On The Shelf

MONSOON DIARY: A MEMOIR WITH RECIPES
By Shoba Narayan
Penguin India
Price: Rs 295
Monsoon Diary is a memoir, and it has recipes. While the first takes up a fair amount of the space, at the end of the read, it is the latter which the reader is most likely to remember better. There are recipes for South Indian temptations rasam, idli, upma, vatral kuzhambu. All-time Indian favourites like fruit chaat, thandai, puri, pav bhaji, too, find a place. I would not do the author justice if I dwell too much on the food. Let us not forget the book is, technically speaking, a memoir. The author has made a modest effort at engaging the reader in anecdotes of her life and experiences in Madras, Coimbatore, Vaikom and later America. The book also offers an interesting insight into the life and times of the TamBram, of maamis and their silk sarees and diamonds, of arranged marriages and the eccentricities of Indian relatives.

— Miranda Yambem

BEYOND INDIGO
By Preethi Nair
HarperCollins
Price: Rs 295

Double lives are a big theme in NRI chick lit. In Everything Happens for a Reason Kavita Daswani had her America-based twentysomething bahu break Hollywood gossip on the sly. And now Nair, her Britain-based counterpart, tells of Nina’s brush with success. Having lost her boyfriend, job and — triple horror! — spiritual guru in one swoop, Nina gives in to the certitudes of an arranged marriage. Only one thing, she fails to mention that she’s now a lawyer without a brief, and so in a bid to salvage self-image she must disappear each day pretending to be at work. To make a merry story short, she hits the canvas and is soon picked up by an influential art dealer. But having fibbed once, she must keep up pretences, and lie that she is in fact not the painter and only an art dealer. Oh well, when success and happiness are up for grabs, deception is perhaps not a bad strategy.