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Book Name:The Tutor of History Publisher: Penguin Books India Price: Rs. 295 ISBN: 0141007745

The winter season is coming in Delhi: the sun has begun to turn a weak mottled yellow, the nights are chilly and there is a deluge of Indian writing in fiction in the offing. That's right: winter is the best time of the year to do anything vaguely literary: book launches, book readings, book fairs, book whatever you like to do. Even colleges are beginning to hold "literary" fests!

So it is no surprise that Penguin India should present three new women writers for us to sink our teeth into. All three are debutante novelists, and had one more of them been a South Indian Brahmin, the trinity would have been complete. Alas! Such imperfections must remain... The first of these is a sensitive debut, The Tutor of History by Manjushree Thapa. A writer from Nepal, she is perhaps one of the first Nepalese writers to join the South Asian literary bandwagon, along with her Bangladeshi and Pakistani brethren. (Sorry, maybe Musharraf doesn't appreciate the term "brethren".)

The story is set against the backdrop of national elections in a little town of central Nepal. The characters are surprisingly well drawn, and very rarely does the narrative slack. While using the fraudulent elections as a recurring leitmotif for the corruption plaguing Nepal, Thapa manages to avoid descending into a morass of self-pity and despair. Though out the book, there is a sense of hope in the future, which seems to overcome the depressing surroundings.

As an introduction of Nepal as it stands today, The Tutor of History is an important work to enter the world of South Asian fiction. Thapa portrays with an honest pen what a small Himalayan kingdom is going through.

Book Name:An Evening Gone Publisher: Penguin Books India Price: Rs. 200 Pages: 200 ISBN: 0141007664

Alas, the next work, An Evening Gone fails to meet the high expectations laid down. Set in a community of Palghat Iyer Brahmins, Suguna Iyer's novel purports to illuminate a world that has been so far left unexplored. While her brave depictions of life in a conservative community are laudable, Iyer fails to keep the narrative gripping. In trying to weave together too many individual portions, she loses sight of the entire story. So the juxtaposition of NSR Ramachandra Iyer, a take off on C.V. Raman, makes no sense when compared to Meenakshi, the Sanskrit loving girl condemned to a life of a widow. If Iyer was trying to highlight the hypocrisy in the community, she only barely manages.

Thrown into the rather haphazard narrative are lengthy sections I have begun to call "pot luck". After all, the secret of most Indian novels in the west could perhaps be due to extensive descriptions of culinary preparations. Iyer follows in this tradition bravely, throwing in exotic dishes, tedious recipes and images of the womenfolk forever feeding armies of children.

Unfortunately, An Evening Gone ends up as a forgettable, forgivable novel. Even the cover fails to excite! An old sepia toned photograph of two women (we learn about the women in the novel) hardly piques interest. Sadly, Iyer does not do justice to a theme that was fresh and rarely explored.

Book Name:The Hottest Day of the Year Publisher: Penguin Books India Price: Rs. 250 Pages: 240 ISBN: 0670912360

The third in our trio of novelists is Brinda Charry, a faculty member of Syracuse University. Her The Hottest Day of the Year came to me with fulsome praise from the marketing pro at Penguin. But then, marketing people are always fulsome about their products. Nevertheless, I had high expectations from the book.

Set in a pathetic little town in Tamil Nadu, the story is about Nithya, a young Bangalore based girl forced to spend six months with her widowed aunt and bachelor uncle. In a dreary, dull and hopelessly boring environment, Nithya's only friend ends up being Sudha, the young and pretty Brahmin maidservant of the Iyengar family. The turning point of the story is when Sudha is found dead, having hanged herself in her room. The entire neighbourhood is abuzz with gossip, and the family must learn to cope with their new isolation in an already desolate town.

A good effort, Charry manages to deal sensitively with a young girl's thoughts in exceptional circumstances. Her descriptions of life in small town India are crisp and precise, and surprisingly accurate. The entire novel radiates a sense of incredible heat and aridity. If only Penguin, making this one a hardcover, had given the book a more manageable size. It was just that critical amount off the standard size to make reading it quite uncomfortable.

What with an entire flock of publications up their sleeve this winter, Penguin has set the tone with these three debuts. They seem to have struck the right blend of mediocrity and talent, choosing authors with diverse backgrounds and writing styles. Here's looking forward to a fruitful winter.

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The Pukka Sahib and Other Stories by- JP Das
- Anjana Basu

Anjana Basu taught English Literature, briefly, in Calcutta University. She writes poetry, stories, features in the local newspapers and in Cosmopolitan. She has had a book of short stories published by Orient Longman, India. The BBC had broadcast one of her short stories and her poems have featured in an anthology brought out by Penguin India. In America she has been published in The Wolfhead Quarterly, Gowanus, The Blue Moon Review, and Recursive Angel, to name a few.

Book Name:The Pukka Sahib and Other Stories by- JP Das Publisher: Harper Collins India Price: Rs. 195

In My End Is My Beginning

The dozen short stories in this collection are grounded in the solid every day of middle class India, with a touch of Das' own experiences in the pompous world of bureaucracy. You run into a peon, a section officer, a rustic just migrated to the city, a woman who wears her liberation on her sleeve. People who spend a great deal of their time in introspection and building castles in the air, looking back to the past where they feel their mistakes lie. There is a sophistication about these stories that is not commonly found in regional literature. Most of the protagonists are struggling to cope with the twentieth century, with varying degrees of success.

Of course, the original flavour of the stories will escape anyone who is not a reader of Oriya literature. The translator's note says as much. But the irony and the underlying spirituality of the stories are universal.

Swati will Come is a story of role reversal. The liberated woman becomes the hunter, showering letters of intent on the man she is going to visit. Letter after letter leaving him to count the days, until the final day when...but to give the ending away is to spoil the mystery. Das strives to inject an element of mystery into all his stories, though this experiment is not always successful. However, he does manage to pile on the tension step by stealthy step. Take The Interview, a story of how a film producer disguises an assignation with a girl by pretending to his friend that he has an interview - only to be drawn into his own charade as the girl takes him at his word and strips him of his mask.

In story after story people come to grips with the real world which they have been trying to elude and the confrontation strips them of their masks and shows them up as they really are. This happens in Empire and the Rivals. Siblings explores the bond between three brothers who have led different lives and who, when they meet after years of separation, realise that all they have in common is their memories. The progression is circular rather than linear - the stories end where they began. This is most so in the title story, The Pukka Sahib, where a brown sahib, who has deliberately separated himself from his more traditional friends and relatives for the sake of his career, begins the painful journey to find his roots again - helped by the very people he shunned.

Nothing is overstated in the stories - the emotions and language are deliberately banked, so that the effect is greater. In fact, the translator Bikram Das had tried to retain as much of the original flavour as possible. If you're in the mood for introspection with an ironic Chekov touch then these stories will certainly appeal to you.

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