Literary Safari

I read Devis with Babies post “How to Celebrate Diwali with Your Kids” with interest. Though I don’t have those mommy duties yet, I could appreciate the second-gen challenges of passing on a festival and its traditions. (My nephew is almost two and recent conversations with my sister have been a lot about how to fashion his Diwali memories and experiences.)

Book fiend that I am, the following suggestions in Devis with Babies’s “Ten Insta-Culture Ways to Celebrate Diwali With Your Child” especially stood out to me, :

7. Exchange small gifts with friends. Last year, my friend gave little diyas to her friends’ children, personalized with their names. She also got us a children’s book about Diwali. I was super impressed.

8. When your kid asks you, “Mommy, what is Diwali?” don’t get panicked — whip out a book! Here are some more Diwali books for children.

Great idea. Only problem is that I think there are some wonderful books that got ignored in the above links. Here’s what I consider a more timely and rounded list of great Diwali books for kids, many of which, really, can also be read at any time of the year. They all touch on themes of celebration, sharing, festivals, and tradition.

Divali Rose, by Vashanti Rahaman ((Boyds Mill Press, 2008)

Ricki’s grandpa is the proud owner of a rosebush that promises to grow roses “the color of Divali.” As the Hindu festival grows closer, Ricki snaps off one of his grandpa’s prized rosebuds by mistake. Will he allow Grandpa to blame the loss on their Indian neighbors or will he gather up his courage to confess his mistake? Jamel Akib’s chalk pastels create a lush, tropical, festive atmosphere in this sweet, multigenerational tale which examines the complex history of Indians in Trinidad.

You can listen to my podcast review of this book at Just One More Book, which served up a special Diwali episode yesterday - “Cheers, Jeers, and Jeera”. This episode features books with more “Flavors of the East,” including Shehnaaz Nanji’s Treasure for Lunch, Pooja Makhijani’s Mama’s Saris and Rachna Gilmore’s Lights for Gita, also worthy Diwali reads.

(more…)

This is part of an ongoing series that I recently started here, “Flex Your Writing Muscles,” (installment 1) where I take a writing prompt and work it, knead it, pound it … and see what emerges out of it.

In this case, my prompt was to begin with the words “When I was [insert age]” and to write about a memory of that age. I actually started this prompt a year ago, around Diwali, at my desk at work in between tasks. I’ve been playing with it for a while and finally made a small breakthrough today.

The Times of Diwali

Diwali in Bombay

When I was seven
We drove along Marine Drive
My face pressed
Against the grimy glass
Of the bumpy taxi
In my lap a gift-wrapped box
Of store bought jalebis
Sticky orange
Sugary sweet
Circles of delight
Topped with edible aluminum foil

(more…)

“What are you doing for Diwali?” Ask that question of most members of my family and the first response will be “cleaning!” That’s right. There’s one very important thing that my mom and grandmothers taught me that we must do on the Hindu festival of lights: Clean the house.

When I was a kid, for weeks preceding Diwali, I would watch as ladders were pulled out so that those faraway storage spots could be investigated and dusted clear of cobwebs, drawers were emptied and wiped clean of every speck of dust, closets were emptied and old clothes given away, and the windows of my father’s and uncles shops were polished like new.

It was only then that we could break out the new clothes, the diyas (earthen clay lamps) and the sugary treats. Then, of course, was my favorite part – the opportunity to switch on every single light in the house. I mean, every *single* light, from the tiniest desk lamp to the dining room chandelier! There was never any talk of the electricity bill on Diwali and this “lights on” attitude lasted for three whole days.

I’m sitting here today watching the sunset and about to switch on all the lights at home and it’s striking me how fitting it is that Diwali arrives at this time of year, just when our days are getting shorter and darkness is creeping upon us earlier each day. More than anything else, I suppose Diwali brings with it the metaphorical reminder that even if we are surrounded by darkness, we do still hold the power to …. switch on our individual | inner | personal lights!

Election fever is on the rise. (I don’t know about you, but none of my favorite TV shows quite have the same appeal these days and anytime I pick up a newspaper or hop on a website or facebook, I’m more likely to read or click on a election story than anything else.) It’s even hitting Anu Garg, the software engineer turned wordsmith and the brain behind the immensely popular (600,000 people in some 200 countries) A.Word.A.Day newsletter.

Garg is asking a simple question this week: What’s in a name (of those whom we call our presidential hopefuls)?

“The effect of the actions of a president last for years and eponyms (words coined after someone’s name) enter the language that reflect their legacy, such as Reaganomics and teddy bear (after Theodore Roosevelt),” Garg wrote earlier this week in his daily newsletter. And, although the five words for this week’s A.Word.A.Day all appear to have been coined after this year’s presidential candidates (Obama, Biden, McCain, and Palin). they have been in the language even before these candidates were born.

The first word for this week: obambulate

PRONUNCIATION:
(o-BAM-byuh-layt) MEANING:
verb tr.: To walk about.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin ob- (towards, against) + ambulare (to walk). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ambhi- (around) that is also the source of ambulance, alley, preamble, and bivouac. The first print citation of the word is from 1614.
USAGE:
“We have often seen noble statesmen obambulating (as Dr. Johnson would say) the silent engraving-room, obviously rehearsing their orations.”
The Year’s Art; J.S. Virtue & Co.; 1917.

[In case you’re wondering, the image to your right was generated using the above definition, courtesy of Wordle, a wonderfully obsessive site that generates word clouds for a chunk of text, url, or RSS feed.]

The remaining presidential words will be posted here everyday for the rest of this week. And, my Q&A with the Seattle-based software engineer turned wordsmith Anu Garg follows below the fold.

(more…)

After all the talk about Joe the Plumber in last night’s final presidential debate, I thought folks might want to meet another plumber this morning. To do that, we’ll take a trip to the seaside town of Obama, Japan (250 miles west of Tokyo; population: 32,000), where Obama mania has been in full swing for months. Obama means “little beach” in Japanese and it is in this town that a plumber friend of the mayor (I tried, but couldn’t find his name) has sculpted this bust of Obama, microphone in hand with a traditional Japanese sash around its head.

The bust stands at the entrance to the support group’s war room, a coffee bar and souvenir shop whose wares include Adachi-designed T-shirts, along with chopsticks, kites, and steamed cakes filled with sweet adzuki beans. Grill marks on the bean cakes depict the back of Obama’s head. “We thought it was not appropriate to have Mr. Obama’s face without his consent, since these are for sale,” [Mayor] Fujihara said. So far, thirteen hundred of Obama’s thirty-three thousand citizens have signed up for membership [in the Obama for Obama group]. [see “Talk of the Town” column in this week’s New Yorker for complete article]

Members of Obama for Obama have recorded a boppy theme song “Obama is Beautiful World” whose refrain has been replaying in my head all morning.

More Obama art at Literary Safari:
The Annotated Obama
Obama Madonnari

This review was originally published at Sepia Mutiny. For a chance to win my galley (i.e. extra) copy of this novel, drop me a comment. I’ll pick the “winner” at random a week from today.

No, it’s not a book of recipes and she’s not the sister of the much-maligned Kaavya. “The Toss of a Lemon” (Harcourt, Sept. 2008) is Arkansas-based and Canada-born writer’s first novel. And what a beautifully-wrought, political, social, and at times heart-wrenching work it is—ten years in the making.

The Toss of a Lemon begins in 1896 in the caste-organized village of Cholapatti in Tamil Nadu and carries us to 1958 where the strictures of caste have broken apart amidst the new economic and political framework of post-colonial India, specifically South India.

In the opening scene, ten year old Sivakami (a character based on Viswanathan’s great-great grandmother)and her parents are on a pilgrimage to “her mother’s place” and decide to pay a visit to a young healer and astrologer Hanumarathnam. While making Sivakami’s astrological chart, the healer announces that their stars happen to be in alignment – “He blinks rapidly, the lamplight making him look younger than his twenty-one years. He takes a breath and looks at Sivakami’s father. ‘I have never looked at, nor ever proposed to any girl before now. Please … consider me.’” There’s only one small glitch. Hanumarathnam’s horoscope predicts that he will die in the ninth year of marriage—unless his first-born son’s horoscope matches his.

Sivakami’s parents are optimists and the two are subsequently married “like everyone else, at an auspicious time on an auspicious day in an auspicious month.”

At the heart of The Toss of a Lemon is a horoscope. It dictates the destiny of Sivakami, who is widowed at age 19, the mother of one girl and one boy and the inheritor of her husband’s family home and properties. It also dictates the destinies of Sivakami’s children: Thangam, a quiet beauty whose skin gives off gold vibuthi, or dust, with healing properties—a result of her father’s alchemist experiments—and Vairum, a math genius with “irises nearly black yet strangely brilliant, diamond sharp” and a skin condition (vitiligo) which makes him an anomaly in the Brahmin quarter early on in his life.

There’s a memorable description of Sivakami early in this book: she “carries herself with an attractive stiffness: her shoulders straight and always aligned. She looks capable of bearing great burdens, not as though born to a yoke but perhaps as though born with a yoke within her.” Indeed, though strict Brahmannical traditions call for Sivakami to shave her head, wear white, and to not contaminate herself with human touch between dawn and dusk, she is also a rebel who chooses to raise her children in her husband’s ancestral home (instead of returning to her natal village and living with her brothers). Helping her in this herculean task is Machumi, a non-Brahmin villager and closeted gay man, who manages Hanumaranthnam’s land properties and business. (more…)

This interview was originally published at Sepia Mutiny. Read my review of Arkansas-based, Canada-born Padma Viswanathan’s debut novel “The Toss of a Lemon” here.

Q. When and how did you first start collecting these stories?
A. I interviewed my grandmother over the course of a year or so, in the mid-nineties. She would talk for a few hours, either in English or in Tamil (with my mother translating, to ensure I got the nuances), and then I would transcribe the tape. She told me a story that fascinated and bewildered me: of her grandmother, who was married as a child and widowed at eighteen with two small children. It then took me over ten years of writing to imagine myself into this world and to transform the story I had been given into a novel of my own making. The book that resulted has many emotional and narrative ties to the story my grandma told, but also departs from it in numerous significant ways.

Q. How did you research the historical and social context of this book?
A. I went to India after interviewing my grandmother. I had been many times before, but now saw the old places in a new way, populated by the ghosts of these stories she had told me. I interviewed other relatives and did a lot of reading on the particular social and political upheavals that were happening in this corner of India at that time, in contrast to the larger narrative of Independence. Six years later, with much of a draft written, I made a return trip, visiting some incredible resource centers in south India, where I did more detailed research on themes and characters that had emerged in the writing. This involved a lot of reading, as well as interviews with scholars and historians. I also revisited the places where the novel takes place, to refresh my sense memories and ask more specific questions of my relatives. Although the world I have described exists now only in a fragmentary and vestigial way, I actually saw it crumble in my lifetime. So some of the research was reconstruction of my own memories. (more…)

This post originally published at Sepia Mutiny.

I’m playing a new online video game today. It’s called “Homeland Guantanamos” and it has transformed me into an undercover journalist whose task is to unearth clues about the mysterious 2007 death of Boubacar Bah, a Guinean tailor who was held at a detention center in Elizabeth, NJ for overstaying his visa.

“Homeland Guantanamos” is the latest multi-media offering from Breakthrough, the human rights organization which uses media and popular culture to raise awareness here and in India. [Abhi covered their video game “I Can End Deportation” or I.C.E.D. earlier this year. ]

We’ve all heard stories about immigrants (illegal and residents) being detained without explanation or for prolonged periods of time. At the website, I got to see what life might be like on the other side of the fence. I took a tour of a simulated immigration detention center and collected clues to help solve the mystery of Bah’s death (he died of a skull fracture and brain hemorrhages). Along the way, I saw other detainees (eg: a pregnant woman kept in shackles during labor) and witnessed conditions of the facilities, including the solitary confinement room, the bathrooms, and the dining hall. Though this is a simulated experience, the content is based on factual sources such as news articles, court documents, and interviews.

Why call the site “Homeland Guantanamos”? According to Malikka Dutt, executive director of Breakthrough, “the Department of Homeland Security is violating the human rights of legal and undocumented immigrants” and some of the inhumane conditions of detention centers where these immigrants are being held are not all that different from the facility at Guantanamo Bay.

A few facts:

Last year, more than 300,000 people were held in detention centers on mainland USA.
The cost to tax payers last year alone was $1.2 billion to tax payers.
Since 2003, 87 detainees have died in detention centers.
There are over 100 detention centers throughout the country. [ A map of detention centers is available here, searchable by zipcode. The most detention centers seem to be clustered in the Northeast. ]
Between January 2004 to November 2007, nearly a million people passed through immigration custody.

As with I.C.E.D., response to this project has not been all warm and fuzzy. In a Times article published this weekend, Kelly A. Nantel, a spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the video game was “a work of fiction that dehumanizes the individuals depicted and grossly distorts conditions in detention facilities.”

Dutt maintains that the Dept. of Homeland Security’s enforcement measures are “increasingly draconian” and hopes that this game will serve as a platform for increased support of the Protect Citizens and Residents from Unlawful Raids and Detention Act, proposed by Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Edward Kennedy (D-Ma.). More in the NYT article.

The Homeland Guantanamos site features compelling video testimonials from detainees. Breakthrough went “live from jail” and interviewed several long time permanent US residents who face possible deportation because of unfair immigration laws. It also has an action guide and a memorial wall. Most certainly worth checking out.

I’m going to be judging Kahani’s Fourth Annual Young Writers and Illustrators Contest this winter. It’s open to young writers between ages 6 and 11 and the deadline is Sunday, Nov. 23, 2008.

The rules are simple: the story must include the words fever, mountain, and peacock.

Monika Jain, editor of Kahani, the award-winning literary magazine for South Asian children, asked me for some tips for the young writers. Here are my three golden rules:

Cook Up a Rich Setting. When we tell a story, we often bring a scene to life with description. On a blank piece of paper, write down the three contest words. Make a list of all the descriptive words (adjectives, especially) that come to mind when you think of each of these things. What does it smell like? Taste like? Feel like? Remind you of? Sound like? This brainstorming exercise will give you rich language to weave into your story. For example, for cobra (a word from last year’s contest), words that come to mind are sneaky, poisonous, dangerous, hiding, hood.

Map Out Your Story. Every short story has a beginning, middle, and an end. Before you start writing, ask yourself: When and where does my story take place? Who are the main characters in my story? Are they kind, naughty, unhappy, young, old? What is the big problem that they have to face? What events happen along the way? How does the problem get solved? Use your answers as a map or guide when you are writing.

Don’t Think Too Much! Writing a story should be fun, and a great story is all about letting your imagination loose. If your peacock wants to live inside a house, let it. If your cobra wants to be magenta in color or wants to talk, why not? Start writing and see where your writing takes you. This is supposed to be fun!

An entry form and complete guidelines are available here. Do spread the word. Kids don’t have to be subscribers to enter the contest.