Meena Arora Nayak

Myths and Folktales of India

The Blue Lotus

In the enchanted land of Kashir, the only casualty was peace... On the evening of 17 December 1971, Indira Gandhi declares ceasefire against Pakistan, seemingly bringing an end to months of violence and terror along the Indo-Pak border. At just about the same time, in the Kashmir Valley - Kashir to its people - Salahudin Bhatt of Zaina Kadal, Srinagar, has another reason to celebrate: the birth of a grandson, whom he names Ali, after Islam's greatest warrior. Yet, Salahudin is uneasy, for the boy's father has inadvertently spoken the words of war in the child's ear, and who knows what that might portend? Despite Salahudin's best efforts to keep the boy out of harm's way with mystic formulas and charms, Ali grows up strangely at odds with the world around him. The minor afflictions in his life, of which there are many, are compounded by the animosity he feels towards Ayesha, his eldest sister, with whom he shares an unspeakable secret. Then, when Ali is eleven, the family is struck by a terrible tragedy. face, for the first time, with the horrors wreaked on his beloved Kashir, Ali takes a decision that will change his life, and that of his family, for good. Evoking in fascinating detail the legends and rituals of Kashmiri life as well as the desolation of a land torn apart at its very seams, Endless Rain is a poignant tale about ordinary lives trapped in violent times.

Endless Rain

Margaret Clark

Almost 3000 years ago, a highway robber wrote one of the world's greatest epics. He is known to us as Valmiki. In the 5th century BC.

The Puffin Book Of Legendary Lives

Good and evil, loyalty and treachery, faith and doubt, honour and ignominy—the Mahabharata has served as a primer for codes of conduct to generations of Hindus. Over time, the epic has also fascinated those who love a tale well told. In its telling, however, the story has lost much of its richness and nuance, and the characters have become one-dimensional cut-outs—either starkly good or irredeemably evil. In this reinterpretation, Meena Arora Nayak analyses how the values espoused in the Mahabharata came to be distorted into meagre archetypes, creating customary laws that injure society even today.

Meena Arora Nayak

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