Words From Vaish

One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing Jasper Fforde Hodder 2011                                                                          388 Pages What if characters in books had a life of their own when no-one was reading the books they inhabited? The marvellously named Jasper Fforde runs (all over the place) with this meta-fictional conceit in the inventively whimsical One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing . His BookWorld is a meta-textual realm (a vast planet? dimensional plain? or alternative universe?)   inhabited by every fictional character ever to appear in print and where competing genres – i.e. Racy Novel and ...

BULLSTRUCK Travelling in a crowded DTC bus, I happened to notice a slogan painted on the curve where the roof meets the side. “Untouchability is a crime against Man and God” it read. Whoever had put up that slogan needn’t have worried; I couldn’t have practiced untouchability even if I’d wanted to. An angular bony gentleman was “touching” my midriff with his elbow and a rather corpulent lady was “touching” my left big toe with sole of her Kohlapuri chappal . Though national solidarity is a desirable goal, I wished I wasn’t so “touchable” or in such intimate physical contact with my fellow citizens. I was luckier than most, having acquired standing room inside the bus, many of my fellow commuters were doing a Spiderman imitation in the doorways. The aforementioned gaunt gent livened up the journey and not just with his funny bone applied strategically against my solar plexus. He was dressed in an Edwardian toff’s outfit from the waist up and below that a diaphanous dho...

A Winter Vignette T he park was a patch of lawn fenced in by black iron railings and a privet hedge. It was a green oasis sandwiched between three rows of mews houses in a quiet housing estate. The people who lived there were mostly childless, so few kids at play  disturbed the neat rows of chrysanthemums, carnations and hollyhocks. Every morning, the girl in the window used to crank up her recliner bed. She would get into the wheelchair parked by her bedside and wheel herself to the big bay window at the end of her bedroom. The park below was as desolate as a cemetery in the pale fog of a cold December morning. At 7 o’clock sharp, the man from the Central Reserve Police Force wheeled his battered old bicycle down the gravel path from the main gate. On this morning, like so many others, he propped his locked bike against a tree and went into the gardener’s shed. The policeman came out a few minutes later, wearing a tracksuit with the letters CRPF stenciled o...

VANISHING ACT There was a gadget in the old Star Trek TV show that de-materialized people and then re-materialized them thousands or millions of miles away. This sounds like a fun way to travel; no waiting in queues for visas, no expensive airline bookings, no rotten flights for the air sick or those afraid of flying... But it wasn’t really much fun when it first happened. That was when the “gift” first manifested itself. “Gift” did I say? Curse, more like.  I didn’t notice at first, going to University College Cork and adjusting to hostel life for the first time has a way of distracting you. Attention-grabbing peers, the academic course load, etc. etc. also didn’t help. Anyway, I had a history of losing stuff since I was a wee colleen with flame-red hair in pigtails. So I chalked up the mysterious vanishing of sundry study materials and some of my personal kit to a natural propensity of mislaying my possessions and didn’t give it much further thought. Big m...

Bad Dad David Walliams Illustrated by Tony Ross HarperCollins Children’s Books 2017                                                   422 Pages           There once used to be a preachy school of sententious Victorian children’s fiction wherein the bad boy was eaten up by a lion for his wickedness; whilst the good boy came into deserved fame and fortune, before being drawn up to heaven by God and his angels. Thankfully, kid lit had come a long way since those awful days. Bad Dad is gleefully anarchic, but no less moralistic, plentiful comic havoc notwithstanding. The “Bad Dad” of the title isn’t really bad; he’s a racing champion crippled after a horrific crash and bla...

THE IMPROBABLE THEORY OF ANA & ZAK Brian Katcher Katherine Tegen Books 2015              328 Pages There’s a gap wider than the entire breadth of the alphabet between  A (Ana) and Z (Zak), the high school protagonists of this Young Adult comedy of escalating errors. A type A personality, driven overachiever and straight-A student Ana Watson resembles a proto-Margaret Thatcher. The product of  a strict upbringing, repressed Ana is meekly subservient to parental diktats while coming across as arrogant and aloof to everyone else.   Happy-go-lucky slacker Zakory “Duke” Duquette, on the other hand, has no clear goals in life and is happy to drift along; indulging his fondness for such geeky pastimes as role-playing games, comic books, science fiction movies and other such manifestations of American pop culture. Both characters are humanly flawed, somewhat irritating and fairly well...

BORN A CRIME Stories From A South African Childhood Trevor Noah John Murray 2016       288 Pages “Racism is a problem everywhere else in the world, in South Africa it is the law”. Under that law (now happily defunct) the birth of comedian Trevor Noah to a black Xhosa woman and white Swiss father was nothing less than a crime; an act punishable by a five-year prison sentence. But people being people, and the pull of individual personal attraction being too strong, even the stringent enforcement of Apartheid failed to prevent widespread race-mixing. This is something our caste panchayats , moral police and anti-“love jihad” activists should also seriously consider. Despite the best efforts of these sundry worthies, inter-religious, inter-regional and inter-caste marriages DO take place. And that’s besides the many Indians with spouses who are foreign nationals... The best way to puncture the absurdities of this essentially untenab...

My Not So Perfect Life Sophie Kinsella Bantam Press 2017                                                                                                     391 Pages Author Sophie Kinsella’s patented chick lit formula is the literary equivalent of blandly satisfying comfort food like mashed potatoes and chicken soup. My Not So Perfect Life constitutes another helping, only slightly more astringent in flavour. That faint tinge of bitter comes from the setting of the cutthroat w...

[FICTION] The Everything Box Richard Kadrey Harper Voyager  369 Pages A religious/mystical/historical artifact desperately desired by disparate groups of people willing to stop at nothing to acquire it. This has been the plot engine behind everything from  The Maltese Falcon  to  Raiders Of The Lost Ark . Now, writer/photographer Richard Kadrey tries his hand at something also done before in  Good Omens  by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Not to mention the humorous apocalypses of Douglas Adams and Christopher Moore... A Los Angeles cat burglar named Charlie “Coop” Cooper - a specialist in purloining magical objects - steals and delivers a small box to the mysterious client who engaged his services. Coop doesn’t know that his latest job could be the end of him - and the world as well.  What follows is madcap mayhem of confusion and double-cross straight out of the pages of Elmore Leonard and Thomas Perry. For a secret US gov...

The policeman at the checkpoint picked his nose with his left hand, scratched himself and spat wetly onto the road. His right hand held a Thums Up bottle and a lighted bidi between gnarled and calloused fingers. A bamboo lathi dangled from his right wrist by its leather loop. His jaws worked rhythmically around a quid of paan. A young constable regarded this revolting sight with nervous affection. His grizzled superior looked exactly like a hard-working Havildar should look. So many social engagements, so little time. The Havildar mournfully contemplated the colossal cabriole curve of his enormous pot belly. The starched khaki of his uniform blouse was strained to bursting point by his protruding paunch and softened in placed by dark patches of perspiration. He philosophically took a swig of his cola and a puff of his bidi. Gather ye roses while ye may. A policeman’s lot is a hard one; what with sundry speeding motorists, eve-teasers, auto-lifters, terrorists – and not to...