HT Picks; New Reads
The list of interesting reads this week includes a novel featuring an unlikely set of friends in a city insistent on alienating them, a volume on how the diverse peoples inhabiting the valley of the vast Brahmaputra river became part of India, and a book about two misfits who discover they are kindred souls
The unlikeliest of friends
Set in the capital of all things chic, surrounded by inexplicably irritable inhabitants, this book is an ode to the friendships that have got so many through the darkest days of their lives. In spite of living in the same apartment block in Paris, Neera, Rosel, Violet and Dasha have no idea about each other’s existence. In the grand duplex of Number Thirty-Six, the socialite Neera chain-smokes spliffs and lives a life of luxury with her director-producer husband. Many floors above, Rosel, a Filipina housekeeper-cum-nanny, dreams in her tiny attic room of becoming a French citizen and being reunited with her son. Seventeen-year-old Russian model, Dasha, shares her cramped apartment with other women, wanting to walk the ramp for the biggest fashion moguls but settling for whoever pays the bills. And on the ground floor, Violet, a Senegalese trans woman, is a burlesque dancer at night and plays saviour to a handsome beggar by day. When the whole world comes to a halt and turns itself upside down, the women of Number Thirty-Six are shocked out of their arduous lives. They become the unlikeliest of friends, relying on each other to belong to this city that is insistent on alienating them. Irreverent, joyous, hilarious and passionate, with characters who seem to leap unapologetically off the page, Clearly Invisible in Paris is a celebration of the contradiction of being an outsider and belonging to the city.*
Of imperialism, Christianity and the British love of tea
As India and the world are roiled by questions of nationalism and identity, this book journeys into the history of one of the world’s most fascinating regions: Northeast India. Having appeared with the stroke of a pen in 1947, as the British Raj was torn asunder and partitioned into India and Pakistan, this is a region of river valleys and hills inhabited by myriad tribes. Until colonial rule, several of these tribes had lived in their ancient ways, largely unmolested by their neighbours, who were rather keen to avoid their traditions of headhunting. Samrat Choudhury chronicles the processes by which these remote hill tribes, and the diverse other peoples inhabiting the valley of the vast Brahmaputra river, became parts of the “imagined nation” that is India. He explores two other ideas of India that remain in daily competition: Bharat, the Hindu nationalist conception of the country, and Hindustan, the Persian-origin name by which India is still known as far west as Turkey. Taking a long view, this absorbing political history chronicles the separate pathways by which imperialism, Christianity and the British love of tea brought each of the contemporary region’s constituent states into modern India.*
Pointing to a new ecological story
Two strangers meet in a park by chance. Sonal, formerly a sociology professor and firebrand activist, is battling memory loss and acute depression. Abhay, a once-celebrated genetic engineer, is a paranoid fugitive hiding from an establishment whose scientific paradigm he once challenged. To the world they both are insane, but the truth is deeper. Abhay shares his most closely guarded thoughts with Sonal, in the form of a book. It is a radical, paradigm-shifting perspective, and the two misfits discover that they are kindred souls, forced to doubt their own sanity by a deluded culture. Together, they plan to take their revelation to the world before it’s too late. But, as always, reality has other plans.*
*All copy from book flap.