The Shilappadikaram by Prince Ilango Adigal is the story of a doomed young couple. The husband abandons his wife for a dancer. He squanders his fortune on his mistress, breaks up with her over a somewhat petty tiff and then goes back to his wife, who naturally accepts him. Broke and disgraced, he drags her on an arduous trek to Madurai, where, using his wife's gold anklets as capital, he will start afresh. Unfortunately, in Madurai, the queen has just lost a gold anklet, so he is captured and executed while trying to pawn his wife's anklet. His wife, in a frenzy of grief, confronts the king, who, learning of this miscarriage of justice, dies of shame. Then, the girl wanders around, rips off her right breast and causes the city of Madurai to burned down in divine retribution. We are told that it is all because of past life sins - the standard Hindu explanation for anything and everything.

I really don't care much for the central story.

What I did love were the numerous vivid descriptions of *everything* - from the tuning of a musical instrument to the many weird and wonderful magical creatures and places along the way to things like the layout of the city of Madurai and the weapons and torture instruments kept at the sentry posts in its walls. No one in this story can carry on a conversation with anyone else without telling a dozen or so apropos anecdotes, and these stories-within-the-stories are a treasure trove of morally edifying and quaint folk tales. There are several interludes of song and dance where the words of all the songs everyone sings are written down, and these passages often achieve a high degree of beauty, even in a translation that seeks to preserve neither meter nor rhyme.

The translation I have is the one made by Alain Danielou for Penguin. It is full of anachronistic words, such as genii, fairies, Eros and so on, when it would have been more accurate to use the appropriate Indian word, whether it was apsara, rakshasa and so forth and footnote it the first time. The use of words from completely different traditions was extremely dissonant. I could also have done with more comprehensive introductory material, putting this work in better context, exploring tropes and storytelling devices, and with some amount of annotation - this translation has none at all.

All in all, a fascinating book for all the peripheral detail even if I thought the story itself was the sort of thing that still forms the staple of normative melodramatic cinema and television shows.

Finished Wylder's Hand by Le Fanu last night. It was a very effective mystery story, albeit one without a sleuth, but rather a story in which a central mystery is established, hints are dropped, consequences are shown and a sustained atmosphere of suspense maintained until all is revealed in a final cataclysm. Pacing is one of Le Fanu's great strengths, and he maintains interest and tension very well over the course of about 400 pages with a cast of vivid characters, including several nasty villains, two fascinating heroines, a possibly spectral and quite oracular uncle and many others. There are interesting subplots to hold interest, several moments of wonderfully Gothic atmosphere, beautiful descriptive passages, witty and philosophical asides and enough clues being dropped throughout the novel to keep the reader constantly engaged in trying to figure it all out.

Favourite quote: on the morning after a nocturnal visit from the aforementioned uncle, the narrator declares: 'I was growing most uncomfortably like one of Mrs. Anne Radcliffe's heroes - a race of nervous demigods.'

curfew, drought and UFOs

Hyderabad, in the late 80s. My family lived right at the entrance to a largely Muslim neighbourhood. Our upstairs neighbours were a Mennonite Christian family and our next-door neighbours were a Muslim family. During the annual Ganesha festival, louts participating in the never-ending processions of Ganesha idols were known to occasionally vandalise Muslim homes or harass their inhabitants. I remember my mother pre-empting this by stationing herself outside our Muslim neighbours' house with a garlanded Ganesha idol.

Conflict is stronger than harmony. Communal tensions led to curfew being declared several times when I was a boy. People were not allowed out in the streets after a certain time in the evening, and even during the daytime there were police checkpoints and patrols all over the place. My father, as a journalist, was exempt.

I was never really scared; except once. Walking through the streets to a nearby market area, I reached a place where there was a barricade across the road. The policemen manning this barricade were armed with rifles. It may have been the first time I had actually seen people bearing such large weapons. I was very terrified as I approached the barricade. Perhaps sensing this, a young policeman confronted me sternly and asked in a very harsh and frightening voice what I wanted. I stammered out that I was on my way to the marketplace. He nodded me through. I walked back the long way around from the marketplace, avoiding the barricade.

In my imagination, the experience was conflated with various war comics and movies into a highly-charged personal narrative. I lived in a war-torn city. The streets were filled with bomb craters, rubble, torn and scattered barbed-wire fences and military camps. I was a resistance fighter, undercover, moving from one safe home to another, carrying supplies, ammunition and important documents right under the noses of the enemy. In my fantasy, I was a tall, slim, strong man, highly trained and capable, but at the same time I was also myself, a little boy who could easily slip through the enemy's check posts.

The other great recurring feature of my childhood in Hyderabad was drought. This happened for several months a year, many years in a row. The water in the taps would dry up altogether and we would have to have water brought to us, first in tankers and later on in a barrel that was wheeled around in a sort of cart. My sister, then only 3 or 4 years old, would jump into this barrel and splash about. She nearly drowned at least once.

Because water was so scarce, we had to have sponge baths. My mother would heat a saucepan of water and give it to me to bathe with. I would wipe myself with a sponge, soap myself up and then wipe myself again until all the soap was removed. These were synthetic sponges, dyed a sickly shade of green or sometimes bright magenta. I never felt entirely clean afterward.

Hyderabad summers are very hot, and I was often thirsty, but we also had to be careful about how much water we drank.

Sometimes I imagined the whole city a vast desert, sweeping vistas of dunes replacing the crowded streets that surrounded our house, the last outpost of civilization in a vast wasteland. Clusters of cactus plants broke up the monotony of sand and sky. A few bones were strewn about, remains of less hardy travellers. I was a seasoned traveller, returning to civilization after a treasure hunting expedition. I would soak a thin towel in water and wrap it around my head - this was a permitted extravagance due to the extreme heat - and walk around the garden, stumbling, weary, bent under the weight of my precious cargo, but doggedly determined. I was tall, handsome, unshaven, a fascinating man with many mysteries in his past, a nameless wanderer who never stayed in one place for long but was always off in search of the next adventure.

My dogs also took part in this game in the character of a faithful pack of half-tame wolves.

I loved to read books about UFOs as a boy. I would simply inhale the pages of any UFO book I could get my hands on, believing every single word and somewhat blurry picture. Many of these stories of UFO encounters had a menacing aspect, but I could not get enough of them. Late at night, though, I would regret reading those books as I lay in bed, the sheets drawn over my head and my legs and hands safely tucked in, listening to the sounds of leaves rustling, a dog barking, cars on the road and imagining some sort of alien being, vaguely humanoid and luminous, creeping about in the garden, coming up to my window and standing out there, sending mental commands to me, glowing horribly...

One night, my upstairs neighbour Calvin and I were on the terrace when we saw a UFO. It was spherical and had a white glow, with traces of green around the edges and pink in the middle.

'What's that?' I asked Calvin, who was about 3 years older than me.

'It must be a UFO,' he replied in an awestruck voice.

We watched in excitement as it hovered for a while and then vanished.

My father's paper ran a small story about the sighting a few days later. I never saw a UFO again.

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Three young men discover a hidden land peopled entirely by women (they reproduce by parthenogenesis). These women have built a sort of progressive-collectivist utopia, much to the chagrin of at least one of the men who cannot believe there can be a civilization without men. Although Gilman spends a little too much time in exposition, there are numerous telling observations on the limitations imposed on both men and women by conventional gender roles, and the absurdities and abuses allowed by a patriarchal society. Two of the men and one woman are setting out to return to the outside world in the end, and I feel Gilman could well have extended her narrative to show the woman from Herland's culture shock out in our world, instead of abruptly ending it at this point. In short, a witty, thought-provoking and interesting book, but one that falls short of its full potential.

ETA: Actually, there is a sequel, With Her in Ourland , which forces me to increase my rating of this book.

Caleb Williams by William Godwin

I'd expected a novel by William Godwin to be politically charged; what I didn't expect was that it would be such a gripping and sophisticated narrative.

Caleb Williams is a young, naive and bookish man from a humble family. He is hired as a private secretary and librarian by a local country squire, Ferdinando Falkland. Falkland seems to be the best of men - a cultivated, humane, liberal and kindly man. But a shadow hangs over him - years ago, his rival, a neighbouring squire called Tyrell, a vain, cruel and tyrannical man, was found murdered shortly after an altercation with Falkland. Falkland is tried and found innocent; soon afterwards, evidence is found that the murder was done by Hawkins, a former tenant of Tyrell's, and his son. Father and son are hanged. However, reputation being such a great deal for him, Falkland is crushed by the fact that his name has been dragged into a murder investigation, and forever after becomes morose, withdrawn and moody, while retaining his benevolent side. At least, that's what an older servant tells Williams when the latter runs afoul of Falkland's more morose moods.

Williams has a severe case of hero-worship when it comes to Falkland; despite which, he has a sneaking suspicion that Falkland murdered Tyrell. What follows is a story that moves from an investigation into slumbering evil to a crazed flight from that evil, now awakened.

The rest of the novel is a tale of unrelenting suspense, but also one that is full of damning portraits of society and institutions in Godwin's times. Williams himself, in the final event, is unable to completely shake off the regard which the social structure forces him to hold his persecutor in; despite his own recriminations in the end, we are able to see that he is the victim of both individual and systemic injustices. The attitudes Godwin criticises are so deeply ingrained that Williams is even unjust to himself in the final analysis.

Political comment, social critique, an unreliable narrator and a gripping thriller-like story; Godwin accomplished many things with this novel. The only real down sides are that he tends to dilate a lot on every emotion that flits through Williams' head and his style tends towards passive reporting rather than active description. If you re-calibrate your reading sensibilities a bit, these are not major hindrances.

THE ITALIAN BY ANN RADCLIFFE

Oh, man. What's happening to me? I really enjoyed this book.

It's essentially the story of two young people who conceive a deep and abiding love for each other on the strength of a very brief acquaintance, largely consisting of longing for each other from afar after a brief initial meeting and subsequently spending a few boating trips together, chaperoned by suitably respectable relatives. The boy is from a noble and proud family; the girl, apparently, is from far more humble stock. His parents, hearing scandalous rumours about goings-on between the two, forbid the union. The boy's mother goes a step further and, prompted by her Confessor, an ambitious and sinister monk, has the girl kidnapped and sent to a convent. The boy tracks his girlfriend down and they escape,only to be captured again. He's sent to the prisons of the Inquisition, she's sent to a desolate sea-side spot to be killed. How will they ever break free of their tormentors and be reunited? Who is the girl's real father? What secrets lie in the evil monk's mysterious past?

A series of events no less absurd than complex eventually bring things to a happy resolution. Along the way, we learn a few more Gothic truths of life:

A well-bred girl, while travelling, will only stay in the local convent and not in a common inn, even though convents are dens of infamy that exist for the purpose of entrapping such girls into lives of gloom and celibacy.

Just because someone is today a monk or nun does not preclude them from having had a rich and varied career beforehand, including the begetting of assorted progeny and the commission of various sins.

The Inquisition takes a really long time to get to the point.

Mrs. Radcliffe was a writer of ridiculously convoluted and completely gripping novels.

The gothic revival carries on with The Monk by Matthew Lewis (1796)

So melodramatic! But also very richly textured, with various little odds of folklore thrown in, such as a spectral nun and the wandering nun, various apposite folktales in the form of poems and a wildly fraught dual storyline that somehow manages to converge at the very last.

What I learned: if two women in a Gothic novel love the hero, one of them is going to die terribly at the hands of the villain.

Also: don't deal with the devil unless you've thought out your list of demands beforehand. Fool!