ON DIGITALIS

Diwan Sahib said it reminded him of a curious, very old man at the Nawab of Surajgarh’s court, who had been there since the Nawab’s father’s time, and who wore brown clothes and a green pugree and had a face as cavernous as a starving man’s. He walked long hours in the forest and came back with cloth bags full of plants that he disappeared with into his laboratory, which was a quack’s den filled with glass flasks and Bunsen burners and test tubes and vernier callipers, and where, in the instant when the door opened a crack as he slid in, the smells that trickled out were of a kind that existed only in hallucinations and nightmares, so that when he shut the door you wondered if you had imagined them. It was rumoured that he manufactured poisons in that
den, and the rumour was strengthened by the inexplicable decline or death from time to time of people at the court who had fallen foul of the Nawab. The Nawab had claimed that the man made medicine, Diwan Sahib said, but the line between medicines and poisons is finely drawn, and this very foxglove, so poisonous and so beautiful, in the correct quantity, produced digitalis, which was medicine for troubles of the heart. “Not devastated hearts,” he had said laughing, “like yours
or mine, Maya, for that there is no medicine but death, which too the
foxglove can provide.”

From The Folded Earth

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE SINISTER

Have been looking around the hillside and am struck by the number of sinister plants there are, some of them also beautiful. The other day I spotted a strange phallic object that had snaked out of bare earth. Took photographs, looked it up, and found it is called the Voodoo Lily, apparently a favoured house plant in some parts of the world because the corm flowers minus any soil -- put it on your window sill and there's the flower, in a few days. I wouldn't allow it anywhere near my house though. It's single petal falls in a revolting leathery fold on to the ground and is spotted, like snakeskin. The mile-long stamen looks like a sting. To attract flies, which are its main pollinators, the lily gives off a foul stink, like that of carrion. And after the flower falls off it develops a red corn like seed -- I know of a child in the neighbourhood who almost died because she ate a tiny bit of that cob, attracted by its pretty colour.

After the flower falls off, the plant develops a pretty necklace of leaves. But grazing animals, being wiser than humans in some things, know it's not a salad plant and give it a wide berth.

AT THE FEET OF NANDA DEVI: SOME BOOK NOTES

The first few pages of a book by Frank Smythe mentions the town where I live: "On June 1st I arrived at Ranikhet from Naini Tal where I had stayed with Sir Harry Haig..." This town, in the Himalayan foothills, is so inconsequential that it doesn't feature on most maps and when you are far away from it you begin to wonder if it does exist. Yet here it was. As a printed word, the place gained solidity and consequence because the year was 1937, and Smythe was about to begin the expedition that would lead to a book whose title changed the name of a Himalayan valley.

My copy of the The Valley of Flowers is an inherited one, annotated in the margins by its previous reader. The notes have little to do with Smythe's poetic, contemplative prose, or his thoughts on solitude, freedom, nature, humankind. "Remember to take napkins for cleaning dishes etc", says a scribble next to a paragraph about the expedition cook wiping dishes on his filthy shirt. Closely underlined is a passage that lists reasons for climbing accidents. Mosquito nets and ration lists are marked up, as are places where swathes of primulas and gentians had been sighted.

The annotations were made by a woman who was half-English, half-Indian, and in the photograph that stood on her husband Amit's shelf she looked like Ingrid Bergman in a sari. A mist of tragedy wreathed this photograph. Soon after their wedding doctors told her she had a savage cancer that would kill her in a matter of months. She and Amit, both advertising people in Calcutta, decided they would spend those last months alone with each other, in Ranikhet. Here she lived another eighteen years and their days included picnics, walking trips into the neighbouring hills, and quantities of gin and cigarettes.

I met Amit long after she died, when I began visiting Ranikhet. Once the visits felt too brief, however long they were, my husband and I found a cottage there to live in. Amit was then about seventy, a spindly, grey-bearded, thatch-haired man in glasses. He had lost interest in walking and sat all day in his veranda. The veranda was fronted by a meadow on which, alongside flamboyant yellow day lilies, grew spinach sometimes, sometimes radish or corn. Amit smoked roll-up cigarettes that looked grey and damp, but they kept him occupied, as did passing children who wanted cricket scores off his radio. He could no longer bring himself to read new books so he reread his old ones. His world began roughly with Evelyn Waugh and came to an end with Somerset Maugham. Eventually, when he thought - or hoped - that he was on the brink of death, he told me, with the air of having found a good home for a lost dog, that I could have his books, as well as the day lilies.

Read the rest of the article HERE.

THE US EDITION

I promised the cover of the US edition -- and here it is, absolutely beautiful. It will be published in April. Meanwhile, some advance reviews have begun to come in.  

Kirkus said: "Gentle comedy, bitter tragedy and grief intertwine in an affectionately delineated portrait of an Indian hill community.
While ostensibly offering a leisurely exploration of the town of Ranikhet in the foothills of the Himalayas, Roy (An Atlas of Invisible Longing, 2011) has achieved something larger, a poem to the natural world and its relentless displacement by the developed one. ...Roy pulls politics, society, ecological warning and history into her slow, episodic story, but it’s her love for the creatures, landscapes and eternal beauty of this place that inspire it. Finally events gather speed after an act of petty spite against a neighbor and his pet, culminating in death, a terrible discovery and an act of shattering revenge.
Despite an occasional sense of drift, this understated, finely observed book expresses a haunting vision. A writer to watch."

MS Magazine called it a "carefully observed story of separation, loss, and resourcefulness... an elegant marriage of psychology and nature... reminiscent of the great R. K. Narayan's poignant tales of rural India."

Elsewhere: Bookbag, UK, said "There is a steel hand in the velvet glove of Roy's story-telling...There are three great strengths to this book. Firstly, the contrast between the timeless majesty and beauty of the landscape and the all too brief lives of the often rather less noble human residents who live there. This leads to the second reason that this is such a good read: Roy creates some wonderful, often quite eccentric characters. You can always tell when this is done to perfection when even the smallest bit part characters seem to come to life with a few brief idiosyncracies. The final thing that stands out about this book is that, while at times it's not altogether clear where the plot, such as it is, is heading, the final few pages make sense of the whole thing and may surprise you and will probably make you smile".

And DAWN, Pakistan, said: "The novel examines loss, yearning, seemingly inconsequential actions, culpability, rationale and the frailty of human existence, from a refreshingly simple perspective. As we are
introduced to Maya’s microcosm — Diwan Sahib, Charu, Ama, others — there is familiarity and recognition as all of these people exist in our lives as well. They are our friends, confidants, relatives, acquaintances and help. The dynamic the writer weaves between these all-too-real characters is instantly identifiable and at times frighteningly real."

"DESTROYED BY TOO MUCH SMARTNESS"

On Charles Dickens's birthday, his letter about a prospective author's manuscript.

OFFICE OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Monday, June 1st, 1857._

MY DEAR STONE,

I know that what I am going to say will not be agreeable; but I rely on
the authoress's good sense; and say it, knowing it to be the truth.
These "Notes" are destroyed by too much smartness. It gives the
appearance of perpetual effort, stabs to the heart the nature that is in
them, and wearies by the manner and not by the matter. It is the
commonest fault in the world (as I have constant occasion to observe
here), but it is a very great one. Just as you couldn't bear to have an
épergne or a candlestick on your table, supported by a light figure
always on tiptoe and evidently in an impossible attitude for the
sustainment of its weight, so all readers would be more or less
oppressed and worried by this presentation of everything in one smart
point of view, when they know it must have other, and weightier, and
more solid properties. Airiness and good spirits are always delightful,
and are inseparable from notes of a cheerful trip; but they should
sympathise with many things as well as see them in a lively way. It is
but a word or a touch that expresses this humanity, but without that
little embellishment of good nature there is no such thing as humour. In
this little MS. everything is too much patronised and condescended to,
whereas the slightest touch of feeling for the rustic who is of the
earth earthy, or of sisterhood with the homely servant who has made her
face shine in her desire to please, would make a difference that the
writer can scarcely imagine without trying it. The only relief in the
twenty-one slips is the little bit about the chimes. It _is_ a relief,
simply because it is an indication of some kind of sentiment. You don't
want any sentiment laboriously made out in such a thing. You don't want
any maudlin show of it. But you do want a pervading suggestion that it
is there. It makes all the difference between being playful and being
cruel. Again I must say, above all things--especially to young people
writing: For the love of God don't condescend! Don't assume the attitude
of saying, "See how clever I am, and what fun everybody else is!" Take
any shape but that.

I observe an excellent quality of observation throughout, and think the
boy at the shop, and all about him, particularly good. I have no doubt
whatever that the rest of the journal will be much better if the writer
chooses to make it so. If she considers for a moment within herself, she
will know that she derived pleasure from everything she saw, because she
saw it with innumerable lights and shades upon it, and bound to humanity
by innumerable fine links; she cannot possibly communicate anything of
that pleasure to another by showing it from one little limited point
only, and that point, observe, the one from which it is impossible to
detach the exponent as the patroness of a whole universe of inferior
souls. This is what everybody would mean in objecting to these notes
(supposing them to be published), that they are too smart and too
flippant.

As I understand this matter to be altogether between us three, and as I
think your confidence, and hers, imposes a duty of friendship on me, I
discharge it to the best of my ability. Perhaps I make more of it than
you may have meant or expected; if so, it is because I am interested and
wish to express it. If there had been anything in my objection not
perfectly easy of removal, I might, after all, have hesitated to state
it; but that is not the case. A very little indeed would make all this
gaiety as sound and wholesome and good-natured in the reader's mind as
it is in the writer's.
Affectionately always,
Charles Dickens

The JAIPUR LIT FEST 2012

Was a rather different affair this year. Some differing points of view -- vitriolic, explanatory, celebratory -- and accounts of events, here and here and here and here. 

What the media accounts did not care to highlight were the many excellent sessions that did take place despite the problems -- I went to brilliant ones by Jamaica Kincaid, Anna Pavord, Nayanjot Lahiri, Tom Stoppard, Girish Karnad. As always I discovered new writers and came back with their (signed) books. As William Dalrymple's article says, other than the extra security, most visitors perceived nothing out of the ordinary.

THE FOLDED EARTH: PUBLISHING SOON IN THE US

THE FOLDED EARTH is coming out in April 2012 in the US, published by the Free Press, as An Atlas of Impossible Longing was. If you want an early, free copy, there is a giveaway on Goodreads -- have a look here. The giveaway closes in about 3 weeks. Watch this space for the cover... I still haven't seen it, and can hardly wait.

The British paperback

The Folded Earth has been out in India and the UK for about a year and has had some great reviews -- you can look at excerpts and go to the links here. It was shortlisted for the Hindu Literary Prize and longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Award alongside Haruki Murakami's IQ84 -- I love Murakami's writing so I was delighted to be on a list with him (and almost as pleased that when my book was knocked out in the shortlist, so was his!)


The good news about both An Atlas of Impossible Longing and The Folded Earth is that they will soon be out in Arabic, published by Dar al Adab, a Beirut-based press that publishes Elias Khoury and other excellent writers. Very happy that my books will be on their list. The other translations of the books are listed here.

The Folded Earth also had an outing at the Jaipur Lit Fest, where I read from it. Will post a few pictures soon -- don't have any yet. But for people looking in general for pics from the Jaipur lit fest, there are tons of pictures of each day's activities posted by an agency, Solaris.


And finally, both the UK (Maclehose Press) and Indian (Hachette India) paperback editions of The Folded Earth will be out in April. The British edition will have the gorgeous new cover shown above.