Taseer on Partition and Pak violence

Few people of Aatish Taseer’s generation have experienced Partition as much as he has. For the majority, on either side of the India-Pakistan border, it survives as a defining political rivalry. For some, with its tales of migration and loss, it is a painful episode in the family’s history. But for the half-Pakistani author, who was brought up in New Delhi by his Sikh mother, the Partition of 1947 was a lot more than that.

For Mr. Taseer, now 30, the relationship with his father had everything to do with Partition and the enmity it cemented. His father was Salman Taseer, the former governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province who was killed by an Islamic extremist, his own bodyguard, in January.

For the elder Taseer, who lived in Lahore with his Pakistani family, having an Indian connection – a son born from a short-lived relationship with an Indian woman and who called India his home – proved problematic for his political career.

Long before the assassination, this and disagreements on the nature of Pakistani society and politics, of which the younger Taseer was critical, strained relations between the two. By the time the governor of Punjab was killed, father and son were no longer on speaking terms.

Full report here WSJ blogs

Elegant but limited

Aatish Taseer’s latest novel, Noon, despite being a slim and incredibly easy book to read, is not an easy one to describe. It is composed of four unequal parts, each longer than the last, with a prologue and epilogue. All the sections are bound together by the presence of Rehan Tabassum, the child of an Indian Sikh woman and a Pakistani Muslim father (similar to Taseer’s own life), although some sections are from his first-person perspective, and others from a third-person perspective.

Through the four stories of Noon, a reader follows Rehan from his early childhood all the way to the present day. A reader is walked through an evolving, triangular relationship between Rehan, his mother and his grandmother; the changing social dynamics between India’s new business elite and the decay of its old, compromised feudal lords; an investigation into a robbery; and finally the power play within a politically and economically powerful family in Pakistan. Closely observed, and finely told, the stories have atmosphere and resonance.

Full report here Mint

"Noon echoes violence that killed my father"

A talented young writer, Aatish Taseer is the son of well-known Indian journalist Tavleen Singh, and the late Pakistani businessman and politician Salman Taseer, who have provided both the impetus and the starting point to his writing. His thought book “Noon” is out recently where he continues to explore the contemporary Indian psyche as well as the state of Pakistan. Below is a verbatim transcript of his interview with CNBC-TV18’s Anuradha SenGupta. For complete details watch the accompanying videos.

Your personal life story has been the starting point and actually much more than the starting point of all your writing so far, isn’t it?
It’s true. One of the things that people get confused with is they think that in some ways I am revisiting that personal story, but it’s quite a different thing that I am trying to do. It’s to use the personal as a prison to make a journey outwards. So a stranger who is intensely personal really about my own circumstances that’s probably why it was a book of nonfiction.
The way the template goes, I think it is a book about Delhi and about class and yet I have used that nonfictional crust. Part of the reason is I like to show how I got from one place to another. I like to show my working as it were and to also sort of allow the reader backstage in some ways. My fiction has a kind of almost transparency in some ways.

While your stories do go beyond your personal context, an eye about larger universal truths or about universal realities, they are still and perhaps only barely disguised fiction, isn’t it?
No, that’s the thing that people trip up on. I like to create that sense, almost an illusion of nonfiction. But the stories are not mine. It would be a mistake to believe that the narrative of the template goes as Aatish Taseer or to believe that Rehan Tabassum is Aatish Taseer, he is not.

Full interview here Moneycontrol

Reading between the lines

Halfway through Noon, the sophomore novel by Aatish Taseer, I was almost tempted to call it a post-modern joke. Many questions were unanswered: is this the fiction equivalent of a mockumentary where the writer’s memoir masquerades as fiction? Is this novel a parlour game for the Indian and Pakistani gentry, who are supposed to read between the lines and guess who’s who in reality? Will Aatish Taseer continue to mine his own past to write fiction?

A golden rule about enjoying a work of fiction as laid down by D H Lawrence is to “trust the novel, not the novelist”. Fair enough. It’s common knowledge that at some level every writer generously pilfers from his or her personal experiences. But Noon is cut with a different cloth: Taseer talks about his parents through Rehan Tabassum, a love child of Udaya Singh and Sahil Tabassum. Taseer had a not-so-idyllic childhood because his father Salman Taseer, a Pakistani politician who was assassinated earlier this year, never displayed any fatherly affection towards him. Rehan, too, has to deal with his father’s absence after Sahil deserts Udaya in London in the mid-80s.

I could have ignored these obvious similarities with Taseer’s personal life if Noon had been fiendishly compelling, which it mostly isn’t. Instead of exploring themes in some depth, the novel provides fleeting glimpses into various stages of young Rehan’s life. Right from his childhood in Delhi where an adoring grandmother takes care of him to a stint at his stepfather’s farmhouse to a visit to Sahil’s place in Pakistan, Taseer’s sharp gaze never overstays its welcome. Noon could be called a daring piece of fiction in as much as the writer chooses to leave many loose ends.

Full report here Business Standard

"Tragedy helped me become a writer"

An experience with pain allows me to understand how other people are feeling

Aatish Taseer is a British-born writer and freelance journalist. The son of newspaper columnist Tavleen Singh and the assassinated former governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, Salman Taseer, he grew up in New Delhi. Holding strong views on political heirs — be it in India or Pakistan — he says: "It's very bad and an attack on talent, hard work and merit." Aatish feels people are disappointed when the society rewards a person's family connections and class. "If that's the reason why people can hold high positions, it will ruin the environment," he says. His debut book, memoir-travelogue, Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands, published at the age of 29, was an insight into his uneasy relationship with his late father. Aatish's novel, The Temple Goers was the story of an individual trying to discover himself. Noon (Harper Collins), launched recently, is about a young man who grows up trying to create an identity that transcends the one divided across India and Pakistan.
The author speaks to Gulf News in an exclusive interview.

You wrote in Noon: "The gaps in my life were too many, the threads too few." Was this an inference to your personal life?
No in that the narrator is speaking. But yes, somebody in England also said to me recently that the way my book is structured, it is as if it's the shape of the way people's lives have started to look — with a lot of fracture, disruption and upheaval.
My life has certainly some of that element in it. But it could be true of me as to many more people.

How much of Noon is fact and what percentage is fiction?
It's hard to say that, because there are always characters, models and situations, which become the origin and give you the idea for a story. But the resemblances to my life are mainly superficial. The resemblance — this half Pakistani and half Indian narrative — makes people think that it is for real. It's not. For the large part it is fictional. There's only a crust of non-fiction.

Full interview here Gulf News

More of the old whine

Noon Aatish Taseer
4th Estate
Rs 499; pp 240 

The title of Aatish Taseer’s latest novel, Noon, does not say as much as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas or The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Essentially a story of Rehan Tabassum, a London-born love child of a Pakistani businessman and an Indian lawyer, one may have to leapfrog the chapters, venture deep into the narrative and read — and re-read — between the lines to put Noon in perspective.

But that, too, is not devoid of obstructions. For example, how do you drown in a storyline that isn’t even deep enough to float? Or, how much novelty can you expect in book after book with similar storylines and characters?

Like Aatish and Aakash of Taseer’s earlier novel, The Temple-Goers, Rehan is a typical 21st century babalog, simultaneously trying to fit into and fall out of his social standing in an India he knows little about. We see many shades of Rehan in the four sections that are spread over a little over two decades (1989-2011). In the first, ‘The Last Rites’, Rehan the fatherless child becomes the reason for the constant pettifogging between his mother and granny.

Full review here Hindustan Times

'Damn' hard to write on sexual pleasure: Taseer

CNN-IBN's Amrita Tripathi interviews Aatish Taseer on everything from the IPL saga to the new India, to his debut novel, The Temple-Goers, and writing about sex.

I feel this is a brave book. At any point were you worried about a backlash? Because of course, people are going to read it wondering who it is you’re talking about?
Yes, but what you speak of, if it occurs at all, is necessarily restricted to a very small sphere, and can last only for a limited period of time. I’ve just come back from a nation-wide book tour and no one in Calcutta, for instance, thought they recognized anyone. What people forget, when they make these Delhi assumptions and talk of a roman à clef, is that many well-known works of the 19th and 20th century were read that way when they first came out. Take Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; that, despite all the big themes in the background, was, when it first appeared in Paris, in the early part of the last century, read as a roman à clef. And it’s impossible to believe that now. So if there is a ‘backlash’, it can only really be a backlash in a teacup.

Full interview here CNN IBN

Aatish Taseer: An interview

Aatish Taseer’s The Temple-Goers (Picador India) takes you to a Delhi that is grappling with issues of religion and class that define and shape the metropolis in myriad ways. At the heart of the novel is an assimilation of two different worlds: those of Aatish, the narrator and an aspiring writer, and Aakash, his trainer at a gym in the city. Through their friendship, Taseer shows the socio-economic and religious divides that come in the way of developing a cohesive national and cultural identity. “We’re making a world in India that is unwelcoming of the man coming up. It is a place in which, if he is to succeed, he must give up many things about himself — ideas of language, dress, customs and religion — and fall in line with a very shabby modern ideal, one that will leave him a smaller man than he was,” says the author, emphasising the need for human awakenings which can happen only when we, along with the new prosperity, have a “cultural and historical renewal”. For Aakash, Delhi is a “city of temples and gyms, of rich and poor people, of Bentleys and bicycles, of government flats and mansions, of hookers and heiresses”.

Excerpts from an interview:

The Temple-Goers has some parallels with the real life. Does it also have some personal parallels?
 Very few, in fact. There is a non-fictional cast, which falls away as the book progresses. And this is because it is, in part, a story about a writer finding his material, about him discovering how to write about the world he grew up in, a world that in many ways has been superseded by the changed city he returns to. But as his material clarifies, this non-fictional crust breaks to reveal a core that is pure invention.
It is unusual that you have given the narrator your own name, isn’t it?
Less unusual than it seems. There have been others well before me who have used  narrators like this. Think of Proust’s “Marcel,” for instance, or Manto’s “Manto Saab” These narrators, as with mine, have a reality that seems shared by the writer, but it is in the end a superficial likeness. It is there for a reason, but I don’t want to give too much away.

The title is interesting, though the novel has less to do with religion. Did you want to explore the sacred?
No. I am always only interested in the attitudes and sense of self borne out of religion, not in faith itself. The “temple-goers” of course is a shorthand given the narrator by a character in the book. And it refers to a kind of person for whom the idea of India is very easy to apprehend, almost instinctive. It is not an idea of a nation state with fixed political boundaries, but of a land, and it is a very gentle and persuasive idea; it is bound to the actual physicality of India, to a geography made sacred, ritualised and re-enacted over and over again. This person, still with his religion, his language, his customs close around him, stands very far apart from the culturally denuded India I grew up in, where often a kind of boastful, national pride stood in for real learning and knowledge. Now, as you know from reading the book, its aim is not to put forward a romantic idea of the “temple-goers” and to run down the other India; that would simplify the picture too much; but yes, there is the pain of cultural and linguistic loss running through the book, and perhaps a longing for a wholeness that seems less and less possible.

The novel shows the city in a state of flux, though many things are changing for the worse. Do some of these changes bother you?
I don’t think of it as a change for the worse, but yes, there are things that concern me. I feel, for instance, that we’re making a world in India that is unwelcoming of the man coming up. It is a place in which, if he is to succeed, he must give up many things about himself — ideas of language, dress, customs and religion — and fall in line with a very shabby modern ideal, one that will leave him a smaller man than he was. We speak a lot of pride and self-confidence these days, but what do these things mean when every day we force Indians to forsake those things that should naturally be the source of their pride and self-confidence? Instead of enshrining our culture and history at the heart of our new modernity, we have cast it out in favour of something far shallower; a very drab modernity. We can try and hide it with bogus words like “aspirational”, but we both know that these are really euphemisms for more tackiness and imitation. It is important not to forget that only tyrannies can survive on science and technology alone; free societies need something more; they need human awakenings. And for that to happen, there must be, along with the new prosperity, a cultural and historical renewal.

The novel bristles with so much tension — social, sexual and, even, political. Was the mix essential for an engaging narrative?
I think it is as an aspect of the multiplicity of values, some old and decaying, some new and still forming, that have come into play in our cities. There is, at this present moment, an amazing level of particularity in each man’s idea of his self and worth. There are the old forces like language, region, caste and class. But these only give half the picture, for overlaying these things are a set of appealing, modern values that have changed the way we want to live, the kind of parents we want to be, the talent and hard work we wish to reward, the discriminations we want to prevent. All this makes for a special tension in which our deepest affiliations (and prejudices) come up against the reality of a society in which the old rules don’t fully apply and the new ones are yet to take firm shape. Aakash is a man made on the cusp of this change, a man who is many men to many people. But, in a sense, the city is full of men like Aakash, each an exquisite, highly particular configuration of different values. And the challenge is to bring into being a world where this vast spectrum of human possibility can find just fulfilment.

Your first book, a non-fiction, was a personal journey. And your novel, too, is some sort of journey for the narrator. Do you feel at home in Delhi?
Very much so. I adore Delhi. And slowly, as it has become part of my writing, I find its life richer and more varied than ever before. I’m also enthralled by the changes to its landscape, the new lines of communication being slung across its expanse, and the people being thrown up by the change.

Is it tough to deal with issues of identity and mixed parentage? How much has that difficulty shaped your sensibility?
Tough initially, but now easier and easier, almost a privilege. I feel that that initial confusion freed me from the desire or possibility of belonging to any one group. It helped make the world a bigger place. I do, in the deepest sense, feel Indian, but this is a very wide net and often, much to their annoyance, includes Pakistan.

Could you tell me some of your early influences, both in fiction and non-fiction?
I started by admiring the simple and direct writing of V.S. Naipaul. That ideal of writing has remained very close to me. But quickly I felt I needed to find writers in whose worlds I could recognise subjects similar to my own. For this the Russian writers — Pushkin, Gogol and Tolstoy — and their times, made available to me through the biographies of Henri Troyat, have been a great inspiration. I have also looked to French writers like Balzac and Maupassant. The latter was an important influence on Manto, from whom I was able to learn more about how I might write about my own world. But to tell you the truth, for a long time it all felt like a great muddle, and it has only now begun to clarify by degrees. It will never be a straightforward picture; it will always feel, as with so many things today, like an inheritance pieced together from odds and ends. There is no easy tradition to inherit, but you make your way from writer to writer, gaining, one hopes, a surer sense of what works for you. And then there is the Sanskritic world, which, though it is yet to feed into my writing, has had perhaps the most profound effect on my view of what our literary past contains.

The modern mutiny

Aatish Taseer, author of The Temple-goers, walks Raghu Karnad through a city of ambition, horror and flowering trees. Photography by Mikma Lepcha

In his third book, Aatish Taseer’s observant eye scans from the lawn parties of  Sunder Nagar to the cement plains of Dwarka, recording the Delhi of right now. The Temple-goers is a novel about a young writer returning to Delhi, a city of scorching newness, and befriending his gym trainer Aakash, who embodies that newness. As a young Haryanvi man full of ambition, bravado and class confusion, Aakash is an easy figure to spot. Yet the detail and particularity of his character are the real accomplishments of The Temple-goers. “For a character to be ‘credible’ is my highest aim,” Taseer said. “It means he can’t be dismissed, whether you like him or not.”

How did you develop Aakash, and make him so recognisable without becoming a stereotype?
The first little throb of Aakash went through me in a story I wrote about a year before I began The Temple-goers. It resulted in a kinder, more vulnerable likeness who, at the end of the story, is cut down by the system. He sinks from being a trainer at a gym to a security guard.

At the time I was quite happy with the story, but as the months went by, I began to feel that I had underestimated Aakash. I had filled him with my own fears and reservations about the world that was coming into being in Delhi and India, and made him more fragile than he really was. When I sat down to write the novel, Aakash’s frailer twin emerged not some easy prey of the new system, but made by it, and full of resilience and survival instinct. But he is not some sociopath or amoral creature – he is someone very shrewdly aware of being in a society in which his hard work and talent might not be enough.

Full interview here Timeout Delhi 

Delhi noir

“Doesn’t he read a lot like Naipaul?” asked a colleague as she leafed through a copy of Aatish Taseer’s debut novel, The Temple Goers, at the Oxford Bookstore last Wednesday. A few minutes later, as Taseer read out passages after passages from his book at the launch ceremony in a wise old man’s voice, words strung together in precision paid homage to Taseer’s most obvious literary influence, VS Naipaul.

And as he narrated a part of his novel (“a typical party scene in upmarket Delhi”), Naipaul himself leapt out of the pages as an intriguing character referred to as the “Writer”. The Writer in Taseer’s book is the visionary who almost predicts the lead protagonist’s brush with fate. Much like Naipaul, he is astute and is dismissive about the concept of India as a democracy. As the party scene is played out in the living room of a posh Delhi household, we indulge in a game of identify-the-Delhi-celebrity. Isn’t the somewhat loud, chief minister who also happens to be a royalty of Jhaatkebaal (an imaginary state) modeled on a certain CM of a princely state? Isn’t the mother of the protagonist modeled on Taseer’s mother (journealist Tavleen Singh)?

Full report here Indian Express

A question of identity

Aatish Taseer's debut novel The Temple Goers talks about belonging, corruption, power, and more…

Just the author with his book on the stage, and a smattering of silent listeners. That was the scene at the launch of Aatish Taseer's debut novel The Temple Goers at Landmark, where for close to three-quarters of an hour, the author simply sat and read long, descriptive passages from his book.

No interaction or discussion on the themes of the novel with a Chennai personality. No chatty interludes by the author himself. Even the post-reading audience interaction was brief, with the author not really going out of his way to engage the admittedly sparse audience.

Relaxed reading
It made for a rather subdued event (unusually so for a Landmark reading). But what it did do — and one might argue this is after all the point of any book reading — is give that small group of listeners a clear feel for the prose itself — emotional, and vividly evocative of the many facets of Delhi. The relaxed reading of unbroken segments from the novel allowed one to get under the skin of The Temple Goers, feeling the narrator's urgency, for instance, as he searches for the old poet, Zafar Moradabadi, and seeing Old Delhi — in all its decaying magnificence — come alive through his eyes.

Full report here Hindu

"One doesn't write for oneself"

What was the hardest part of writing your fiction debut novel, The Temple-goers?
Joseph Conrad, in a preface to (his novel) The Secret Agent, takes note of criticism based on the ground of ‘sordid surroundings and the moral squalor’ of his story. I think it’s fair to say that an element of this exists in The Temple-goers too. And while it does not produce any feeling of apology in me, it was difficult to work out characters who, though not necessarily likeable, were believable and interesting.

How autobiographical is it?
Not even remotely.

What was the most interesting aspect of Delhi society that you uncovered whilst researching the novel?
Probably - and this is a result of a new urbanity - people looking at each other in different ways. Never before has Delhi felt so full of fresh faces. The city has known many convulsions, population-altering convulsions, like almost no other Indian city. Consider 1857 and then 1947, both occurring in less than 150 years. But I think at this moment in Delhi’s history, an equally important, population-altering convulsion is happening. And unlike those earlier ones, it is not coming on the back of destruction, but marks a moment in a city’s life, reminiscent of Haussmann and Paris, when its different strands are pulled together and its spirit seems to lift.

Full interview here DNA

REVIEW: The Temple Goers

REVIEW
The Temple Goers
Aatish Taseer
Picador
Rs 495
Pp 297
ISBN: 0330514083
Paperback

Blurb
A young man returns home to Delhi after several years abroad and resumes his place among the city's cosmopolitan elite - a world of fashion designers, media moguls and the idle rich. But everything around him has changed - new roads, new restaurants, new money, new crime - everything, that is, except for the people, who are the same, only maybe slightly worse. Then he meets Aakash, a charismatic and unpredictable young man on the make, who introduces him to the squalid underside of this sprawling city. Together they get drunk and work out, visit temples and a prostitute, and our narrator finds himself disturbingly attracted to Aakash's world. But when Aakash is arrested for murder, the two of them are suddenly swept up in a politically sensitive investigation that exposes the true corruption at the heart of this new and ruthless society. In a voice that is both cruel and tender, "The Temple-goers" brings to life the dazzling story of a city quietly burning with rage.

Reviews
A fact-fiction puzzle Mint
Within a day of completing Aatish Taseer’s debut novel The Temple-goers, I found myself in the eerie position of living out an episode from the book. Staying in a borrowed apartment in New York City, Taseer’s protagonist—also called Aatish Taseer—steps out and lets the door slam shut, only to realize at that precise instant that the keys are inside. Minor details aside, my drama in real life ended in much the same way, with brass flakes flying, the lock’s components giving way one by one under a powerful drill, finally leaving a hole in the door.

It was coincidence. But fresh off the novel, it was yet more evidence that the lines between fiction and reality are very, very blurred in The Temple-goers. By itself, this is not a new phenomenon in Indian writing in English: When Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy appeared in 1993, Kolkata society spent many merry hours identifying the inspirations behind the dramatis personae. More recently, Marrying Anita (2008), journalist Anita Jain’s account of a groom-hunt in New India, offered its only pleasures in the guessing game.

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Questions of identity Hindu

The narrator of Aatish Taseer's debut novel is a young man named Aatish Taseer, and some of the details of his life appear drawn from the author's. The device is guaranteed to raise questions about exactly how “autobiographical” The Temple-goers is (as if such things are neatly quantifiable), but that would be to miss the wood for the trees; this is a book that encourages us to ask subtler — and more interesting — questions about identity.

The fictional Aatish is a young writer born to privilege. After a few years studying and working in America and England he's just returned to Delhi to revise a novel, and he has access to two apartments — his mother's and his girlfriend Sanyogita's — in the high-end colonies that border Lutyen's Delhi. A citizen of the world, Aatish is estranged from non-cosmopolitan India, and always conscious of — and uneasy about — this estrangement.

Lending his write hand

The Temple-Goers is a fine novel. Most of its characters come across as real. The plot is news by other means. The staple sex scene is comic in its tragic details . And the novel seriously tries to make sense of the India that the author, Aatish Taseer, thinks he is intimate with.

Taseer tells the story of what happens to the narrator and his girl friend, Sanyogita, both recently returned from London where they seem not to do much besides living the good life. What happens to their relationship is India, specifically Delhi. Perhaps it is the raw urges of a newly material people; or the heat that bares the brain down to the last thought; or a certain vantage point that people reach in relation to each other, an intangible terminus they arrive at along the coordinates of a place and its alluvial culture. The cumulative result is the end of a relationship.

Quirks are at the quick of the novel. For instance , the narrator, in a sustained fit of narcissistic self-validation, christens himself Aatish. Oh-Oh. And, much later in the story, he has another character — a poet, naturally — endorse the first person device. Who else would take you over the uncharted seas but I?

Full report here Times of India

Fiction for a change

When Aatish Taseer arrived in his native Delhi in 2007 after a long stint abroad, he returned to discover, he says, a “double shock”. First, the years away – spent at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and later working for Time magazine in London – had shifted his perspective on his home city, so that even familiar sights now seemed somehow alien.

On top of this, though, came the second shock: the city to which he had returned, Taseer realised, was going through a profound and inescapable transformation, a transformation that was sweeping the entire country and that rendered much of what he knew – even who he was – outdated.

In short, Taseer had returned to the supercharged, cacophonous, sometimes brutal metropolitan sprawl that is called the “New India”.

Full report here National

REVIEW: The Temple Goers

REVIEW

The Temple Goers
Aatish Taseer
Picador India
Rs 405
Pp 304

Extract from Outlook 
Aatish Taseer’s much-awaited first novel, The Temple-Goers, explores the tensions around religion and class in a rapidly changing India. He evokes, with comic flair, the world of Delhi’s power dinner. Some guests seem familiar enough to set off a guessing game.

Delhi drawing rooms. They were what I remembered of the city from my childhood. Perhaps it was Delhi’s fragmented geography, or that it had no real restaurants the way Bombay had—restaurants that were not attached to five-star hotels—or just that it was an old city, closely bound, with people who all seemed to know each other, but there was no setting, no cityscape more evocative of the city I grew up in than a lamp-lit drawing room with a scattering of politicians, journalists, broken-down royals, and perhaps an old Etonian, lying fatly on a deep sofa. And it was a dinner like this, with two blue-and-red glass fanooses burning in a corner, jasmine floating in a porcelain dish on a dining table draped in a white tablecloth, with white-on-white chikan-work flowers embroidered on it, and the over-strong aroma of a scented candle, that my mother gave for the writer.


He was annoyed even before we sat down. My mother had asked him for eight; he had arrived with his wife and shooting stick some 10 or 15 minutes past eight. Shabby Singh in a black-and-red cotton sari, her large red bindi fiery that night, her politically grey hair in a tight bun, had come by eight-thirty. She brought her husband, a small Sikh gentleman in a yellow kurta. Sanyogita and I were on time as well. But Chamunda was late, very late.

At nine, the writer, unaware that Chamunda was coming, but seeming to anticipate a general tendency on the subcontinent for late, drunken dinners, said, “Udaya, we’ll eat soon, won’t we? We’ll eat soon.

Reviews 
The Independent 
India's seamy underbelly, though hardly news to Indians, is a trendy subject for novels and movies, such as The White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire. If you have seen Monsoon Wedding, you should have a fair idea of the milieu of The Temple-Goers, a first novel by Aatish Taseer. He was born in New Delhi of an abortive affair between a well-connected Sikh journalist mother and a philandering Pakistani politician, and now lives there and in London, where he has worked as a journalist. Like the film, the novel moves among Delhi's wealthy middle class in all its energy, brashness, pretentiousness, perversion and corruption, supported by a cast of thrusting, upwardly mobile hustlers and servants, all tinged with Bollywood-style romance.

The style, on the other hand, owes more than a little to VS Naipaul's non-fiction, with its combination of precise observation, analytical self-confidence and pitilessness. Not only is Taseer personally acquainted with Naipaul, who has praised him as "a young writer to watch" for his first book, the memoir, Stranger to History. Naipaul is also a lightly disguised character in the novel: a famous writer visiting Delhi from London referred to by the narrator in the Naipaulian grand manner as "the writer", complete with emphatic repetitions, shooting stick and adoring wife.