February fiction: A graphic novel and five new titles for this month’s reading

All information sourced from publishers.

Gooday Nagar, Maithreyi Karnoor

Inhabiting the weirdly wonderful world of Gooday Nagar are disillusioned playwrights and their trysts with soan papdi, vacuum-cleaner salesmen, armless ghosts and erstwhile revolutionaries with a fear of gobhi manchurian.

In this city that could be any and every city in India, lives have been disrupted by the Covid pandemic but put back together by thieving monkeys. People wake up in a post-apocalyptic world only to discover everything is made of cake, medieval English castles hide unlikely stories of murder and magic, and heaven-made marriages are unmade on earth.

Story after story in Karnoor’s surreal, spellbinding collection unearths the ironies of modern life and rewrites its philosophy with humour, in language that serves as both the medium and the message.

Absolute Jafar, Sarnath Banerjee

Brighu is getting older. Badminton has replaced judo, irritation has replaced anger, metabolism has slowed down. Yet, some things remain: the inability to take a cab, anxieties about the digital universe and panic for the future. So Brighu walks. Unceasingly, through known and unknown terrains, with the pointlessness of a detective without a case.

An Indo-Pak romance withstands years of toxic nationalism between two hostile countries, only to unravel in a third, in Europe. Jafar, born of that romance, inherits a history he has no control over. As he grows up in Berlin, his father, Brighu, desperate to hold on to the fantasies of a fading home, tells him bedtime stories: of sultans and jinns, of street food and eccentric cousins, of Delhi, Calcutta and Karachi.

Set in a world where bureaucracies and borders shape human relationships, Sarnath Banerjee’s Absolute Jafar is a meditation on belonging and becoming.

The Last of Earth, Deepa Anappara

1869. Tibet is closed to Europeans, an infuriating obstruction for the rap­idly expanding British Empire. In response, Britain begins training Indians – permitted to cross borders that white men may not – to undertake illicit, dangerous surveying expeditions into Tibet.

Balram is one such surveyor-spy, an Indian schoolteacher who, for several years, has worked for the British, often alongside his dearest friend, Gyan. But Gyan went missing on his last expedition and is rumoured to be imprisoned within Tibet. Desperate to rescue his friend, Balram agrees to guide an English captain on a foolhardy mission: After years of paying others to do the exploring, the captain, disguised as a monk, wants to personally chart a river that runs through southern Tibet. Their path will cross fatefully with that of another Westerner in disguise, 50-year-old Katherine. Denied a fellowship in the all-male Royal Geographical Society in London, she intends to be the first European woman to reach Lhasa.

As Balram and Katherine make their way into Tibet, they will face storms and bandits, snow leopards and soldiers, fevers and frostbite. What’s more, they will have to battle their own doubts, ambitions, grief, and pasts in order to survive the treacherous landscape.

The Missing Memsahib, Arjun Raj Gaind

Maharaja Sikander Singh of Rajpore, barely returned from his adventures at the Delhi Durbar, receives an invitation to the wedding of his childhood tutor, Peter Rowan. Ever eager to escape his princely duties, he travels to Bombay to attend the nuptials. Upon arriving, he learns that his friend's intended bride, Miss Mary Hartley, has vanished.

The vessel transporting her out from England docked the day before, with no trace of Miss Hartley to be found on ship or ashore. A distraught Rowan, convinced something dreadful has befallen his betrothed, pleads with Sikander to find the young lady. Sikander, always up for a mystery, is delighted to oblige.

Sikander’s journey to track down Miss Hartley leads him across the city, from the rarefied heights of Malabar Hill and the colonial bungalows of Byculla to the seamy underbelly of the native city, deep into the crowded gullies of Pydhonie and the flesh markets of Falkland Road. With each new interview, a bewildering and often conflicting portrait of Miss Hartley emerges. Did Miss Hartley change her mind about getting married and decide to run away? Or has something genuinely terrible happened to the Missing Memsahib, something so horrible that even Sikander, with all his wealth and influence, will not be able to save her?

An Ocean in a Well, D Ravikumar, translated from the Tamil by V Ramakrishnan

A stranger in a village is befriended by an itinerant salesman who shares his meal with him – only to be repaid in an unexpected manner. The opening story in this collection, “Thambi”, sets the tone for the stories that follow, where the characters remain nameless for the most part, yet give voice to the internal struggles of men and women caught in an increasingly divisive society where questions of trust, love, loss and loneliness have a profound effect on their lives.

In “Un-timely”, a young girl dies a mysterious death, and is reunited with the man who loves her – but just for a day. In the titular story, “An Ocean in a Well”, a man’s search for his mother draws him to the ocean, but leads him to a well where he hears her voice, and sees the waves rising from within, beckoning him.

“Fact finding” and “A Death and Some More” portray a bleak picture of persistent caste-based violence in a modern world and the ineffectiveness of the political system. And in stories like “Zha, The Unique Letter”, “The Word” and “A Theory Concerning Theft”, Ravikumar satirises the contemporary ideological and intellectual scene of Tamil Nadu, exposing the follies of a culture in transition.

Together, these stories explore themes ranging from the psychological struggles of individuals, to the ideological and societal conflicts of the Tamil people.

The View From Here, edited by Githa Hariharan and K Satchidananda

During the seven years of its existence, from 2015 to 2022, the multilingual journal of culture Guftugu resolutely asserted India’s diversity against the attempt to force-fit the country into a single mould. Selected from the 22 published issues of Guftugu, The View from Here arms us with prose and verse that bear powerful witness to the many Indias, past and present. 20 stories and more than 50 poems are, together, unflinching in their insistence on diversity, dissent and, most of all, equality.