Book Review: Night of the Golden Butterfly by Tariq Ali

Night of the Golden Butterfly is the fifth book in Tariq Ali’s Islam quintet, a collection born in response to the Islamophobia generated by 9/11 and its aftermath. Like the first four books, the idea seems to be to show the civilised face of Islam to the rest of the world. The first four books in this quintet were set in places and epochs ranging from Granada after the Re-Conquest by Ferdinand and Isabella, Saladdin, Ottoman Turkey at the turn of the twentieth century and Sicily in the twelfth century when it was ruled by the Normans. The fifth one, Night of the Golden Butterfly, is set in the present and the locales vary from the Fatherland (as Pakistan is referred to throughout in this novel), London, Paris, Beijing, Kunming, Dali and even Hoi Chi Min City in Vietnam.

Night of the Golden Butterfly could be semi-autobiographical since Tariq Ali is one of the characters in this novel, in the form of Dara, a successful writer, who is the main narrator of the story. The novel begins with Dara’s friend Plato (real name-Mohammed Aflatun) calling in an old favour (which a young Dara had promised to repay with interest) and demanding that Dara write Plato’s story. Dara agrees. The reader is led to believe from the opening chapters that the novel will be all about Plato, but it isn’t. Instead, Night of the Golden Butterfly is the story of Plato and his friends’ circle to which Dara too belongs. Plato’s story takes up maybe a fourth of this 275-page book. Plato, Dara and their friends are the cream of Lahore, all of them moneyed, with Plato, a refugee from Ludhiana, being the only exception, but Plato makes up for his lack of money with his wit, sophistication and intelligence. We are talking early to mid-sixties. The crowd is essentially left-wing, intellectually honest, morally incorruptible and largely atheist. It is also a cosmopolitan crowd, though since the setting is Lahore, most of them are Punjabis. There’s Tipu, a Bengali communist from Chittagong, Hanif Ma, also called Confucius, an ethnic Hui from Yunnan, whose family has settled in Lahore and Jamshed, a Parsi. The honest, atheist, socialist, cosmopolitan values continue to rule the roost till the end of the novel and it is these values which Ali holds up as an example of modern Muslims, for the rest of the world to see.

Soon the friends finish college and leave Pakistan for greener and more diverse pastures. They don’t exactly keep in touch, because one of them, Zahid, is (wrongly) suspected of having betrayed Tipu, to the security forces who were on the lookout for him. However, their paths and the paths of their wives and girlfriends keeping crossing each other for the next forty or fifty odd years. I found Night of the Golden Butterfly to be a very interesting read because it gave me a glimpse into the mind of Ali. How secular and cosmopolitan is Ali? Very. How Punjabi is he? Equally so. Night of the Golden Butterfly has dialogues which are from the horse’s mouth, capturing the rustic and earthy Punjabi atmosphere of Lahore, which Dara, Plato and their other friends carry with them wherever they go.

Ali is a man of very strong likes and dislikes. In Night of the Golden Butterfly, Dick Cheney happens to one of the objects of his disaffection. Zahid turns out to be a successful doctor, married to Jindié, Confucius’s sister and Dara’s one-time heart-throb. Living in the US, Zahid turns Republican and is part of the medical team which operated on Dick Cheney (in one instance, this operation is said to take place in 1999, in another in 2000), saving his life. Jindié is true to her socialist, left-wing ethos and is bugged with Zahid. Zahid’s children don’t speak with him for a month. Then comes 9/11 and we are told that ‘within twenty-four hours of 9/11, Cheney instructed his staff to make sure that Zahid was removed from his medical team. The Muslim name was enough. He came home that night looking like a beaten dog.’ Zahid, Jindié and family moved to London within months after that. Now, I am pretty sure neither Dick Cheney nor any other senior White House official fired a member of his staff on account of religion, either before 9/11 or afterwards. True, Muslims did face (and continue to face) a lot of prejudice in the United States after 9/11, something brought out very well in the Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist, but to say that Dick Cheney fired a doctor who was part of the team which saved his life a year or two before 9/11, is a bit over the top.

Similarly, the Pakistani army also gets its share of the overblown Tariq Ali pie. After introducing his readers to Naughty Lateef, ‘the spirited wife of a junior officer eager for promotion,’ who sleeps around with two generals at the same, leading them to fist cuffs, we are told that in the Pakistani army ‘the pretty wives of the more obedient junior and nor-so-junior officers were regarded as fair prey, occasionally to be had with the full agreement of the husbands eyeing a rapid promotion or a sinecure in the military-industrial enterprises and pleasantly surprised that their wives had turned out to be such lucrative investments.’ To begin with, there are the only two Generals at any given time in the Pakistani army, namely the Chief of Army Staff or COAS and the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, unless of course the Army Chief becomes the President of Pakistan, as Musharaff did, in which case the post of Vice Chief of Army Staff is created and the occupant would also be a General. Thus while the current Pakistani army chief is General Parvez Kayani and the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee is General Khalid Shameem Wynne, the next senior-most officer would be a Lt. General. This information is easily available on the internet and one would expect a writer of Ali’s stature to get his facts right. To say that Naughty Lateef was sleeping around with two Generals, (who are not shown to be at the apex of the army pyramid), and to show a third general heading the Inter-Services-Intelligence, which is currently headed by Lieutenant-General Zaheerul Islam, is downright silly. Also, it is very unlikely that the highly Islamized Pakistani army, for all its faults, has a widespread culture of senior officers taking up with the wives of junior officers.

I guess if Ali doesn’t like someone, he will go all out to attack him, even at the expense of the truth or his credibility. Ali does some thing very similar in The Book of Saladin, the second book in this quintet, where he claims that crusaders attacked and desecrated Mecca. Is Night of the Golden Butterfly fact disguised as fiction? Partly, yes. However, some of it is fiction, disguised as fact, within a work of fiction.

The best part of the book for me was Ali’s descriptions of Jindié’s and Confucius’s Hui ancestors and their life in Yunnan. In case you haven’t guessed, Jindié is the golden butterfly who has lent her name to the title. I had a vague idea that China has a Muslim minority generically referred to as Hui, who are very similar to the Han and speak mandarin or dialects of mandarin, but didn’t know till I read this novel that Yunnan province saw a rebellion against China’s Ming rulers in the middle of the nineteenth century in which a Muslim ruler held out against Ming China for eighteen years. Dù Wénxiù, uncle to Jindié’s and Confucius’s great-grandmother Quin-Shi, changed his name to Suleiman and banned the use of pork in Yunnan which had Kunming as its capital, though Dali was its most beautiful city. Sultan Suleiman was a moderate soul, one who treated all his subjects, both Hui and Han, Muslim and non-Muslim, alike. Likewise, his subjects, both Muslims and non-Muslims rallied around him, as he valiantly fought the Ming rulers, who had the support of traitors like Ma Rulong. Ultimately the rebellion failed and the Jindié’s and Confucius’s family left for Burma, from where, after a stint in Calcutta, they ended up in Lahore. Ali holds up the Hui rebellion in Yunnan as an example of how moderate and secular Muslims have been in the past, something on the lines of Moorish Spain or the Muslims in Sicily. Mind you, the description of the Yunnan rebellion forms a small part of the story.

The second best thing I liked about this book is Ali’s depiction of the upper class Pakistani elite, which sounds very authentic. Ali’s characters, who quote from Stendhal and Balzac at the drop of a hat, sleep around a lot. Dara goes to bed with two of Plato’s partners, Alice Stepford and later with the Sindhi beauty Zaynab, who was at one time, married to the Koran (so that her brothers could inherit her share of the ancestral property. I understand that marrying the Koran is not unheard of in Sindh. Incidentally Plato turns out to be impotent, despite much camouflage to the contrary and Dara takes up with Plato’s women only after he finds out. Dara never gets to sleep with Jindié though at one point he comes pretty close. Please read this book to find out why Dara and Jindié never get to make love – it’s got something to do with Dara’s love for coffee. Towards the end of the book, Jindié confesses to having had a couple of liaisons, one of which is, lest you start wondering if Dara and friends sleep only with fellow light-skins, with a Tanzanian. Of course, one in a while, a character from the higher stratum turns religious, as Jindié daughter Neelum does, though she is still a good human being. One friend, Anis, a closet homosexual, is tormented so much by his parents that he commits suicide. Jamshed the Parsi and Tipu the Bengali communist (and Zahid for a brief while) are the only ones who turn to mammon at the expense of their values and of these, Jamshed comes to serious grief.

Money is never an issue for Dara and friends. Either they are extremely successful in their chosen professions, like Zahid is, or they have inherited a lot of wealth or they have a lot of wealthy friends. The only time we see a glimpse of poverty is when Plato, after moving to the UK, is forced to work as a waiter, as a newsagent and finally as bus conductor. However, even then Plato doesn’t despair. Just like every upper middle class individual from the sub-continent, Dara and gang are used to being waited upon hand and foot. When visiting Zahid at his Richmond mansion, Dara, just to be difficult, asks for Pomegranate juice and is told it’s possible. Towards the end of the book, Dara, Zahid, Zaynab, Alice etc. are to congregate at Zaynab’s country mansion in Sindh where they get to see Plato’s final work. They arrive in Karachi. ‘Zaynab’s brother had thoughtfully organised a helicopter and we were met off the gangway by flunkeys. ……… The flunkeys took our passports and escorted us to the hotel’s VIP suite……….. We were taken to our guest cottages, with mine the closest to the house. I was greeted by a refrigerator overloaded with Muree beer, but demanded fresh lime juice without sugar and a jug of tamarind juice with ice and honey.’

Does Night of the Golden Butterfly succeed in exhibiting a moderate and civilised Islam to the outside world? I am not too sure. You see, the bulk of the characters amongst Dara and Co. are practising atheists and left-wingers who have no right to claim to speak for the global Islamic community. More importantly, they form a very minuscule percentage of the global Ummah. Ali does make a few attempts to rope in the common Muslim on the street into the camaraderie and global fellowship exhibited by Dara and friends. We are told that once, ‘after giving a lecture in Olso, I dragged a group of newly arrived Punjabi migrants who attended my talk to the Munch museum to show them their new country’s greatest artist. Some were reluctant to waste precious time, but came anyway. All of them were stunned, and one, Salah, who became a dear friend, had moist eyes, as he whispered in Punjabi, “This is an artist who knew inner pain. Our Sufi poets say that the cure for that lies in oneself. Neither Allah nor a psychiatrist can help.” Do please take a look at Scream and decide for yourself if newly arrived Pakistani-Punjabi migrants in Norway are likely to be so touched by it.

Ali’s characters are deeply upset by the Islamophobia and anti-immigrant feelings aroused by 9/11. They fight back at times. When Zaynab is asked one too many times why female circumcision takes place among Muslims, she responds: “If men can be circumcised, why not women? It was a sign of our equality. Anything a man could bear, so could we.” Once while Zaynab is walking around in Paris, she sees an African man without papers being arrested by a gang of policemen. “It happens in Fatherland all the time, but here too Dara? I was really shocked. People watched in silence and turned away.” “Just like Fatherland,” I told her. “It happens all over Europe. In Italy, they love burning gypsies and taunting Muslims. Repression and cowardice in the face of it have become everyday occurrences. Africans from the colonies, kids from the banlieus, are often treated like shrivelled leaves. Kicked into the dirt. You’ll get used to it.” One is left in little doubt that repression in Paris hurt Dara & Co. much more than anything that might take place in Pakistan. Of course, the fact that Dara and his friends are very unlikely to be so tormented in Pakistan could be one reason for this dichotomy.

Here are links to my review of the first four books in this quintet:

Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree

The Book of Saladin

The Stone Woman

A Sultan in Palermo

Book Review: "A Calendar Too Crowded", written by Sagarika Chakraborty

Ever since 1992 came to be known as the Year of the Woman, awareness about women’s rights has increased and every month there are more and more events meant to create awareness about the rights of the girl child or women’s rights in general. So much so that, according to Sagarika Chakraborty, author of A Calendar Too Crowded, the calendar seems to be getting rather crowded. If 24 January is the National Day for the Girl Child in India, 6 February is International Day Against Female Genital Mutilation, 8 March is International Women’s Day, 18 April is Anti-Harassment Day in Egypt, the 2nd Sunday of May is Mother’s Day (not everywhere, but Chakraborty doesn’t say this) , the first week of August is World Breast-Feeding Week, 26 August is Women’s Equality Day in the USA, 24 September is International Girl Child Day, 25 November is Anti-Domestic Violence Day, 26 November is Anti-Dowry Day in India and 9 December is Anti-Human Trafficking Day. These are just some of the days which Chakraborty’s A Calendar Too Crowded mentions prior to the commencement of each of the 12 sections, one for each month in the crowded calendar, with two or three stories or essays in each section.

Chakraborty also tells us that 4 April is Anti-Child Prostitution Day in Italy, that 21 June is Anti-Eve Teasing Molestation Day in India, that 24 October is World Silence Day (Anti-Selective-Abortion Day), but I couldn’t find anything on the internet for these days. Her claim that 2 February is International Widow’s Day in Italy seems to be wrong. According to this UN website, it is 23 June across the world. 1 July is claimed to be Daughter’s Day – nothing much on the internet, but this website says 1 July is Doctor’s Day. Some of the doctors celebrating Doctor’s Day might be daughters, I guess.

The point which Chakraborty tries to make is that though it looks as if a lot has been achieved, women’s rights have a long way to go. Using a mix of stories, essays and poetry to convey her point, Chakraborty covers issues ranging from dowry deaths to harassment and violence on the roads, to trauma inflicted on a woman when unable to bear children, to a woman getting her priorities right. The points made by Chakraborty are all well-made, though at times I wasn’t too sure if the most optimum delivery mechanism was being used to convey her points. For example, while reading what appears to be an essay written in the first person by a woman whose daughter has been conceived with donated sperm, I wasn’t sure if I ought to treat it as a story or an a work of non-fiction though it is written in the first person. I assume Chakraborty isn’t telling her own story – she is a law graduate from the National Law University at Jodhpur, currently studying management at the Indian School of Business at Hyderabad. However, the point made by the essay, that even though the narrator has brought up her daughter to be independent and, unlike a traditional Indian woman, to think of oneself first before worrying about the rest of the family, the narrator’s daughter doesn’t seem to share her mother’s views, is a valid one.

‘But then again, as I see my daughter explain to her friend that she would stay at home and cook dinner, while the friend took the make believe kid to the pool, I wonder if my independence too is really an elaborately constructed facade that hides a more traditional feminine desire to be protected and provided for? In my attempt to raise my daughter with the lesson that she has the right to call off any relationship at any point and not stick by it like her grandmothers have, I might be shielding her from domestic pressures of marriage and domesticity, but introducing her to new ones, such as the pressure to be strong, completely independent, shunning, even the slightest help from men.’

Atleast once I thought an essay written in the first person is Chakraborty’s own story. In ‘When The Ganges Ran Dry’, the narrator analyses her grandmother’s approach to pollution on account of caste, such as when the domestic staff touch her food or puja articles. But then towards the end of the essay I came across the narrator’s husband and child and other paraphernalia. Which meant, this couldn’t be Chakraborty’s story. You see, I do have a problem classifying stuff like this. This essay is obviously not a true story. Maybe parts of it are true. Though the point made by this story is very valid, the legitimacy of the argument is undercut by the fact that this is fiction masquerading as non-fiction.

Many of the story cum essays have stayed with me even after I put the book down. In one, the narrator is a mother-to-be who follows the mother of a boy for a day as she takes the boy to the school bus, carrying his school bag, holding an umbrella over his head and fretting over and pampering him. There is no doubt that in terms of priorities, the boy and the boy’s father tower over the mother. As she observes the all-sacrificing mother, the narrator briefly wonders if she should abort her own child, but then decides to embrace motherhood because she has learnt what she does not want to be. ‘Today I am ready to embrace motherhood because I am ready to raise a child as a human being rather than a wish fulfilling machine who will make up for the things my husband and I couldn’t accomplish. .... For once I want the realisation to set in that kids are not the bearers of our unfulfilled dreams and that we should not make the sacrifices which we have seen our parents make.’ I can’t say I fully agree with the last bit of that statement. Is Chakraborty against parents making sacrifices because usually it is the mother who makes most of them? If so, she could have expressed herself better.

The best piece of the lot is a set of letters, one written by a commercial sex worker to her daughter and the daughter’s reply, written while on a flight to Berlin to pick up an award. Almost as good is the essay about a fashion model’s travails as she looks for standards and ethics in a work place where the designer’s hand traverses her derriere with a sense of entitlement. Off she goes to the police station to file a complaint and does she fare any better out there? I don’t want to give away much here. Do read this very interesting and even more unusual book to find out more.

What appears to be picture perfect on the surface might not be so tranquil underneath. A perfect mother-in-law gets a perfect daughter-in-law. As months pass, the distrust grows and bruises appear. The daughter-in-law was always clumsy handling the kerosene stove and one day it explodes. Nothing out of the ordinary – we are told at the end of the story that ‘one dowry death occurs in India every four hours. That for every one reported case, 299 cases go unreported and of all the reported ones, only five percent of the total number are actually pursued.’

Some of the stories fall outside the pale of women’s rights. One deals with the treatment of senior citizens, the other deals with adoption and the third is about nationality, which Chakroborty calls a priceless gift. All three topics are dealt through fiction, with mixed results. The treatment of senior citizens is handled fairly well. Children are only too happy to dump their parents in homes for the aged. In this story, when a mother accepts a proposal from a fellow resident, the son who lives overseas, throws a fit. The story about adoption revolves around a girl, but it could just as well have been about a boy. The story meant to convey how one’s nationality is the most priceless gift didn’t really work for me. Set in an unnamed foreign country, the father and the two sons don’t relate to India anymore. The sons don’t speak Gujarati. In between, the mother rushes off for an ‘office emergency’, a trafficked girl has been brought in and she has to help. The girl who has bruises all over, is a Tibetan who was born in China, lived in Nepal and India for a while before being trafficked to the West, doesn’t have any nationality. When the narrator gets back home, she is even more convinced that nationality is the most precious gift and as she helps her son write as essay on his most-prized possession, you can well guess what subject she would choose.

The Homecoming is a story, thankfully narrated in the third person, of a woman coming face-to-face with a man who had rejected her while in college. The woman is now happily married, but is still flustered to meet her ex-crush, as long-forgotten memories are revived. How does the story end? Is the woman happy to see the man she was once in love with? Do read this book to find out more for yourself.

Chakraborty writes well with the authority and ease of someone with a lot of experience and understanding. However, atleast once this doesn’t work too well. In one tale, a home-maker attends a class reunion. Just before she leaves the house, she has to help her mother-in-law go to the toilet. She doesn’t get the time to dress up the way she wanted. At the reunion, everyone ignores her as an underachiever who has put on weight. ‘Families were dissected, in-laws were debated upon, husbands and their jobs were held up as the touchstone by which personal success was measured.’ However, with some prompting from an old teacher, everyone discovers that their bookshelves contained books written by her, that the places they went on holidays she travelled to for work, that she has won an UN award for fighting for the cause of the girl child in third world countries. It turns out that her husband has even more accomplishments. After the programme, the lady is not to be found, for she has left, to go on a long, romantic drive with her husband, after which she goes to a slum where she educates slum-dwellers about the dangers of arsenic infected water storage, hygiene etc., after which she goes home to make it up to in-laws for the special Sunday lunch they had missed out because of her class reunion, after which she tucks her daughter to sleep with a story, after which she shares a drink with her husband as she explains to her husband ........ The whole story seemed to be totally unrealistic and contrived. I even didn’t fully get the point being made – that a woman can cram in a lot into her day, achieve so much and still remain down-to-earth?

On the whole, this is an interesting book, worth reading if you are interested in women’s rights issues or if you are merely curious to understand the point of view of a dyed-in-the-wood feminist.

Book Review: The Taliban Cricket Club, by Timeri N. Murari

For a few weeks after I read Kite Runner, I was a Khaled Hosseini fan. Later, as I reflected on the story, I had a nagging feeling that it had demarcated good and evil into boxes that did not offer the possibility of any overlap. Grey did not exist. That was 2003. Over the years, one got a better idea of the Afghan conundrum, in particular of the Taliban. Hosseini had made them all out to be illiterate paedophiles who, when they weren’t sodomising young boys, went around beating up women and killing people for no reason at all. Soon one realised that some of the Afghan warlords on the side of the West had a worse record than the Taliban. Also, the Taliban, for all their faults, do not permit abuse of young boys. In fact, the Taliban have a better record in putting down Bacha Bazi than some of Karzai’s allies, though when it comes to women’s rights, the Taliban are peerless. These days, the Taliban even write poetry.

Now in 2012 along comes a novel written by a reputed journalist who takes us back to 2003. The Taliban are pure evil and without them, Kabul would have been a wonderful city. Rukhsana is a young journalist, in her twenties I presume, the daughter of an Afghan diplomat, who has spent some time in Delhi. After the Taliban come to power, Rukhsana is unable to work as a journalist or file reports in her own name. To make things worse, Rukhsana catches the eye of a Taliban Minister, the nasty Zorak Wahidi who heads the worst of all ministries, the Ministry for Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. The only individual who seems to be even more evil than Wahidi is his brother Droon. Wahidi wants to marry Rukhsana, so that he can reform her, and the only excuse Rukhsana and her family can come up is that Rukhsana is engaged to her childhood sweetheart Shaheen, who has already escaped to the United States and is expected to send for Rukhsana. Wahidi is in no mood to accept such an excuse.

Like many others in Kabul, Rukhsana and her cousins dream of escaping from Afghanistan. Paying money to a human smuggler seems to be the only way out and everyone is trying to scrape together the money for that. ‘Of course when the time came, I would be very earth bound, with a smuggler, in the company of others fleeing our native land. I could be the lone woman and that made me afraid. I had heard that, apart from the bribe, the border guards would also demand a woman’s body for their quick use, and to refuse them, was to be denied passage.’ How true is this statement, I wonder. There are hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran. Did all or even most of the women among them offer their bodies to border guards to be allowed to escape from Afghanistan? I couldn’t help remember that spectacular scene in the Kite Runner where the young protagonist Amir’s father puts his foot down, at the risk of his own life, to save the honour of a young woman travelling with them, from the predation of a border guard.

As luck would have it, the Taliban decide to promote cricket and announce a cricket tournament. Though they frown upon sports in general, non-contact cricket has gained favour in the eyes of the guardians of Islam. The winning team is to be sent to Pakistan for better training so that they can come back to further promote cricket in Afghanistan. It doesn’t take Rukhsana, who attended college in Delhi and played cricket there, much time to decide to form a team composed of her cousins and teach them cricket. The idea is to win the tournament, travel to Pakistan and to never return to Afghanistan. As she turns into a cricket coach, Rukhsana goes into male disguise and as Babur, gains freedom of movement.

While in Delhi, Rukhsana had made various friends, one of whom, Veer, is a very special friend, one she longs for, even as she is engaged to Shaheen. Rukhsana’s memories of Delhi are happy ones, and Delhi is made to appear to be a clean and modern city, where happiness reigns everywhere. Murari’s description of Kabul is not very different from that of Hosseni. Rukhsana, her cousins and friends defy the Taliban in innumerable silent ways. The Taliban beat women and carry out executions at the drop of a hat.

Can Rukhsana successfully train her cricket team to win the tournament and escape to Pakistan, from where they hope to escape to the West and seek asylum? Written in simple English with an Enid Blytonesque feel to it at times, you could enjoy The Taliban Cricket Club if are able to shut out the black and white background and ignore the various clichés and stereotypes that Murari has resorted to.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Rukhsana’s fiancé Shaheen breaks off the engagement. Rukhsana doesn’t mind, though her family is upset. As I had expected, though Rukhsana isn’t meant to actually play in the tournament, she finally does, in male disguise. Just before the tournament starts, Veer turns up in Kabul to take Rukhsana away. Veer is made part of the team, without disguising the fact that he is an Indian. There are only four teams in the tournament which is officiated by an MCC official. The players turn up for the final match with their passports. Rukhsana’s team win the tournament, but Wahidi refuses to honour his promise to let them leave. Instead, the Afghan State Cricket team which lost the final is allowed to leave for Pakistan. Rukhsana’s team members lock up the state team in their washroom (a large communal one for all the players, which is very convenient), and escape with their official jackets, which has their passports. The story ends at Karachi airport where they get rid of their official jackets and stolen passports. They have their genuine passports with them and they go their merry ways. Veer and Rukhsana are to fly to Delhi from where they will travel to New York.

I didn’t like the fact that the final tournament is described rather briefly in this 320-odd pages book. There is very little excitement as Murari takes us through the three games that comprise the entire tournament, except towards the end of the final, when Rukhsana takes a scintillating catch behind the wickets that practically wins the game for them. I also found it difficult to digest that Veer, Rukhsana and the cousins escape to Karachi on stolen passports and consider themselves safe once they are outside Karachi airport.

Book Review: “Chinaman – The Legend of Pradeep Mathew” by Shehan Karunatilaka

A Chinaman is not a man from China, but a delivery by a bowler in a game of cricket where the ball is drifted in a wayward manner to pitch outside the batsman’s feet, only to suddenly turn in towards the batsman. We are told that such a delivery was originally bowled by Ellis Achong, a West Indian of Chinese descent. The Chinaman was Pradeep Mathew’s stock delivery in his role as a Sri Lankan bowler.

Karunatilaka’s Chinaman is a book of exquisite beauty, at times raw and crude, at times fine and sensitive, about cricket and a cricketer named Pradeep Sivanathan Mathew, who is at times called Mathew Pradeepan Sivanathan. One is never sure if the first name is Mathew or Pradeep or even Pradeepan. In ethnically sensitive Sri Lanka, Pradeep Mathew is classified as a Tamil, though his mother is Sinhalese.

Chinaman is narrated by Wijedasa Gamini Karunasena, a sports journalist who is fanatic about sport in general and cricket in particular. Wije, as the narrator is called by many, has seen Pradeep Mathew bowl and thinks he is the greatest Sri Lankan cricketer ever. Unfortunately Pradeep Mathew seems to have disappeared and might even be dead. Even more unfortunate is that there are few public records of Pradeep Mathew’s achievements. A temperamental man who was shy and honest, Pradeep could twist his wrist almost by 360 degrees which enabled him to spin the ball much more than the average bowler and bowl various types of unplayable spin. We are told that there was a time when Pradeep Mathew was a pace bowler. Normally left-handed, he could also bowl with his right hand. Apparently Pradeep Mathew could imitate practically all well-known international bowlers, both pace bowlers and spinners. If this doesn’t stretch your incredulity, then here goes: When Pradeep Mathew was young, he was drafted in to play for Royal College in Sri Lanka’s fiercely competitive inter-school cricket tournament, though he was actually a student of Thurstan. However, Pradeep Mathew didn’t play as himself. ‘In the first match he wore a double T-shirt and played the role of burly pacey Nalliah de Silva. Against Nalanda, he wore a gold chain and mimicked Chanaka Devarajan, de Silva’s new ball partner. He took four wickets and ripped the spine out of a Nalanda batting line-up featuring future international stars Roshan Gurusinha and Hashan Mahanama. In the St. Joseph’s match, he masqueraded as star spinner Rochana Amarasinghe, while his namesake recuperated from an ankle-sprain. His spell of 6-72 livened up an otherwise drab game.’ One’s incredulity isn’t stretched to breakpoint since Karunatilaka has all Royal College players in sunglasses, sunscreen and hats.

Pradeep played a few international games – just a handful. For reasons which can’t be explained in a book review, there are no records of those games and no one remembers Pradeep Mathew who was instrumental in persuading the Sri Lankan captain to not take Aussie sledging like a gentleman, but to pay back in equal measure. A man who never endeared himself to seniors in the cricket team or to selectors, Pradeep Mathew was infatuated with a girl Shirali for whom he wrote poetry and was even prepared to give up cricket.

To add spice to the story, the narrator Wije has ruined his liver by excessive drinking. Wije cannot write unless he drinks. Warned by doctor that he would die in a year or two if he did not stop drinking, Wije has decided to continue drinking and look for Pradeep Mathew. Wije is aided in his search by his friend Ari – Ariyaratne Cletus Byrd. Does Wije succeed in his search? Do please read this wonderful book to find out.

Chinaman is politically incorrect and does not make any bones about it. Rather, it celebrates political incorrectness (of a bygone era) in a very pleasing manner so that no one is really offended. Wije the narrator leads a life which is revealed in great detail, just as Pradeep Mathew remains an enigma till the end. Married to a Christian woman Sheila, with an only son who is called Garfield from whom Wije is estranged, the fun loving Wije fits into the stereotype of a typical hard-drinking sports journalist who cares a lot more about sports and having fun rather than his longevity. Towards the end we find out that Garfield’s real first name is Shehan, same as the author. As much as Chinaman is the story of Pradeep Mathew and Wije, Karunatilaka’s satire also makes it the story of Sri Lanka and its society as it goes through so much pain and suffering on account of its inability to deal with its ethnic divide. For cricket aficionados, the various cricketing anecdotes and trivia make this 500-odd page tome a must-read. Non-Statutory Warning: If you are not a cricket fan, it is possible you may turn into one by the time you finish this novel which won the DSC prize for South Asian literature at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2012.

Book Review: “Beautiful Country – Stories From Another India” by Syeda Hameed and Gunjan Veda

Two sensible and clever women travel all around India, meet interesting people and hear stories which are at times exciting ones with a happy ending and at times sad ones which show extreme poverty and hardship. There are more of the latter. Nevertheless, Beautiful Country is a very good read as the stories are from Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur and Nagaland in the North-East, West Bengal in the East, Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the South, Maharashtra in the West, Madhya Pradesh and the tribal belts of Gadchiroli and Ganiyari in Central India, Rajasthan in the North West, Kashmir, Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Utttar Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana in the North and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Frankly, even for an Indian, the stories come as an eye opener as one gets to learn so many new things. This is especially true with regard to the chapters on the north east. I learnt why the Khasi tribes of Meghalaya greet visitors with Kwai (a combination of betel leaves, betel nuts and lime paste), how random and unauthorised coal mining is playing havoc with the environment in Meghalaya, why Manipuri Muslims are called Meitei Pangal and how Meitei Mayak, Manipur’s original script was replaced by the Bengali script.

The narration is matter of fact, without embellishments, but is nevertheless riveting. For example, after taking us through the Sundarbans, we are told that ‘it has often been said that the sundarbans represents one of the final frontiers between humans and nature. This is the story of the constant tussle between people and animals, a story of human tenacity in the face of great adversity and of human greed and its consequences; a story that is often lost in the silence of the winding creeks and marshy forests that unite the two.’

The authors meet many individuals fighting the might of the State. Irom Sharmila is mentioned in notes of admiration and awe. In Kashmir, we find that even though one and a half years have elapsed since the earth quake of October 2005, villagers continue to live inside tin sheds, without water or jobs. Poverty and even starvation deaths are in abundance in central India. Village schools do not have sufficient infrastructure. However, it is the stories which come out of the Andamans, one of innocent exploited tribals struggling to survive, which affected me the most.

However, one important aspect of this book befuddled me. Of the two authors, Syeda Hameed is a member of the Indian Government’s Planning Commission. The other, Gunjan Veda is a former journalist who has been an officer on special duty with the Planning Commission. In case you didn’t know, the Planning Commission is a body which was originally set up to formulate five year plans for India’s growth. Members of the Planning Commission are essentially bureaucrats - the Indian Prime Minister is the ex-officio Chairman of the Planning Commission and its Deputy Chairman is a member of the Cabinet. When Syeda Hameed and Gunjan Veda travel around India, they are on official tour and are taken in government vehicles and boats (in places like Kerala and West Bengal). Despite being a part of the government, the narrative would have you believe that the authors are a couple of college kids who are fighting the system. Reading this 350 odd-page tome, at times I wanted to shout, ‘for chrissakes, which side are you on? If you find so many things to be wrong, why don’t you do something about it?’

For example, when Hameed and Veda meet with prostitutes in Varanasi’s red light district, they find that many of them have been beaten by policemen who take it on themselves to enforce their own code of conduct on the hapless women. Hameed and Veda argue with the cops. ‘Do you not know that in our country prostitution is not illegal; only public soliciting is.?’ “Madam,I don’t know if their paisha (profession) is forbidden by law or not. I don’t even need to know.’ The arguments go back and forth. The exploited women show Hameed and Veda their bruises. ‘If you touch these women, you will have to face the consequences,’ they threaten the policemen. The threat works, but Hameed and Veda wonder how long it would hold. I was left wondering if this was the best a member of the Planning Commission could do when faced with such injustice.

There are a few instances where Hameed and Veda ‘did something about it.’ While in Kashmir, Hameed and Veda heard that the National Foundation for Communal Harmony, a part of the Ministry of Home Afffairs, funds the education of orphans of militancy. Children of militants, especially of men who have crossed over to Pakistan and then heard of no more or of men who were killed and then declared to be militants, did not qualify. Hameed and Veda showed sympathy for the view that ‘children are children’ and should not be discriminated. We are told that they took up this issue and now the Foundation funds the education of both orphans of militancy and of militants.

I guess this isn’t meant to be a book about how after travelling to a particular place, Syeda Hameed went back to Delhi, fought the powers that be and made changes in policy which made a helluva difference to the people she just visited. This book is only meant to be a collection of stories from various parts of a beautiful country, written by two sensitive individuals, which tug the heart-strings of the reader, however cynical he or she might be.

‘When the Snow Melts’ Goes To Press

My novel ‘When the Snow Melts’ has finally gone to press! I had received an offer for it from Amaryllis in December 2010!

I’ve been saying this for a bit, but When the Snow Melts should be on book shelves in a few months from now.

Book Review: Breakout Nations by Ruchir Sharma

Credentials can’t come better than this. Ruchir Sharma, author of recent best-seller Breakout Nations, is head of Emerging Market Equities and Global Macro at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. A regular contributor to Wall Street Journal and Economic Times, Sharma is also a contributor editor for Newsweek. A man who travels often to various emerging nations for his work, Sharma has put forth a theory on how emerging markets will evolve in the foreseeable future. In the last decade all emerging markets grew (at varying rates of growth), but according to Sharma, it’s time to stop regarding all emerging markets through the same global lens. Each geography is different in various respects and not all the players are going to make through to the ranks of the developed world. There is no reason to believe China will continue growing at 8 or 9 percent, neither will India continue to move forward forever at 8 percent. Sharma gives even less of a chance for Brazil or Russia to breakout and make it to the league of developed nations.

The best thing about Breakout Nations is Sharma’s analyses based on his various observations as he takes his readers on a grand tour of various emerging markets. In addition to the usual suspects such as India, China, Russia and Brazil, he also goes to places such as Nigeria, Mexico and Turkey. China has built up infrastructure, but not all of it is in the right place nor is it always appropriate for China. Shanghai’s maglev train (short for magnetic levitation) which takes eight minutes to travel from Longyan Road to Pudong International Airport travels at 270 miles an hour and uses technology that is currently not used anywhere else in the world, is a case in point. After reaching the airport in eight minutes on the maglev, it takes longer to reach the terminal. The starting point - Longyan Road – is also in the middle of nowhere. A ticket on the maglev costs $8.00 and most people prefer to pay $1.50 for the metro. When Sharma took the maglev with a colleague, they were the only passengers on the train. Brazil on the other hand, is the exact opposite. It suffers from a lack of infrastructure. Its roads are so bad and so unreliable that ‘it costs more to truck soy from the plantations of Mato Grosso to the coast that it does to ship the soy from those ports to China.’ According to a 2011 newspaper report in a Rio paper (O Globo), in Brazil croissants are more expensive in Paris, haircuts cost more than they do in London, bike rentals are more expensive than in Amsterdam and movie tickets sell for more than they do in Madrid.

India’s high population and equally high growth rate was supposed to be a problem, but now it is considered to be a demographic dividend since India’s policy planner have taken the view that China’s high growth is be partly the result of a baby boom. ‘India’s confidence ignored the post-war experience of many countries in Africa and the Middle East, where a flood of young people into the labor market produced unemployment, unrest, and more mouths to feed. The conventional view is that India will be able to put all those people to work because of its relatively strong educational system, entrepreneurial zeal and strong links to the global economy. All of that is real, but India is already showing some of the warning signs of failed growth stories, including early-onset overconfidence. Most outsiders were just as confident before the recent signs of trouble. I put the probability of India continuing its journey as a breakout nation this decade at closer to 50 percent, owing to a whole series of risks that the Indian and foreign elites leave out of the picture, including bloated government, crony capitalism, falling turnover among the rich and powerful and a disturbing tendency of farmers to stay on the farm.’

India and Brazil have a lot in common, though one is a commodity exporter and the other a net-importer. Both are ‘high context’ societies, where ‘people are colorful, noisy, quick to make promises that cannot always be relied on, and a bit casual about meeting times and deadlines.’ This is in contrast with low context societies in the USA and Germany ‘in which people are individual oriented, care about privacy and are much more likely to stick to timeslines and their word.’ In a number of developing countries such as India, Brazil and South Africa, private enterprises have a tendency to look overseas. This is actually a sign of weakness since it means it is not easy to do business in the domestic market. Also, ‘if a country is generating too many billionaires to the size of its economy, it is off balance.’ India has more billionaires than China. Only the US, Russia and Germany have more billionaires than India. What’s worse, many of India’s billionaires have made their money through government patronage and unlike China, India’s billionaire list has a slow turnover.

Just as various emerging markets are different, each Indian state is different from others. Sharma says that foreign investors are slowly learning to look at India on the lines of the United States of Europe. Indian states in Central and North India like Bihar are fast catching up and have higher growth rates than the ones in the South. Sharma concludes that India has a good chance of being a breakout nation, a higher chance than the 50% Sharma gives China. ‘No other large economy has so many stars aligned in its favour, from its demographic profile to its entrepreneurial energy, and perhaps most important, an annual per capita income that is only one-fourth of China’s. But destiny can never be taken for granted. Indian policy makers cannot assume that demographics will triumph and that problems such as rising crony capitalism and increased welfare spending are just sideshows instead of major challenges. These are exactly the factors that have prematurely chocked growth in other emerging markets.'

Brazil may have lousy infrastructure, when compared with China, but its stock market is ‘hot’ unlike China’s. This is because Brazilian companies are forced to be disciplined on account of the high cost of borrowing and are highly profitable – hence the Brazilian stock market booms. In China, there is little fiscal discipline since the focus is on growth at any cost.

Mexico is a bigger oligopoly than even Brazil with a handful of families and companies controlling the economy. At one point, the richest country in Latin America, it has now been overtaken by Brazil and Chile. Mexico’s economy will find it hard, though not impossible, to breakout. Russia is another nation whose ascent is in doubt. A nation of extreme wealth and poverty, Russia’s per capita income is $13,000 p.a., which is way above that of China (just above $4000) and India ($1,400). However, Sharma calls Russia ‘an oil state which has lost its way’ and gives it even less of a breakout chance than China.

Despite Russia, all is not lost in Eastern Europe which has a couple of sweet spots. The Czech Republic, which was a leading industrial nation in the 1920 and Poland are doing well. Hungary which was doing well has slipped up.

Sharma is highly appreciative of Turkey’s achievements after the Erdogan regime came to power. Though despised by many secular and modern Turks for their Islamic values and backwardness, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP has brought stability to Turkey, along with greater inclusiveness. Masses once excluded on account of their religious values now play a leading role in the economy. Erdogan has taken the middle ground on many issues and some of Turkey’s former elites have also come to appreciate the stability he has brought. After consolidating its hold on power, the AKP started using Putin-like tactics, but Sharma suggests that ‘Erdogan would prefer to be seen as a Turkish avatar of Lee Kuan Yew.' In stark contrast to Turkey is Malaysia which is yet to cast off the shadow of Mahathir Mohammad. Of the former Tiger economies, Malaysia is one which hasn’t recovered from the 1998 crisis which affected all the South-East Asian countries. Unlike Indonesia which addressed the issues which caused those problems, Mahathir Mohammed blamed malicious foreign speculators for the crisis. As a result, Malaysia has slid backwards.

Indonesia on the other hand is a commodity based economy which has not suffered on account of its income from commodities. Sharma calls it the best run large commodity economy where foreigners find it easy to do business. In the 1960s, the Philippines was a regional leader, but now it is a laggard with a few family owned conglomerates dominating the markets. However, its new President Benigno Aquino III seems to be a good leader who is ‘delegating power to competent technocrats and seems to understand what needs to be done to get the lights back on.’ Thailand too has suffered a number of downturns, but the new Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra offers hope.

Sharma calls South Korea the gold medallist among breakout nations, mainly because it has, in addition to developing its infrastructure, it developed global brands. This is unlike Taiwan which has stuck with manufacturing components for western companies and has little bargaining power over pricing since the manufacturing can be done anywhere else. South Korea too has a number of problems. For example, its service sector is underdeveloped. In case the two Koreas manage to reunify, South Korea would gain even more since it is in a position to utilise the disciplined workers of North Korea.

South Africa is another resource-rich nation, which after showing some promise after the end of apartheid, slipped into a state of inertia. A cappuccino economy (a white layer on top of black coffee with some dark chocolate sprinkled on top), South Africa has been moving towards a welfare state before it can afford it. In this respect it is similar to Brazil. In South Africa, wages rise faster than inflation. This coupled with powerful unions and a strong currency has resulted in deindustrialization. Again like Brazil, many South African businesses are very profitable but they look to foreign countries to expand and make profits. Many enterprises are still state owned and hence there are no cheap airfares to South Africa.

Sharma also examines a handful of countries he classifies as the Fourth World of Frontier Economies. These are countries where the rule of law has a limited franchise and where just as profits are high, so is the possibility of making a loss. All Gulf States fall into this category. So do countries like Nigeria and many African countries some of which show promise. Sri Lanka is also classified as a Frontier economy, one which is reaping its peace dividend. I feel that Sri Lanka ought to have been classified as a breakout nation rather than a frontier economy. As Sharma himself admits, even during the bleak days of the civil war, its economy grew at the rate of five percent.

Sharma tells us that ‘the richer a country is, the harder it is to grow national wealth at a rapid pace’ Another interesting rule promulgated by Sharma is that a country should ideally have more than one big city. The second city should have a population of atleast one-third to half that of the first city. Brazil has Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Korea has Seoul and Busan, Indonesia has Jakarta and Surabaya, but Thailand has only Bangkok, which has ten times as many people and the next largest city. This, according to Sharma, is a bad sign.

Is dictatorship better than democracy for emerging nations? Sharma suggests that rather than the actual system in place, what matters is the quality of the politicians. For example, Vietnam’s system is similar to that of China, but on account of inferior management, Vietnam does not show any sign of being a breakout nation despite a small flicker of hope in the middle of the last decade.

Sharma predicts that commodity prices are bound to fall. There was a time when many believed that the US Federal Reserve had mastered the art of making the economy go up without the occasional recession – it was thought that the boom-bust cycle was a thing of the past. Now with the benefit of hindsight, we know that it is not the case. Similarly, there are some who feel that commodity prices can only go up, that China will keep growing at the rate of nine percent forever. ‘Commodity.com is driven by fear and a total lack of faith in human progress: fear of rising phalanx of emerging nations with an insatiable demand led by China, of predictions that the world is running out of oil and farmland, coupled with a lack of faith in the human capacity to devise answers, to find alternatives to oil or ways to make agricultural land more productive. It’s a Malthusian vision of struggle and scarcity: of prices driven up by falling supplies and wages pushed down by foreign companies.’ The hype about commodities 'has created a new industry that turns commodities into financial products that can be traded like stocks. Oil, wheat and platinum used to be sold primarily as raw materials, and now they are sold largely as speculative investments. Copper is piling up in bonded warehouses not because the owners plan to use it to make wire, but because speculators are sitting on it ......'

What will be the result when commodity prices crash? Will it lead to a global crash? Sharma argues that it will not. Also, Sharma feels that when China’s economy slows down, it will not come to a shuddering halt. Do please read this amazing book for Sharma’s rationale for his conclusions.