Paulo Coelho, Roll Call Again: Book Review

Paulo Coelho’s latest offering to be a piece of art, demonstrating the magic he is capable of creating with simple, ordinary language. “Zahir, in Arabic, means visible, present, incapable of going unnoticed. It is someone or something which, once we have come into contact with them or it, gradually occupies our every thought, until we can think of nothing else.” (From the foreword of the book.)
heartbroken novels about the presumably corrupt world of today and the jaded cynicism of most intellectual writers, The Zahir is like a fresh ray of hope, because it is essentially a very positive book. The concept of The Zahir is very important here, because it puts the entire plot into perspective, which is necessary to grasp the meta-plot of this multi-layered and wonderfully complex story. It is easy to relate to the narrator and protagonist, because it is just not about a rich writer who is obsessed with his disappeared wife, it is about the human experience of learning to follow dreams, realising them, and unleashing the powerful force of truth.
The book is about facing who you are and what you are afraid of, and erasing past histories in order to create more and more love every day. It is easy to sense that the protagonist is a broad-minded individual, who is brighter than the average person. As the book goes on to describe his journey it is easy to see how he grows more spiritually aware with every chapter.
The narrative is alive and vibrant and so insightful that it is sometimes overwhelming. The narrator’s view of life and society is very difficult from the conventional and commonsensical, and hence it provides new interpretations of even the most mundane things. The symbolism is very significant in the book once the reader has grasped the basic plot; within that outline the story progresses to reveal new dimensions into the writer’s search for his wife and his initially inadvertent stumbling into the truth about his own life.
As pointed out that school stories always have been and will be cherished by generations of students. Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s and Malory Towers stories will always find readers. What they have in common is that usually they are only representative of the students’ views. But in a school there is another body of important people, the teachers.

Intercast Marriage: Story of Urban India

Grandmother was pretending to be lost in prayer, but her prayer-beads were spinning at top speed. That meant she was either excited or upset. Mother
put the receiver down. “Some American girl in his office, she’s coming to stay with us for a week.” She sounded as if she had a deep foreboding. Father had no such doubt. He knew the worst was to come. He had been matching horoscopes for a year, but my brother Vivek had found a million excuses for not being able to visit India, call any of the chosen Iyer girls, or in any other way advance father’s cause. Father always wore four parallel lines of sacred ash on his forehead. Now there were eight, so deep were the furrows of worry on his forehead. I sat in a corner, supposedly lost in a book, but furiously text-messaging my brother with a vivid description of the scene before me. A few days later I stood outside the airport with father. He tried not to look directly at any American woman going past, and held up the card reading “Barbara”. Finally a large woman stepped out, waved wildly and shouted “Hiiii! Mr. Aayyyezh, how ARE you?” Everyone turned and looked at us. Father shrank visibly before my eyes. Barbara took three long steps and covered father in a tight embrace.Father’s jiggling out of it was too funny to watch. I could hear him whispering “Shiva Shiva!”
She shouted “you must be vineet?” “Yes, vineeth” I said with a smile. I imagined little half-Indian children calling me “Vijaantee aunty!”
Suddenly, my colorless existence in Madurai had perked up. For at least the next one week, life promised to be quite exciting.

Soon we were eating lunch at home. Barbara had changed into an even shorter skirt. The low neckline of her spaghetti was just in line with father’s eyes.

He was glaring at mother as if she had conjured up Barbara just to torture him. Barbara was asking “You only have vegetarian food? Always??” as if the idea was shocking to her. “You know what really goes well with Indian food, especially chicken? Indian beer!” she said with a pleasant smile, seemingly oblivious to the apoplexy of the gentleman in front of her, or the choking sounds coming from mother. I had to quickly duck under the table to hide my giggles.

Everyone tried to get the facts without asking the one question on all our minds: What was the exact nature of the relationship between Vivek and Barbara? She brought out a laptop computer. “I have some pictures of Vivek” she said. All of us crowded around her. The first picture was quite innocuous. Vivek was wearing shorts, and standing alone on the beach. In the next photo, he had Barbara draped all over him. She was wearing a skimpy bikini and leaning across, with her hand lovingly circling his neck.
Father got up, and flicked the towel off his shoulder. It was a gesture we in the family had learned to fear. He literally ran to the door and went out.
Barbara said “It must be hard for Mr. Aayyezh. He must be missing his son.” We didn’t have the heart to tell her that if said son had been within reach, father would have lovingly wrung his neck.
My parents and grandmother apparently had reached an unspoken agreement. They would deal with Vivek later. Right now Barbara was a foreigner, a lone woman, and needed to be treated as an honored guest. It must be said that Barbara didn’t make that one bit easy. Soon mother wore a perpetual frown.
Father looked as though he could use some of that famous Indian beer.

Vivek had said he would be in a conference in Guatemala all week, and would be off both phone and email. But Barbara had long lovey-dovey conversations with two other men, one man named Steve and another named Keith. The rest of us strained to hear every interesting word. “I miss you!” she said to both.
She also kept talking with us about Vivek, and about the places they’d visited together. She had pictures to prove it, too. It was all very confusing.

This was the best play I’d watched in a long time. It was even better than the day my cousin adtiya ran away with a anglo Christiangirl. My aunt had come howling through the door, though I noticed that she made it to the plushest sofa before falling in a faint. Father said that if it had been  his child, the door would have been forever shut in his face.
Aunt promptly revived and said “You’ll know when it is your child!” How my aunt would rejoice if she knew of Barbara!
On day five of her visit, the family awoke to the awful sound of Barbara’s retching. The bathroom door was shut, the water was running, but far louder was the sound of Barbara crying and throwing up at the same time. Mother and grandmother exchanged ominous glances. Barbara came out, and her face was red. “I don’t know why”, she said, “I feel queasy in the mornings now.” If she had seen as many Indian movies as I’d seen, she’d know why. Mother was standing as if turned to tone. Was she supposed to react with the compassion reserved for pregnant women? With the criticism reserved for pregnant unmarried women? With the fear reserved for pregnant unmarried foreign women who could embroil one’s son in a paternity suit? Mother, who navigated familiar, flows of married life with the skill of a champion oarsman, now seemed completely taken off her moorings.

She seemed to hope that if she didn’t react it might all disappear like a bad dream.

I made a mental note to not leave home at all for the next week. Whatever my parents would say to Vivek when they finally got a-hold of him would be too interesting to miss. But they never got a chance.

The day Barbara was to leave, we got a terse email from Vivek. “Sorry, still stuck in Guatemala. Just wanted to mention, another friend of mine,
Sameera Sheikh needs a place to stay. She’ll fly in from Hyderabad tomorrow at 10am. Sorry for the trouble.”

So there we were, father and I, with a board saying “Sameera”. At last a pretty young woman in salwar-khameez saw the board, gave the smallest of smiles, and walked quietly towards us. When she did ‘Namaste’ to father, I thought I saw his eyes mist up. She took my hand in the friendliest way and said “Hello, vineeth I’ve heard so much about you.” I  almost had a crush on her.In the car father was unusually friendly. She and Vivek had been in the same group of friends in Ohio University. She now worked as a Child Psychologist.

She didn’t seem to be too bad at family psychology either. She took out a shawl for grandmother, a saree for mother and nothing for me except a box of chocolates.
“Just some small things. I have to meet a professor at Madurai University, and it’s so nice of you to let me stay” she said.Everyone cheered up.
Even grandmother smiled. At lunch she said “This is so nice. When I make sambar, it comes out like chole, and my chole tastes just like sambar”. Mother was
smiling. “Oh just watch for 2 days, you’ll pick it up.” Grandmother had never allowed a muslim to enter the kitchen. But mother seemed to have taken charge, and decided she would bring in who ever she felt was worthy. Sameera circumspectly stayed out of the puja room, but on the third day,I was stunned to see father inviting her in and telling her which idols had come to him from his father. “God is one” he said.

Sameera nodded sagely.
By the fifth day, I could see the thought forming in the family’s collective brains. If this fellow had to choose his own bride, why couldn’t it be someone like Sameera? On the sixth day, when Vivek called from the airport saying he had cut short his Gautemala trip and was on his way home, all had a million things to discuss with him. He arrived by taxi at a time when Sameera had gone to the University.

“So, how was Barbara’s visit?” he asked blithely. “How do you know her?” mother asked sternly. “She’s my secretary” he said. “She works very hard, and she’ll do anything to help.” He turned and winked at me.

Oh, I got the plot now! By the time Sameera returned home that evening, it was almost as if her joining the family was the elders’ idea. “Don’t worry about anything”, they said, “we’ll talk with your parents.”

On the wedding day a huge bouquet arrived from Barbara.
“Flight to India - $1500.
Indian kurta - $5.
Emetic to throw up - $1.
The look on your parents’ faces - priceless” it said.

Wicked - The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Wicked - The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West:

by :Gregory Maguire

If you’ve never read Frank Baum’s children’s classic The Wizard of Oz or seen the movie starring a very young Judy Garland, you should not be reading this book (or my review). Because you really should read the book or watch the movie one day and I wouldn’t want to spoil your enjoyment of either.
But if you know the story already, I cannot recommend this companion piece too strongly. In The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West was seen merely as a source of evil, a peripheral character who caused the troubles that Dorothy and her party had to overcome in order to free the land of Oz. Gregory Maguire chose to question the very idea of wickedness itself. Who or what is wicked? And how and why? Do the wicked also not have a strong rationale behind their behavior? The result is a wonderful, exciting and challenging book.
Wicked starts with the circumstances surrounding the birth of Elphaba, the green girl who would one day be known as “The Wicked Witch of the West”. It describes the unusual baby she was, the repressive atmosphere in which she grew up, her father’s religious fervor and her mother’s casual treatment of the baby girl she had not wanted. Elphaba enters University as young girl with strong convictions, a deeply embedded sense of right and wrong and a fellow feeling for the underdog. The political turmoil of Oz and the Wizard’s callousness towards the rural districts (where she grew up) and especially the Animals, sees her joining the underground revolutionaries.
The death of her lover leads her to her lover’s home in the mountains, in an attempt to find forgiveness from his wife. The wife herself frustrates this desire and insists on friendship instead and she stays on with the boy who may or may not be her son. Politics enters her life once more however and takes away this home and she is left behind at the castle with her attempts on biological engineering (trying to stitch wings on monkeys in an attempt to teach them to fly) and her reputation amongst the rural hillside folk as a sinister witch.
Her sister Nessa — the Wicked Witch of the East — after having taken over their part of Oz by a political coup, is killed one day by a house falling on her head. Elphaba flies down in haste to hear about a mysterious tornado and a girl called Dorothy, and that this girl caused her sister’s death, albeit indirectly. An old friend from University, Glinda the Good Witch has sent Dorothy to the Wizard, hoping that he will resolve the political crisis Nessa’s death has led to. Knowing the Wizard as she does, Elphaba then sets out looking for Dorothy, trying to stop her from taking Nessa’s powerful shoes to the Wizard.
From here on the novel shows the other side of Baum’s narration. Anything more than this would maybe spoil the novel for you, so I’ll keep quiet. But if you do read the book, try drawing the connections between the Baum and the Maguire versions. And try not to let Maguire brainwash you into thinking that it was Dorothy who was the (unwitting) cause of evil instead! Maguire is a powerful storyteller and it challenges the reader to find a ‘truth’ somewhere in between the two novels.