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Literary Review
Book Watch
Tea times
JASON GOODWIN had two grandmothers. One liked tea and the other — she liked Chinese tea. Young Jason grew up with Lapsang Souchong and Darjeeling playing their subtle melodies on his palate. Years later, he set off on the Tea Route.
Goodwin begins with Hong Kong, goes on to China and ends up in London via Darjeeling and the Nilgiris. He stays in dives and houseboats, unfurling the intricate mystery of producing fine teas. His search for old auction houses and tea "professors" sets up collisions between alien worlds, which Goodwin describes with an unerring eye for the comic. The bends in the road of his quest are interspersed with excerpts from old books that bring alive the fraught journey of tea from third century Szechwan to the modern supermarket, and its place in the building of empire.
"Leaf tea which was steeped" was China's last refinement in tea making, preceded by whipped tea, drunk in blue-black bowls that set off the green froth. Chinese tea drinking trends make most of us in India seem atavists. Unless we are Easterners, we usually like our tea kheer-like: sugary, boiled up with cardamom. Similarly, in the Chinese Early Tea Period, "cake tea ... was boiled", to which would sometimes be added "onion, ginger, jujube... peppermint". It was scorned even in 775 as "the slop water of a ditch".
The Gunpowder Gardens, Jason Goodwin, Penguin £4.99.
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Ism, or isn't?
IN the dim and distant past, the Congress had an ideology. To argue that the party still adheres to it is to walk on leaf thin ice. This thin ice is what Congressman Ashish Talwar skates on.
His book is a paean to the Congress; one hardly expects searching self-analysis from a party man. But Talwar's account contrasts so sharply with reality that it demands an impossible leap of faith from the reader.
The chapter on Democracy, for example, does contain passing mention of that little inconvenience we know as the Emergency. But the author is indignant at its critics. Not only was that kind of "control willingly discarded", the Congress leadership's nobility extended to expressing "regrets for any excesses committed during that period". The breath-stopping righteousness is continued in the chapter on Secularism: the Congress has apparently never stooped to using religion for petty political gain.
The Congress's ability to make its ideology, such as it is, dance to the will of political expediency, poses a dilemma for the logic-obsessed: does this leave it with any ideology worth writing about? Nevertheless, in the process of making out a case for attaching an "ism" to the Congress that is neither left nor right of centre, Talwar, drawing on various documents, has provided a ready reckoner of the party's position on diverse issues. He's also given us a peek into what the Dorian Grays of the Congress see when they look in the mirror.
Congressism: The Ideology of the Indian National Congress, Ashish Talwar, Frank Brothers, Rs. 290.
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War worlds
CONFLICT — the bitter flavour of these times — is the theme of the latest book-sized double issue of The Little Magazine. Gujarat, Kashmir, Iraq, Punjab — there's no dearth of material. In a moving short story translated from Malayalam, the man with folded hands and pleading eyes in that most published photograph of the Gujarat carnage is endowed with a life, thoughts, hopes and a smile that are destroyed when the mob comes. Noam Chomsky writes a sarcastic solution to the Iraq crisis, in which Iran invades it, Gulzar's screenplay for "Maachis" is reproduced, there are stories and poems, and more. The range of material and writers is startling, even if all of it makes for such grim reading that in the end I had to search out relief in Tom and Jerry hyper-massacres.
The Little Magazine, Special Issue, Rs. 150.
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Rajneesh babies
ONE wouldn't normally associate the two, but Bhagwan does rhyme somewhat with Spiderman. To Tim Guest, growing up in a Rajneesh commune in Leeds, it was the most natural thing to do — to alternate between being Bhagwan, Zorro and Spiderman.
All the Leeds sannayasis wore beads. To Guest it was normal to wear a baby mala as a child, and there were special malas to identify commune children on visitor's days: they had yellow or green beads, or more ominously, silver or gold: silver showed the child was awaiting the result of an AIDS test, gold signified an "all-clear". On the matter of beads for those who tested positive, Guest is intriguingly silent.
This issue of Granta is about friends and families, many of whom are neither friendly nor loving. In Oedipal India, where parent and God are revered equally, it is liberating to read novelist Angela Lambert on her mother: "I resented her from the age of seven and gave up trying to love her by the time I was twelve... [her] hair was often greasy and smelled somehow wiry, sour... she had a big nose and a habit of stroking it downward [to] reduce its size ... she was vain and shallow, she could be spiteful, and she was always self-obsessed."
Granta, The Group, £5.99.
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A cricket prize?
TOMORROW some people will eat lunch at the Royal Over-Seas League in St. James's Street, London. Between slivers of smoked salmon and sips of Merlot, judges will announce the winner of The Cricket Society Book of the Year Award. This award is for the best book on cricket published in the United Kingdom. Ramachandra Guha's A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador, 2002) is on the four-book shortlist.
ANURADHA ROY
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