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HT Picks: The most interesting books of the week
A delightful book for children, a volume on labour migration, and a novel feature in this week’s list of good reads
THE ICE MONSTER BY DAVID WALLIAMS, ILLUSTRATED BY TONY ROSS
London 1899: This is the story of a ten-year-old orphan and a 10,000-year-old mammoth.*
UNCERTAIN JOURNEYS; LABOUR MIGRATION FROM SOUTH ASIA, EDITED BY AS PANNEERSELVAN
Labour migration is a perennial hot-button issue in the media, appearing in stories about the global economy, environmental concerns, exploitation or increasing political instability. All too often, these issues take precedence over the people involved – the migrant workers who leave their homes in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, to work long hours in precarious situations across the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In this book, eleven journalists explore the lived realities of migrant workers from South Asia – their aspirations, fears and dreams; how global forces determine their freedom how they navigate the policies that attempt to regulate their lives; and their hopes for a better future which carry them through years of unrelenting toil.
The essays in this book explore a variety of reasons why people migrate: from climate change gutting agricultural economies across the subcontinent, to the perception in Nepal that migration is a lottery, with great rewards and attendant great risks. Though meticulously researched long form reportage, Uncertain Journeys asks fundamental questions about the nature and costs of labour migration. Essays about the plight of Pakistani migrant workers on death row abroad, or of Indians stranded in Kuwait due to unpaid salaries and bankrupt employers, query whether labour sending countries can continue to assume that their responsibilities to their citizens abroad end with facilitating a steady inflow of remittances. The horrifying stories of men and women forced to labour, locked up and abused demand whether the blurred borderlines between migration and human trafficking effectively enable modern-day slavery Most crucially, the book questions whether human beings can be reduced to a mere commodity within the global free flow of capital.
Written with empathy, yet with a critical take on the stories being told – and the silent ones underlying them – the essays in this book are an important contribution to the conversation about labour migration in South Asia. *
A PATCHWORK FAMILY BY MUKTA SATHE
Young and idealistic, Janaki is eager to serve the cause of justice as a lawyer. Her only confidant is Ajoba, an elderly friend of her grandfather’s, who supported her throughout her childhood. They are unrelated by blood or marriage ties, but they have both lost their own families. So together, they struggle to create a family, patched together perhaps, but stronger for it.
As this gripping novel unfolds, the two characters in turn tell the traumatic story of how they came together: how Janaki being the eyewitness to a gruesome crime led to years of court cases and police investigations; the toll it took on the members of her immediate family; the ways in which Ajoba and Janaki each overcame their immediate prejudices to connect with each other; and the impact of the judicial system’s vagaries on their worldviews.
Written in spare, unadorned and confident prose, A Patchwork Family is a debut novel of unusual wisdom and maturity. *
*All text from book flap.
