POCKETS FULL OF POETRY I Indian Poetry Festival organised by Sahitya Akademi I

The human world is styled in words. While nature provides the style, it is the poets who provide the words. A vibrant cosmos of words emerged in Delhi last week at the Indian Poetry Festival "The World within the Word". Shaping of words was the first act of poetry, said vice-president of Sahitya Akademi, Vishwanath Tiwari, who opened the festival. Poets, he said, are creatures who thrive on words, "Poets like Tukaram eat, wear and live on words." Having said this he paused, "This is the day of poetry, so we will keep prose at bay," and briskly drawing out his papers, he presented two of his
poems in Hindi: Jagah (Place) and Aatma (Soul).
Nearly 25 poets from different languages and different parts of the country followed and a master symphony of ideas and emotions emerged. Poets presented at least one poem their native language and the rest in translation.
Eminent Hindi poet Kedarnath Singh drew attention to the poetry of international expats in India. He said it was a genre which had not received enough attention. Citing the example of Tibetan poetry, he read out lines from a piece by a young Tibetan on exile in India: I am a Tibetan-Indian/ I live in India/ I dream of dying in Tibet. With the constant struggle for identity at its core, the poet, a young man, narrates in simple words how he must carry his certificates to prove his identity and how easily he is mistaken for someone from India’s east or north. On the power and life of words, he presented a poem
Shabd (Word). "Words don’t die in cold / it’s the lack of courage/ that kills them." Kedarnath said that considerable growth is taking place in poetry but on the fringes. New voices that challenge and break the centre are emerging. "These voices must be heard if one has to understand the reality of the 21st century India," he added.
In the vein of Romantic poets, well-known Dogri poet Padma Sachdeva emphasised that only that which emerges from the heart qualifies as poetry. Her verses carried an acute awareness of nature and projected its forces as alive and communicative. In one of her poems titled, Air, she says the villagers had "packed’ some of it for her as they had bid her farewell. She carries the village air around with her and uses it whenever she missed home. The pristine village air with its unique aroma of incense in the morning, crops in the afternoon and wet soil in the evening is a part of the heritage that she has received and wishes to pass on to her daughter. In another poem, she is the sky that says: I am not the king without an heir/ My lap is filled with children/ I am India’s sky.
Another poet who brought the inanimate to life through her verses was Varsha Das. Two of her poems were titled Mitti and Daraaj. While in Mitti (Soil) she spoke of a dead soil made fertile by a person’s dreams, in Daraaj (Drawer) she gives a beating heart to a piece of furniture. In Daraaj she is an old woman who keeps misplacing her things. To solve this problem her daughter gets a cupboard with several drawers. The drawers are labelled alphabetically so that: the job is just to set/ specs in S/ watch in W/ and pen in P. But things get complicated as the watch lands up in another drawer that has a throbbing, loving heart.
Tamil poet Salma came up with poems on women issues and sensibilities. In a moving piece she drew upon the life of Somalian women who suffered the terrible tradition of sewing up of the vagina to prevent their "pollution". The subject of each recital was unique and as a result the poems ranged from the Berlin Wall to Irome Sharmila, from a key to a wall, and a stammer to a secret. While one poet
like Subodh Sarkar (Bengali) came up with politically charged free verses another one like Nisar Rahi (Urdu) broke the pattern with witty and insightful couplets. Each poet took you to a different journey into a different world lighting the way with his words. The event, organised by Sahitya Akademi, was thin on audience. However, those present were serious fans, shedding an occasional tear or breaking into a frequent "wah wah".
Looking at the audience Padma Sachdev recounted her young days when iconic poet Ramdhari Singh "Dinkar" would moan that perhaps the era poetry had ended. But he was wrong, she said, we still write poetry and there are people who can’t have enough of it.

A SIMPLE TALE OF BASEBALL, TOLD IN STYLE I Calico Joe by John Grisham I

The basics of baseball are simple but the game is complicated. There is a pitcher, a  hitter and in this case there is an 11-year-old boy too in a crowd of 55,000 at the stands.  But this is no ordinary match. It is the last match that the two will play and the last that  the third will watch. It is also the match that will haunt the 11-year-old Paul Tracey years  later when he is a happily married man.

John Grisham, known for his best-selling legal thrillers has another passion: baseball.  The first book in which he infused the verve of the game was A Painted House. Calico  Joe is the latest work of fiction from Grisham in which you can "watch" the game.  Grisham knows his curveballs from fastballs but doesn’t expect you to know the same. He doesn’t assume that you will know or should know or will find out about the game.  Infact, he provides an engaging introduction to baseball. This is an introduction unlike any other and must not be skipped. He puts you on the home plate, gives you the bat  and makes you face the pitch. You find yourself hitting home runs, throwing a drag bunt and cutting a ground ball. By the end of these pages you are singing baseball. From this happy start, Grisham takes you to the middle of a family tragedy: A father on the death bead with pancreatic cancer. The father here is Warren Tracey, who once played for the Mets. The news of Warren’s impending death causes no stir in the lives of those around him. His daughter and first wife want nothing to do with him but his son Paul has a score to settle. While it seems to us that he has set out to meet his dying father, he has a different plan up his sleeve. He is in Calico Rock, Arakansas, where he must go with an alias. The town hates his father Warren Tracey who had "beaned" Joe Castle. As a result of the throw, Joe is maimed for life as are all hopes in Calico Rock. Paul decides he must coax, compel and even blackmail his dying father to come to Calico Rock and say sorry.

Warren Tracey is a hardened man with a failed career in baseball; a philanderer, given to drinking and violent behaviour. Meeting his son is another of the life’s formalities that he is forced to go through. But the moment Paul reveals his real purpose, he throws off all garbs of civility and digs his heels in. Going to Calico Rock is a big no. The book is named after its third and most important character, Joe Castle. In his early twenties, Joe is the best thing that has happened to baseball in a long time. He is a hitter and an extraordinary one. On his first day of a league match, he thrashes half-a-dozen records. With him the Chicago Cubs look formidable, almost invincible. But one unfortunate game watched by Paul and pitched by Warren changes it all. Joe is also my only serious problem with the book. He gets to say the least and as a result hardly looks real. While the story actually revolves around him, it hardly attempts to looks inside him.

Grisham is not the most insightful of the writers but he knows how to tell a story. He has a simple tale but tells it in style. Baseball is the heart and soul of the narrative. One can feel the rush of a packed stadium, the focus of the pitcher, crush of the ball against the skull. He doesn’t delve into the recesses of human mind but makes his story authentic and gives all actions an arguable reason. Given Grisham’s brisk style, Calico Joe makes an interesting read. It puts the thrill of a game on the larger canvas of life. The argument that baseball is a game for children spoiled by adults holds true for this book. Followers of the game will of course find a lot meat and the faithless will be dreaming home runs before the last page is reached.

DRIFTER, CHARMER, ACTOR, CHEAT I The Flying Man by Roopa Farooki I

Some battle for a normal life, others fight against it. The "flying man" in Roopa Farooki’s novel belongs to the latter.
Sunny, alias Maqil, alias MSK, alias Mikhail Lee, is a freak genius and an anti-hero. For him, what is normal is redundant and hence repulsive. He goes through his life like a play act and dares to change the script mid-way. He will not suffer boredom and throws away both fortune and love in his persistent bid to escape lichés.
Born in Punjab of 1931 he is Sunny for his parents and Maqil for the family in which all first-born sons bear the same name. At 16, Sunny is dashing, glamorous and street-smart; the star of the family. A train of fans from urchins, servants to his own parents follows him everywhere. He is the Pied Piper and everyone is happy to step up to his tune. He is already blackmailing his school seniors into loaning their father’s Bentley and is advising the bookstore owner to sell tea and coffee along with books.
This is the only section where Maqil’s character sounds forced and stalk-type. Hereon, Ms Farooki builds with force and remarkable consistency. Maqil emerges as someone who’s foremost motive is to surprise his audience, whatever the cost.
In America, where he goes to study, he is MSK, a mystery, a phenomenon of sorts. No one knows where he is from and when asked he says, "Everyone knows who I am and if they don’t , they should."
In 1965 he is Mehmet, married and settled with a job in Egypt. He leaves for work one day and never returns to his wife, never writes or calls for the simple reason of being bored. Maqil’s arguments are unnerving for their cold, murderous simplicity. Ms Farooki handles this complex character with great craftsmanship. One can’t resist liking him despite his almost criminal egotism.
In 1969 he is at the blackjack table at a casino in France. From a few thousand francs he swells to a hundred thousand. Wining is too easy for him but he loses too just to get that symphony of oohs and aah from onlookers. He loses till he is left with a sparse scattering of chips and celebrates with champagne his narrow escape from fame and fortune.
In 1970, he is back in Lahore where he meets Samira. She is a Bengali Christian; skinny, espresso-skinned and very glamorous. Love strikes Maqil. Samira is an unusual woman, hence, a perfect match for him. In another three years the  two are married and have moved to London.
One of the best achievements of Ms Farooqi in this book is her characters. They are all unique, almost eccentric yet convincing and endearing. Samira is no sweet-talking, innocent chick with haunting eyes. She is the "modern" woman with cosmetics in her drawer, brands in her wardrobe and wits that can outsmart Maqil. Samira is perpetually on diet and has trained herself to throw up food after plush
parties.
Maqil and Samira are made-for-each-other but that’s too simple a script for Maqil to play. So he decides it is time for him to be a father. Samira is of course too smart and knows him too well to let that happen, so he cheats her, switches her pills and soon she is pregnant. With the twins between them Maqil soon has to move ahead but not before attempting to trick Samira out of her money. But Samira is never a damsel in distress and can see through the act he puts up for the world.
From London he goes to Madrid, then to Marbella-Spain, Hong Kong, Paris and finally Biarritz. He swindles people out of their money, dabbles in forgery of art and passports and crosses continents till too many people are on lookout for him. He marries a third time to a matronly Bernadette in Hong Kong but Samira is always the only love of his life. His twins grow up angry and estranged.
The vibrant milieu of this novel ensures there is never a dull moment. Ms Farooki is an expert at getting inside the characters and making them speak. From Samira to the twins to Bernadette and even the minor characters are intriguing but not elusive. The story is written as a letter by Maqil at the end of his life. He is old and broke and has refused persistent efforts by his children to take him home as that would be too simple an end.
He sticks to his fight for a life lived unusually, till the very end. The letter writing though gets forgotten in the tide of the story. The initial few pages are quickly forgotten and seem to be somewhat disconnected from the rest of the novel that is remarkably well-knit.
After you finish the novel the lines on the book cover also begin to sound strange: "I was once a son, a husband, a father. And now I am a storyteller."Maqil never played the role of son, husband and father with conviction. He is always a storyteller.
The Flying Man may strike some as a story of a highly-selfish man. Maqil has little regard for others in his life. He seems almost Camusian in his disrespect for all that is established and acceptable. A man who sticks to his flawed vision of life till the end causing immense pain to all he knows.
He comes across as almost heartless. But that’s not entirely true. In his life filled with depravity, Maqil has just one acute regret. Quite like her creation, Ms Farooki’s surprises the audience, and gives a story unlike any other.

An Afghan’s odyssey I In the Sea There are Crocodiles by Fabio GedaI

At the age of 10, Enaiatollah Akbari sets out with his mother from his village Nava, in Afghanistan. After a perilous journey, they arrive in Quetta, Pakistan. She makes him swear three things: Never to use drugs; never to use weapons; never to cheat or steal.
This advice is all he has when his mother leaves in the quiet of the night to return to her other children back in Nava.

With most of the odds against him, chances of Enaitollah’s survival in a new, hostile country are bleak. But he survives to tell his poignant tale. The story is told by Fabio Geda as a series of conversations with Enaitollah. These conversations between the author and the protagonist are spread through the narrative. Written in Italian, the book has been translated into English by Howard Curtis.

Abandoned in Quetta, Enait picks up odd manual jobs. Even when he is reduced to a mere street urchin, he misses his days at school and Buzul Bazi, a dice game played a bone taken from a sheep’s foot after it’s been boiled. He listens to the children playing during school recess, longing to join them but is forced to go out into a world where a simple request for water elicits a scathing reply: First tell who are you? Are you a Shia or a Muslim. By now Eniat has learnt his lessons as he shoots back, "First I am a Shia, then I am a Muslim. Or rather, first I am a Hazara, then Shia then a Muslim." Hazara, inhabitants of Ghazni province, are identified by their almond eyes and flatter noses. While some claim to be descendants of Genghis Khan’s army others claim to have come down from Koshans, the legendary builders of the Bamiyan Buddhas. "Some others say we’re saves and treat us like slaves," says Enaitollah. Fed up of being treated badly, he decides to go to Iran, where he had heard "things were much better". Here begins  Eniat’s association with people traffickers, cramped trucks and the constant fear of Telisia and Sang Safid, the immigrant detention centres. At the Iranian city of Isfahan, he picks up the job at a construction site, which is where most of the illegal migrants worked. But with the constant police raids and the sword of deportation hanging on his head, Eniat decides to move again; this time to Turkey. This journey is far more challenging than anything he had been through. From Salmas, the last city in Iran and
closest to the mountains, begins a 27-day trek across snow-capped mountains.

On arriving in Istanbul, it becomes clear that there was no work to be found there. A journey further ahead to Greece is imminent. Here ensues a voyage in a dinghy which ends in his landing at a Greek port town without any clothes. The journey to Mytilene and thereon to Rome is largely aided by kind-hearted people. Enaitollah’s tale is a real-life account not a fictionalised narrative. His journey, that spans from Nava to Turin, may bring to mind the century-old adventures of Kipling’s Kim. This is however a much more realistic account pared of all the romance of adventure and powered by the sole grit to survive. Enaitollah refuses to name most of the people and places. "Facts are important," he tells Fabio, "The story is important. It’s what happens to you that change your life, not where or who with." While debating if they should take the journey to Greece in a dinghy, a fellow Afghan mentions the threat of crocodiles in the sea. The only answer available at that time to the group of young boys in desperate search of a better life is that there are no crocodiles in the sea. A postscript to the novel notes that Eniat, who is now 22 years old, and has received asylum in Italy, has discovered that there really are crocodiles in the sea.

The circus of dreams I THE NIGHT CIRCUS by Erin Morgenstern I

In 1886 a circus arrives in London: Le Cirque des Rêves (the Circus of Dreams). A notice at its entrance announces "Opens at Nightfall, Closes at dawn". On the night of October 13, the gates of the circus are thrown open. One steps into a world of wonder. Everything in the circus follows a pattern of black and white colours. As people move from tent to tent, they admire the curiosities. From painfully slow-moving human statues to a giant clock that turns itself inside out, everything in this circus touches the point of bizarre. Nothing is out of step, everything is too perfect. As the clock strikes midnight, a giant bonfire is lit by 12 archers. As each of their barbs produces a different colour at the bonfire, two people in the circus realize the "game" had begun.
The "game" is a challenge between two magicians Hector Bowen and AH, who swore their students into a battle of magic. The rules of the game are not clear perhaps because there are no rules. The students Celia and Marco, are mere kids when their "preparation" for the challenge beings. While Marco spends cold, comfortless days in intense study, Celia is subject to painful exercise like her fingers being cut up so she can repair them "magically".  
The Night Circus is Erin Morgenstern’s first novel. Morgenstern, who lives in Massachusetts and is also multimedia artiste, describes all her work as "fairy tales in one way or another". Morgenstern’s peculiar brand of imagination works on details: frill and cut of dresses, smells that bring back memories, rain seeping slowly into clothes. The details present themselves through the magical world of the novel.  
The night circus is the stage where the challenge of wizards is played out. Celia is the illusionist in the circus and Marco is the owner’s assistant.  While, the bonfire lit by Marco powers the circus, Celia is the one who transports and "holds the circus together". The other members of the circus, including its owner Chandresh, have little clue about the real magic in action. The challenge involves a series of move with the two players adding their own magical tents to the circus and trying to gain control of it. Both Marco and Celia find themselves increasingly in awe of each other’s skills. By now the circus has tents like cloud maze, pool of tears, wishing tree, ice garden, desert world, to name a few. A steady group of fans known as rêveurs, follow the circus around. They dress in the trademark black and white of the circus but with a flourish of red. Meanwhile, the members of the circus don’t seem to age and begin to suspect something is wrong.
The admiration between Celia and Marco blooms into love soon, followed by the realization that the challenge would never end as long as both of them are alive.    
There is nothing ingenious about the story, given the rush of fantasy fiction in the last decade. While the magical challenge of Marco and Celia is played out in the world of muggles it is not clear how the two worlds interact.
This book would have been an ordinary work of fiction but for its stylized narrative. The story beings with the declaration: "The circus arrives without a warning." As you read the first chapter, you know Morgenstern is not in a hurry to tell her story. She lets the story breathe, slowly. Though, at 387 pages, it means a lot of breathing, but her prose has a lilt to it that accounts for more magic than all the charms in the book put together. She commits her blunders too, losing her rhythm to adjectives but pulls herself together.
Love between Marco and Celia is not something you see coming, given their detached rivalry. It does not sprout at the spur of the moment but evolves gradually, culminating to the point where both create breathtaking illusions for each other. A particularly interesting scene is the one where the two meet face to face as opponents for the first time. There are no pretences and secrets as the two wizards share details of how each controls the circus and what they are capable of. There is no love interest, but a
compulsion of having been unwillingly bound together by fate. While Celia stabs her hand with a dagger and heals it, Marco recreates a garden: What had been little more than a stack of rough stones moments before is now set and carved into ornate arches and pathways, covered in crawling vines and speckled with bright, tiny lanterns.
Contrived, yet compelling.

I am, therefore I am [ WELCOME TO AMERICASTAN by JABEEN AKHTAR ]

There are three stages experienced by one coming face to face with someone from Pakistan, explains Samira, the protagonist of Welcome to Americastan. First, disbelief that someone from the world’s most notorious brown country

ended up in the same room as you; second, fear and excitement that this Pakistani could have sinister ties with some of the terrible news events; third, the formulation of a bone-headed comment: You gave Bin Laden a house before our boys took his left eye out. Or, what an interesting time to be from Pakistan. With all the terrorists being from there and all.
There is method in the crazy humour.
I caught up with Jabeen Akhtar when she was in Delhi last week for the release of her first book, Welcome to Americastan. Akhtar is light-hearted, “cool” and surprisingly clear-headed. “It’s okay. We can survive people laughing at us,” she says before breaking into a giggle.
“It’s important to just sit back and laugh at ourselves and let other people laugh,” says Jabeen. “Humour is missing in any idea or literature about Pakistanis and Muslims. All the heavy elements on the subject have been out there for some time now, I wanted this book to give a kind of fresh
perspective.”
Welcome to Americastan deals with a peculiar Pakistani family that she calls “almost dysfunctional”, with each member seemingly headed in a different direction, with zero idea of what’s right or wrong.
It has a dramatic opening, throwing us right in the middle of a mother-daughter brawl. “Haramzadi! Awara! Bewaqoof!” Samira’s mother screams at her. Samira, or Sam, has come home, in Cary, North Carolina, after losing her job and her boyfriend of eight years in Washington, D.C., besides managing to get her name on the FBI’s terrorist watch list. None of this is known to her parents who think their daughter is home for a weekend. She bargains with her siblings to help her tow in her luggage secretly but is caught red-handed.
Here is a bizarre family in a state of disarray. Samira’s sister Meena doesn’t mind giving a blow job to a stranger at a party to get some weed for her heartbroken elder sister. Later she brings a female date to the elder brother’s Muslim wedding. Khalid, the elder brother who is about to get married, can think of
little other than videogames. He blows up the money saved up
for his marriage to get a fancy gadget.
The parents on the other hand carry deep memories and a longing for Pakistan. The father narrates how his date of birth was “estimated” after his mother
said he was born around an epidemic in India, on a cold rainy night with ber littered around trees. The children are unable to relate to any of this.
A new trend in the expatriat community comes across. “The concept of identifying with geography is becoming more and more irrelevant for second generation children in the US,” says Akhtar. “You don’t get a sense of ‘I belong to this country’; it’s more like I’m just out there, floating about in the world’.”
The author, who was brought up in the US, says she had been in Pakistan for less than a fortnight in her entire life. “It was nothing like I had imagined it to be. I had thought people there would look like me, think like me, be cool... but it was nothing like that. A lot of things I did there were inappropriate.”
Much like Akhtar, her protagonist also rejects being classified as either an American or Pakistani or Pakistani-American.
Back home, Samira looks for ways to recover from her heartbreak. She begins to help her father at PAC-PAC, a civic organisation he started in the aftermath of 9/11.
Samira has a brush with racism at a store when an angry woman swears at her, “F***ing Arabs”, and then adds, “Welcome to America.” Samira is surprised to find people around her more angry and upset at this than she is. Despite being the “victim”, she has to comfort and pacify the crowd.
Later she thinks of the retort that would have trounced her opponent, “Hey b***h, didn’t you hear? It’s called Americastan now.”
Still unable to get over her ex-boyfriend Ethan, Samira ends up in an affair with a guy at her gym. Meanwhile, at PAC-PAC things begin to get difficult as some members oppose helping non-Muslim Pakistanis through the organisation. At one of the meetings the debate even turns into proving who is a better Muslim.
The fact that Samira had been put on the FBI’s terror list is revealed to her father at a crucial PAC-PAC meeting. The author puts Samira’s brush with law in a comic light: After realising that her boyfriend had left her for her bestfriend, she chases them and tries to run them over. She is caught by the cops and becomes a terror suspect. However, when she returns home, nothing troubles her more than the end of her relationship with Ethan. Being on the terror list seems to be the last thing on her mind. “It would be difficult for someone who thinks about his/her identity all the time to come out of such an experience,” says Akhtar. “But for someone for whom identity is not an issue it would be a joke.”
Meanwhile, Khalid is going to get married to his girlfriend, a white catholic, much to the dismay of his parents who insist on a Muslim wedding by a maulvi from Pakistan.
At the wedding Ethan is also invited and Samira prepares for the final faceoff.
The story has a young, hip tone. This is the view of the world from someone who doesn’t listen to newsroom debates or reads winding editorials.
The narrative does begin to lag towards the end, sounding nothing more than a girl’s pursuit of her ex-boyfriend. But humour being the touchstone, it keeps the story together.
Akhtar takes an unapologetic view of Pakistani expats. She doesn’t feel the need to “appear” American or even Pakistani. Like her, Samira belongs to an increasingly threatened brand of liberal-minded people. But her beliefs are not shaken either by the “terrorist” label or by a peer group that doesn’t share her views. Neither does she come across as a smug rebel. “Rebellious?... Oh, it’s nothing that glamorous. We’re just suburbanites,” she says.
Akhtar cleverly inserts thought into a largely humorous novel. She often manipulates farce and gives it a surprise sentimental twist. The father, for example, time and again uncovers his “Partition-era” scar for the children to see. The display is followed by a “scar speech” to remind them how hard the struggle was and how privileged they had been. This comic family scene takes a sharp turn in the end. “It is a part of me,” father tells Samira, “and it follows me wherever I go, but all I have to do is put on a shirt, you see. Cover it up and I can start over… that is why everybody comes to America.”

KARMA CHAMELEON I The Man Of A Thousand Chances by Tulsi Badrinath I

During the reign of 17th century emperor Jehangir, gold coins were minted for the king’s beloved wife Nur Jahan. She became the only empress to have her own coinage without ascending the throne. One of the biggest Mughal coins, the 1,000-mohur, weighing around 12 kilograms was also minted in this period.

This coin found its way to the coffers of the Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali, and is now locked away in a Swiss vault. It is one such coin that becomes the karma leash of Harihar Arora in Man of a Thousand Chances.

Weighing two kilograms and worth millions, the coin is in a Chennai museum where Harihar works and hatches the plan to “borrow” it. As Harihar’s colleagues watch mahouts trying to control an enraged elephant, he steals the Jahangir coin and rushes straight to the pawnbroker.
Having pawned the invaluable piece for `2 lakhs, guilt-ridden Harihar goes home to his wife Sarla and soon-to-be-married daughter Meeta. Harihar is determined he will return the money and restore the coin soon after Meeta’s wedding. Harihar notices his wife’s crumpled sari and preoccupied look. He resents her transformation from the shy woman who would greet him at the door wearing fresh clothes and a special smile. He recoils at sight of her tooth that had turned blue and could not be cured because of the money involved. As his daughter displays before him the purchases of the day he is drawn into a labyrinth of memories. The story of how his father had moved to Chennai for business unfolds. Harihar’s estranged relationship with his elder brother Ashok had led him to move out of the family business and the family house. He had then found a job at the museum and a mentor in his boss Mahadevan.
From Sarla’s angle, the world looks different. The fact that she trades in shares has been kept hidden from her husband all these years. He believes she spends her time trying to sell plastic kitchen boxes and “getting nowhere”. That, however, is far from truth. She has a mind and flair for business and is able to earn some money out of it. Another hidden name arises as we hear Sarla’s story: Ratan, the son who had gone missing and was never found. Despite all the years Sarla grieves for her lost son and somehow holds Harihar responsible for him.
A second generation north Indian in Chennai, Harihar’s household is a queer mix of traditions and language. Sarla’s learns bits of Tamil from her maid and the family works out a part-Tamil part-north Indian menu for the wedding. With sufficient cash at hand now, Harihar buys his wife and daughter saris of their choice. He has invested in a fund which will come to maturity soon after Meeta’s wedding. From this Harihar plans to buy back the coin. While the wedding is in progress Harihar gets to know that the fund managers are unable to pay back investors. On the other hand, the coin is spotted by a collector who recognises it’s real value and takes it from the pawnbroker. The pawnbroker tells Harihar the coin had been melted down. Dejected and beaten, Harihar is sure the loss of coin will be discovered anytime soon. Fate, however, has several surprises in store for him. Not only does he escape being accused of theft but is also able to mend his decaying relationship with his wife.
While one might think a second chance can make a world of a difference, this is the story of the man who gets a thousand. Caught in the storm of affairs surrounding his life, Harihar makes desperate attempt to make sense of it. His boss and mentor Mahadevan helps him connect the dots between karma and destiny. As Mahadevan takes him through a tedious journey from Gita’s karma to Schopenhauer’s will, Harihar emerges a man ready to take charge of his tumultuous life.
The Man of a Thousand Chances is Tulsi Badrinath’s second novel. She has made an attempt to bring together aspects of karma and art. She is unable, however, to weave the theme into the story. The exploration of karma and art by Mahadevan towards the end stands aloof from the rest of the narrative. It is also hard to believe that a mere lecture could induce a major change in Harihar. However, Tulsi has a keen eye for detail and her portrayal of family life is seamless. Be it Meeta stealing glances at the picture of her fiancé or the husband, wife and daughter filling their weekly store of water; the descriptions are warm and colourful.
One finds it hard to reconcile how a man may get so many chances while the others struggle for a single go. If we were to believe the words of Harihar’s mentor Mahadevan, that’s where karma comes into play. The story moves through pensive scenes without breaking into a common laugh at the face of destiny. While to a simple man like Harihar Schopenhauer may be too much to understand, humour can provide the perfect umbrella to take shelter from the moods of karma. After all a coin is as much a slave of karma as the man who carries it.