Click here to buy In a Land Far from Home
I rented a house in the village of Khwajamollah, about two and a half miles away from Kabul. I acquired a servant too, along with the house. Principal Girard, the head of the college where I was going to teach, was French. He introduced us formally, ‘His name is Abdur Rahman. He will do all your bidding—from polishing your shoes to killing your enemies.’ It meant he was my ‘Harfan-Moula’, my ‘Jack of all trades.’
…I had seen two giants in Kabul. One was this Abdur Rahman—I will talk about the other one later. I measured him from head to toe with a tape—he was six feet four inches. His width was proportionate to his height. His arms came down to his knees and his fingers hung like a bunch of plantains. His feet were the size of a small boat. His shoulders were so broad that if he had been Amir Abdur Rahman instead of my chef, he could easily have carried the entire weight of Afghanistan on them. His mouth stretched from one ear to the other—he could have swallowed a whole banana sideways. His nose sat atop his face like a rugged mountain, and he had no forehead. His head was covered with a big turban but I had no doubt that it was so small that a baby hat would have come down to his sideburns.
The second attraction of Kabul was its bazaars. People who had been to the old bazaars of Agra, Amritsar or Benaras, would know what they looked like. Narrow lanes with small cubicles on both sides, at chest height, double or treble the size of roadside kiosks. The front would protrude like a box eating up road space. Some shops had hinged doors so that at night they could put them up and close their upper halves.
There were small holes beneath the shops, which were either used as storage space, or by cobblers plying their trade. In fact cobblers occupied thirty per cent of them. If the Pathans of Peshawar had their shoes mended once a week, the Kabulis did it three times. A man who had no work would park himself in a shop while the cobbler would stick a few new nails in his shoe or sandal.
You thought that they had to buy something if they sat in a shop? Never. Kabuli shopkeepers were not at all worried about selling their merchandise. A ‘quick turnover’ was a concept, alien to the Orient. Even Calcutta was laidback; the shawl-sellers of Chitpur or the attar sellers of Bara Bazaar still kept this tradition going.
They would talk about everything, except for politics. Even that would be discussed but you had to be a trusted friend in order for them to do that. The habituees of the bazaar of Kabul were very clever—in three days they would find out if you had been a frequent visitor to the British Legation or not. It was unlikely for an Indian to be a spy for the Russians or the Afghan foreign office. The bazaar would share all its ‘bazaargap’ with you once they had established that you stayed away from the places of high politics. And what ‘bazaargap’! From women’s liberation in Turkistan in Bolshevik Russia; to Janakibai, the exotic dancer of Peshawar; to how the wife of the Viceroy in Delhi managed to get diamonds and emeralds without paying a penny. Such colourful stories. After keeping your ears and eyes open for a few days, you would be in a position to figure out how much of what you heard was true and how much concocted. You would begin to understand if two-thirds or three-quarters of it was cooked up.
Tenali Rama
By Subhadra Sen Gupta
Enter Stage Right
By Feisal Alkazi
RAAGAM TAANAM PALLAVI – A LALLI MYSTERY #EXCERPTTWO
By KALPANA SWAMINATHAN
Raagam Taanam Pallavi – A Lalli Mystery #ExcerptOne
By Kalpana Swaminathan
Colaba
By Shabnam Minwalla
Loki Takes Guard
By Menaka Raman
The Brass Notebook: A Memoir
By Devaki Jain
Bride of the Forest: The Untold Story of Yayati’s Daughter
By Madhavi Mahadevan
The Night of Broken Glass: 15 December 2019
By Seemi Pasha
The Teenage Diary of Rani Laxmibai
By Tanushree Podder
ISRO’S Magnificent Women and their Flying Machines
By Minnie Vaid
Tales from the Tail End
By Ananya Mukherjee
The Last Dance
By Anmol Arora
She Stoops to Kill
By Preeti Gill
Dancing in the Family
By Sukanya Rahman
Maharishi and Me
By Susan Shumsky
The Book of Love
By Ekarat
Those Magnificent Women and Their Flying Machines
By Minnie Vaid
On Leaders and Icons
By Kuldip Nayar
Cancer, Your Body and Your Diet
By Arati Bhatia
Great Jataka Tales
By Noor Inayat Khan
The Greatest Indian Fairy Tales
By Joseph Jacobs
Strange Worlds! Strange Times!
By Vinayak Varma
Jiya Jale
By Gulzar in conversation with Nasreen Munni Kabir
Sky Is My Father
By Easterine Kire
Shillong Times
By Nilanjan P. Choudhury
The Rise and Fall of the Emerald Tigers
By Raghu Chundawat
Right Arm Over
By Moti Nandy
Looking for the Nation
By Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee
The Impossible Fairy Tale
By Han Yujoo
The Disobedient Indian
By Ramin Jahanbegloo
The Scope of Happiness
By Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
The Flavours of Nationalism
By Nandita Haksar
Travels On My Elephant
By Mark Shand
The Man Who Saw the Sun
By Makarand Sathe
Sunita De Souza Goes to Sydney and Other Stories
By Roanna Gonsalves
She Goes to War
By Rashmi Saksena
Weaving Water
By Ajeet Cour
Manspotting
By Ritu Bhatia
The Haunted Horse
By Rudyard Kipling
A Time for All Things
By Ruskin Bond
Prison Days
By Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
Murder in Seven Acts
By Kalpana Swaminathan
Gardens of Love
By Meera Godbole-Krishnamurthy
Naishapur and Babylon
By Keki N. Daruwalla
The Guru Who Came Down from the Mountain
By Roshen Dalal
New Delhi Love Songs
By Michael Creighton
Dancing with the Nation
By Ruth Vanita
Don’t Run, My Love
By Easterine Kire
Woman to Woman
By Madhulika Liddle
Season of Crimson Blossoms
By Abubakar Adam Ibrahim
The Assassinations
By Vikram Kapur
Available Light
By C.P. Surendran
An Elsewhere Place
By Malay Kumar Roy
There’s a Carnival Today
By Indra Bahadur Rai
The Girl Who Couldn’t Love
By Shinie Antony
Lessons for Mrs Hauksbee
By Rudyard Kipling
Shehzadi Mircha
By Flora Annie Stee
Upcountry Tales
By Mark Tully
Smritichitre
By Lakshmibai Tilak
When the Moon Shines by Day
By Nayantara Sahgal
Understanding Kashmir and Kashmiris
By Christopher Snedden
The Meaning of Civilisation
By Naguib Mahfouz
The Leopard’s Tale
By Jonathan and Angela Scott
Shiva’s Drum
By Chandrasekhar Kambar
Comeuppance
By James Tooley
Guldaar
By Stephen Alter
Is That Even a Country, Sir!
By Anil Yadav
The Elephant in the Temple
By John Lockwood Kipling
One Out of Two
By Daniel Sada
Dispossessed
By Ashwin Parulkar, Saba Sharma, Amod Shah, Shikha Sethia, Rhea John, Anhad Imaan and Annie Baxi
No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight
By Parimal Bhattacharya
The Secret Life of Zika Virus
By Kalpish Ratna
The Diary of a Nobody
By George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash
By Eka Kurniawan
A Night with a Black Spider
By Ambai
The Division of Heaven and Earth
By Shokdung
Tibetan Caravans
By Abdul Wahid Radhu
The Shah of Chicago
By Nate Rabe
Azadi’s Daughter: A Memoir
By Seema Mustafa
The Ring of Truth
By Wendy Doniger
The White Umbrella
By Brian Sewell
Mishti, the Mirzapuri Labrador
By Gillian Wright
Shared Tables
By Kaumudi Marathé
Pocket Piketty
By Jesper Roine
Eve Out of Her Ruins
By Ananda Devi
Star of India
By Alice Perrin
Unforeseen Desires
By Anil Chopra
Vampire in Love
By Enrique Vila-Matas
Half-Open Windows
By Ganesh Matkari
The Vermilion Boat
By Sudhin N. Ghose
The Flame of the Forest
By Sudhin N. Ghose
Curry
By Colleen Taylor Sen
Bombay Modern
By Anjali Nerlekar
Harilal & Sons
By Sujit Saraf
Immoderate Men
By Shikhandin
Tourist Season
By Jaina Sanga
The Woman in the Bazaar
By Alice Perrin
Lords of the Global Village
By Ranendra
Intimacy Undone
By Malavika Rajkotia
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Tiger
By Prerna Singh Bindra
And Gazelles Leaping
By Sudhin N. Ghose
Snowfed Waters
By Jane Wilson-Howarth
Murder in Mahim
By Jerry Pinto
The Adivasi Will Not Dance
By Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar
Chandni Chowk
By Swapna Liddle
Perhaps Tomorrow
By Pooranam Elayathamby and Richard Anderson
The Sari of Surya Vilas
By Vayu Naidu
Kautik on Embers
By Uddhav J. Shelke
The Sun and Two Seas
By Vikramajit Ram
Out of War
By Swati Sengupta
Thamel
By Rabi Thapa
Son of the Thundercloud
By Easterine Kire
The Exodus Is Not Over
By Nandita Haksar
The Pocket Kamasutra
By Alka Pande
Amba
By Laksmi Pamuntjak
The Creature on the Moonlit Road
By Montague Rhodes (M. R.) James
Fatal Accidents of Birth
By Harsh Mander
The Curry Coast
By Binoo K. John
The Temple Road
By Fazlur Rahman
Loitering with Intent
By Ritu Menon
A Village Dies
By Ivan Arthur
Gandhi on Non-Violence
By Thomas Merton
A Season for Martyrs
By Bina Shah
The Haunted Dolls’ House
By M. R. James
The Big Cat Man
By Jonathan Scott
I Want to Destroy Myself
By Malika Amar Shaikh
Journey After Midnight
By UJJAL DOSANJH
Himalaya
By Ruskin Bond and Namita Gokhale
The Case of Lady Sannox
By Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sand Libraries of Timbuktu
By Rohinton Daruwala
A Full Night’s Thievery
By Mitra Phukan
Istanbul Istanbul
By Burhan Sönmez
Up Campus, Down Campus
By Avijit Ghosh
Garrisoned Minds
By Laxmi Murthy and Mitu Varma
The Sleepwalker’s Dream
By Dhrubajyoti Borah
Gulbadan
By Rumer Godden
A Book of Light
By Jerry Pinto
Kohima
By Arthur Swinson
Belonging
By Umi Sinha
The Man Who Wouldn’t be God
By Shashi Warrier
Man Tiger
By Eka Kurniawan
Shell-Shocked
By Mohammed Omer
On Art, Literature and History
By Naguib Mahfouz
Indian Dust
By Rumer & Jon Godden
One Last Drink at Guapa
By Saleem Haddad
A Little Book of Happiness
By Ruskin Bond
Empire of Tea
By Markman Ellis, Matthew Mauger and Richard Coulton
Kingpin
By Kavita Daswani
House Spirit
By Palash Krishna Mehrotra
The Prisoner of Kathmandu
By Charles Allen
One Thousand Days in a Refrigerator
By Manoj Kumar Panda
Tram 83
By Fiston Mwanza Mujila
I, the Salt Doll
By Vandana Mishra
Feasts and Fasts
By Colleen Taylor Sen
The Yard
By Aliyyah Eniath
Tales of the Metric System
By Imraan Coovadia
Growing Older without Feeling Old
By Rudi Westendorp
The Silk Road
By Jonathan Clements
The Hangman’s Journal
By Shashi Warrier
Two under the Indian Sun
By Jon Godden and Rumer Godden
Beauty Is a Wound
By Eka Kurniawan
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
By Jerome K. Jerome
The Science of Happiness
By Stefan Klein
Bicycle Dreaming
By Mridula Koshy
The Ballad of Bant Singh: A Qissa of Courage
By Nirupama Dutt
River of Flesh and Other Stories
By Ruchira Gupta
Mother, Where’s My Country?
By Anubha Bhonsle
Framed As A Terrorist
By Mohammad Aamir Khan
The Hunter’s Friends
By Jim Corbett
The Fortunate Tiger
By Jim Corbett
The Invisible Man from Salem
By Christoffer Carlsson
Bullets and Bylines: From the Frontlines of Kabul, Delhi, Damascus and Beyond
By Shyam Bhatia
The Patiala Quartet
By Neel Kamal Puri
Remember to Forget
By Neel Kamal Puri
On My Terms
By Sharad Pawar
East of Suez
By Alice Perrin
We Are All Stardust
By Stefan Klein
New Songs of the Survivors
By Yvonne Vaz Ezdani
Runaway Writers
By Indu Balachandran
Friends in Wild Places
By Ruskin Bond
The Scenes We Made
By (Ed.) Shanta Gokhale
Like a Pinprick to the Heart
By Shujoy Dutta
The Light of His Clan
By Chetan Raj Shrestha
Into the Hidden Valley
By Stuart Blackburn
The Hindus: An Alternative History
By Wendy Doniger
The Naked Surgeon: The Power and Peril of Transparency in Medicine
By Samer Nashef
The End of Plenty: The Race to Feed a Crowded World
By Joel K. Bourne Jr
Animal Madness
By Laurel Braitman
Asian Absences: Searching for Shangri-La
By Wolfgang Büscher
The Valley of Flowers: An Adventure in the Upper Himalaya
By Frank S. Smythe
The Adivasis Will Not Dance: Stories
By Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar
Breakthrough: How a Teen Innovator is Changing the World
By Jack Andraka
Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life
By Emily Nagoski
The Devil is a Black Dog: Stories of War and Revolution from the Middle East and Beyond
By Sándor Jászberényi
Nine: Poems
By Anupama Raju
Rungli-Rungliot {Thus Far and No Further}
By Rumer Godden
Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Under-Rated Organ
By Giulia Enders
The Many Faces of Kashmiri Nationalism: From the Cold War to the Present Day
By Nandita Haksar