From the 4th of July till the 9th, the rains came pelting down. As if to make up for the deficit, it really began raining buckets. And it went on for 5 days at a stretch as if in a rush to fill up the lakes that held water only for a few more weeks .

Of course we were grateful that all our prayers were answered and that it rained. But at the same time, it rained so much that many trees were uprooted, branches fell, cars were damaged and sadly around 11 people lost their lives. One was an 8 year old boy who was crushed in his school bus when a branch fell on it .

So when the rain stopped last Thursday we all heaved a sigh of relief .

We took advantage of this by placing the clothes rack back in the verandah. And thank God for that . It does get quite depressing having clothes drying in the living room !

Belly of the Beast

I’m not one of the theatre going types and unless a play comes highly recommended, I’d rather give it a miss. But I also suffer majorly from FOMO ( an affliction known as. Fear Of Missing Out), so I HAD to accompany my friends to this show, which was luckily at the NCPA.

But this new-age play was just NOT my scene. The theme itself, in my opinion, is the typical reaction of a new mum who suddenly discovers that motherhood is not all that it was meant to be. Naturally, she wants the whole world to know what it’s like, hence the stage adaptation of Kalki Koechlin’s oeuvre ‘Elephant in the Womb’ as ‘Belly of the Beast’. Otherwise, the script, which at times I found offensive, was hardly ‘original’. The sound and light effects made no sense to me, and the overall flow was confusing and, all in all, a play completely worth missing despite the sincere performance of the actors.

It’s been a long while since I’ve written about books that I’ve read so I thought I’d catch up with the reviews.

Read during the Lull

As always, I’ve diligently borrowed books but not always read them.

Ever since I read Freida McFadden’s ‘The Teacher’ , I’ve developed a strange fascination for her psychological thrillers . So in June I read ‘One By One ‘ and ‘The Tenant’ .

I always wonder why murder mysteries are so popular. With complex characters and unexpected twists, these books are truly absorbing. Unlike the simple mysteries of yore, these books have characters that are riddled with childhood trauma that have given them a dark side to their personalities. But the stories are crsiply told and the reader is kept guessing till the last page.

During the lull I managed to read Kiran Desai’s humongous novel ‘ The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny ’. I borrowed it from the library largely on the recommendation of Anna Shetty, who reads everything on her Kindle. So it didn’t really matter to her how heavy the book was, but I actually had to keep the book on the dining table and read it. It was absorbing because it weaves together many stories related to Sonia and Sunny. but could actually have stood on their own. This complicated novel flits between several time zones, timelines, locales and cultures and requires serious concentration to distinguish reality from fact. This ‘magic realism’ is enchanting and the delightful lapsing into Hinglish, and local languages truly captures the different cultures that Sonia and Sunny inhabit. Definitely worth reading.

Alice Feeny’s latest book ‘My Husband’s Wife’ is another book that I couldn’t put down. Set in a remote Cornish village, the tightly woven plot with its unexpected twists will keep you rooted to the book. Definitely worth reading if you like psychological murder mysteries . But do not read alone in the night or if you’ve had a fight with your spouse .

Currently I’ve begun ‘ This Book Made Me Think of You , Libby Page’s bland, predictable romance. Perhpas Mr. Kinney recommended this book as a relief from the dark mysteries.

Not Read in the lull but read nonetheless

Since I haven’t mentioned the other books I’ve read last month ( June ) I think I’ll take this opportunity to mention them.

Is it coincidence that I read two memoirs written by two authors from Kerala in quick succession?

‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’ by Arundhati Roy is a memoir I found fascinating. Of course, not many people enjoyed the book, which is not very surprising since Arundhati’s books make you think. I did wonder how much of her book was fact and how much was exaggeration. Another ‘autobiographical’ book that caught my eye was ‘The Elsewhereans’ by Jeet Thayil. Thayil describes his book as a document

I read this book largely because Anna Shetty and her family were travelling to Vietnam. And I thought it would be a natural read after Nguyen’s earlier book. Dealing with the problems of Amerasians and the Vietnamese who are willy-nilly drawn into situations for sheer survival, once again this book is worth a read.

Finally, this book by Julian Barnes is quite unlike any book I’ve ever read. I’m a bit ambivalent about it. Did I like it or did I not?

Why were most of the books I’ve read ‘biographical’? And why were most of them dark and morbid?

Now that it’s been dry for a week, we’ve begun getting antsy again. We still have three more months of the monsoon to go and the lakes and reservoirs that supply water to our city are not yet full .

Ciao,