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When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition.Known as the twice-born - first into the flesh, and again when initiated into their vocation - the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death, is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. At every turn, the seductive,...
When Skanda's father Toby dies, estranged from Skanda's mother and from the India he once loved, it falls to Skanda to return his body to his birthplace. This is a journey that takes him halfway around the world and deep within three generations of his family, whose fractures, frailties and toxic legacies he has always sought to elude. Both an intimate portrait of a marriage and its aftershocks, and a panoramic vision of India's half-century - in which a rapacious new energy supplants an ineffectual elite - The Way Things Were is an epic novel about the pressures of history upon the present moment. It is also a meditation on the stories we tell and the stories we forget; their tenderness and violence in forging bonds and in breaking them apart. Set in modern Delhi and at flashpoints from the past four decades, fusing private and political, classical and contemporary to thrilling effect, this book confirms Aatish Taseer as one of the most arresting voices of his generation.
'A subtle and poignant work by a young writer to watch' - V.S. Naipaul 'An amazing narrative, a kind of Muslim Odyssey' - Antonia Fraser As a child, all Aatish Taseer ever had of his father was his photograph in a browning silver frame. Raised by his Sikh mother in Delhi, his father, a Pakistani Muslim, remained a distant figure. It was a fractured upbringing which left Aatish with many questions about his own identity. Stranger to History is the story of the journey Aatish made to answer these questions. Starting from Istanbul, Islam's once greatest city, he travels to Mecca, its most holy, and then home through Iran and Pakistan. Ending in Lahore, at his estranged father's home, on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed, it is also the story of Aatish's own divided family over the past fifty years. Part memoir, part travelogue, probing, stylish and troubling, this outstanding work now includes an incisive new introduction which brings Aatish's story up to date with the horrific assassination of his father in early 2011.
Set over twenty years of convulsive change, Noon is the story of Rehan Tabassum, a young man whose heart is split across two cultures’ troubled divide. Throughout his young life, Rehan has been aware of his father’s absence. The journey to find him is long and difficult, from the glitter of his mother’s New Delhi to the Pakistan of her former lover, the man Rehan has never known. Through lands of sudden wealth and hidden violence, in a toxic atmosphere of blackmail and moral danger, he travels towards the centre of a dark and shifting world. But his imagined destination is simply another beginning . . . ‘As the political and personal undergo seismic shifts, Taseer grapples with new ways of telling stories. In both form and content, he conveys with great acuity what happens when the ground beneath our feet is shaken to its core’ Independent ‘An engrossing and gifted writer’ GQ ‘Imbued with a feel of latent menace, Noon explores a morally unedifying world of power, corruption, violence and complicity’ Guardian ‘Gripping’ Sunday Times
The seductive and uncompromising debut novel from the author of Stranger to History
The gentle dhobi who transforms into a killer, a prostitute who is more child than woman, the cocky, young coachman who falls in love at first sight, a father convinced that his son will die before his first birthday. Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories are vivid, dangerous and troubling and they slice into the everyday world to reveal its sombre, dark heart. These stories were written from the mid 30s on, many under the shadow of Partition. No Indian writer since has quite managed to capture the underbelly of Indian life with as much sympathy and colour. In a new translation that for the first time captures the richness of Manto’s prose and its combination of high emotion and taut narrative, this is a classic collection from the master of the Indian short story.
As a child, all Aatish Taseer ever had of his father was his photograph in a browning silver frame. Raised by his Sikh mother in Delhi, his Pakistani father remained a distant figure, almost a figment of his imagination, until Aatish crossed the border when he was twenty-one to finally meet him. In the years that followed, the relationship between father and son revived, then fell apart. For Aatish, their tension had not just to do with the tensions of a son rediscovering his absent father -- they were intensified by the fact that Aatish was Indian, his father Pakistani and Muslim. It had complicated his parents' relationship; now it complicated his. The relationship forced Aatish to ask lar...
What does it mean to be a young Muslim in the 21st century? When Aatish Taseer receives a challenging letter from his estranged father in Pakistan, he decides to set off on an expedition across the Islamic world in search of his own Islamic heritage.
The remarkable story of how a Westerner ventured into the heart of radical Islam in Yemen.
A Full Circle is an evocative ode to the power of poetry, in which art and verse bring each other alive. In this poem, author and artist Namrita Bachchan describes the magic of childhood and what the world looks like through the eyes of her curious, free-spirited five-year-old daughter, as she explores the wonder of reading. Enriched by a soothing rhythm, the words in this exquisitely illustrated book run parallel to ethereal imagery, immersing readers of all ages in a fantastical journey against the backdrop of nature. Within these pages, a wide, wild world waits to be discovered - in a way that is finer, freer, and ultimately fuller.