Tag: #oprahsbookclub

A Guardian and a Thief

Some books are so bad that there can be no redemption for them. That’s precisely how Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief appears to be. Since it came with great appreciation from none other than Oprah and was even her book club’s pick, also having been shortlisted for the National Book Awards, it made me wonder what exactly made this book a “shining jewel”, particularly in the eyes of an American readership. To put it bluntly, this book has been written by an NRI for a Western, specifically American, audience. It ticks every box when it comes to caricaturing and stereotyping Indians through a familiar western gaze. What is especially astonishing is that despite having lived in India for nineteen years, Majumdar still chooses to pander to this gaze by reproducing a shoddy and pathetic poverty porn. This raises a larger and more troubling question: what should be said about the literary genius of someone like Oprah when they champion a book like this which exemplifies lazy writing highlighting all the tropes, has a flimsy storyline and actively perpetuates stereotypes. Shouldn’t Oprah have known better? 

The story is set in a climate-stricken Kolkata of the future where poverty, famine and scarcity form the backdrop of an anarchic society. The billionaires continue to profit obscenely making billions out of the misery of the poor while hoarding resources. There’s the protagonist, Ma, who is desperate to migrate to America with her father and her two-year-old daughter, Mishti, to reunite with her husband. Battling the everyday challenges of extreme heat and hunger, she does secure the visas for their journey. However, fate has other plans when a thief steals her bag containing their passports, leaving Ma helpless and hopeless, just days before their scheduled flight.

What follows is so tedious, disjointed, and incoherent that one loses track of the entire story. Calamity after calamity befalls Ma, but her otherworldly, almost supernatural stoicism feels performative and implausible. The city of Kolkata experiencing the effects of the climate crisis that Megha has tried to depict, is reduced to cursory descriptions of poverty, emotional apathy and belligerence amongst its inhabitants without allowing for nuance, insight, or interpretation. It feels as though the author has simply taken the tropes of a ‘third world country’ and transplanted them into a speculative future, where little has changed, an exercise that caters neatly to a voyeuristic western imagination. 

More than being disappointed, I am angry. Ma is singularly the most frustrating character I have encountered in recent literature. Not merely one-dimensional, she is also burdened by an unnecessary, almost theatrical resilience and pretence. She seems to be the living embodiment of somebody who is deliberately delusional. Mishti, her daughter, emerges as one of the most irritating child characters I have ever read and I bemoan the author’s craft in making me dislike even a toddler. 

The book leaves me with a host of unanswered questions. What was the author trying to convey with the supposedly shocking climax? What traumas has Ma endured that explain her behaviour and why is there little to no mention of the same? Does the text hint at child abuse, and if so, why is it merely gestured at and abandoned? Why is the narrative energy spent building empathy for the thief while Ma, the ostensible victim, remains alienating and opaque? Lastly, why did Majumdar write this book at all? If the aim was only to appease an American audience, then it’s worked brilliantly. 

This brings me back to those who have praised the book, Oprah included. Where does the responsibility of the reader lie when a book such as this gets promoted as one of the “best books of the year”? For Oprah did this book tick the ‘diversity reads’ box and hence the appropriation of India and Indians by a diaspora author was never examined or interrogated? Should diaspora authors get away with such misrepresentation simply because they are Indian by origin, even though their work is divorced from the lived realities it claims to portray and their writing is nothing but a patronising paean? 

I have said this before and I will say it again, diaspora Indian authors should write about their diaspora clan. Everything else risks becoming appropriation. To imagine an India steeped in suffering and mythological misery, written for western consumption and for pacifying one’s misplaced patriotism, serves neither literature nor truth.

It genuinely pains me to criticise my forever idol, Oprah for choosing Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief. Oprah will continue to remain my idol, but at times it’s imperative we question our idols too for their choices. If not, we become equally complicit. 

Postscript: I am aware that this review may be misconstrued as misogynistic and dismissed for mansplaining, because I, as a cis-presenting queer man is criticising two women, but I still stand by my review nonetheless. After all, this critical thinking is also inspired by Oprah and her penchant for speaking truth to power. 

~ JUST A GAY BOY. 🫣😠

The Covenant of Water

Oprah’s book club pick, is indeed a modern day masterpiece. It’s grand, it’s moving, it’s all encompassing. It’s a historical fiction, a medical mystery and a multigenerational saga. Abraham Verghese’s epic tale, ‘The Covenant of Water’, is all this and so much more. It’s a story that shape shifts its way across generations and timelines, still retaining generosity of the human spirit at its core. It feels like a grandiose gesture on the part of Verghese to have told us this story; something that’s unflinchingly brutal, unapologetically morbid yet when the author writes it the way he writes it, that is to say, so evocatively tethered; it feels tender, considerate and benevolent.

It begins in the year 1900 in the village of Parambil, in Kerala where a twelve year old girl, is about to be married to a 40 year old man. The story progresses, and the girl soon comes to be known as the matriarch, Big Ammachi. She has been married to a man who’s family suffers from a “condition”, the men are afraid of water and the deaths have occurred because of drowning. Nobody is able to explain this strange phenomenon, until Big Ammachi’s granddaughter, becomes a doctor and unearths the mystery behind the “condition”. From 1900 to 1977, the story traverses geographies and politics, medicines and diseases; poetically; introducing us to a plethora of interesting characters and throwing a few riddles along the way. We come across Philipose, Big Ammachi’s son, a writer, who gets lost in his chauvinism and addiction, only to regain his lost ardency. His tumultuous relationship with Elsie, stands out in the prose, due to its fecklessness, its reality rooted in ambivalence and ego. Elsie, is stoic yet yielding, an artist who is wronged by Philipose’s austere callousness and detachment. Elsie’s daughter and Big Ammachi’s namesake, is a passionate doctor, yearning to be a surgeon, who is constantly juggling between her familial attachments, medical duties and heartaches. Her discovery of the “condition“ is a sublime moment in medicine; a moment that stands still for its enormity and humility.

Verghese also acquaints us with a myriad of interesting doctors. Rune Orqvist, a clinician extraordinaire, committed to his profession and people, opens a leprosarium, not just to treat leprosy, but to heal its ostracism, and provide patients with empathy and kindness. Digby Kilgour, misunderstood and misplaced, often lost in predicaments of love and longing, finds his calling in the leprosarium. The moments leading upto it, though seeped in pathos and despondency, ultimately celebrate resilience.

Abraham Verghese has a gift for words. His words, his text, interspersed with Malayalam, are so detailed yet exact. He transports us effortlessly to Parambil, Glasgow, Madras; so much so that it begins to feel like we are witnesses to the happenings in the narrative. A colonial India and an Independent India get beautifully worded; the former has angst, desperation and bondage, while the latter has a bittersweet joyous effervescence. It’s incredible to note the tapestry of the language as he describes the topography of Kerala in the 1900s. Similarly his musings with Madras city are so thorough. Just as geography provides the lush landscape to Abraham’s story, emotions provide a realness to the words. They form the undulating subtext to each of the characters’ struggles in undoing their trials and tribulations. The author provides an incredible emotional arc to each of them. Their internal struggles in coping with their unresolved traumas, and unspoken mental issues often gets reflected externally in their unparliamentary conversations and wrong decisions. This dichotomy of distress gets explored by Verghese subtly and sensitively. Also poignant and piercing are the conversations on caste between Philipose and his lower caste pulayan friend Joppan.

Death and disease form an integral part of this narrative. Since the author is a doctor, medicine gets centre stage in the proceedings. It’s magnificent to note the diagnoses being made in the early 1900s. He doesn’t shy away from getting into the details of the anatomy, physiology and grotesque pathology of it all. The surgical scenes are almost musical, so anatomically accurate. Leprosy, a disease such, that even the pen refrains from writing about it, gets its biggest attention since the medical textbooks. The conscientious decision to portray a disease that’s synonymous with exclusion and abandonment, is humbling.

It is a big book, but an easy read. Abraham Verghese’s words are captivating and commiserating. It’s a story of epic proportions and is told such. Every character adds layers and nuances to this riveting family and medical drama. There lies an undercurrent of melancholy in every page. There remains an enigmatic dread at every turn. However, the author infuses hope even in the moments of despair by singling out compassion, love and kindness in his characters and situations.

The Covenant of Water, is a triumph of human spirit. It leaves you feeling calm and contented long after you have finished reading it.

~ JUST A GAY BOY. 🥹✨