Fusing social commentary with emotional truths
Each of the six stories in this arresting volume cleverly captures the interplay between the personal and the political while exploring the everyday existence of Indians across different social strata.
A landowner contemptuous of political activism finds it taking root in his own home. A couple’s holiday takes a surprising turn when they initiate a role-playing game. In a traditional akhara in northern India, caste drives the plot as much as the characters’ will. A woman’s marriage quickly morphs into an endless series of humiliations -- until she decides to do something about it.
The tales are set in different parts of the country: a small town in Karnataka, a temple town and a village across the border in Kerala, cosmopolitan Chennai and Bengaluru, and a farm near Hathras in Uttar Pradesh. They explore a range of themes, from gender violence to pandemic lockdowns and cyber fraud, fusing incisive social commentary with deeply evocative emotional truths. In doing so, they take the reader on a transformative journey, both disturbing and memorable.*
Laying bare the fault lines of a marriage
{{/usCountry}}Laying bare the fault lines of a marriage
{{/usCountry}}A woman lost and found and lost again . . .
Born in a world that was unfair to women, Mannu Bhandari, grew up to be a sensitive, fiery and outspoken writer. Little did she realize though, that getting married to a man from her own field would prove to be the death of her own writing for the next decade.
In this very straightforward and open autobiography, Mannu Bhandari presents the other side of the household that she and Rajender Yadav occupied. She talks about how she drew her characters from her life and how difficult this seemingly simplicity of writing was.
Deeply hurt by her husband, Mannu lays bare the fault lines of her very controversial marriage and her dilemmas and struggles ― of being together and yet completely alone. With rare, candid ease and sentimentality, she takes the reader through her life, revealing her writing genius and claiming her rightful position as one of the best writers in Hindi literature.*
The hungers that shape us
Tell My Mother I Like Boys is a memoir of appetite ― for food, for love, for belonging. Suvir Saran, one of India’s most celebrated chefs, traces a life lived between continents and cultures, where the kitchen becomes both a sanctuary and a crucible. From the spice-laden streets of New Delhi to the pressure-cooked world of Michelin-starred New York dining, he reveals how cooking is never just about taste but about memory, survival and the making of the self.
Saran writes of the exhilaration of opening Devi, the first Indian restaurant in North America to earn a Michelin star, and of the loneliness that trailed even the brightest success. In his hands, food becomes a vocabulary: the slow patience of a biryani, the intricate layering of a galouti kebab, the quiet comfort of dal simmered at home. Each dish carries a memory and meaning, stitching together the fragments of exile, grief, desire and return.
At once an intimate kitchen story and a reckoning with identity, Tell My Mother I Like Boys is about the hungers that shape us and the meals ― lavish and humble ― that teach us how to live.*
*All copy from book flap.