Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust, 1975

The 1975 Booker Prize winner that was also made into a Merchant Ivory film. I enjoyed this closely examined interaction of cultures and eras, in which a 1970s British woman goes to India in search of the truth about her 1920s step-grandmother, the naïve wife of a dull British diplomat, who forms a brief romance with a minor Indian prince. A small scandal and not especially dramatic, though what impresses are the well-drawn characters, the portrayal of the condescending paternalism of the British as India’s colonial masters, and an atmospheric rendering of the all-pervading, oppressive Indian climate. Recommended.  PY

MORE ON RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA : WIKIPEDIA

Sabai Muang, The Call of the Midnight Hour, 1993

Sabai Muang is one of the many pseudonyms of the Thai author Sukanya Cholasueks, and The Call of the Midnight Hour is one of five novels she wrote on each of the Five Precepts of Buddhism. The Third Precept here is that of abstaining from sexual misconduct and is the story of Phatta, who abducts another man’s wife and suffers the consequences but also obtains a rather unusual redemption. Set in India at the time of the birth of Buddhism, Muang’s story has supernatural elements which muddy the waters of what is otherwise a very clear storyline, and towards the end it splits into two threads that separate what is going on with Phatta’s soul in the spiritual world and what is happening with his body in the real world, but these are blurred in such a way that it may become difficult to tell what was happening where, and with whom. If the other four short novels are also published in English they will probably be worth reading as well as this was well written, even if I felt at times that it was either too straightforward in places or a little too abstract.  PY

MORE ON SUKANYA CHOLASUEKS: BANGKOK POST PROFILE

Carsten Jensen, Earth in the Mouth, 1991

This is an interesting experiment in self-reflection: the Danish author Jensen revisits an unpublished fictional Indian travelogue he wrote twenty years earlier, and questions himself – and indeed his younger self – on why it remained unfinished. The travelogue itself is of the kind many thousands of backpackers-as-aspiring-writers would have turned out, with the self cast as a third person and where the protagonist’s culture shock is explored to the nth degree. In fact Jensen’s alter, Thomas, excels at this as he staggers from one crisis of the ego to another, utterly overwhelmed by the alienness of India. The bracketing prologue and epilogue frame it well, and understandably Jensen never really gets to the bottom of things as his journey isn’t yet finished. A mature book, with writing that has been compared to Bruce Chatwin and Milan Kundera.  PY

MORE ON CARSTEN JENSEN :  WIKIPEDIA

Salman Rushdie, East, West, 1994

Nine stories, three of Indians in India, three that exhibit aspects of Rushdie’s own peculiar way with Western fictional forms, and three of Indians living in England. Those middle three are notable for their imaginative diversity but they don’t sit well with the rest: we have a bizarre (and somewhat unreadable) abstraction on Hamlet, a scenario where fictional characters are infiltrating the real world at an auction of Dorothy’s slippers from The Wizard of Oz, and a courtship with Queen Isabella in the fevered mind of Christopher Columbus (a story which, somehow, has Bruce Chatwin written all over it). The remaining six more straightforward stories show how Rushdie makes the act of spinning very engaging tales of ordinary Indians and their families look easy, including the very original ‘Chekov and Zulu’, something which could qualify as a piece of very Indian and very erudite Star Trek fan fiction.  PY

MORE ON SALMAN RUSHDIE : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE   |  WIKIPEDIA

Meher Pestonji, Sadak Chhaap, 2005

‘Sadak chhaap’ means ‘street kid’ in colloqial Hindi, and this charts five years in the life of Rahul, one of Mumbai’s many thousands. The book opens with him discovering a baby girl wrapped in newspaper on a railway station, but this hint of a plot-in-the-making is dropped in favour of Rahul’s ups and downs as he frequently tries to makes good before regularly letting himself go, preferring the unstructured freedom that street life offers. This spirals down into drug abuse and paedophilia while friends watch on in despair. Realistic in its rather plotless form, one is often left wondering where the book will end up though Pestonji is thankfully uncompromising in her refusal to provide a fairytale ending.   PY

•  Meher Pestonji has campaigned extensively for a change in rape laws, housing rights for slum-dwellers, and a more sensitive understanding of street children and their special needs. She lives in Mumbai.