Miss Wisey Pants

"I fought, I struggled, I obeyed, I compromised, I rebelled, I surrendered, but above all, and at last, I think, I found myself. I found the truth that is me. I lived the life given to me as a woman with all honesty, true to my instincts and faithful to my impulses, eager and yearning, but always true to myself. Always." There are books you don't just read, but books you have long conversations with. Ahalya's Awakening was one such gem. I immersed myself in it, read and re-read chapters to uncover the meanings they so beautifully hid. But most of all, I devoured it!  The book tells us the story of Ahalya, born a Princess, married to be a Rishika, but destined to be every bit a human first. As a young girl, she had to fight with her family for her right to seek education and not simply be married off to the best suitor meant to be her destiny. She stood her ground even when all the odds were pitted against her. As she grew older, she kept evolving and surprising hersel...

  "She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how people like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us." Endurance is what comes to the mind when one reads A Thousand Splendid Suns. It's a gut-wrenching account of two women connected by an obstinate thread of fate, violence and destiny. Although they are years apart, they find each other thrown together in the merciless rut of destiny where time stands still but sufferings continue to grow.  Mariam was once a wide-eyed little girl full of naive hopes & dreams. Cared for by a woeful mother, she lived from one day to the other desperate to see her father. A father for whom paying weekly visits to his illegitimate daughter was enough to fulfil his fatherly duties towards her ...

  "Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realise, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought." The Help was nothing like I had imagined it to be. This title was sitting on my want-to-read list since forever. And now I'm reeling with the effects of its hangover. This book was an absolute delight. It got me hooked so much so that I stopped caring where my phone was, started pushing everything else just to get a few more minutes with the book and forgot all about my sleep schedule for the next few days! The Help is a story of three women - Aibileen, Mini & Skeeter - cautious but strong. The three of them set off on a mission to make the voices of the black women of Jackson, Mississippi heard, albeit anonymously. These black women, who were hired as help, raised white babies like their own, cooked food for white families with love, tended to their sick with warmth and took care of their homes with utmost sincerity. And ...

  " Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again ." I'm not a fan of love stories and I did not quite know what exactly I was getting into when I picked up this book, but once I started reading it I didn't really have a choice. Have you ever had a friend (or even an acquaintance for that matter) who has a habit of bringing up their childhood friends, whom you've never ever heard of before, by their first name in conversations with you? And there you are left wondering whether this was some person you were supposed to know until finally your friend understands your predicament & unapologetically decides to give you some context! This book is like that friend. Right from page one it starts talking to you...about everything under the sun as if you've known them for long. At first,...

"Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night." That's pretty much the tone of this novel. The Lowland happened to me by accident - one I have no qualms about. While vacating my beloved flat in Gurugram last month, I chanced upon this novel on an abandoned bookshelf in the living room I shared with my flatmates. Since there was nobody to claim it, I decided to make it mine!  The Lowland is a story of an ordinary Bengali family torn by the Naxal movement back in the 1960s when life, supposedly, used to be simpler. It narrates the story of two brothers who, inseparable as kids, grew up to be polar opposites of each other. While the elder one, Subhash, moves to the US to build his own identity, the younger one, Udayan,...

“ When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same ?” That's Marie Laure for you. One of our protagonists. She's plainly a victim of her circumstances. At a young age, she loses her eyesight. Her father is her world. He's a gentle soul whose world revolves around "ma cherie" as he fondly calls his daughter. He builds for her a safe haven, one where her eyesight can't be a deterrence to her.  All the light we cannot see tells us the story of a father & a daughter, a brother & a sister and two friends, all of these relations afflicted by one single tyrant - the war. It's a story of love, trust & loyalty. Of hope amid darkness and belief amid hopelessness. Above all of this, it's a story of survival.  It's the offset of World War - II, David LeBlanc is forced to flee his home in Paris to safeguard h...

I had been trying to get my hands on this book for a couple of years now. The first time I bought the kindle version of this book, I felt betrayed when I found out that it was actually the comic version of the book. It's hard copy is obviously easier to find but is quite expensive for some reason. Perhaps cause it turned out to be a movie blockbuster. Then I struck gold (or so I thought) when I finally bought the right version recently. I even flaunted this on my insta story and couldn't wait to gobble it all up! The story, like any other decent suspense thriller, is quite riveting. There was, however, quite a lot of beating around the bush introducing all the main characters of the plot, their background stories, their personalities and what have you! I found myself getting a bit impatient wondering where is the mystery in all this. But when all the introductions were done and the protagonists' prowess had been successfully displayed, the heart of the matter finally emerge...

I dreamed of girls in green veils, hundreds of them, climbing up the mountain to the north of our town. A stream of emerald on the trail to the summit, where, one by one, they fell off the other side, their arms outstretched like wings that should have known how to fly. There are times when the title of a book is enough to lure you. This was one such book for me. Set in Afghanistan, the story is a parallel narration of the lives of Shekiba and Rahima, who are generations apart from each other yet bound by a common thread that weaves the intricacies of their struggles to define their own naseeb  (destiny).  Rahima, 13, is the third-born among five girls to a loving & diffident mother and a father who's mostly conspicuous by his absence. In their village in Afghanistan, not having a son is considered a failure. Just the way it used to be when Rahima's great-great grandmother, Shekiba, was alive. Girls aren't allowed to step out of the house by themselves, let alone going ...

It's been a long time I've written anything about a book. That's because I've been slacking. The house-arrest is starting to get to my head so much so that I ended up indulging in some mindless Netflixing. I devoured this Canadian comedy show called Schitt's Creek & absolutely forgot everything about reading for a few days. I guess I needed some time off.  Like I mentioned in my previous post, I started reading Fall of Giants for the second time. The first time I had read this marvel by Ken Follet in 2016, I was absolutely mesmerised! The way he's narrated the whole World War saga intertwined around the lives of five families of different nationalities is nothing but fascinating. I was pleasantly surprised to realise that I did remember parts of this story. However, I wanted to give it another read just to refresh my memory on World War 1 of which I remembered nothing.  Although this book is a work of fiction, it does have some famous real life leaders, like...

I like books that make you think. And in my opinion, there are very few books that have the ability to take you back to your own childhood and leave you with the gentle embrace of reminiscence. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn does just that to you. In simple terms, this book is full of child-like innocence and hard-hitting at the same time. It's a brutally-honest story of a little girl, Francie, who's brought up in squalor and abject poverty by a strong-minded, hard-working mother who leaves no stone unturned to make ends meet and a father who's often shown lost somewhere in the hustle-bustle called life. Francie has a little brother who's also her friend and later a confidant. The story moves at a languid pace, though never boring, recounting the struggles Francie's family goes through just to manage a decent meal on most days. Amid all this is Francie with her wide-eyed amazement and child-like perspective towards everything in life. Like all kids, she has the simpl...

Timshel.. Thou mayest. You may. I chanced upon a gem of a book last month. Though, in my search for my next read, I did fall into a trap. I started reading this very catchy-titled book " The Paper Princess "(Part 1 of a trilogy). It turned out to be shallow and flimsy. It was an all-too-good-to-be-true story of a girl in her teens who was raised by a single mom (who was a stripper). The girl has now lost her mom and is surviving in this harsh world all by herself by studying hard during the day and working as a stripper herself at night to get through life. One day, there appears a man in her life, more than twice her age, who presents himself as her run-away father's bestie and who, also, turns out to be a business tycoon with nothing less than a whole airlines company under his belt! The run-away father, just before dying, found out that he has a daughter out of some flaky one-night-stand he had back in his 20-somethings, which he probably doesn't even remember n...

It's day 56398050 of quarantine. Yes, I've stopped keeping count. Having said that, it's not that I'm complaining. Not even a bit. I've learnt to be grateful for what I have. After a few initial hiccups at home, the dust has started settling down on the few differences I was facing with mom-dad. I mostly chose to give up fighting with them on not calling the maid for cleaning & mopping. In God, we trust. Anyway, I'm using this quarantine/house-arrest as an opportunity to learn new things, catch up with old favourite hobbies, spend quality time with my parents and take some time to stay away from alcohol. The last one is rather forced, but no complaints. I had been trying to strike a healthy balance for some time already. I've been trying to stay disciplined and stick to a schedule daily. So far so good. I've been reading a lot, thanks to Kindle, I still have access to new books! The last 2 books I read turned out to be a treat. Both starkly diff...