Book reviews

(TOI-Crest, this morning)

TALKING ABOUT JANE AUSTEN IN BAGHDAD by Bee Rowlatt and May Witwit
Some years ago my friend Asra Nomani and I did an email exchange across the border. She was on sabbatical from The World Street Journal and exploring family ties in Pakistan then and I was with the Times of India’s Internet division in Delhi. We wrote about life, how people were responding to the then-resurgent Afghan conflict, the aftermath of the Kargil War, the Hindu-Muslim divide and everything else, from parties to food to social mores. This correspondence was published by a newspaper in the United States and earned us lipstick money. It also gave us and our readers a chance to learn more about being women in rapidly changing situations in two very different cultures, with all their political, social and moral variations.

Something of this kind, only a lot more so, happened more recently between Bee Rowlatt in London and May Witwit in Baghdad, as documented in the frequently moving and occasionally tedious Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad. Bee, mother of three young girls and wife of a busy and peripatetic television journalist, worked at the BBC World Service Radio. She called May at random, as journalists often need to do for that all-important ‘quote’, and found an intelligent, articulate, highly qualified woman who quickly became more than a contact. The teacher of English literature at Baghdad University was soon a friend and, over the course of emails, text messages and a rare phone call or two, was close enough to be a sister.

May wrote to Bee about the anguish of being a modern woman in Baghdad. She and her much younger husband, Ali, came from opposite sides of a religious chasm – she was a Shia and he, a Sunni – that divided their families, society and the country. Her emails show not only the horror of Baghdad during and after the arrest and execution of Saddam Hussein, but the daily see-saw of violence and uneasy peace that she lived with. Touched by this, and genuinely horrified, Bee starts trying to find ways to get May and Ali out of their devastated land to a much safer life in England. Meanwhile, she sends money, gifts, reassurance and love through her sources to Baghdad, getting small packages and reams of electronic text in return. The mails are often interrupted by power failures and deprivation in Iraq and holidays and mundane chores in England, but they are expressive, often anguished and always full of emotion. The collaborative effort to help May and Ali escape frequently trips over bureaucracy and finances and does the one-step-forward-two-steps-back routine more often than not, but, after many hitches and halts, it all works out.

This is a must-read for anyone who cannot understand what ordinary people go through during a war. There is time to get haircuts and dream of new shoes, but it is never as simple as walking down to the nearest shopping centre and choosing a style. In a state of conflict, there are bullets to dodge, hatred to face and death to deal with at every turn, as May describes to Bee. It would have been interesting to read the emails unedited, with all the errors made typing in text through tears and anger, but the occasional spelling mistake and multiple exclamation marks do some of that job. The photograph at the end, reached after compulsive reading of page after page, of the two women locked in a hug, had me pushing back tears and that strange lump in the throat…


THE GREAT DEPRESSION OF THE 40s by Rupa Gulab
The novel begins with an insider joke – about a woman walking out of her newspaper job for a restaurant review that told it like it was rather than like the puff piece the management would have liked. Then the plot wanders about through a series of too many almost-predictable events all at once – domestic violence, Page 3 wannabes, infidelity with steamy sms exchanges, a maid doing well for herself with her memsahib’s help, suspicion, anger, tears, potentially fatal illness and more. Perhaps the best part of the admittedly well written and occasionally truly funny story is the dead mother-in-law who still lives with Mantra and her husband Vir. Readable, yes, but just once.