It’s difficult to pick a favourite book of the year when your job involves reading a book a week; and reading it thoroughly so you can hold a halfway intelligent conversation with the author either on video as I did in the old pre-Covid times or on podcast as I do now. Having tried both media, I have to say podcasts are more fun and also more exacting. On video, you can get away with half truths about reading every word – few can tell if you smile widely, if your earrings are flashy, and if you are personable enough – but lies can’t be disguised on audio. They screech and call attention to themselves like combative robins in a Delhi garden in December. So I set aside a couple of days a week to devouring a book so I don’t get caught out. There are worse jobs.
Many books have grabbed my attention this year: Ashutosh Bhardwaj’s The Death Script, Manjiri Indurkar’s It’s All in Your Head, M, Rajat Ubhaykar’s Truck de India, Amandeep Sandhu’s Panjab, (the last two were 2019 releases) Akhil Katyal’s Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue and Loss by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi. Truck de India, which takes the reader into the tough Uski Roti lives of truckers, appealed to that side of me that loves the freedom of the open road. The Death Script is difficult but necessary reading and the author’s compassion and compulsive need to record the great horrors wreaked on the tribal population of Chhattisgarh come through. A book that emerged from serious reportage, The Death Script made me think deeply about the State, about power, ideology, and about how easy it is for humankind to descend into barbarism.
Akhil Katyal’s poems speak to the hybrid core of my being, that self that enjoys both John Donne’s love poetry and popular Hindi film songs, the self that is transported by Shostakovich and Kishore Kumar, that glimpses a couple in a Delhi park among the medieval domes and imagines a whole tragedy waiting to unfold, that is struck by the city’s layers, its sense of Time-grime. Here is For Someone Who Will Read This 500 years from Now:
… would you do me a favour/
for old time’s sake would you go to
Humayun’s Tomb in what used to be Delhi
and just as you’re climbing
the front stairs, near the fourth step
I had cut into the stone wall
to your left – ‘Akhil loves Rohit’. Will you go look for it?
Just that. Go look for it.
It’s been a terrible year but, strangely, it’s also been a good year; the year I learnt how important it is to protect the fragile world within. The books helped. They always do.
