BOOKS
20 Little Indias

Essayists with their quills on the pulse of the country

By Ashok KOSHY

The head honcho at Penguin India confessed to me a couple of years ago that it was house policy not to publish any material that had already seen the light of day in a newspaper, book or magazine. The arrival of Elsewhere, therefore, gave me a bit of a turn since the 20 essays in it have already appeared in The India Magazine between 1996 and 1998, when Kai Friese was the magazine's editor. One is relieved that Penguin has had a change of heart on what it ought to publish, else these extraordinary nuggets might never have been blessed with a second coming. The India Magazine silently slipped away into oblivion some years ago, not obviously for the material it printed. In his introduction, Friese asserts his sole responsibility lay in providing the current publishers with what he thought was the best writing of his editorial stint with the magazine. He has chosen shrewdly.

Much is written about inscrutable India and the nightmare of attempting to pigeonhole its diversity into neat sub-heads. These authors have their quills unerringly on the pulse of the country and can fathom "the grain of daily life, its pleasures and perils". "The House on Debendra Ghose Road" is a fine chronicle of a few hours spent through "the arena of privileged domesticity and sexuality" within an ancient and venerable mansion, in the company of three elderly gentlemen on a hot April morning. Amit Chaudhuri is a master of language and at moments quite surpasses Charles Lamb, whom he undoubtedly read at Balliol.

An Englishman is found with his throat slit in a hotel in Goa. The author is given the task by the victim's policeman-brother of bringing the culprits to book. In a riveting expose, Bishakha Datta converts subtly from sniffing bloodhound to rationalist patriot, indifferent in the end to "The Death of a Tourist", since "all conventional signposts of morality have dissolved into a landscape of greys where there is no right, no wrong, no good, no bad, no truth, no lies". But gore and nostalgia aside, my favourite pieces include Pankaj Mishra's evocative reportage of Sonia Gandhi's fumbling foray into politics while campaigning in Goa ("Among the Believers") where, in the finest traditions of Italian soap opera, "a middle-class woman from near Torino tries to rescue India's oldest political party from extinction"; and Manjula Padmanabhan's "Transports of Delight", where the wicked three-wheeled scooter rickshaw is lyrically immortalised, both in prose and illustration. I reserve the laurel, however, for Anita Roy, who with brevity of space and stiletto sharp wit has portrayed the "nouveau Rajas and their dishevelled, bored, expat Maharani-manques", former inhabitants of middle-class Wimbledon who domicile temporarily in diplomatic postings amongst sweaty natives, subsuming their overt racism in "the sweet cloud of white meringue" on the high commissioner's immaculately manicured lawns.

"All Indians are ch---yas," says a CBI official to the investigative journalist in "Tourist". Perhaps, but the 20 essays show us up to be a marvellously diverse people, unfazed by poverty and squalor, sporting the will to survive against all odds and overcome in the end. Vive le difference!