said. I couldn't wait for eventually. I was scheduled to speak at BookExpo Canada on a panel with Anne Michaels. I bought a US edition of the book so I could ask Anne to sign it. Now we own two copies, and both are precious.

The Telling
by Ursula Le Guin

Reading
A Wizard of Earthsea
as a child, I wondered what ursula Le Guin would be like in person. I'm still wondering, because she chooses the style and voice that suits each story. I now know how difficult that is. She's an anthropologist, feminist, and an explorer of the impact of technology.
The Telling
is one of my favourites: the story of emissary Sutty, who moves to the north of the planet Aka to find people unaffected by the rule of the Dovzan Corporation, “inefficient people” whose way of learning is through ideograms and story. Her journey is monitored by the Corporation but equally interesting is how she monitors herself as an observer who must make a report without HP (hocus-pocus). If you're a writer, read
A Wave in the Mind
as well.

Plowing the Dark
by Richard Powers

In the early days of virtual reality, the long-ago eighties, a team of programmers realize an artist is required to make a virtual world. Enter Adie from New York, a character who gives rise to the most amazing descriptions of computer art you've ever read. Alongside, Powers describes the virtual world of memory created by an English teacher from Chicago captured by terrorists in Beirut, lebanon. The twined stories in this brilliant novel link memory and the future. Powers captures the wonder and delight of creating a virtual world in story, without shying from the political implications of technology.

Slow Emergencies
by Nancy Huston

Lin Lhomond has two beautiful girls whom she loves, yet she chooses ballet over being a mother and a wife, and her choice affects the whole family. Nancy huston's words are so well chosen they are transparent, allowing her story to shine through. It's also poetry without line breaks. Whether you have children or not, have faced the woman artist's dilemma or not, you'll recognize the ever-present distance between real-life obligations joyfully assumed and the life you'd like to lead. And — what if?

Changing Planes
by Ursula K. Le Guin

Stories that take off from an airport terminal waiting area — except that you visit different planets and societies. Le Guin offers new perspectives, plays what-if scenarios, teases your brain, and makes you feel strongly about people not of your species.

The Time of Our Singing
by Richard Powers

A German physicist meets a black singer at the Marian Anderson concert in Washington DC in 1941; they fall in love, marry, and have three children. Their mixed-race family's saga is told mostly by their second son looking back from 2000, recounting
with understated pathos how he was always pulled between his older brother and sister. Histories of racism and Western music come entwined in this sweeping complex novel of 600 plus pages. Every sentence is so beautifully crafted; I was not surprised to learn Powers was a programmer in the days when disk space and processor time came at a premium.

The Hungry Tide
by Amitav Ghosh

Delhi-based entrepreneur Kanai Dutt meets marine biologist Piyali (Piya) Roy in the tide country of the Sunderbans. Piya is a second-generation Indo-American marine biologist studying the ways of the Irrawady Dolphin. By the end of the novel, events force Kania and Piya to do without texts or data and reinterpret their time in the tide country. Each must make a greater effort to communicate between English and non-English speakers, oral and written traditions, and across class and religious divides. Amitav Ghosh is in full command as he tells this prophetic and disturbing tale. Every chapter develops slowly as a wave, then ebbs, leaving a nugget that compels you further into this powerful, moving novel. I did wonder why Piya never menstruates, never thinks about having/not having children, is unaware of having breasts or uterus, and never exhibits sexual desire. But at least here's a woman who loves her work and believes in understanding rather than hunting animals. Offering old “Mashima” — NGO founder, quiet builder of a hospital — Ghosh pays tribute to legions of dedicated women whose social work has crossed class boundaries throughout South-East Asia and supported women in changing their own lives.

Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
by Anita Rau Badami

A novel with heart, history, finesse, and some hugely funny moments. It brought me to tears several times. It is true to the time of its tale, and describes us halfway-house Indo-Canadians so
well, the characters are still with me. I stayed up till 1:00 a.m. to finish it, and couldn't get to sleep for hours afterwards because the ending is so harrowing. Read slowly to really savour this superb novel and just don't let it end.

Song of Kahunsha
by Anosh Irani

This is the tale of an orphan boy in Bombay. Comparisons to
Oliver Twist
are spurious — this novel is in a class by itself. Human Rights Watch says, “At least eighteen million children live or work on the streets of urban India, labouring as porters at bus or railway terminals; as mechanics in informal auto-repair shops; as vendors of food, tea, or handmade articles; as street tailors; or as rag pickers, picking through garbage and selling usable materials to local buyers.” Irani's simple, unassuming prose asks us to feel deeply for just three of them: Chamdi, Sumdi, and Guddi dream of a city of no sadness called Kahunsha. I will never stand at the Gateway of India in Bombay without remembering Guddi, that little girl singing her “Song of Kahunsha.”

Orpheus Lost
by Janette Turner Hospital

This book deals with our strange civil rights situations post 9/11, terrorism, and rendition, all through the Orpheus myth. The predicament of Leela the mathematician from South Carolina and her lover Mishka, a half-Muslim Australian musician kept me awake at night. I kept reminding myself that Cobb, the interrogator who goes too far is “just” a character and that
Orpheus Lost
is “just” a novel. A devilishly smart and prescient novel by a mistress of the art.

Echomaker
by Richard Powers

Mark Schluter, victim of a truck accident, is afflicted with a brain condition called capgras, so he can no longer recognize his sister Karen. Along comes Gerald Weber, celebrity neuroscientist,
whose created persona seems to be unravelling as he questions all that he knows about the brain. Powers shows the beauty and flaws of modern neuroscience in this complex and personal novel. What do we really know of the three-and-a-half-pound universe we're carrying around, or the self it creates? Maybe the vedas are right after all — it's all maya, all illusion. I also enjoyed the audio edition, unobtrusively narrated by Bernadette Dunn.-