Jeffrey Archer

 

With Sir Jeffrey Archer’s passing away, the reading world has lost a showman, and writers have lost an icon. Which writer would not like to reach the giddy heights that he did? And which reader would not delight in the delicious denouement that Archer specialized in?

I have always been a fan of the surprise ending, the twist in the tail in any story, ever since having read O’Henry and Saki. Then along came Jeffrey Archer, and cemented my absolute absorption with this style of writing.

My first book by him was Not A Penny More, Not a Penny Less. This was some time in 1984. Boy, was I hooked! Four people get swindled and they set out to get their money back in the most creative and elaborate ways. After reading this one I could not wait to discover the others.

Kane and Abel soon followed, with the riveting tale of deadly rivalry between the two protagonists. I also like the nod at the Biblical names Cain and Abel. It was heartbreaking in its own way. The Prodigal Daughter was a worthy sequel. Again, with some heartbreak and again a Biblical allusion: Prodigal Daughter instead of Son.

Shall We Tell the President seemed to be a sequel to The Prodigal Daughter, in that the author does not mention who POTUS is. However, I see it was written in 1977 and Prodigal Daughter in 1982, so that conjecture can be laid to rest.

I fondly remember Honour Among Thieves: special for me because it was a prize I won for a “What’s the Good Word” competition in college. Again, an absolutely shocker of an ending.

Then there are his cleverly titled collections of short stories. I greedily gobbled up the first few: A Quiver Full of Arrows, A Twist in the Tale, and Twelve Red Herrings. From another collection (And Thereby Hangs a Tale), “Death Speaks” is a fascinating all- time favourite.

I would loyally buy each and every book that came out.

For me, a dream came true when he came to Delhi to launch his book, A Prisoner of Birth, in 2008.

This was before the age of social media and even the internet was not all that omnipresent here. I just read about his visit in the paper and was determined to go. I got some books autographed for myself and to gift to dear ones.

He shared that he handwrote all his books; and this one had gone through seventeen drafts! It gives me a satisfied feeling to think that I hand-write my stories too. He called himself a storyteller rather than a writer. For me, that was a point to ponder.

He made several quips about the traffic chaos in Delhi and joked that he would like to be transport minister here!  

“At what age,” he asked in all seriousness, “do you learn to drive in two lanes at the same time?”

In the audience interaction, I asked him when he was going to write a story set in India. I like to think maybe he wrote “Caste Off” (One of the stories in the collection “And Thereby Hangs a Tale”) after that!

Rest in peace, storyteller par excellence. I am sure you will be quipping and displaying your razor sharp wit wherever you are.

The Old House: A poem

 

I visited the old house today,

The windows glazed over with dust.

The plaster peeling

Seepage here and there

Rubbish strewn about

The wiring loose in places,

The plumbing a bit off.

The patina of Time is not attractive.

I came here with wonder,

Eyes full of dreams.

I built a home in this house,

Filled it with laughter,

The gurgles of children,

The pattering feet.

I added storage,

A place for everything.

The House embraced it all.

Now it creaks and seeps.

Accusingly it weeps;

“You left me,” it says,

“Others occupied me,

Doing as they pleased,

Their comfort wreaked havoc

On me.

“You come and paint me from time to time

Add some plaster, scrub away the grime,

And leave again, glad

That I seem all right.

You don’t see I am sad,

 Giving up a little every year.

They say I look fine

For my vintage.

“But you! You should know

You lived in me after all!

Lizards dart out now and then

Mostly hidden.

I am tired now.

“So much wrong with me.

Maybe it would be better

To demolish me and start over

Brick by brick,

Or cell by cell?”

This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon 2025

The Women of Trishul (1978)

 

The iconic Hindi blockbuster movie, Trishul, was a Yash Chopra film, in the late maestro’s flamboyant style. The characters slip into English with the ease born of privilege in those days. The sentiments and sensibilities are Indian, yet the presentation is Western. In the cutthroat world of business, tenders are jealously guarded and equally zealously overturned. Traitors are bought, yet loyalty is respected.

When the competitive work day ends, the evening sees rivals and opponents attending the same parties and conversing over drinks with a suavity that would impress even a James Bond. Even when Shashi Kapoor realizes that Amitabh Bachchan has tried to sabotage his relationship with Hema Malini, he passes over it lightly---no confrontation and no blaming Hema either. It is all very refined--- no threats of thirsting for the other’s blood!

Hema Malini’s character, Sheetal, is a working woman, who wears sarees and trousers (bell bottoms!). She plays tennis and golf. Sheetal also does yoga and watches what she eats.

Rakhee’s character, Geeta, is also a working woman, but there is a subtle difference--- she has to work for a living. She wears sarees, trendy ones. She is comfortable riding up to the top of buildings-under-construction, on a crane, in those same sarees. Geeta earns the title of ‘human computer’ when the term was not too familiar. She is an employee, but does not feel inferior to her boss in any way, be it Sanjeev Kumar (R. K. Gupta), or later, Amitabh Bachchan (Vijay). On the contrary, she yells back at Sanjeev Kumar when he unjustly accuses her of treachery. And has the grace to apologise afterwards.

Waheeda Rehman’s character, Shanti, does not cling to Sanjeev Kumar when she discovers his duplicity (however helpless he may have been). She is proud. However, she neither forgives nor forgets. She does not let her son, Vijay forget either. She nurtures him with a burning desire for revenge, demanding the price of the mother’s milk----a recurring theme in many Indian films.

Poonam Dhillon is the cute ‘Gapuchi gapuchi gam gam girl’, Babli, starry eyed and in love with her classmate who is now her father’s employee. She knows what she wants, and is determined to fight for it, especially when she gets encouragement from an unexpected quarter.

 These four main women characters drive the story in their own ways, foreshadowing the empowered women of today.

 This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon 2025.

 

Age and Ageism

 

Not long ago, there were old people. (Yes, I said Old. Not seniors, not any other euphemism). People touched their feet: they blessed those people. The older they got, the more important they were. Venerable was the word. Wrinkles, white hair--- badges of honour. A life lived to the full. Wisdom gained from experience. Their stage in life was almost aspired to. No doubt, physical ailments may not have been too severe. Even if they were, they were looked up to as battle scars. The aged were the marathon runners in the race of life. The very age they had reached was a mark of their success. They had beaten death thus far.

Even at a baser level, the veneration and regard rose from a healthy respect for the fact that we are all going there one day. Now we seem to have forgotten all that.

Maybe we are scared. Not so much of the disability and the deteriorating faculties, but of the wrinkles. The toxic positivity around aging surely cannot be healthy. How many times have we heard the refrain, “Age is just a number!” That sounds patronizing.

Sure, one must do everything one can, to keep fit. However, let us not equate fitness with youth and beauty. Ageing gracefully does not mean looking young for one’s age. It means accepting with grace, the fact that change is taking place, and how to make the best of one’s resources—physical and mental.

Let us not relegate Age to just a number. Age is a whole life: the hurdles, the triumphs, the ups and downs. Age is experience and memories of a forgotten world.

This post is a part of the Blogchatter Half Marathon 2025.

Writing on Prompts

 

I have always written sporadically. In fits and starts is how the train of thought translates into the written word.

The writing bug is a mosquito--- one bite, one itch, one scratch, and one piece of writing done. For me it is not a leech, steadily drawing the ink from my veins, as it gets fatter and fatter, making my manuscript bigger and bigger.

So, these days, I turn to prompts, to force me to write. Waiting around for inspiration, just leads to perspiration. I have always enjoyed putting pen to paper, writing longhand, writing impatient notes to myself in the margin (for example, “find a better word!”). Putting arrows to interchange paragraphs, giving them temporary numbers to sort out a sequence, things like that. I then type it up later, when I am in the non-creative zone.

However, on taking up a prompt challenge recently, I found that I would just note down some ideas to get me started, and then start typing directly. There was not enough time to write twice, you see. The added benefit was that typing on a laptop kept me aware of not only the word count, but also let me keep an eye on the clock. Writing challenges typically have deadlines.

In writing flash fiction, almost always I have to sacrifice the beginning to accommodate the ending. I have to give up on the build-up, to keep the clarity. I enjoy the concise and the precise, but it is still a pang to delete the so-called frills. A short-story writer finds it difficult to write flash fiction; however, 100-word challenges are again head scratchers, yet doable!

Now I know why novelists find it difficult to write short stories!

This post is a part of the Blogchatter Half Marathon 2025

Cooking: A Life Skill

 

Being a Defence kid, I attended eight schools in my school-going years. After that it was graduation, post- graduation and post-post- graduation. Barring a short dalliance with home-science as an extra- curricular subject in one of the schools, my familiarity with the kitchen was near zero. Indulgent parents who were keener on academics, kept me out of the kitchen too.

Fast forward to marriage and circumstances where I was thrown in at the deep end of the culinary pool. In those days I did not even know how to make tea (filter coffee was fine!). Nervously and painstakingly, I learned. While I questioned the automatic assumption that a girl would be a born cook, I simply could not give up. Any task I took up, had to be seen to its conclusion, and diligently, at that. Cooking is something that one has to do well, at least for the sake of the children. Simply catering to the nutritional and palate needs of elders also fine tunes one’s skill.

I learnt recipes from elders, neighbours, and magazines. I noted all tips and fixes in a diary which is now filled with authentic and exclusive recipes. As with all skills, cooking gets better with practice. It also has a meditative side to it. If one is not harried, intent on a deadline, that is, a mealtime, then one can experiment and perfect one’s own special touches.

Over the years, this is what I have done. The meditation during cooking gave rise to several ideas for stories that I subsequently wrote and that were published. While there were several tearful episodes around cooking in those early years, I did come out of it all with a valuable skill learnt. While there are many acquaintances who still don’t know the writing side of me, they all certainly know about my cooking. It is now a large part of who I am. My approach to cooking may be directed by the way I do things in other spheres. However, cooking, in turn, has taught me to multitask, to focus, to be resourceful, and to think on my feet.

The best takeaway is the realization that food is the language of welcome, and belonging.

This post is a part of the Blogchatter Half Marathon 2025.

https://www.theblogchatter.com/

The Last Four Books I Read

A few years ago, I found myself facing a reading block, as it were. I would only go to my comfort reads, namely Wodehouse and Christie. No matter how many times I read them, I would always guffaw at one and be fascinated by the other. Then I discovered book clubs. They enticed me and then nudged me to get out of my comfort zone. Over the years I have become a part of three vibrant reading communities. The choice of books varies and swings wildly from bestsellers, to Booker Prize winners, to run-of-the mill stories, to autobiographies, to sagas, and everything in between.

Over the past few months, I have read these:

1.    1.  What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin: A tale of two wives set against the backdrop of the partition of India. Though the Partition comes into it near the very end, the book is a detailed account of the life, systems and beliefs of almost a century ago. I read it with great concentration, as I was to speak on it at a special book meet centered on our Independence Day. I found that I had been so wrapped up in the story that I hardly looked at my notes. I enjoyed narrating the salient points in the story and the questions from the other readers, thereafter.

2.      2. Normal People by Sally Rooney: This book’s claim to fame is that it was never the book choice we were supposed to read! One of my book clubs also discussed TV shows and series, and movies too. They had been discussing the series by the same name, based on this book, and I went ahead, downloaded it on my e-reader and was all set to wax eloquent about it (I didn’t like it much) when I discovered that the book of the month was something else entirely. I came in for a lot of good-natured leg-pulling and we refer to my faux pas at each subsequent meet!

3.      3. What You are Looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama: This is a set of short stories, in each of which the main character is looking for some answers about their life, career choices, and struggles. By chance or design, they find their answers in the library, with a little help from a wise librarian. While the premise was nice and the stories were feel-good, they became a little monotonous and repetitive. Maybe something was lost in translation (The original is in Japanese).

4.      4. Just For the Summer by Abby Jimenez: This was a much- needed palate cleanser after many heavy and depressing books read by us in another book club. A delicious rom-com, it still had depth. The premise of the book got to some readers and they were close to tears while talking about it. It shows that no book can be dismissed as light reading--- it touches different readers in different ways.

I have now started reading The Chola Tigers by Amish, having picked up a signed copy recently. It promises to be a fast paced, thrilling narrative which I am sure I will enjoy.

Writing about reading is by far the easiest thing to do!

This blogpost is a part of the Blogchatter Half Marathon 2025

Blogchatter Half Marathon 2025