The Ground Beneath Her Feet

This review, and the one that follows, appeared in the April 18 issue of TimeOut Mumbai.

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH Jhumpa Lahiri

Michael Frayn once said, tongue somewhere near his cheek, that his advice to writers would be “to write the same thing over and over again, changing things very slightly and going on delivering it until people accept it.”

With the publication of her third book, Unaccustomed Earth, the time has come to ask the question: is Jhumpa Lahiri simply writing the same thing over and over again?

The elements of this meta-story, simply put, would be: academically-oriented Bengali parents who have immigrated from Kolkata to the northeastern United States, caught up in the unfamiliar ways of the new world, yet unwilling to renounce their earlier lives; their offspring, more confident and Americanised, yet, as their relationships show, more confused; and a pervasive strain of melancholy because of relinquishing old ties and coming to terms with new ones.

Lahiri herself defined her concerns as a writer in an article for Newsweek magazine two years ago, stating that “the immigrant's journey, no matter how ultimately rewarding, is founded on departure and deprivation, but it secures for the subsequent generation a sense of arrival and advantage.”

Most of the eight stories of her new collection adhere to this template. Yet, all of them, to varying degrees, convey a richness of experience, a universality of sentiment and an investigation of emotion that makes reading them a pleasure.

Here, among others, a 38-year-old daughter apprehensive about how the death of her mother will affect her relationship with her father learns truths about her needs and wants; another daughter unravels the story of how her mother fell in love with a family friend; a sister finds out the hard way about the limits of responsibility and discipline when it comes to her alcoholic brother; and a married couple’s mis-steps while attending a wedding give them another chance at togetherness.

If the ground is familiar, what, then, accounts for the impact of the narratives? Consider, to begin with, Lahiri’s mastery of the well-chosen detail. Henry James famously informed us that a writer ought to be one on whom “nothing is lost”, and Lahiri unearths dime-sized maroon bindis, useful safety pins attached to bangles, hotel room wallpaper with squiggly grey lines, biscuits with the faint taste of coconut, Tiffany candlesticks as wedding presents, a professor looking like a smaller version of Ringo Starr, a chain link fence matted with forsythia and the figure of a man spotted swimming in a lake during a grey drizzle. All of these and more are worked seamlessly into the narrative, and such verisimilitude is to be prized.

Contrasts in food, too, are always present and nicely judged as competing markers of identity: creamy pasta and plates of prime rib with asparagus and potatoes vie with curried mackerel, chorchori and homemade mishti.

Lahiri’s prose, as before, is sensitive and nuanced, progressing for the most part in a fine-tuned series of minor chords. Emotions creep up unannounced and the word “evocative”, so often bandied about to describe pieces of fiction, is singularly apt here. Relationships are largely pastel-shaded – as one of the characters, musing on her parents’ life together, thinks: “It was neither happy nor unhappy, and the lack of emotion in either extreme was what upset Sudha most. She would have understood quarrels, she believed. She would even have understood divorce. She always hoped some sign of love would manifest itself…” One of Raymond Carver’s later poems was titled “No Heroics, Please” and this is the expression that comes to mind. No heroics, but as Lahiri so amply demonstrates, merely the quiet heroism of dealing with life’s vicissitudes.

Interestingly, however, it is when the author narrates a story from a different point of view that the results are not as impressive – as in the one which speaks of the fascination of Paul, a American doctoral student, with the bewitching Sangeeta, one of his roommates, who is in the snares of a tempestuous relationship with Farouk, a caddish Egyptian.

The three concluding stories all deal with the fates of Hema and Kaushik, who meet as children because their parents are family friends, going on to trace their separate lives until, approaching middle age, they bump into each other in Italy. The denouement is something of a let-down, with its uncustomary strain of melodrama and dire coincidence, but the first two stories are compelling, imbued with the grief that the loss of a parent brings about. In fact, the ageing of, and distance from, one’s parents is another recurring theme in this volume.

Faulkner had his Yoknapatawpha county; Narayan his Malgudi town; Cheever his suburb of Westchester. With Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri lays claim again to her own metaphorical patch of ground, and shows us the treasures buried within.

Utterly Monkey

GORILLA Shobasakti

Playful and sardonic aren’t words that you’d use to describe depictions of the bloody ethnic unrest that has characterized Sri Lanka in recent times. Yet, that’s the overarching mood of this slim novel by Shobasakthi, a former LTTE child soldier and currently a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee in France.

The structure itself is unusually inventive. Gorilla starts out with a long petition written by one Anthony Thasan seeking asylum in France, detailing the travails he’s undergone as one suspected of having terrorist links and throwing himself at the mercy of the French authorities. Then follows a long middle section dealing with the exploits of the young Rocky Raj: his fractious relationship with his father, the thuggish Gorilla, and his induction into “the Movement” as a child soldier. (The chilling footnotes here describing the deaths of the characters we encounter are an ingenious device.) Finally, there’s a concluding first-person section told by a Tamil refugee in France which re-introduces us to Anthony’s life. Clearing up confusion over the identities of the characters in the novel, this section, ending in an act of shocking violence, asks disturbing questions about whether one is capable of entirely shedding one’s past. All of which is thrown into sharp relief when you realise that Sobasakthi’s real name is, in fact, Anthony Jesuthasan.

Originally written in Tamil and felicitously translated by Anushiya Sivanarayanan (who also provides an informative, context-setting introduction), Gorilla has an impact greater than the sum of its parts and is far removed from the genteel alienation of a Romesh Gunasekhara or Shyam Selvadurai. How much of it is made-up, and how much real-life is for the author to know; all one can do is to call it mock fictional – with equal stress on both of those words.

How To Write About Authors In The Indian Media

Worried that a lack of knowledge or an unbiased attitude will get you nowhere in the exciting world of journalism? Don't fret. Follow these simple steps and you, too, could get your byline in respected weekly magazines, making the rich and famous quiver at your approach. Let us take as our model, Sanjay Suri's piece in the latest issue of Outlook, "Sir Talk-A-Lot", which purports to be an analysis of the literary status of Salman Rushdie on the publication of his The Enchantress of Florence. (All the extracts that follow are from this piece.)

# 1. Ignore facts. They only get in the way.

Trumpet this ignorance right at the start, by proclaiming that the title is "Salman Rushdie's ninth book...." In fact, it's his tenth novel and 14th book, but don't let that bother you.

# 2. Fire over someone else's shoulder.

Say there's one specific publication that's published a bad review of the book. Use this to inform your entire argument that of "all the novels he has written, there isn't another whose readability has been challenged quite as rigorously as this one." In Suri's case, he lavishly quotes from Peter Kemp's review in The Times: "...by a long chalk, the worst thing he has ever written." (In passing: Kemp is certainly entitled to his opinion, more so because he's actually read and quoted from the book -- something that you, following Suri, should give no indication of.)

In order to appear even-handed, you should also quote from other reviews that are more favourable, such as the one in The Guardian -- but indicate for no reason that this isn't because of the book's content, but because it "will have takers for the subject alone". (In such ways, you can also cast aspersions on the Guardian's rave review, by one Ms Ursula Le Guin. Ursula who? Calm down, it doesn't matter if you haven't heard of her.)

To show you've done your homework, throw in some more phrases from other reviews, stressing the negative and grudgingly acknowledging the favourable points the reviewers have made. See, you're nothing if not fair. In fact, speak to people who share your views and quote them -- it helps if one such person (Alok Rai) also reviews regularly for Outlook. Also throw in a (suspiciously-unnamed) "fellow Indian writer" who says, "Rushdie's recent books have been long and awful and this new novel doesn't sound any good." (See this chap hasn't read the book, too. You're on the right track, after all.)

# 3. If you can't impress, baffle.

This is when you really come into your own. Throw in words such as "style" and then proceed to demonstrate your point of view in ornate sentences. Such as: "...more than the subject the style is intended for, it's come to say only that this is a place that Rushdie wants for himself, a place where the signboard he has put up announces universality of reach, oneness of civilisations, and the power of the narrator to remind you of it." (When talking of matters such as style, don't get into quicksand by being specific. Far better to be vague.) Be generous with generalisations: "[Rushdie] thrives now on the loyalty of a band with a sense of the progressive, almost a brand now of intellectual acceptance than a great read....For too long now, a declared admiration of Rushdie has been our forged passport to literary standing."

# 4. End with an ungrammatical outburst.

"The Rushdie talk is now into its new round. And between this book and the next we will have no doubt another Rushdie affair to keep us going." See? How knowledgeable and world-weary and impressive that sounds. Simple, when you know how.

Self Help

This is from the latest issue of TimeOut Mumbai.

HIS ILLEGAL SELF Peter Carey

Shape-shifters, continent-crossers and murky identities are only to be expected in Peter Carey’s novels, and so it is with his latest, His Illegal Self. Set in the early Seventies, it deals with the fate of the seven-year-old Che Selkirk, living with his grandmother on privileged Park Avenue when the novel opens.

It turns out that Che’s parents – whom he’s never lived with -- are radical Ivy Leaguers, wanted by the authorities for their violent socialist protests. Che’s imagination is fuelled by thought of a parental reunion, so when a woman calling herself Dial (short for “dialectic”) arrives to accompany them on an outing, he immediately jumps to the conclusion that she’s his mother.

Circumstances lead Dial to abscond with Che, and after some nights in strangers’ houses and flea-bag motels, they fly to a commune in Queensland, Australia. As his relationship with Dial flourishes and deepens, Che comes to understand the truth about his parents and Dial’s involvement in the affair.

The novel is written in short, interlocking chapters, occasionally alternating between Che and Dial’s points of view. When this works, it works very well, making the narrative proceed in a two-steps-forward, one-step-back manner. The prose is jagged, with the excess wrung from it, yet enlivened by the occasional appropriate metaphor.

It’s also clear that Carey writes with first-hand knowledge of the Australian interior, dwelling on the nature of vegetation, the properties of lumber and the difficulties of agriculture.

Though the novel is very good when it comes to capturing the mystifications of childhood and the relationship between Dial and Che, it’s let down by some narrative inconsistencies: the flight to Australia, for a start, and Dial’s continuing motivation, for another. His Illegal Self is certainly not a mis-step, but neither is it as sure-footed as some of Carey’s other novels.

Love And Longing In Bombay

This appeared in today's Hindustan Times. It's the third book I've read in a row by Indians writing in English that suffers from overstatement. (The first two being Saeed Mirza's Ammi and Priya Sarukkai Chabria's Generation 14.) It's not that these three books are bad, but they would have been so much better with a little more Hemingwayesque restraint. On quite another note, I finally managed to stop myself from using the word "quotidian" in a review.

BREATHLESS IN BOMBAY Murzban F. Shroff

Salman Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai grew up in the privileged vicinity of Breach Candy; Anita Desai’s Hugo Baumgartner met his fate in seedy Colaba bylanes; and Vikram Chandra’s Inspector Sartaj and Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram traipsed through slums, dance bars and other gangland haunts. Now, in Murzban Shroff’s debut collection of short stories, we’re shown yet another aspect of Mumbai: the lives of its marginalised and migrant citizens, “their conflicts, their betrayals, their realisation and their redemption”.

This, among others, is a collection of low-lifes, itinerant service providers, ne’er-do-wells, scroungers, and, inevitably, good-hearted diamonds in the rough, all battling yet attracted to Bombay’s malign, magnetic lure. That may sound Dickensian, but Shroff’s brand of didactic social realism is closer to that of Upton Sinclair.

Many tales here have a similar pattern: a present occupation inter-cut with a past preoccupation. Thus, a dhobi delivering a load on a Churchgate-bound local train wonders whether his livelihood has a future; a Chowpatty masseur servicing a customer muses on the fate of his wife left behind in the village; a taxi-driver carrying a passenger from Nariman Point to the airport reflects on the vagaries of his profession; a film production assistant navigating rush-hour traffic ponders on the fall-out of a messy relationship; and a horse-and-carriage driver taking an Arab family for a ride down Marine Drive speculates on how to provide for those he’s responsible for.

Other stories deal with lives of the Parsi community, such as the moving ‘The Great Divide’, where an aged couple faces “a national failure to dissolve differences”. Also poignant is ‘Babu Barrah Takka’ featuring an upright public-sector employee at the crossroads.

Shroff has clearly done his homework, which shows in his use of everyday detail. His prose is straightforward and unadorned, though not above the occasional act of legerdemain -- such as the long opening sentence of ‘This House of Mine’. He’s also confident enough not to provide neat, well-rounded endings. However, what offsets these sterling qualities is the didacticism referred to earlier: the epiphanies are too pronounced and in story after story Shroff spells out realisations that have already been made clear by the narrative itself.

After a while, these overstatements take on a moralising tone, which robs many stories of the power they would otherwise have had. Take the title story, dealing with a wedding party hosted by a rags-to-riches businessman, which is among the weakest because the author’s ill-concealed disdain for bourgeois social-climbing overshadows everything else. As a mode, satire, not realism, is better suited to such sentiments.

That having been said, Shroff’s writing gives off an air of earnestness and sincerity that is endearing, and his dedication to his subject matter is apparent. This isn’t exactly a debut to leave you breathless, because it wears its liberal pieties too overtly on its sleeve; nevertheless, Breathless in Bombay deserves attention because of its unflinching focus on the lives of those who are often overlooked in Mumbai’s heedless rush towards modernisation.

Will, No Grace

This appeared in yesterday's DNA.

WHEREE THERE'S A WILL Matt Beaumont

Some years ago, Matt Beaumont came to the attention of the reading public with his wry, inventive novel, e, which updated Richardson’s Clarissa in providing us with a take on the goings-on in an advertising agency, told entirely in the form of e-mail exchanges. Since then he’s reverted to more traditional ways of storytelling, and this is the case as well with Where There’s a Will, his fifth book.

It’s clear from the beginning that Beaumont is partial to narrative in which his authorial presence makes itself felt in a number of ironic descriptions and asides. Because there are many of these, and because none of them are especially droll, Where There’s a Will emerges as more than occasionally irritating to read.

This is the tale of Alvin Lee, the forty-something “learning mentor” of a group of deviant teenagers in a school on the fringes of London. Like Voltaire’s Candide, Lee is an incurable optimist as well as do-gooder, and this embroils him in hopeless misunderstandings with not just his students and staff but also his extended family comprising partner Karen and four children of varying ages.

After visiting one of his former students who’s now working in a massage parlour, Lee happens to save an octogenarian heiress from being mugged by another one of his wards, and this causes the rich old lady to name him as sole beneficiary in her will. Her subsequent death leads to a farrago of complications during which Alvin’s fidelity, his health and his reputation suffer serious injury.

Through a series of twists, turns, zigs and zags – as well as some jaw-dropping coincidences – all ends well, with Lee reinstated as a paragon of virtue, as various characters discover their penchant for Christianity, rock-n-roll, astronomy and more. When ironic reversals appear – and there are more than a few in this book – you’re past being affected because by then your credibility hasn’t just been stretched, it’s passed breaking point.

With its mannered facetiousness and paper-thin characters, about the only thing Where There’s a Will has going for it is that it moves at a breathless pace. Recommended for those who find Nick Hornby too taxing.

Looking London, Going Tokyo

This appeared in the latest issue of TimeOut Mumbai

THE JAPANESE WIFE Kunal Basu

The title story in Kunal Basu’s collection, The Japanese Wife, is a quirky tale of an introverted teacher in rural West Bengal and his marriage to a Japanese woman he’s never met, only corresponded with. Not only is it poignantly rendered, it’s often portrayed in strikingly visual terms.

When it comes to the rest, however, the devices that make the title story work seem flat and forced. In ‘Long Live Imelda Marcos’, an account of an Indian couple’s relationship with their Filipina maid in Hong Kong, the story’s delicacy and insight is marred by the trick ending. The same occurs in ‘Father Tito’s Onion Rings’, dwelling on the predicament of a Yugoslavian priest in Calcutta. And the finale of ‘Lotus Dragon’, dealing with an Indian couple in Tiananmen Square in 1989, is frankly manipulative.

Many stories revolve, as above, on the plight of people out of place. In ‘Grateful Ganga’, a recently-widowed American arriving in India to immerse her husband’s ashes finds herself attracted to a strapping Punjabi in Delhi; in ‘Miss Annie’, a Russian harlot in Calcutta forges a relationship with three incendiary revolutionaries. There aren’t really any clash-of-culture insights: the tales are predicament-driven rather than character-led.

Where trick devices are dispensed with, there’s the absence of narrative charge, as in ‘The Last Dalang’ or the odd ‘Lenin’s Café’. Then, there’s ‘The Accountant’, which has a promising premise – a middle-aged accountant believing that he’s the reincarnation of one of the Taj Mahal’s architects – but ends all too neatly. It’s almost as though Basu, having come up with interesting characters, doesn’t trust them to evolve organically. In one of the stories, he states “In life, as in a work of art, it’s the accident that reveals more than the plan”. More accidents and fewer plans would have made these stories better.

Modernism And Its Discontents

This appeared in the January-February 2007 issue of Biblio.

MODERNISM: THE LURE OF HERESY Peter Gay

Finding myself with a little time to spare during a recent visit to London, I embarked upon a quick stroll around Bloomsbury Square hoping to come across the former residence of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, as well as those of her contemporaries, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington. Of course, I didn’t bump into even one: what I realised later was that their houses are, instead, located in Gordon Square, a few minutes’ walk away.

Those hunting for the presence of Modernism nowadays seem fated to meet with similar frustration. That age of avant-garde experimentation, the desire to “make it new” and the obsessive urge to break with traditional forms has been replaced by a time when art is an investment opportunity, literary magazines and independent bookstores are dwindling and serious composers and conductors cater to a meagre few. These are the fragments we shore among our ruin.

To look back on the Modernists, then, may seem an exercise in fruitless nostalgia. But, as cultural theorist Peter Gay’s sweeping new book reminds us, their accomplishments can be counted as among the foremost aesthetic achievements in art, music, architecture and writing, with an influence that ripples out till today. Rather than an exhaustive study, he says, “I have looked for what Modernists had in common, and the social conditions that would foster or dishearten them”, with selective choices to exemplify his arguments, based on the fact that “the one thing that all modernists had indisputably in common was the conviction that the untried is markedly superior to the familiar, the rare to the ordinary, the experimental to the routine”.

For Gay, Modernism starts with Baudelaire in the mid-1800s and terminates around the time that Andy Warhol displayed his infamous Brillo Box in New York in 1964. This latter event, he says, brought about “the death of art” by forcing people to confront uncomfortable questions: “What is a work of art? How do you distinguish between one of them and the rest of creation?”

For the bulk of the book, Gay focuses on the disciplines of painting, sculpture, fiction, poetry, music, architecture, design and film, discussing the life and work of those such as Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Munch, Cezanne, Picasso, Stravinsky, Griffith, Eisenstein, Welles, Chaplin, Le Corbusier and Van der Rohe – to name only a few. To go through the roster of such names – and muse on their determination to flaunt convention allied with principled self-scrutiny -- is to realise once again that nowadays, there may be many good works of art, but there are no great ones.

The virtue of Gay’s book lies not in provocative theses or bold new assessments, but in being a study of the movement across disciplines, shedding light on commonalities and unifying themes. (Notably, the art of photography is excluded; but, as Gay has pointed out elsewhere, one of the reasons for this is that he was unable to provide adequate linkages from this form to the others.)

Gay is, of course, an arch, unabashed Freudian, as he reminds us again in his preface. His desired perspective, then, is to look at the causal forces operating on the Modernists’ minds, the activity of the unconscious and the interplay between libido and aggression. Which is a vaulting ambition he sometimes loses sight of in attempting to capture Modernism and its discontents, with all its nuances and vagaries.

One of the criticisms the work of the avant-garde has always had to face is that its techniques and modes are alienating for the man on the street and, as such, such artists were nothing more than a bunch of effete snobs. As a comment, this is singularly ill-judged: today’s baffling modern mode is often tomorrow’s commonplace. Stockhausen may have had limited appeal to the general public but his compositions inspired the Beatles and Pink Floyd; not many outside the classroom read Joyce’s Ulysses nowadays, but the stream-of-consciousness technique that he streamlined finds echoes in the pulpiest airport thriller; the first reaction to Picasso’s affair with cubes was one of dismayed incomprehension, but drawing rooms of today’s nouveau riche are filled with pallid imitations. This is even more apt when it comes to the art of cinema: to take just one example, techniques such as depth-of-field and extreme close-up are visible on the screens of every multiplex today, yet, when Orson Welles pioneered them in Citizen Kane, they were seen as radical departures from convention.

This argument, of course, is linked to the receptivity of audiences over time, and Gay refers more than once to what he calls the “three publics”: the “barbarian” masses; those superior to the multitudes but reluctant to spend time and effort to understand the avant-garde; and finally, a small group that’s open to innovation. In this context, it’s illuminating to read Gay’s account of the commerce between art dealers, critics, museum administrators and the champions of art for art’s sake: “Businessmen of culture offered and sold artistic products, whether dramas, drawings or volumes of poetry, and with the same gesture advanced the aesthetic cultivation of the buying public”.

The Modernists’ battle with the smugness of the bourgeoisie is almost the stuff of legend now – but Gay also vividly brings out how the social and economic conditions of the time favoured the rise of the experimental. It was, after all, a time of unprecedented prosperity, increasing urbanisation, growing literacy and the questioning of hitherto unchallenged percepts of Christianity.

Gay’s admiration for the Modernists isn’t unblinking; he does devote space to those he terms the “anti-modern modernists”, by which he means those who were drawn to anti-Semitism (Eliot), Italian fascism (Pound), anti-feminism (Strindberg) and Hitler’s Nazis (Hamsun), among others. But, instead of speculating on whether Modernism, in its resolute hunt for new styles, could be psychologically allied to forms of political absolutism, he concludes: “The question of why so many modernists were drawn to regimes that were sick parodies of the modernist quest for transcendence and absolutes is unanswerable”.

My ill-mapped jaunt around Bloomsbury was unsuccessful in discovering some of Modernism’s landmarks; Gay’s visit to Bilbao, Spain, in the autumn of 2000, however, provided him with a pointer to Modernism’s continuing influence. “In a word, I was overwhelmed,” he writes, talking of his visit to Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum. “I was not awed into silence but took pleasure from the first from the wealth and elegance of the forms that rose up around me” Gehry apart, Gay also holds up Marquez as an exemplar of late-stage Modernism, with particular reference to his use of magical realism and ambiguity in One Hundred Years of Solitude. This, however, comes across as a trifle disingenuous. No-one is decrying the merits of Marquez, but there are many others who have been as significantly iconoclastic. Take Cortazar. Take Borges. Take Saramago.

Be that as it may, many feel that Modernism’s achievements seem at present too close to us to form any reasonable, objective judgment about their aims and continuing influence. A pointer to this is the response to the exhibition titled ‘Designing a New World 1914 - 1939’ at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in early 2006. This brought forth strong reactions for and against the movement -- as well as record crowds in attendance. “They were the neo-cons of 20th century art,” fumed Simon Jenkins at the time, while Terence Conran was more complimentary: “Modernism is the most exciting exhibition I have ever seen in London. It means a huge amount to me personally”.

As for the future, it could well be that the rising ride of nationalism – often couched in religious terms – and the shifting of the world’s axis towards Asian nations will give rise to a new form of Romanticism in the arts, conceivably an exalted version of medievalism. It’s only from the ashes of this second Romantic Movement that a subsequent Modernism will be permitted to arise.

Then again, perhaps we’re all mistaken in looking for Modernist attitudes nowadays in books, on canvases, in marble and in metal. In this age of information, the heirs to that fin de siecle artistic revolution could well be among those writing software codes, directing music videos, devising computer games and – heaven help us – composing mobile phone novels.

Great Yates

I read -- and marvelled at -- Richard Yates' classic, Revolutionary Road, for the first time only late last year, and resolved to get my hands on his other books as well -- a resolve forgotten until I spotted his moving, disturbing novella, Cold Spring Harbour, in a bookshop last week. Why, I asked myself after putting it down, isn't this writer better known? In a pleasing coincidence, The Guardian's Nick Fraser asks the same question in this excellent piece that sums up Yates' themes, his life, his obscure fame and probable revival. James Wood is quoted as saying: "He is a reader's writer, always lucid, elegant and frequently poignant", which is good enough reason to now seek out his short stories.

Another Jodha Akbar

The lastest issue of the New Yorker --- and how fortunate we are that it's all available online -- carries a piece by Salman Rushdie, clearly an extract from his forthcoming The Enchantress of Florence, featuring Emperor Akbar and his queen, Jodhabai who, in Rushdie's hands, is an imaginary character: "Queens floated within his palaces like ghosts, Rajput and Turkish sultanas playing catch-me-if-you-can. One of these royal personages did not really exist. She was an imaginary wife, dreamed up by Akbar in the way that lonely children dream up imaginary friends, and in spite of the presence of many living, if floating, consorts, the Emperor was of the opinion that it was the real queens who were the phantoms and the nonexistent beloved who was real. He gave her a name, Jodha, and no man dared gainsay him."

Should have thought of that, Mr Gowarikar.