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Out of the many bookstores in Kathmandu and Lalitpur that I visit frequently, I find the one at Patandhoka, Lalitpur, called ‘Patan Book Shop’ to be the most useful and interesting. It’s a small space but the collection it has is simply amazing. There are shelves upon shelves filled with books as well as books piled high on stools, benches, and tables. It’s a little out of the way and I struggle with parking in the area so I don’t visit it as often as I would like to but whenever I can’t find a book or I want to discover some new titles or authors, I make it a point to go there.

I think I can easily spend a few hours at this bookstore. If you go there, just don’t browse through their new releases section. Take your time to go through the shelves. You will definitely come across some treasures. I found ‘A Mirror Made of Rain’ by Naheed Phiroze Patel here. I hadn’t heard about the author or the title and the cover art and the blurb both caught my attention. The fact that the book was dedicated to the author’s father, Phiroze, who, she says, would always find a kind word for anybody who needed one made me unable to put it down. I feel first novels and those dedicated to parents hold a lot of promise as there’s a lot at stake there.

The story is about Noomi Wadia, a young woman with a fraught relationship with her mother. Her father, Jeh, is supportive and she’s close to him but her mother has mental health issues and is also battling alcoholism. Noomi spends most of her childhood and teenage years fearing her mother and, along with Jeh, trying to get Asha to stop drinking. It takes a lot of her energy and time. But alcoholism is a tricky and difficult situation. No one and nothing can force an alcoholic to stop drinking. It puts a lot of strain on a family. Eventually, Noomi finds herself unable to cope and leaves home.

Years later, she’s all set to get married to Veer, someone she met at a pub and felt an instant connection with. But Noomi has inherited her mother’s self-destructive behaviors. She’s unable to cope in high pressure situations without a drink to calm her nerves. She, like everyone who enjoys alcohol a little too much, thinks she has it under control. But she carries miniature vodka bottles in her handbag and can never stop at one or two drinks at parties. Soon, she realizes she must control her impulses or risk everything she loves.

While I was reading A Mirror Made of Rain, I was unable to think of much else. The story and Noomi, Jeh, and Asha were on my mind all the time. It’s a dark and disturbing novel about what addiction can do to a family and how every person has his/her way of dealing with the trauma. The author has fleshed out the characters really well and you can see what drives them to do the things they do and empathize with them. Even the relatives and friends, who make occasional appearances, are apt depictions of our overly curious to the point of intrusive society.

All in all, A Mirror Made of Rain is a brave and unflinching story that deserved to be told. It’s a reminder of the fact that the most potent sorrows and sufferings are often generational and that children who see too much of it early on carry battle wounds of sorts for the rest of their lives, and that their perception of love is perhaps forever skewed. A word of caution though: Peppered with Hindi words and phrases, reading this book can sometimes be a bit jarring, especially if you aren’t familiar with the culture and its slangs but it’s just a minor hiccup. 

A Mirror Made of Rain

Naheed Phiroze Patel

Published: 2021

Publisher: Fourth Estate

Pages: 285, Paperback

There’s a quaint little bookshop in Bhanimandal, Lalitpur, called Wisdom Books and Aroma Shop that sells books, notebooks, candles, incense, and various other handicraft items. It also has a small cafe on the first floor where you can get some tea or coffee and light snacks. It’s a place I often go to if I want to buy a little something for someone or if I’m in the area and have some time to spare. 

During one of my visits, I chanced upon a cookbook called ‘The Ayurvedic Cookbook’ by Gita Ramesh. It was on the counter and it was a slim volume. For a while now, I’ve been into finding and collecting interesting cookbooks so that I can learn to cook a variety of dishes. The copy I was holding in my hand turned out to be a third edition published in 2016. I thought to myself if the book had to be reprinted three times, it must be good. The bookstore owner also said he and his wife had been following some recipes in the book and that the meals were simple and satisfying. 

The Ayurvedic Cookbook is a basic cookbook. The recipes, divided into sections like salads, soups and mains, are simple, so simple that I often wondered why the author had even bothered including something like that in a book. I later realized that we often forget the joys of simple meals and having it written down somewhere reminds us to indulge in them whenever you can. My mother, who has been cooking and feeding her family for over 35 years, says she will have forgotten about a certain recipe for months, only to be reminded of it out of the blue one day. 

The problem in regular cooking is that you tend to make the same dish over and over again instead of trying to cook a particular vegetable in different ways. The Ayurvedic Cookbook will teach you to use everyday ingredients in a variety of ways and in different forms. I learnt a great recipe for a banana cucumber salad that I really enjoyed. I was initially doubtful about the combination but surprisingly bananas and cucumbers go really well together. The papaya salad was another recipe that I liked. I don’t like papaya and I would have probably never known how great it can be in salad form if it hadn’t been for this book. 

The cookbook also has a nice section on soups. There are recipes for the regular tomato soup and mixed vegetable soup as well as more elaborate ones that teach you how to incorporate oats in your soup and even make a tasty okra soup. As for the mains, you will learn to cook different vegetables in interesting ways. The curry recipes in the book result in light and flavorful dishes. Basically, all the recipes in the book can be replicated using simple ingredients that you can readily find in your fridge and pantry. 

As a practitioner of Ayurveda, Ramesh has also included a section of diet plans at the end of the book for weight management and healthy living. There’s a daily diet plan section, with different recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for 12 days. The good thing is that all the recipes require minimal preparation and cooking time so they aren’t difficult to follow. In the introduction to the book, Ramesh says that she has kept in mind that the recipes in the book are suitable for all body types. The aim, she says, is to offer readers a balanced diet that is delicious and meets all their nutritional requirements.

What I really liked about the book was the informative section of different spices, fruits, and vegetables. I have found that it helps to educate yourself about the variety of ingredients in your kitchen so that you can decide what you want to add to your food to suit what you might want and need at that given moment. You are also able to use food as medicine if you understand the properties of different herbs and spices. In that way, The Ayurvedic Cookbook arms you with a lot of helpful information while teaching you to use basic ingredients to whip up simple and wholesome meals. 

The Ayurvedic Cookbook

Gita Ramesh

Publisher: Roli Books

Published: 2013

Pages: 95, Hardcover

Samantha Harvey’s ‘Orbital’ is the winner of The Booker Prize 2024. This slim novel is about six astronauts as they rotate in a spacecraft above earth. There to collect meteorological data and conduct scientific experiments, the astronauts observe the space from a unique vantage point. They see earth in all its glory and feel protective about it as they question what it means to be alive and what in fact is reality when they are so far away from home.

The good thing about writing a review of Orbital is that I don’t have to worry about the possibility of giving out spoilers, like I usually am while working on book reviews. It’s basically an account of what these six astronauts see from space and how they feel about it. There’s no plot as such except for the day to day occurrences in their lives. Their backstories make for tiny slivers of the story which takes place in one day but time is measured differently in space. Morning arrives every 90 minutes and each of the chapters record a single orbit of the earth.

Harvey has captured the psychology of these characters and interspersed it with visuals of the earth from space. You will get to be in a certain character’s head and then suddenly be jolted with views of the craters and ridges of the earth. The combination, I felt, works for a short while so it’s a good thing that the book isn’t long. I enjoyed the book but it felt like the narrative was dragging on by the end of it. Any longer and I would have probably given up on it.

But Harvey’s writing makes the scenes come alive in front of your eyes. You get a bird’s eye view of a space station and the universe that surrounds it. She describes it so well. It’s almost like you are the one on the mission. Harvey has written other novels like ‘The Wilderness’, ‘All is Song’, ‘Dear Thief’, and ‘The Western Wind’ and a work of non-fiction called ‘The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping’ which is a study of insomnia and its complexities. Judging by her body of work, it seems she’s fascinated with things that can’t be explained easily but attempts to do it anyway. Orbital might be her boldest work yet as there isn’t another piece of fiction like it.

In an interview, Harvey said she wrote Orbital during a period of anxiety induced insomnia. She started the book before the pandemic but most of it was written during the lockdown. That probably explains the sense of urgency and desperation in Orbital. The story makes you feel trapped—in the space station, the character’s heads and thoughts—and leaves you with little room to think for yourself. Despite being a novel, it’s also a book you can dip in and out of as there’s an almost essay-like quality to it. Don’t be fooled by the novel’s slim size, it’s not an easy and thus quick read and you could be a little confused at times. But I urge you to give it a try as it’s different and daring. 

Fiction

Orbital

Samantha Harvey

Published: 2024

Publisher: Vintage

Pages: 136, Paperback

Featuring 12 stories by different authors, all of whom are fans of Agatha Christie and Jane Marple, ‘Marple’ is a collection that you might want to give a miss if you haven’t grown up reading Christie. Otherwise, this anthology is a great book to pick up for a trip down memory lane. Some stories are short, some are long, but they all feature our favorite heroine Miss Marple and her charm and wit are on full display.

Miss Marple, one of literature’s favorite detectives, first appeared on print in a short story called ‘The Tuesday Night Club’ in Dec 1927. She reappeared in the novel ‘The Murder at the Vicarage’ in 1930, followed by 11 other books after that, as well as several other short stories. She is observant and intelligent and solves crimes because, with her keen eye, she doesn’t miss a thing.

Marple is an ode to St Mary Mead’s sharpest mind. The collection has stories from bestselling authors like Lucy Foley, Ruth Ware, Kate Mosse, and Leigh Bardugo among others. A murder mystery is a difficult genre to attempt in a short format. You have to get to it right away and there’s little or no time to set the scene or develop the characters. You run the risk of being unable to make the readers care. But the writers in the anthology know how to tell gripping stories and their craft is on full display. Despite having to keep it brief, they manage to build suspense.

Out of the 12 stories, there was just one I didn’t like. My husband, who was reading the same book with me for our two-member unofficial book club, didn’t like it either. It’s called ‘Murder at Villa Rose’ and it’s by Elly Griffths. It’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s about an imaginary murder that actually turns out to be imaginary. The author put absolutely no thought into it. All the others have solid elements of mystery in them. Murder at Villa Rose is just pointless.

For this collection, the publisher roped in established crime writers with distinctly different writing styles. The result is a collection where every story, despite having a common theme and similar setting, is unique and refreshing. All the stories, even the one I didn’t enjoy, get the essence of Miss Marple just right. Her mannerisms and quirks feel familiar. At times, I even forgot it wasn’t Agatha Christie’s stories that I was reading.

If I had to choose, I’d say ‘The Jade Empress’ by Jean Kwok, ‘The Disappearance’ by Leigh Bardugo, and ‘A Deadly Wedding’ by Dreda Say Mitchell were my top three favorites. In January, I read one story before work every now and then and it set a nice tone to my days. I’d constantly be thinking about whichever story I’d recently read with a smile on my face. More cozy than riveting, if murder mysteries are your thing these stories might be just what you need to power through a particularly rough day. 

Short Stories

Marple

Published: 2022

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 372, Paperback