HT Picks; New Reads

The list of good reads this week includes a collection of Urdu stories set in 1950s Hyderabad that explores the spectrum of depravity among the city’s elite, an insightful book on the conundrums and paradoxes that result when the law is entangled with sex and sexuality, and essays that range from the personal to the sublime and transform the particular into the universal

Resurrecting a forgotten world

This week’s reading list includes a collection of Urdu stories set in 1950s Hyderabad that explores the depravity of the city’s elite, an insightful book on the conundrums that result when the law is entangled with sex and sexuality, and a book of essays by a great author. (HT Team)

220pp, ₹499; Hachett

Set in Hyderabad’s old-world aristocratic society of the 1950s, this stellar collection of stories resurrects and explores the work of Wajida Tabassum, one of the most prominent names in Urdu literature, an iconoclast and a nonconformist often referred to as the ‘female Manto’. In her lifetime, Tabassum’s fearless portrayal of the realities of the society she lived in met with severe criticism from the so-called custodians of culture of the time, and she was reviled to the point that mobs set out to torch her publishers’ offices.

Sin showcases Tabassum’s boldest short stories, alongside the story of her own life, translated for the first time into English, in which she captures, in riveting prose, the spectrum of depravity among Hyderabad’s elite, middle class compulsions in the mid-twentieth century, and blurred lines of decency and decorum.

Featuring lascivious nawabs, lustful begums, cunning servants, and unfulfilled marriages marked by peculiar rituals and customs, this volume will surprise, intrigue and entertain readers in equal measure.*

Rulings on Sex and Sexuality in India

148pp, ₹499; Speaking Tiger

Can a woman choose whom to marry if her father disapproves of the match? Does sex remain sex when it becomes work? Can a man become a woman because he feels like one? Is it the law’s task to ensure heterosexuality? The State attempts, with law as its instrument, to answer these questions for us, thorough legislation and, when contested, through court judgments. As this brilliantly insightful book argues, though India’s laws and courts claim to know what they mean when they declare an expression of desire criminal, obscene or unnatural, upon inquiry their logic appears muddled and often casteist and patriarchal. Thus the law struggles to ‘rescue’ ‘fallen women’, for sex work cannot be work, but a sign of immorality; a Supreme Court judge can exonerate the artist MF Husain on charges of obscenity, but claim that ‘obscenity lies in the eyes of the beholder’, leaving us wondering how, then, the law can ever define what is obscene; and while a court may declare that the ‘third gender’ has fundamental rights, no one really knows what fundamental rights have to do with gender in the first place.

From the personal to the sublime

322pp, ₹699; Bloomsbury

‘Any story that starts will also end.’ As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this as she explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success, and what it all means.

Ranging from the personal – her portrait of the three men she called her fathers; how a chance encounter with Tom Hanks led to one of the most important friendships of her life; how to answer when someone asks why you don’t have children – to the sublime – the unexpected influence of Snoopy; the importance of knitting; the pleasure to be found in children’s books – each essay transforms the particular into the universal, letting us all see our own worlds anew.

Illuminating, penetrating, funny and generous, These Precious Days is joyful time spent in the company of one of our greatest living authors.*

*All copy from book flap.