Sometimes words betray us when we try to describe a book. The best of us may take a while to do some justice to the novel that left us speechless. Sometimes, you wan't to tell people how you felt about reading the book and sometimes you don't, just because you think that what you felt while you were engrossed in those pages is deeply personal. Homegoing is one which leaves me in the middle. I want to tell people about what I think of this book so that they can rush to the stores, at the same time I don't want to say anything at all because what I felt when I imagined myself walking midst the African natives speaking Twi, is something residing in one of the rooms of my heart.

On 8th of March, International Women's Day, I had the privilege to attend and cover the Tumi Annanya Awards held by Beyond Dreams at the Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad.
The aim of this award show was to honour several female achievers, to give them prominence in this male dominated world and encourage others of this clan to come to come forward and shine bright in their life.

That this show is of a different kind was proved by the inauguration ceremony itself. It is an award show for celebrating women, and what better defines women than mother nature herself. So instead of lighting the customary diyas on a dais, the show started off with the watering of a plant, symbolizing the need of both women and nature in an environment where both of them are deeply neglected.



The first awardee of the night was Agnimitra Paul, awarded for her Excellence in Fashion Designing. Having catered to all the three strata of the film industry (Tollywood, Bollywood and Hollywood as well), she gained immense popularity, but her work doesn't end there. In spite of having such a star studded clientele she also focuses on creating designs that her next door neighbour can wear and more importantly, afford as well. So she is not only a designer for the celebrities, she is also a designer of the masses. Rarely do we see a designer who has once reached the stars, think about the people who live and breathe beside her as well.



Up next, the rockstar of Kolkata, Usha Utthup took the stage and did she rev up the crowd or what! Such an amazing stage presence she has. The sharp and witty emcee, Ms.Madhubanti said that had Usha di not stayed back in Kolkata and moved up to California or New York, which she could as a matter of fact, given the timbre of her voice, her shelves would be stocked with Grammys instead of the Tumi Annanya award and she couldn't be more correct. The entire audience whole-heartedly seconded her words. Once on stage, wearing her trademark kanjeeveram saree and sneakers made of kanjeeveram too, she said 'Munni toh badnaam ho gayi, I called Sheila lekin uski jawani chali gayi, Anarkali toh disco chali gayi, Chikni Chameli, Jalebi Bai koi nai ayi, lekin aap logo ki Darling reh gayi (the song Darling in the film Saat Khoon Maaf was sung by her)' and after this she sang a couple of lines from Darling and the crowd went berserk! Kamran Khurshid, a singer of soaring popularity, came up on stage to do an impromptu performance with Usha Utthup and sang Senorita with her. The crowd cheered on immensely and the audience clapped to the rhythm. There wasn't any soul in the audience, young or old, who didn't tap their feet or hoot for the duo. She was presented with the Tumi Annanya Award for Excellence in Music.




Tanushree Shankar, the popular veteran of dance, was awarded the Tumi Annanya Award for Excellence in Dance. A very reserved and charming lady, she stuck to saying a few words in her soft voice.




Next we had Alokananda Roy on the stage for receiving the Tumi Annanya Award for Excellence in Social Service. She has been in the industry of performance for about six decades! Being an incredibly humble personality, she said that the most important duty of a woman is being a mother, irrespective of the sex of her child. She said that through her art, she has been a mother to hundreds of both boys and girls, and jokingly said that she has crossed the record set by Gandhari. What she believes is that all a child seeks is acceptance without any conditions, and any lady who can provide that is a successful mother.





If women don't help women, then who will? This question is best understood by Ms. Saira Shah Halim, a lady who has dedicated her life in improving the life of many unprivileged girls and intends to do so further.  Tumi Annanya Awards gave her the trophy for Social Activism.

An extremely dignified personality in the domain of theatre, Ms. Dolly Basu, graced the stage and told the audience that everyone sitting in the audience was entitled to freedom of choice, but then there are so many who don't have this basic right and it is our duty to do help those who don't. She was awarded the Tumi Annanya Award for Excellence in Theatre.



Koel Mullick, seconded Ms. Dolly Basu's notions, as she came up next to receive the award for Tumi Annanya Award for Bengal's Madhubala. She said that she belonged from a family where she wasn't treated differently just because she was a girl. She was given every possible freedom and says that she feels unbelievably lucky  as she shuns to think what her life would have been had she not been allowed to do so.





One of the awardees, a lady who needs no introduction at all, we have seen her on the silver screen and seen her work behind the screen as well for decades, Ms.Aparna Sen received the Tumi Annanya Award for Excellence in Direction. Unfortunately she wasn't able to grace the show with her presence due to other commitments, but her husband Mr.Kalyan Ray, who has spent twenty-five marvellous years with her, was too happy to take the award on behalf of his wife. He said that in the interim that they have been together, he has seen her take on the role of an actress, a director and a mother with equal panache, and it surprises him to no extent, as he wakes up every morning to see and be amazed by the zeal with which his better half thinks of new ways to improve herself even now.




A lady who made women a force to reckon with in the world of media, is Ms. Rita Bhimani. She was given the Tumi Annanya award for Excellence in PR and Corporate Communications, as she has been running a successful PR agency called Ritam for the past fifteen years. When you see her speak her mind with clarity at a soft yet firm voice, you cannot help but appreciate this lady who has gained prominence in a sector where even men consider it difficult to firmly find their feet.

Many of the awardees of the night said that a feminist cannot only be a woman. A feminist goes beyond the boundaries of gender. A feminist is any person who supports and works for the rights for a woman and gives respect to a woman.

So the next awardee of the night was Ms.Manabi Bandopadhyay, a person who is seen as a transgender in the eyes of the world, but is a person who strongly believes in the fact that her soul is that of a woman. Going beyond the perceptions of the superficial society, she is a professor and is known to be the first transgender in India to receive a Doctorate in Philosophy. Here we are in a world where we fight for letting girls go to school and colleges, and here is Ms.Manabi who firmly states that the right to education is not entitled to just a boy or a girl, it is entitled to anyone who dreams and craves for education. She was awarded the Tumi Annanya Award for Excellence in Education.



As we said that feminism isn't something that only women support, Mr.Utpal Chatterjee, another personality renowned in the world of journalism and feminism rights, was honoured with the Tumi Annanya Award.



This award is to state that if you are working for the upliftment of women in this world, then you will be acknowledged, irrespective of whether you are a woman or not. This award was a representation of humanity. Humanity that should go beyond the gender biases of man and woman, as after all we are humans and first, and a boy or a girl later.


It has been my honour to be present among such eminent personalities and I give Beyond Dreams my heartiest congratulations for holding such an outstanding show. The execution of the Tumi Annanya Awards has been phenomenal, but as it is said, that it is the thought that matters - it is great to see that minds are finally coming together to uphold womanhood and the idea of it hasn't just remained as a seed, it has finally bore some fruit. Here is to hoping that Beyond Dreams manages to continue this in the coming years.

Love has always baffled even the best of us. It brings forth different questions in our mind whose answers we do not know, and at times don't want to know. It induces a strange helplessness within us, a helplessness which we wish would leave our bodies and wouldn't bother our minds so much, but at the same time we cling on to this helplessness with every ounce of will our souls can provide.

This House of Clay and Water is a novel about love, a very unusual love. While exploring it between the most unexpected and strange couple, Faiqa Mansab, the author of the novel makes us take a different approach to love.

It made me ruminate on a lot of thoughts and that gave rise to several questions.Our usual notion of love has always been between a man and a woman. That one must give one's soul, body and mind, to one person (at a time). The idea of your heart belonging to one and your body belonging to another is always classified as adulterous. If we have given the right to our bodies to a single person don't we think that our heart too must belong to him or her? And when we give these two entities to two different beings don't we feel amorous and feel irked by the fact that we are bereaving both? To those we have given our minds and hearts to, to them we seek to give the physical cage of flesh and bones as well. Anything else is unacceptable to us. Why? Who said that this is the right way? Why do we feel it within ourselves, the constant desire to possess another being in all entirety? Why do we find peace in the eyes of the person we love even when there is no physical intimacy and feel repulsed at the thought of any other skin grazing against our own?

Faiqa Mansab embarks on a beautiful and lyrical journey to bring out love in its truest form, going beyond the mental barriers and showing the unconditional love between a woman, Nida, and a hijra, a hermaphrodite, Bhanggi. Nida thought she loved her husband, the husband who she thought didn't care about her, who didn't care about the death of their only diseased child. To her, her husband's claims for her love were nothing but false. She had trained herself to love him. But can one really train to love? She met Bhanggi, a person whose body resembled the characteristics of both a man a woman, yet not belonging to either, and trapped inside this cursed body were the feelings of a man. Nida found solace in the calm eyes of Bhanggi, she grew to love his narrow shoulders and slim waist and thin ankles. The fact that Bhanggi's body was stuck on two sides of a wide border separating man and woman didn't bother Nida. She was in love with him and as a result she didn't have a problem in loving his body eventually. Bhanggi found his reason for existence in Nida, as if God had purposely tortured him in the first twenty-three years of his life, so that He can give him the insurmountable joy of meeting and loving Nida. But a love this pure didn't have a blessed lifetime.

Nida had become friends with a woman who we can safely say was poles apart from her. This woman, Sasha, had seen Nida as a begum of a respectable politician, had seen her as a girl who had read so much that she found the world to be a bleak place and was thereby lost. Sasha had not changed Nida. Sasha had been witness to the change in Nida, and Nida was the one who brought about a change in Sasha. However the new Sasha wasn't an old Nida. She wasn't even a new Nida in fact. She was a Sasha who thought was going on the right path but was clearly on the wrong side of it. Nida's and Sasha's friendship was something unnatural as very rarely do we see women of such opposing nature come together. It's all because deep down they had a common thread and they were both lost. Lost and unable to understand what they should do whilst drowning in the ocean of right and wrong.

Men play another important role here. For men love is very difficult to decipher. They have mistresses on whom they want to shower every possible materialistic gift and make love to. Yet when it comes to leaving their wives and settling down with their mistress it is a big no for them. If their mistress humiliates their wives then they will not listen to it. When they go back to their wives they cannot bear them either. It's as if home and wife are both insipid beings and are just meant to be there. Just like one cannot leave their home, one cannot leave their wife. If they find that their friend's wife has paramours then it is wrong. However if their mistress is a married lady they don't really mind. A comely wife is a necessity. A wife who is dependent on them emotionally and physically is a must. Not having such a wife is demeaning to a man's self esteem. But tending to their physical needs is not, as they have already given birth to the required number of children and their bodies no longer hold any appeal. The man's appetite of course is looked after outside the house. And these very men think they love their wives deeply. After all he hasn't left his wife, still feeds her and clothes her and snores beside her every night. For a man, his heart belongs to responsibility and that belongs to his wife, while his mind and anatomy belong to another woman. For him, this is love. Is it wrong? Or is it right?
   

Spirituality too has a strong essence in the story and it is not the stifling kind of spirituality but more of the awakening kind.

This House of Clay and Water is an excellent read. Written about love in Pakistan, this is a bold story and deals with the notion of love in the gentlest of ways possible. At the end of it all, it will make you feel that love is unnatural. It can be between anyone and love isn't specified only between a man and woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man.

There are only two kinds of love and that is love between two beings, and love between a being and God.

Title : This House of Clay and Water

Author : Faiqa Mansab

SOC Rating : 5/5

Genre : Fiction/Contemporary Fiction

Publisher : Penguin Random House

Publishing Year : 2017

#Pages : 272

Grab the book from Amazon below!

Let me tell you at the very beginning that you MUST. ABSOLUTELY. READ. this book. Every page has a new revelation, every page took me by surprise and I had this funny feeling of wanting to finish the book yet not wanting to finish the book.

"Teachers, no ice" - said Soha Ali Khan's maternal grandmother to Aamir Khan when he asked her if she would like some tea or fresh juice.