How beautiful is this night...
A gentle breeze,
a few muted lights,
dark shapes playing hide and seek.
Laughter, drifting from a lively home nearby;
another home, cozy I imagine,
lets out a soft melody.
A vast stillness settles within me,
A deep breath of calm.
I should go now, I think.
Move on, and let this safe night swallow me.
It rained so hard,
I forgot to weep.
The drops fell all in a blur
and the world became soft around its edges.
The ache dulled,
blacks faded to greys,
and the screams in my head became whispers.
The rain fell hard
and I forgot to remember.
This book was the reason I fell in love
with King Ashoka, the "stumpy, pot-bellied, pumpkin-faced, fragile King
who had the tendency to faint under stress".
The book itself is
written like a detective story, narrating how Ashoka's life was
painstakingly pieced together clue by tiny clue by the "Orientalists",
beginning in the 18th Century.
Charles Allen has kept it real,
without being pretentious, overly academic or puffed up with his own
importance as many literary historical non-fiction writers tend to do.
The language is simple, current, and narrative.
At the same
time, there's a faint hint of the author's tenderness towards this King
throughout the book. In the way he regrets the way Ashoka and his
efforts in making Buddhism the way it is now, have been unrecognised
even now, in the way he recognizes the tender feelings in Ashoka's one
of the more emotional edicts near the Ajanta caves when he was young,
and the way he talks about his appearance.
I’m not a great
non-fiction reader, but this book, I absolutely loved. It also triggered
a need in me to want to know more details about King Ashoka Maurya, and
everything to do with that period.
So here's why I have mixed feelings about Kiran Nagarkar's 'Jasoda'... This was my second Nagarkar book and after 'Cuckold', I started reading this with high expectations. It started off well. A gut-wrenching story of a woman struggling in rural Rajasthan and later in relentless Mumbai, told in a casual, matter-of-fact manner.
There were pages when I just wanted to shut my eyes tight and not read anymore because it was so gut-wrenching. There were also parts when I couldn't stop reading.
But as the book progressed, the story telling kept getting too casual, very disjointed in parts. For example, one moment the family returns to their village and the older son rejoins school, you turn the page, and now he's a professor in a college in the USA and dating a white woman, who becomes his wife almost immediately.
Sure the book touches on several prevalent social evils.. patriarchy, female infanticide, abusive husband, poverty, tyranny of the ruling class... and sure, you do hurt for Jasoda, you weep for her and all the women who have to go through so much pain. But the second half of the book feels totally unnecessary, and seems like it's been written in a hurry, with the intention of "just need to finish this already!" I guess it's not surprising since the author started writing the book more than 20 years ago and completed it only recently. There is bound to be a disconnection with the passing of so much time.
To summarize, not one of his finest works. Now I feel like pulling out 'Cuckold' and reading it all over again just to remind myself why I liked Kiran Nagarkar in the first place.