Why?

Well, because the twists in this novel were too much for my heart to take so I wanted to finish it off and put an end to it as soon as possible, and on the other hand I wanted to read on and on because very rarely do we get a story which leads you to think in one direction all through a chapter and then throws you off the track completely. Ricky Khosla has an amazing way of building the plot and then ending the chapter with a banging shock, pretty much like those lozenges whose sweet exterior diminishes slowly to suddenly reveal that electrifying sourness at the centre, leaving its taste in your mouth after contorting your face into weird expressions. He truly lives by the phrase 'Calm before the storm' I think. 

Now to talk about the lady whose life is what this novel is all about. You can call her the protagonist or the antagonist of this novel, you can think of her as the heroine or the villain in her own life. 

To take it from the top, a teenage girl has fate play a cruel bout on her life, leaving her and her brother in an orphanage that changed her and her brother's life in unimaginable ways. The life that she led there and the things that she had seen, turned her soft spine made of human bones surrounded in flesh and blood turn into an iron rod with nerves of steel. Her brain, which was once full of childish whims metamorphosed into a powerhouse with a complex maze. On the other hand her brother, the one who had always been shy, turned into something that you will know of only in the last few pages of the novel. Not that he disappears in between. You will be aware of his presence, yet you won't know it's him.

Let's make a list of words and phrases which would describe our lady in question:

• Impish - What her light-hearted flirting and dazzling smile usually made people think of her.
• Rational - Carefully chalked out every plan of retribution. So much so, that there are times when your eyes go round in astonishment and a fraction of a second later you have a smirk on your face, appalled by the audacity of the girl and her method of executing the most scandalous plans.
• Determined - You will never see her not doing what she has already put her mind to. Never.
• Selfish - She didn't care about anyone. Except for one. She cared for one and one only. And half for another. That's about it.
• Cold hearted - A woman who first built warm relationships just to get rid of the person on the other end, has to be cold-hearted right? However when you reach the end of the novel, you decide whether her heart pounds ice cold blood or the complete opposite. 
• Innocent - She was so once, but soon had it snatched away from her. Well not exactly snatched. To face up to the people she had to deal with, she more than willingly gave it away. 
• Lover - Every being seeks tenderness and love from someone. Even though she twirled people around her little finger, she did find love. But karma did to her what she did to others.  
• Sensuous - Incredibly attractive, to the extent that men couldn't look elsewhere. She didn't use it as a weapon, she just used it as a tool to entice. 
• Talented - She gained fame in Bollywood but not without being backed up by talent.
• Bull's eye aim - She never fails with her meticulous plans.
• Remorseless - She doesn't even know what remorse means.
• Vengeful - Fall in the way of the lioness and you can guess what will happen to them. 
• Brave - Can you imagine the guts of a woman who lives by the name of the first person she brought about an end to?  Also that's not the end of it. She has more stories of bravery scattered all through the novel. 

    

Suprised?

Well, so was Amir Khan as Soha says. 

The Perils of Being Moderately Famous is full of such witty and fun anecdotes from the star's (Soha literally means Star in Arabic, she says) life. Saying too much about this would just take the fun away. It's such a detailed book, that divulging one would give away a lot.

Right at the start she says her book is all about her, her and her; and no else at all. Well it's true. She doesn't tell stories of her family members unless she is involved. So no revelations about Kareena Kapoor's workout regime or whether Taimur Ali Khan is actually made of flesh and bones or of flour and milk (Kareena Kapoor fans please take note).

She begins by talking about her paternal family. The Nawab clan. Despite the era they belonged to they were quite progressive. Love and aptitude for sports is something which is passed on from generation to generation, but has probably come to a stop at her generation? Also her paternal side is a family believing in "love marriages" and not political marriages.

She talks about her Bengali connect too. Her mother, Sharmila Thakur, is a Bengali lady who rocked the world of cinema for quite a while. She is still revered and loved and remembered. Also if you don't know, she is a descendant of Rabindranath Thakur, the Tagore family as the anglicized people would say. This book clearly delineates how exactly is she related to that family. But hold your horses, her daughter, the author in question, doesn't speak Bengali like a bong. But she did speak a couple of lines in the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Meet, and seemed very fluent actually!

Now to speak of her life in totality, she has been an academically star student, gone to Balliol College, Oxford University, then to London School of Economics and Political Science, had a highly paid dream job in a bank which she couldn't wrap her head around and then ventured into the world of films which rudely snatched the ladder from her feet. And she takes us through this journey of 39 years chapter by chapter (no, there aren't 39 chapters to her book, she writes about each phase in a chapter). In those pages you will get to know a lot about her father Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi and your respect for him will soar. The justification to his nick name Tiger Pataudi is described well in words. These aren't biased words from a daughter about her father. She backs them up with all the cricket-y recorded proof of how he slayed in his prime time (cricket fanatics don't wince in fear by thinking that she is an actress what does she know of cricket, must have got all the terms muddled up. Worry not. She hasn't. She is quite smart that way.) Her mother, though had a busy life where she was often away, sometimes for long durations, would always drop her two daughters to school every morning, whenever she was at home. So much so that when she was down with chicken pox (thanks to her youngest daughter) she went to see her off at school wrapped from top to bottom, afraid that someone would see that she was a walking house of virus, just because Soha refused to go to school without her. Then she talks about her years in college, my favourite part. Her college life is quite a read I tell you. She has had some amazing travel experiences to foreign lands and no, not in Business class of a fancy plane.

Her mother had given her one valuable advice among many, which she didn't heed by eventually. Her mother had warned her against marrying an actor; they are attention seekers and either work too much or not at all, and both of these pose as a problem. But now she is married to Kunal Khemu; an actor. And she ends this novel talking about her marriage to the man she had spoken exactly 2 sentences with on their first meeting and on her newly achieved parenthood.

What she wanted to convey, through the title and the content, is how she felt dwarfed, both in height and fame, in comparison to her entire lineage. But it's clearly not in a way that will make you feel sorry for her, hell she isn't even sorry for herself; all because she talks about the highs which she has achieved in her life which mean a lot to her even if they mean nothing else to the world at large.

I feel it's a fun read and a lot of delicious little details about dreams and life in general and her life as well, are strewn about in her book. Also you might want to sit armed with a dictionary 'cause this lady knows her words very well.

There are times when you come across something and then you look at your life in retrospect and think how better off you are.

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, a National Award winning novel is a must read. It goes into your skin and pushes you into a mesh of helplessness, makes you want to reach out and give these characters some solace, wipe out the misunderstandings, punch some sense into their head.  

This is about a broken American family. Leonie, a young black girl, hopelessly in love with a white man who is her husband, is deep in drugs, turned a mother in her teens and can't figure out what she should do with her life. She is the mother of two kids, Jojo and Michaela. Falling in love with Michael is probably what turned her life upside down. Leonie and Michael's dad's had the same father, yet Leonie's dad Pop was black, and Michael's dad Big Joseph was white. Pop and Big Joseph were never on good terms. Big Joseph despised Pop. Big Joseph was also the uncle of the boy who shot Leonie's brother Given; Pop's only son. That makes Michael the cousin of the guy who killed her brother. Yet she loves him. He isn't the man who is tainted, so why can't she love him? That's what she thought. That's what Michael thought. But the bad blood between the two families just got thicker. 

Already a bad start eh? 

Leonie got pregnant and had her first child, a boy, Jojo. Jojo was black; like Leonie, like Pop, like Mama; unlike Michael, unlike Big Joseph, unlike his white grandmother. More reason for Big Joseph to not like him. However Leonie's Pop and Mama never raised any issue. They swallowed the bile that rose in their throat, let Michael stay at their house and looked after Jojo and Michaela like their own children. They had no option either, because Jojo and Michaela's parents didn't look after them. 

Leonie wanted to be a good mother, but she couldn't. She hated it when she couldn't comfort her own toddler daughter, when her daughter chose Jojo over her. She felt like ripping apart Jojo's eyes when he looked at her with indifference and distrust, when she felt he looked at her thinking she was incapable of doing anything, incapable of being a mother. But she couldn't do anything to change that. All she ever wanted to do was snort Coke up her nose to think about Michael who was now in jail, and see her dead brother Given give her admonishing looks. 

Coming to Jojo. Jojo doesn't call his mother Mama. He calls his grandmother Mama. He calls his own mother Leonie, as Leonie; by her name. Not because he was taught to,but because he felt she didn't deserve being called Mom. Ever since he noticed the change in her, he shifted to calling her by her name. He even called his dad by his name. Pop was reserved only for his grandfather. For Jojo, his family included Pop, Mama and Kayla, his baby sister. Leonie and Michael were like add-ons he could clearly do without. Jojo was all of thirteen, but his demeanor was that of a much older boy, probably because he wasn't allowed to have childish whims thanks to his biological mother and more because he wanted to be just like Pop. He shared a beautiful bond with Kayla, short for Michaela. She depended on him completely. For her too, the family was just Jojo, Pop and Mama, but more of Jojo of course. Jojo was more of a parent to her than anyone else. She barely cared about Leonie, and had hardly seen much of her father. 

Pop and Mama were hardworkers and dear lovers. They both had a strong connect to nature, especially Mama. She could whip up potions and make different kinds of tea for myriad ailments, and they worked of course. Except for the time she tried it to fight cancer. The disease took the better of her, and reduced her to a wrinkled and shrunk up old lady writhing in pain. But she was the only one who understood her daughter. When Jojo told her that Leonie hates him, she said she loved him aplenty, she just didn't know how to show it. As for Big Joseph, well he got all hands and fists and jumped into a brawl with his own son when he brought his wife and kids to their home and if he had the chance to, he would gladly shoot Leonie dead. 

Apart from all these characters and their incredibly poignant descriptions, there is another thread to this novel and that is between Pop and a boy called River. This is something that I shall not open to the readers of this review, because it will be a test for you; a test of your understanding, a test of your imagination. 

Do give this beautiful novel a read. I am sure it will touch your heart in ways more than one. 

Note : I received a copy of Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward from Bloomsbury in exchange of an honest review. I would like to thank them for giving me this opportunity.

The protagonist of the tale, Willa, is one such child. 

Willa and her siblings, elder sister Joan and younger brother Luke, live with their mother and step father Eugene. Eugene too has a couple of boys from his previous marriage, Patrick and  Kenneth, but they mostly stay away in schools and come to meet their new family occasionally and these occasions are extremely conspicuous. 

Both these brothers develop an attraction towards their step sisters in their own way. Patrick has a kind of affinity towards Willa, much different than what his brother has for Willa's sister Joan. Kenneth and Joan are much like a common teen couple, although romantic relationships between step siblings might be considered unnatural by some. Every vacation, the duo of boys would come down to the girls' house and while it would spell love and romance for Joan, for Willa it was a different experience.

What Patrick and Willa did is disturbing, not just because there is some semblance of a relation between the two, but because two children should not be doing what they did at that age. And Willa was all of nine when she met Patrick. 

Just as moths are attracted to fire, children are enchanted towards the strange, towards the unnatural. Patrick was the fire to Willa. Patrick was an oddball himself. He eyed Willa oddly, challenged her to do things which were sometimes gruesome, sometimes offensive and sometimes downright painful. Willa could have easily told her mom about it or her step father, but she didn't. Primarily because she was entranced in Patrick's unusual charm and secondly she didn't share a great camaraderie with her mother. Her mother had an effortless grace about her which her opposite sex found very attractive. She almost had the aura of a sexual predator which is why when her second husband was away she ended up getting close to other young boys, not even barring her youngest step son. 

Willa and Patrick, they existed for each other only when they met each other. As if they were tools used for discovery to the other. What started off in their childhood ventured into their adolescence as well. Even when Patrick seemed to be indifferent towards her, Willa wanted his attention, and that opening was all that he needed. Every encounter treaded the line of sexuality and eventually crossed to the other side. Patrick got kicks out of doing some of the most unusual things on Willa, and though Willa felt disgusted after she regained her senses, during the act she was always silent; as if she wanted to see how far Patrick could go and what he could do to her. 

In spite of sharing such an awkward relationship, they did not have any emotional connect. Hardly any normal conversation ever took place between the two. They knew almost nothing about each other. It's as if they used each other just for the sake of their sexual awakening. 

However, it is not only these two who had ridges in their relationship. The two love birds Joan and Kenneth got married in their prime and all was going fine till Joan felt she had started walking in the path her mother had taken in her youth. Joan did not become amorous like her mother, but having an insatiable interest in men wasn't her mother's only vice. She shared a very detached relationship with her children and as the days went by, with her second husband as well. There wasn't any affection in the relations she developed, just a habit of getting used to existed. Finally, it was a gradual deterioration. Joan feared that she couldn't manage children and didn't want to have them either, much against Kenneth's wishes.  All of this was revealed to Willa when she accompanied her sister, brother-in-law and Patrick on a yacht ride. In this yacht ride, though Patrick was the one who started making advances towards Willa, it wasn't only him who did the most shocking things on board. Willa, on her final encounter with Patrick, did what she had never done before, something which was incredibly abhorring to even herself. However, this yacht ride was the last time she ever saw Patrick.

Slowly, each and every one of the characters in this novel is torn up at the end. The family that had once shown signs of coalescing into one, got stripped into small pieces.

There is no denying that this novel is quite disturbing on certain levels, but it's a book that you cannot let go off. It seeps into you and you will find yourself turning the pages with knotted eyebrows. 

Note :I received the review copy of Demi-Gods by Eliza Robertson from Bloomsbury in exchange for an honest review. I thank Bloomsbury for giving me this opportunity.