HT Picks; New Reads

A journey through grief

In the summer of 2021, India was throttled by the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hospitals were running out of oxygen and the daily news recorded the soaring death count. Families were torn apart as beloved ones were quarantined or confined in intensive care units and lost to the deadly virus — leaving survivors without even a chance to say goodbye.

In that cruel summer, Andaleeb Wajid lost her mother-in-law, and then just five days later, her husband, even as she was hospitalised with COVID herself. Wajid’s grief struggled to find words as she returned to a home that was shorn of the love that had once inhabited it and was now empty, but for her two children.

Wajid finally turned to her writing to make sense of it all. She found herself wanting to tell the story of her life and her loss. She chronicled her family life, of growing up as a cherished daughter of a father whom she lost too early. She wrote about her marriage, the happy companionship that marked it, and the many ways in which her husband and she looked at life so very differently. She described the incredible joys and the unbearable pain of motherhood too.

Learning to Make Tea for One is Andaleeb Wajid’s journey through her grief. She tells her story with truth and courage, looking at death squarely in the face as she learns to make tea for one. It is a story that will deeply touch anyone who has faced loss and pain.*

Retracing the journey of the Indo-European language

One ancient language transformed our world. This is its story. Star. Stjarna. Stare. Thousands of miles apart, people look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see.

Listen to these English, Icelandic and Iranic words and you can hear echoes of one of the most extraordinary journeys in humanity’s past. All three of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient ancestor.

Five millennia ago, in a mysterious Big Bang of its own, this proto tongue exploded, forming new worlds as it spread east and west. Today, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. How did this happen?

In Proto, acclaimed journalist Laura Spinney sets off to find out. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the Silk Roads and the Hindu Kush. We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings – the ancient peoples who spread these tongues far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists racing to recover this lost world. What they have discovered has vital lessons for our modern age, as people and their languages are on the move again.

Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.*

Images of a fragile love

This novel tells the story, partly through the events of one weekend, partly through the skilful use of memory and flashbacks, of a marriage between an Indian girl and an Englishman. Caught in the clash of two cultures, their love becomes mired in the pain of infidelity and misunderstanding.

When it was first published in 1992, Kirkus Reviews called the novel ‘a stunning, luminous debut set in Calcutta and London by a young, true heir to Virginia Woolf.’ It goes on: ‘The forward action of Gupta’s hypnotic novel takes place during a single weekend: Calcutta-born Moni, despondent over her English husband’s infidelity, secretly plans to take their daughter and return to India on the child’s sixth birthday. But the stream-of-consciousness narrative weaves together memories and images, providing not just the history of a fragile love but of a woman’s psychology and soul: Moni’s brother first brings Anthony home in the rain-swollen dark of a Calcutta floodstorm. She and the English student fall in love, expecting an unconsummated passion and years of satisfying, sorrowful memories. Instead, they marry and make their home in London, where Moni — intense but too silent — soon disappoints. When Anthony begins to stray — even when his mistress becomes practically a member of the household — Moni believes his divided heart will add an edge to their painful, eternal love; she cannot bear it when his manner changes to kindness and indifference. Moni’s sensibility — formed by the poetry (both English and Bengali) of anguished passion, darkness, and death — is the basis for gorgeous prose that flickers between romantic longing and exquisite detail. Gupta is impossible to quote briefly. In her sinuous sentences past and present, London and Calcutta, reality and shadow and the painful phrases of Tagore songs melt into one another in long continuous streams. A rare shimmering dream of a book.’

The introduction to this edition published under Westland’s Literary Activism series edited by Amit Chaudhuri states that the book “continues to surprise”*

*All copy from book flap.