Vinod Kumar Shukla

Satti Khanna

There were a hundred games the children played with the sky. Each question that arose in a child's mind was a game. 'Where is the moon?' they asked if they woke up in the middle of the night. There's a pygmy mountain at the edge of the village. Near the top of the mountain is a mysterious hole. If you toss a stone down that hole, it will keep falling until you return to hear it hit the bottom. There's a second-grader named Bolu in the village school. He only speaks while he walks. If you want to speak to him, you must walk with him. And then there's the moon, rising from the green grass roof. It travels with Bolu and his friends wherever they go. In this book, light as pebbles skimming across a pond, Vinod Kumar Shukla speaks of the wonder of a universe in which, however separate we seem, we are inevitably joined as one.

Moonrise From the Green Grass Roof

Suryakant Tripathi Nirala

Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala', the first modern Hindi poet of India, is all of sixteen and not conversant with the Khari Boli Hindi of the litterateurs yet when his father gets him married and sends him off to his in-laws' in Dalmau to fetch his bride. There he meets a strange man called Kulli Bhaat who claims descent from a family of bards and, despite his mother-in-law's reservations about Kulli's sexuality, Nirala finds himself drawn to Kulli. Then an influenza epidemic breaks out, claiming numerous lives, and Nirala's bereavement leaves him without mooring. Adrift on the boat of time, he seeks employment in various places but finds himself unable to stay away from Dalmau for long. Kulli, in the meanwhile, has taken a Muslim wife and become a champion of the untouchables. Set in pre-Independence India, A Life Misspent is as much the account of an unlikely friendship as it is a coming-of-age story. A memoir on the making of one of the greatest poets of all time.

A Life Misspent

Yasi, Rasa and Ta are three restless children who live modest lower-middle-class lives at the edge of town, but their imaginations gleam with threads of many colours. Bored bicycles move away from their owners in the hope of being stolen ... A light bulb in a sari shop mischievously switches itself on and off ... Chalk doodles squirm and squiggle when adults are in the room ... Sandals lying by the door plead to be worn ... The adults who play their games must enter many worlds - the one that prevails and the ones that are possible. They mumble and ask questions, but time and again they realize that a single glance won't take in the whole sky. In The Windows in Our House Are Little Doors, Vinod Kumar Shukla unrolls dreamy wisdom and brocade-like moments that catch the light and dazzle. This 'novel in twenty-six stories' is a thing of sublime joy and pure delight.

Satti Khanna

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