Ibn-e-Safi was one of the great Urdu pulp fiction novelists. Detective Imran is his most famous creation and the best-selling Imran series are Urdu cult classics. The Economic Times carries an excerpt from Shootout at the Rocks, translated into English for the first time by Bilal Tanweer.
The clock struck one and Imran got out of bed. He opened the door and came out of the room. Silence reigned everywhere, but not a single light had been turned off in any of the rooms in the bungalow.
He stepped out into the verandah and waited to hear any footsteps or sounds, and then he darted into the room where the colonel’s family was assembled. Except for Sophiya, everyone had a rifle next to themselves. Anwar and Arif looked extremely bored, Sophiya’s eyes were bloodshot due to lack of sleep, and the colonel was sitting on the sofa, still as a statue. He was not even blinking his eyes. Upon seeing Imran, he twitched.
‘What is it? Why have you come here?’ he thundered.
‘Something is bothering me,’ Imran replied.
‘What?’ said the colonel. His demeanour did not soften.
‘If you are troubled by a few unknown men, why don’t you inform the police?’
‘I know that the police cannot do anything.’ more:
From the Observer:
Each December and January my normal life dissolves in the face of a million emails generated by my favourite commitment of the year: helping direct the Jaipur Literature Festival, which kicks off at the end of this week in the capital of Rajasthan. Private Eye recently ran a cartoon showing two survivors of a shipwreck watching their liner sink from a desert island, shaded by a single, drooping palm tree. One says to the other: “Well, I suppose the first thing to do is to start a literary festival.” The cartoonist had a point: literary festivals now seem almost as globally contagious as swine flu.
But it certainly didn’t seem that way in 2004, when I moved my family back to India from London, and first discussed starting a literary festival in Jaipur. Then, as now, India appeared to be at the centre of the global literary hurricane: every year, it seemed another brilliant young Indian wunderkind would storm the bestseller list and run away with the Booker.
Wherever I appeared at literary festivals around the globe, all the usual celebrated Indian writers were there – everywhere, that is, except India. Arriving back in Delhi, I found to my surprise that one tended to meet far more of what the west regards as the A-list Indian writers in English at the literary festival of Hay-on-Wye, in the Welsh countryside, or Edinburgh or even Sydney, than one ever did in Bombay or Delhi. More:
Jawed Naqvi in Dawn:
AN apocryphal story told by the late Prof A.M. Khusro when he was vice chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University goes thus: in 1603 James VI of Scotland became England’s first Stuart monarch.
Within 10 days of arriving in London, he demanded that Shakespeare’s troupe come under his own patronage. So they were granted a royal patent and changed their names to the King’s Men, in honour of King James.
One day, waiting for The Merchant of Venice to begin, the king asked his senior aide to inquire into the inordinate delay in the show. ‘Sire,’ said the official after a visit to the green room. ‘Portia is being shaved.’ Good-looking boys played female roles in Shakespeare’s England. In India, upper-crust women in Maharashtra would, as recently as the early 20th century, choose their exotic nav-waari saris according to the fashion of the day.
The legendary Bal Gandharva, who depicted many famous female characters from Marathi stage plays, set the standards. Bal Gandharva is still deified as an essential cultural grooming in upper-crust homes. He was of course a handsome man who sang beautifully in the Natya Sangeet format of old Maharashtrian theatre. More:
Manil Suri, 48, is by day a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. By night, he is a novelist, creating narratives set in his native India. From The New York Times:
Q. Have there been many mathematician-novelists?
A. Lewis Carroll. He was sort of a mathematician. There are other people who’ve done something similar. Apostolos Doxiadis wrote “Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture,” and he was a mathematician. There’s someone in Argentina who wrote a short novella on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. So there’s a sprinkling of them. But it’s not like medicine, where there’s a tradition of literary doctors. Mathematics and literature, they seem divergent fields. In mathematics you have a lot of constraints, whereas in literature, you can make your story come out the way you’d like it to.
Q. Are there areas where math and writing converge?
A. Actually, there are a few. If you’re writing and plotting the path of your characters, you have to consider the different directions they might go. “If I move something there, what will happen with this other thing?” Or, “How will the characters interact, if they do this or that?”
In mathematics, in place of characters, you have variables or unknowns. If I’m trying to plot a theorem, I try to imagine these variables interacting with each other. The boundary of their interaction is the theorem.
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Adventurous travellers have found many things in Goa. Innocent escape was never one of them. Ian Jack in The Guardian, UK:
Fiona MacKeown was by no means the first parent of a large family to travel from a rambling home in rural western England, in the middle of a damp winter, and see what Goa had to offer by way of diversion. Evelyn Waugh had six children (a seventh died in infancy); Fiona MacKeown had nine (eight since February 15, when her 15-year-old daughter Scarlett Keeling was found dead on the beach at Anjuna). Waugh travelled from Piers Court, a Georgian mansion in Gloucestershire. MacKeown came from a huddle of caravans near Bideford, Devon, a home summarised as “a mountain of old tyres … empty beer bottles … and rubbish” by Wednesday’s Daily Mail. But the bigger difference is that Waugh left his children behind.
He came to Goa in December 1952. “The scenery [is] delicious … the people soft and friendly,” he wrote to his wife.
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In The Spectator, Matthew d’Ancona describes his time in Mumbai:
A city where the children dash from car to car selling novels is the perfect place for a literary festival: on the way from the airport, snaking past shantytowns and catching my first glimpse of the Arabian Sea, I am offered The Kite Runner by street urchins knocking on the window of my taxi. It is a good location for another reason, which is that, like New York or Rome, Mumbai is a place one visits in literature and film many times before setting foot on the island city itself. In its crush of people, colour, sensuality, surrealism and politics, it is Midnight’s Children or a Bollywood double-bill suddenly made flesh.
I am here to talk about British politics and fiction, doing my best not to confuse the two. A few days before departure, I see the PM at No. 10 and mention my impending trip. True to form, the big clunking bibliomane reels off a list of books I should read before I go. In Mumbai, I unpack my suitcase and look out of the window to the Gateway of India, through which, in 1947, the last British troop left the Empire. A copy of Gordon’s top recommendation, Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi, sits reproachfully on the table, still pristine and unread.
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Does the greatly esteemed and cherished Nobel Prize provide the kiss of death for writers, VS Naipaul in particular? Ramachandra Guha, historian and author of India After Gandhi, in The Hindustan Times:
Like some other writers of my generation, I have a deeply ambivalent attitude towards the work of VS Naipaul. I was moved and charmed by his early stories of social life in the Caribbean. I admired the understated style of his non-fiction. I marvelled at his readiness to challenge the pieties of political correctness, as in his book, Among the Believers, a prescient analysis of the pathologies of Islamic fundamentalism. On the other hand, I was irritated by his ill-judged comments on Indian politics (as in his seeming endorsement of Hindu fundamentalism). And I was seriously put off by his vanity and pettiness, as in his disparaging remarks about his contemporaries and the simultaneous suggestion that he was the only living writer worth considering.
In the middle of last year I was asked to review Naipaul’s new book, A Writer’s People. I found it a disappointing and at times even obnoxious book. He could not, it seems, mention another writer without putting him down (thus Philip Larkin was dismissed as a “minor poet”, and Derek Walcott accused of insinuating himself into the good books of the Americans). The subliminal and at times open message of this silly little book was: Once there was Mahatma Gandhi, who transcended the boundaries of caste, religion, and nation to become a Universal Being. After him came VS Naipaul, who did likewise. In between lay a barren desert of under-achievement.
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In The Hindu, K. Srilata meets American travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux.
When I am travelling, I am going with the motive of bringing as much back as possible. For instance, two years ago when I was in Chennai, I did a continuous trip: Uzbekistan to Jodhpur, Jaipur, Delhi, Amritsar, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and then Tiruchi and Colombo. Every day I woke up and wrote my notes intending to find out something about where I am. That is different from what I am doing on this trip. I am doing a lot of talking, very little listening. If I am planning to write a travel book, it is a mission. The travel writing is deliberate. So is the information gathering. I am offering myself as a sacrifice to experience…
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Suniti Namjoshi in The Hindu.
I’ve just finished writing my 13th book for children. But for most of my writing life, I haven’t thought of myself as a children’s writer. And it has finally occurred to me to ask why there’s such a discrepancy between the images of children in my books for adults and my idea of the child in my books for children.
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