Ten books of 2014 that elevated and enlightened
It was an outstanding year in books. Some that moved me were so inescapably sad that I had to put them down intermittently because my eyes welled up. Maybe it's because I have grown older or maybe the books were just sadder this year. Here's my list of love, longing and loss, by the book, in fiction and non-fiction, in 2014:
#1. Family Life: Akhil Sharma's second novel was a devastating account of an Indian immigrant family living with a trauma. It was clearly based on his own experience - his brother suffered brain damage in a swimming pool accident when 14, his promising career was crushed, his mother was driven to seeking all sorts of cures and his father was propelled into alcoholism. The writing is spare, never dramatised, full of empathy, and sometimes almost too much to bear. When a young Ajay tells his father he is sad, his father snaps back: "You're sad? I want to hang myself every day."' How do you survive pain? You don't. It kills you, bit by bit.
#2. The Book of Gold Leaves: Mirza Waheed writes about Kashmir with compassion, not anger. In Srinagar's suffocated waterways and estranged people, one finds a strange and terrible beauty. India is the confused and out of touch oppressor through its army but Pakistan is the country of false promises. There is no poetry, no flowers, no painting where Faiz, a young naqash, has fled to train for azadi. Ruhi, his beloved at home, waits, as those around her wilt under the shadow of terror. There are no heroes or villains in Waheed's exquisite book, just a palpable grief for what might have been.
#3. A God In Every Stone: What might have been is the dominant emotion in Kamila Shamsie's fiercely intelligent novel. He will know Peshawar by the smell of its flowers, Babur had said. Now it's probably, the smell of gunpowder. Shamsie chronicles the death of Peshawar through the story of Vivian, a young English archaeologist, who befriends a teenaged auto didact who wants to follow in her footsteps. How do a people lose their self confidence, becoming slaves to their own worst enemies? It could well be the story of modern Afghanistan, written with a deep understanding of political history and human behaviour.
#4. In The Light of What We Know: Zia Haider Rahman stunned the world with the scholarship in this novel about friendship and loss. Mathematical theorems, dining table philosophising, gossip about Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf, all thrown in with riffs of Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and Johann Poggendorff's illusion. A fascinating novel that begins in Oxford and goes on to Bangladesh and Afghanistan, it is a tribute to friendship between Zafar and the nameless narrator. "Life," says the narrator, quoting Kierkegaard, "can only be understood backwards even if it has to be lived forwards".
#5. The Past As Present: Romila Thapar could teach Kierkegaard a thing or two. Remarkably prescient, the historian's astonishing work allows us to examine the Sangh Parivar reconstruction of Indian identity. If the past, writes Thapar, in a book that travels from Ghazni's invasions to the Babri Masjid demoliton, ''ïs to be called upon to legitimise the present, then the veracity of such a past is to be continually vetted."' In an interview to me at the time of the book's release, Thapar told me "we give in to political authority too easily. There isn't enough backbone to oppose and also take a consistent position based on rational thinking". She couldn't be more right.
#6. And Then One Day: Biographies are usually anodyne receptacles for massive egos and even more massive grudges. Unless you're Naseeruddin Shah. In a remarkably candid biography, Shah lets it all hang out, his acid trips, his broken relationship with his father, his cruelty to his first wife, and even the occasional sex romp. The Mumbai film industry emerges as shallow, vain and all too obsessed with itself (Subhash Ghai tells him at one point, too much reality is terrible, and even ugly has to be shown as handsome ugly). We knew that, but it took an insider to tell us exactly how terrible the reality is.
#7. The News: A User's Manual: Alain de Botton is one of the foremost philosophers of our time so when he turns his gaze at journalism, we better pay attention. It's worth it. A journalist has to be part chemist, part therapist, part librarian and part curator, he says, pointing out news should not merely be a branch of politics or a tax office but it should function as a government in exile. It's not enough to collect facts, we should also tease out their relevance, he says, while also finding enough time to ask eccentric questions so fundamental to our existence: why are our cities so ugly, for instance. I can tell you more but then you won't read it, which you should.
#8. Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi: Rana Dasgupta's 13-years-in-the-making chronicle of Delhi is part drain inspector's report, part gossip diary. From squalid slums to snobby drawing rooms, he gives us snapshots of a city whose future is worse than its present. If Suketu Mehta's Mumbai was Maximum City, Dasgupta's Delhi is Cynical City, where the pointedness of a man's shoes rises in proportion to his bank balance and where a rich man in trouble ends up calling his father.
#9. The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh: It was the first of the biggest trend in non-fiction in India this year - the revenge memoir. Natwar Singh and Vinod Rai followed in Sanjaya Baru's footsteps. forceful, incisive and all too revealing. We, who have very little access to power understand there may be some concern about official secrecy, but frankly it's about time some light was shone on areas that have been dark for far too long.
#10. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End: Modern medicine prepares you for cure but how does it prepare you for death? Like another book about death that haunts me still, Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking, Atul Gawande's Being Mortal is engaging, thought provoking, and for anyone who dealt with a death in the family, completely heart breaking. Gawande's description of his father's death? I challenge you not to weep for weeks.