A good time to be young

Gone are the days of Briget Jone's Diary or Sex and the City. The impossible world of Young-Adult (YA) literature has taken over the chick-lit sphere. The YA books target all in the age group of 14-25 while chick-lit was meant mainly for young women. Though YA fiction too treads the chick-lit line (teen romance, popular culture) but places it in a complex world of vampires, fairies, or wizards. Given its simple narration, complex and multiple climaxes, considerable love factor and magic, the genre has developed a considerable adult cult following too. Here is a list of YA paperbacks ready to burst on the Indian scene and those not of the "happening generation" remember one is never too old to become younger.

NEARLY DEPARTED by ROOK HASTINGS
If you like your dose of creeps unmorphed by vampires or witches, then here is a ghost tale complete with flickering lights and eerie woods. The story that mainly targets young-adults is set in a British town Woodsville, also locally known as Wierdsville for its quirk-factor.

A set of unmatched youngsters are thrown together for a school assignment. The much-bullied and "invisible" Emily has a problem. She thinks her house is haunted, so the others: Betham, Jay, Hashim and Kelly, decide to give it a ghost-check and dispel her fears. But that’s not the simple story. The gang finds that Emily’s mother is missing and strangely, no one knows of it.As the story unfolds the five keep running into things that go bump in the night. The woods seem to be the centre of all the unexplained in the town. To top it all Jay’s grandfather Albert is the only grown-up who is ready to believe the young gang and help them.Each of the gang-member has a distinct, identifiable trait which makes the characterization engrossing, though straight. The story is swift and language is just what would roll-off the tongue of a British teenager. The ghost seekers won’t be disappointed with this book as the group practically fights off a horde of light-emanating ghosts. As the Scooby-style group solves the Emily-puzzle what emerges is a thrilling plot, if not necessarily a hair-raising one.

RADIANT SHADOWS by MELISSA MARR

Radiant Shadows is the fourth book in the Wicked Lovely series and for those who have been following the chain, there is nothing about Aislinn and Seth (on whom the first book was based) in this story. Those who haven’t been following will find this book tedious as the story deals with the complex workings and squabbles of various faery courts. A quick view of Marr’s faery world for the benefit of all: Faeries live alongside the human world, though invisible. The faery world is divided into courts that have their own typical traits and are ruled by immortal faery kings and queens. Faeries like to stay invisible to humans and can be evil.The present book focuses on Devlin, assassin-cum-adviser to Scorcha, Queen of Faerie, and Ani who is   a half-mortal half-faery. Something about Ani’s blood is different as she strangely feeds on both humans and faeries and has an appetite for both emotions and touch. As she grows, young Ani finds it harder to control and satisfy her appetites. Emotion-denying Devlin, (styled like Dr Spock of Star Treck) who has been ever loyal to his queen, had years ago spared Ani when the Queen had ordered him to kill her.Now, decades later he realizes his fate is somehow intricately tied to hers and he must protect her from Bananach (war) who also wants Ani for her unusual powers.

Marr gives us a complex but engaging world of magic where steeds change into cars, dreams can be woven together and reality keeps changing. A rewarding read only if you have an imagination to cope with the brisk narrative and patience for the unexplained.

SPELLS by APRILYNNE PIKE

Another weave from the faery-land, Spells is a sequel to Aprilynne Pike’s debut Wings. It has nothing of the complex world of Radiant Shadows, and the atmosphere is brighter as faeries flower like plants and carry blossoms on their backs. Those uninitiated to the first volume can easily begin with the second, but other than the faery-life tid-bits there is little original here.The story is more or less a Harry Potter redo as a young Laurel is in a Hogwarts-style academy to learn the faery arts she missed on while growing up with a human family. In the first volume Laurel had saved the gateway to faeryland Avalon. The threat from "trolls" lead by Jeremiah Barnes still exists and she must be ready for it. Everything is not fine on the personal front too.Laurel finds her mother getting increasingly distant with the revelation that she is faery. Also, while  Laurel has her human boyfriend David, she is unable to deny the connection she feels to faery guard Tamani.

Laurel herself is a fall fairy and the more she learns about the winter, summer and spring faeries the more she finds herself at odds with their system. Hormones run high in the novel as kissing and snogging appear frequently even at the expense of the plot. 

Freshness comes only in kicks and starts as Tamani shows Laurel around Avalon and explains to her the faery discipline of classes. Towards the end Laurel has successfully vanquished the threat to her two worlds and resolved the complexity of her love life for the time. The end leaves room for another sequel but with little promise.

THE POISON DIARIES by MARYROSEWOOD

Young and mysterious Weed is dropped at the doorstep of an apothecary Luxton who takes him in for his curious talent with plants. Luxton has a 16-year-old daughter Jessamine, who finds a rare, young friend in Weed as opposed to her distant and cold father. But Weed, much like her father, is riveted to the gardens where Luxton stocks rare plants. As Jessamine tenders to Weed, the couple begins to fall in love. However, there is something strangely inhuman about Weed’s compassion for plants. While he seems to be able to feel plant pain he is numb to humans. Jessamine is appalled with Weed’s behaviour and he is forced to confesses his secret: He can hear plants. He tells Jessamine that her father’s poison garden is a dangerous place as malevolent plants have stuck allegiances and wanted to control all. He promises her he will never go back in again. On the night Luxton announces their betrothal, Jessamine falls sick. 

Weed must go back to the poison garden and release her from the delusion of dream where she is with Oleander, the prince of poisons. As Weed undertakes the heartless tasks assigned to him by the plants of poison garden in exchange of cure, he must also unveil the real villain and sacrifice his love.

The ending is heartbreaking, perhaps in its bid to leave room for a sequel, but the adventure holds its fort well. The story transforms from a brooding Jessamine (first 30 pages), to a coy love and finally breaks into a dark mystery.   A refreshing read, The Poison Diaries is just the sort of book one wants on a rainy Sunday afternoon with a warm cup of coffee.

The death of a slice of history I The Dollmaker's Island by Anuradha Kumar I

They are on the government records but no one has seen them for ages. Their craft seems to travel places but no one remembers hearing them. Yet, everyone has heard about the Dollmakers, or at least some version of their tale. Anuradha Kumar gives us an island that moves with the river and carries with it a drifting story. On the Dollmakers’ Island a voice, a ladder and some boats are missing. What is also silently lost is the history and identity of the dollmakers. Kumar says she sees the dollmakers as symbolising the neglected and the faceless of the society. They could, however, also be seen to symbolise the fringe that doesn’t want to be institutionalised.
The Dollmaker’s Island is Anuradha Kumar’s fifth work. Books for children have been among Kumar’s earlier works. In her latest, she gives us a curious mix of genres, a novel that could perhaps be called a fairytale for adults. The novel moves like a puzzle through a maze of history which is familiar yet has an Alice-like feel. What Kumar does with time is both intriguing and amazing. In her hands, time seems to lose its properties. It is neither linear nor perpetual, neither persistent nor final. She audaciously sidesteps it at one time and dresses it up in her story at another. In a span of 240 pages, her novel resurrects the great kings from Ashoka to Aurangzeb, and the mighty British from Clive to Curzon. She compresses time and trivialises what is known in the adult world as facts and physics. Her story places all the three — the kings, the British and the government —
on the same pedestal, i.e. the ruler, and projects their continuity against the losses of the ruled, Dollmakers.
The Dollmakers are a notorious pack. They have stayed away from the government and caused it pin-pricks for ages. Leela, the protagonist, has lived timelessly and now moves into the era of emails and Internet as she acquires a computer. But Leela’s voice is lost on the day the government finalises the fate of the island. Government representative Ronen Ghito swings into action and is determined to solve the mystery.
While the story, at one level, works as a strong social and political satire, it also, on the other hand, has a love theme as Leela awaits the return of Shyam, a playwright, imprisoned for writing an “ambiguous” play. The story opens in the partition-era with Lord Mountabatten, Radcliffe and others attempting to draw a line through the Dollmakers’ Island. At the island, years later, Leela has lost her voice while the Headman and the Mouldi play out their years-old rivalry. They both have their credentials: the Mouldi, a letter from Curzon while the headman, Gandhi’s glasses. In an Orwellian style, the government is on the island and Leela must cooperate with them in the probe. The plot deepens while Leela looks for Shyam on the Internet as she is also suspected of hiding secrets in her tightly-bound braids.
The climax sees a computer virus annihilate history, turning the island and Leela “ahistoric”. The progress of the story alternates with the history of the island. In a parable-like set-up, the novel simplifies and attempts to understand conflict on one hand and ridicules its history on the other.
Kumar’s prose has a flavour of poetic ambiguity. Each character and event serves as an independent symbol yet mingles smoothly into the story. Kumar doesn’t weigh down the symbols with meanings, she allows them a life of their own. As the symbols remain open to the readers’ interpretation, a distinct style emerges.
In this state of free meanings, Kumar brings in the discipline of consistency and pattern that makes her work truly remarkable. The book compels second and third readings as symbols stay fecund. Her brand of poetic ambiguity is not that of an abyss of dark meanings, but that of multiple analogies and the reader enjoys the unravelling of the puzzle prose that is almost solved yet isn’t.

Maria’s Room by Shreekumar Varma

Give me a dream and make it come true...


Shreekumar Varma’s latest work circles around dreams in different stages: Nurtured, pursued, shattered. The story hinges on the impact of dreams on life, both imaginary and real. The protagonist, Raja Prasad, is a writer. Haunted by an agonising past, he clings tenously to the present through his writings. As he embarks on his newnovel his peresent gets inextricably tied to the story he weaves in his mind. The book's 300 pages come together gradually, like pieces in a puzzle. The puzzle here is both the life of the protagonist, who is a writer, and the novel he aims to produce. In the process we are handed a writer’s enthralling pursuit of his manuscript.

"A novelist looking at life is like a child playing with his numbered drawing book. It is upto him to connect the dots and make the picture;"

In the first 150 pages, the protagonist arrives in Goa and begins to focus on real people as characters for his novel. Raja is a recluse and his vision of the world is like that of an overexposed camera. We are given glimpses into his traumatized mind but the character seems incomplete and weak. It takes an effort to wad through this section of the book. However, brilliant flashes of Varma's creativity make the journey a little less tedious. He imparts an ethereal radiance to his descriptions. Conceits like, "A black Tata Estatedrove up and paused like an animal at a waterhole," provide the much needed succor in this section which could have been compressed to 50 pages. It is like watching a flower blossom, an experience few would sit through, though a satisfying outcome is assured.

There is no turning back once you are past the 150 mark. It is after this point that the novel-within-the-novel format begins to take a clearer shape. Raja Prasad, the protagonist, begins his novel titled Maria’s Guesthouse. Varma however, turns this format upside down. The developments in Maria’s Guesthouse now begin to affect life of Raja and of those around him.

Shreekumar Varma is a Chennai-based writer, poet and teacher. Amonghis other works are Lament of Mohini and Devil’s Garden. Shreekumar is the grandson of the last ruling maharani of Travancore. In Lament of Mohini he dealt with the story of a royal family and its escapades. His debut work, like his latest fiction, used novel-within-novel format. Both the works have at their core a writer’s engagement with his work. Pre-occupation with the past and struggle to free oneself of it, is also a common thread that runs through both the books. In Maria’s Room past is mysterious. It beckons from across the border of memory where it has been banished. Its attempt to cross over into present through the ministrations of mind forms an engrossing plot. Curse is another recurring motif in Varma’s work. Lament of Mohini brings up a family curse wherein women are left behind to suffer. In Maria’s Room too, Raja believes there is a family curse where men are left alone.

The fact that Varma is a descendant of reknown painter Raja Ravi Varma speaks through the heightened visual quality of his work. His vision brings out distinct moods of episodes, much like a painting.

Varma picks on universal subjects of love, loss and death. He adds to this generous scoops of mystery and delectable strokes of word-masonry. Dialogues flow in and out of the narrative inconspicuously. He plays around with words easily and is able to mould the language to his ends. Speech of each character is uniquely and distinctly sculptured. So, on one hand a little boy’s call is transcribed as "Oos there" the female protagonist’s speech is given a pleasing desi twang, "I don’t like phones only". The writer’s pen is free of inhibitionsand complexes. He brings out the neurosis of his protagonist with a poetic flourish.

The reader is not given the benefit of many voices as the narrative runs in first person. An acute sense mystery is evoked as everything is seen and told through the eyes of the protagonist. It becomes difficult to put down the book as a reclusive Raja pieces together the disturbing past. While mystery has an instinctive appeal for readers Varma balances it with insight and creativity. His own words go on to best describe what he has attempted with this novel:

"What wouldn’t we do
To uncoil the coiled
And then coil it up again."

Demand and Supply

CHORUS: Tough and long

                Is our life, but we live

               For moments of joy

                Spells of glee

                Happiness is all we need.

Person 1: what Happiness?

Person 2: which Happiness?

Person 3:  a meaningless word!

CHORUS: Meaningless?

                The truth of our life…

                Focus of our being…

                Meaningless?

P1: Qualify!

P2: Qualify!

P3: Qualify!

TOGETHER: Qualify Happiness!

CHORUS: Pleasure needs

no qualification

you feel it bone to bone

like love,

like energy,

like life!

P1: Romantic hopes!

P2: You’ll never know!

P3: Never know what you want!

CHORUS: But some happiness

                is all we want!

P1: Qualify!

P2: Qualify!

P3: Qualify

CHORUS: Qualify how?

P1: What joy?

P2: Fat or slim?

P3: Tall or short?

P1: Black or white or…….maybe?

P2: 17^th floor or ground floor?

P3: American stocks or Indian?

P1: Management or sports?

P2: Spiritual or physical?

ONE VOICE FROM CHORUS: Let me think…

                                                       Management I think

                                                        Management I want

P1: For 30 yrs ?

                Only that?

                No sports? Sure?

                No spiritual, physical?

                No American Indian?

                No slim or fat?

                No cheese or macroni?

CHORUS : No I want that…

P: What? Which?

P: Qualify! Qualify!

An open market

You can buy

But a smart buyer

You must be

That’s why qualify

What product

Is your Happiness?

168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam I Ever Had A ‘Good Tuesday’? I

Caught in the middle of a monsoon viral and visiting relatives, I was way behind my schedule for reviewing Laura Vanderkam’s 168 Hours. My deadline was looming large. I was stressed.

But by the time I finished reading the book I had not only recovered from the viral and made peace with a grumbling kin, but also managed to overcome a creative block, caught up on my French lessons and was still left with sufficient time to write this piece. I was quite happy.
The first thing Vanderkam, also the author of Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career without Paying Your Dues, says in 168 Hours is that we have more time than we think.
To be honest, for a long time I was scared to open 168 Hours. It was probably another one of those self-improvement books that insist on a strict time-table, something I have been averse to since school days. But Vanderkam doesn’t take the conventional line, though she does insist on keeping a log book on how you spend your day.
Vanderkam begins 168 Hours with the description of a “good Tuesday” — a day when she practically runs around the city of New York without upsetting a single strand of hair — and says that it is possible to make every day of the week satisfying. She presents a new world indeed, one in which we don’t have a frugal 24-hour budget but a luxuriant 168-hour account. Vanderkam made me look at life not in compartments of 24-hour-long days, but as a week of 168 hours. By changing the cramped scenery she had grabbed my attention.
And that’s when she lured me into keeping a log of my days while insisting that the concept of time-crunch is a cultural narrative, a myth. She projects paucity of time as a culural psychosis.
I kept the log but was, of course, still unconvinced with her other argument. In two days my logs were telling a strange tale. Vanderkam was right. We are not busier than our ancestors but were reading, and internalising, W.H. Davies’ Leisure — “What is this life if, full of care/ We have no time to stand and stare?” — in school when we had all the time in the world. Cultural narrative? A myth? Hmmm.
My logs told me that there were some things I was doing much more than I thought: Internet surfing, sleeping, watching TV; while there were other things I was devoting very little time to: exercising, managing money, eating. But this time Vanderkam didn’t make me feel happy at all. While she was saying everything needs time, she also wanted me to believe that I had all the time in the world to do what I wanted. I felt there were a lot of things she wasn’t taking into account, like stress and motivation.
To make her point, perhaps, Vanderkam introduces Theresa Daytner who owns a large revenue company and is a mother of six. Ms Daytner goes trekking, spends time with her children, arranges a surprise party for her husband and meets US President Barack Obama. The key is not that she does so much but that she does it all with such ease. I found myself wanting the Daytner formula but Vanderkam gave me none.
Instead, Vanderkam asked me to look deeper. Defining work as “activities advancing you towards your career”, one of the things she spurs her reader to do is to find the “perfect job”: “Expecting someone else to have conceived of your perfect job is roughly similar to expecting someone else to read your mind”. Then she asks a series of questions and with each one you inch towards clarity: What are your core competencies, what job would exactly match your competencies, how could you create that job for yourself?
All this probing brought me close to the unaccountable aspects of my confusing logs. Like Sid Savara, whose story she narrates, I was spending too much time in household chores. Much like Sid, I liked cooking and keeping my house nice and pretty, but it seemed to be a drain on my time and energy. So I “outsourced” the “non-work” and committed that time to a much-needed exercise schedule. I also found time to dig up some folk music to satiate my parched creativity.
168 Hours is very communicative and Vanderkam’s voice is both convincing and assertive. But, she uses too many words and is often repetitive.
Nevertheless, Vanderkam has a lot to say and her book is not meant to be read in a hurry. For example, a chapter which deals with achieving a breakthrough requires you to visualise the next level in your career and figure out the people who will take you there. She clearly demands time and introspection. Fortunately, Vanderkam doesn’t look at readers as corporate prototypes but understands that her readers may include super-moms juggling house, kids and demanding jobs, couples facing mid-life ennui, and the young and ambitious. As she takes a fresh look at time, Vanderkam makes life look less burdensome, and the “want-to-do” list easy and achievable.
I had been pushing my French lessons for the-day-when-I-would-have-time. But now it’s back on my weekly calendar. Every French word I learn turns my day into a “good Tuesday”.

Where the Serpent Lives BY Ruth Padel I Beauty, beasts & betrayal I

A serpent lives in the heart of the jungle and the abyss of the mind; that is also where author Ruth Padel rears her story. The novel Where the Serpent Lives (Little Brown Books, Rs 595) by the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin progresses by creating reflections of the human emotions in nature. It is a tricky formula that works for Padel in some places but leaves her exposed in most others.

Where the Serpent Lives opens in the nest of a King Cobra as field zoologist Richard observes a snake secure its eggs. From this rainforest in Karnataka, the story makes a fine leap to a house on Primrose Hill, London, where Rosamund, who could once make heads turn like sunflowers, is trying to deal with the jungle in her mind. She is in a state of emotional paralysis, caught as she is between a profligate husband, Tyler, and an increasingly reclusive teenaged son, Russel. Even though she knows Tyler would “romance a rhinoceros if there was nothing else on offer”, Rosamund is unable to get herself to do anything about it. Killburn in London is another frequented address in the story. Here an aspiring singer and unwed mother, Anka, leads a tenuous life shuffling between her young daughter and an unreliable boyfriend.
The death of Rosamund’s dog pushes Russel towards an emotional crash and estranges the couple. Rosamund’s long-time friend Irene, who is married to Richard, advises her to visit India. Richard, though true to his wife, has
been in love with Rosamund and struggles to rid himself of the obsession. The story reaches its climax when bombs go off at London tube stations while Rosamund is still in India — she must find love, make peace with her father
and reclaim her son.
Padel has an undeniable eye for detail, particularly colours, but she fails to trim her story. She mediates beautifully between man and animals but gets distracted and doesn’t pursue her ideas till the end. For instance, she describes local foxes keeping a watch on Rosamund’s family, but pulls at this thread only in jerks and abandons it too soon. In the human realm too, Padel is constantly distracted as she uses precious words to trace the complex story of each of her characters. She makes an effort to season the connection between Rosamund and Anka with suspense, but with early clues like same endearments repeated to the two women by a man, renders herself predictable and weak.
Since a significant part of the action takes place in India, the author tries to draw on Indian symbols and folklore relating to snakes. But she seems to have picked the first pantheist chord that came her way: Shiva and the folk tale Nagamadala, made immortal by Girish Karnad. Padel is at her imaginative best when she sees glimpses of the wild in humans and their emotions: the morals of a black mamba, “Tyler’s jaw, wide like a bull frog’s, gobbling Daisy’s lips”... She is also terrific at writing love scenes, but they get repetitive and boring.
Padel explores the far recesses of the human mind with a creative yet scientific flourish. Characters have a parallel animal alter ego indicative of their state of mind. Rosamund associates herself with a Rusty Spotted Cat “which slips through the undergrowth, trying not to be seen by larger predators”. Her son Russel, on the other hand, is Kaa, an Indian Rock Python. Tyler is associated with a tiger though that fails to account for the strong streak of deceit in him. Betrayal is a constant subject in Padel’s novel — it reappears in Rosamund’s relationship with her father and Anka’s with her mother.
Most of the characters in the book are tied to nature by profession or by instinct and time and again they are set off to explore the jungles where the narrative adopts a Discovery channel-like tone, describing the habits and habitat of snakes, badgers and owls. Padel is known for her nature poetry and the mastery with which she creates the sounds and music of the rainforest cannot be denied. But the melody turns into a cacophony as her characters clamour to “detoxify” their lives of betrayal.
Padel engages nature to give her ordinary story a unique colour. In that, she succeeds. She fails, however, to use that colour to her advantage. Nature remains a mere appendage to the story and rarely enjoys the writer’s full commitment as she flits from one subject to the other. Perhaps, in line with the theme of the novel, Padel herself betrays nature she so dearly loves.

Outlaw by Roy Moxham I Life & times of a bandit queen I

It wasn’t the best or the worst of times, but it must have been the strangest when a British archive restorer chose to write to a bandit languishing in an Indian jail. The letter, written in June 1991, fetched an instant response. Phoolan Devi, who had just stood and lost in elections, wrote back to Roy Moxham asking him for financial help.
Nine years after her assassination, Moxham attempts to resurrect the association which spanned several letters and visits to India. However, his book Outlaw is as much about Moxham himself and his India adventure as it is about the bandit who became a lawmaker.
Much has been said and written about Phoolan Devi for the vengeance she sought against injustice. Born into the bramble of caste and gender, Phoolan had a fairly unfair share of reversals. But neither stoicism nor silence suited her style. Armed with a double-barrel gun and an acerbic tongue, she chose to fight back. Years later, she gave up the gun before the pictures of goddess Durga and Mahatma Gandhi, but retained her tongue. This is the point where most accounts about her draw to a conclusion, but Outlaw takes off from here.
Moxham describes her as small and thin when he met her for the first time in February 1994 after her release from prison; nothing like the fighting-fit woman in fatigues who had surrendered in 1983. He meets the inevitable question of the nature of his relationship with Phoolan headlong. He confesses of being tempted to propose a marriage of convenience to Phoolan when she confided of being under pressure to remarry. He clarifies at the cost of appearing rude to the memory of his dead friend, “… had she been more beautiful, I might perhaps have had second thoughts about our future relationship.”
The Phoolan Devi Moxham befriends is not the gun-wielding outlaw one would imagine. She comes across as a cheerful, plain-speaking woman who spent little on show even during her halcyon days. The book works much like a photo album. The pictures the writer presents are interesting, be it Phoolan bargaining with a vegetable vendor, blessing a shy Dimple, the daughter-in-law of Mulayam Singh Yadav, or Moxham talking to Ravi Shastri. The language is simple and bare, the flip side being that it doesn’t cover up where the writer descends into banality.
During most of his India visits, Moxham stayed with Phoolan or her immediate family. He describes her house as frugally furnished, without any servants and full of near and distant relatives at all times. On his first visit, Phoolan’s brother tricks Moxham into sending him a camera. This is the first in a series of incidents where those around Phoolan come out as coveting her legacy. After her death the relatives bickered in public while the case against those accused of her assassination lingered. Moxham uses the milieu around Phoolan to understand and explore India. Not all his shots are close-ups of Phoolan. More frequently he zooms out and indulges himself with brow-beaten briefs on the great Indian railways crush, the differences between North and South Indian cultures or the political picture. He is, however, more engaging when he observes in the vein of a sahib in India: Roses stay wrapped in cellophane, beds shared by those of the same sex, blasting fan like sleeping under a draught or the girl not going to her own engagement. Phoolan Devi’s political career had kept her in the news years after she gave up arms. Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen, much to Phoolan’s dismay, carried her story to an international audience. In an appended note, Moxham says he could not get himself to see the film till 2009.
He documents his own fruitless fight against its release in London while in India Arundhati Roy fought fiercely against the film. The book also suggests the possibility of Phoolan’s husband being covertly paid to get her consent to the film.
A circus of feuding relatives, funeral and politics followed Phoolan’s assassination in 2001. Moxham says it robbed Phoolan of the dignity she deserved in death. Outlaw attempts to redeem what was so lost. It reconstructs Phoolan as a brave woman who lives the burden of a traumatic past and an endangered future. Yet it shows, ironically, how susceptible the once bandit queen was to harm. Moxham neither indicts nor condones, but he is a crucial witness to the legend of Phoolan Devi, the woman who not only survived but also prevailed.