ON THIS LAST DAY OF 2023

If my work were affected by a fracture of the T12, my weekly reading was not. In 2023, I read a total of 43 books for this newsletter. Here are some favorites.

A 6 AM concert by the light of many oil lamps at a Hanuman temple in Chennai’s Mylapore neighborhood. During the December season of music and dance in India’s Chennai, the beat of the mridangam and the sound of violin is a given in every neighborhood.

I traveled a lot in the year 2023 and yet I managed to read a fair bit. I’m in India’s Chennai at the moment enjoying the city’s special artistic offerings. The Margazhi season of music and dance (mid-December to mid-January) in this city is such an experience—despite its shortcomings—and I’ve personally gained so much from it.

This visit to India has been both exciting and enervating. I’ve traveled more than I normally do in just four weeks and I’ve also managed to spend time with family and friends. Early in December I also experienced being marooned in my home for several days, thanks to a cyclone on the Coromandel Coast. All of this past week, reading has taken a back seat. From morning to night, I’ve been steeped in classical music. In the video below that I shot during one of the events at the music festival, you can listen to two young men taking turns attempting the raga Kalyani.

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Some wonderful, unexpected experiences came my way on this trip, too. During my visit to the state of Karnataka, I spent several hours talking to silk worm farmers and silk reelers All these years, I’d been an ignorant consumer of silks, thoughtless and cavalier sometimes in the ways in which I sometimes gave away or got rid of some of my silk saris. Karnataka supplies nearly 45% of the country's total mulberry silk and about half of the silk used in India. Seeing silk worms feeding their faces until they grew to many times their size and watching cocoons in hot water gave me pause.

Clockwise L to R: silk worms fattening up; worms on a bed of mulberry leaves; silk cocoons at an auction and a mulberry tree..

In Bangalore, the commercial capital of Karnataka, I spent hours in terrific bookstores where I managed to pick up a dozen books that I hope to read in 2024. As I said in last week’s post, Bangalore has some fabulous book dens and although I didn’t have enough time to check out all the books in the shelves, I also know that no amount of time will ever suffice.

The trip was also filled with todos. One of them was clearing up some of the things in our village home home in Esayanur. We went into the village one morning and a pick-up truck hauled away some 100-year-old artifacts away from an age-old kitchen. A house in which hundreds of villagers were once fed elaborate meals has fallen into disrepair and it’s unclear how we will even be able to maintain it anymore. This is the sad story of many traditional ancestral properties in India.

L to R: My mother-in-law presides over all the old brass and bronze vessels in her old kitchen. My husband shoots a picture of the land around his village.

I leave you with several books that ensnared me in 2023. Mai Silently Mother by Geetanjali Shree (Hindi) was revelatory simply by reaffirming some aspects of my own life. I saw my mother in the character Mai and I relived the many moments when I found my own mother irrational just because she was skewed by other feelings and considerations that were hard to explain away. Fire And Ice by Eva Baltasar may be an all-time best for me. This Catalan novel once on the Booker shortlist carves out, with the precision of an Obsidian knife, a story of love and disappointment. I know I will be rereading C. S. Chellappa’s Vaadivasal one day. By the time this Tamil novella ends, it’s clear that man and beast are indistinguishable. In Istanbul’s airport last April, I picked up the late Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna In A Fur Coat and it made me mull over my own unformed expectations of love and partnership. The book’s diatribe against the systemic patriarchy in our societies is as topical and as relevant in 2023 as it was in 1943.

The theater at Kalakshetra, the venue of many arts performances. Chennai needs many such vast performance spaces with seating, food and restroom spaces. For such incredibly gifted artistes in such a vibrant city, there are few spaces where their talent can be showcased at their best.

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