Review: Hello Bastar

review 

Hello, Bastar - The Untold Story of India's Maoist Movement
Rahul Pandita
Tranquebar Press
200pp
Rs 250
ISBN 9789380658346
Paperback

About the book 
With direct access to the top Maoist leadership, Rahul Pandita provides an authoritative account of how a handful of men and women, who believed in the idea of revolution, entered Bastar in Central India in 1980
and created a powerful movement that New Delhi now terms as India’s biggest internal security threat. It traces the circumstances due to which the Maoist movement entrenched itself in about 10 states of India, carrying out deadly attacks against the Indian establishment in the name of the poor and the marginalised. It offers rare insight into the lives of Maoist guerillas and also of the Adivasi tribals living in the Red zone. Based on extensive on-ground reportage and exhaustive interviews with Maoist leaders including their supreme commander Ganapathi, Kobad Ghandy and others who are jailed or have been killed in police encounters, this book is a combination of firsthand storytelling and intrepid analysis.

Reviews
Full review here DNA

A significant chapter in India’s history is the peasant uprising in Naxalbari in the late sixties spawned by CPM leaders Kanu Sanyal and Charu Mazumdar, who became disillusioned with parliamentary political processes.

The Naxalite movement itself was ruthlessly crushed but its ideology proved to be a hydra, springing various people’s movements and struggles, such as the CPI-ML (Liberation), CPI-ML (New Democracy), the MCC or PW. Loosely labelled as Maoists, these various factions — active in the in the jungles of Andhra Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal — have become what the Indian state calls its gravest internal security threat.

Who make up the Maoist leaders and cadres? What is their alternate vision of development? How do they continue to exert a powerful influence on Adivasis, Dalits and the disenfranchised?

This is a subject that has scarcely been touched upon in mainstream publishing. The entry of a book like Hello Bastar therefore raises great expectations. Unfortunately, promises are belied.

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Full review here India Today blogs

Who's written this book? Was my first question after I finished reading Hello, Bastar in one straight sitting. Hard-hitting, well researched and penned with a lot of passion, this book has all the ingredients of a fictional socio-political thriller; ambition, deceit, love, revenge and nationalism, except that it's not.

Hello, Bastar is supposed to be a journalistic account from the ground of how the Maoist movement has become the biggest headache for the central government and despite flashes of brilliant writing and insightful analysis; the book fails on a critical factor.

So who's written this book? The introductory page tells me that it's a journalist, Rahul Pandita, Senior Special Correspondent with national magazine; but the hundred and ninety pages that follow, show Pandita donning the role of an activist than an impartial reporter stating facts as they are and letting the reader come to his own conclusions. Pandita loves his subject and has given amazing details on the growth, finance and functioning of the Naxals – It's a book that should be made compulsory reading in the Home Ministry, but the author's sympathy makes him lose focus of his journalistic neutrality.

Queens without crowns

Well researched, this book is a tribute to the women who have made significant inroads into Mumbai's criminal underbelly.

Mafia Queens of Mumbai 
Stories of Women from
the Ganglands
S.Hussain Zaidi, Jane Borges
Tranquebar Press
Rs 250; Pp 308
ISBN 9789380283777
Paperback

It couldn't get feistier than this you think on reading the title and immediately conjure up images of gorgeous molls lolling on the arms of cigar-puffing villains sporting mismatched shoes. But Mafia Queens of Mumbai: Stories of Women from the Ganglands is nothing like what you'd expect. A cool clinical tribute to the women who made significant inroads into the infamous arena of Mumbai's criminal underbelly, the extensively researched work of journalists S. Hussain Zaidi and Jane Borges, besides enlightening one on the ways of lady gangsters, informs, enthrals and very frequently chills the reader down to his bone-marrow.

No stereotypes
There are no stereotypes in the world of crime, it is established at the every onset, and not every woman criminal is pushed into crime by unfortunate circumstances (as generally depicted in movies and literature). Some women are born to crime, some others chase it relentlessly and yet some others have crime thrust on them. And then there are those others who choose to channel their genius towards darker goals for the sheer adrenalin rush it entails. Thus we have the imperturbable Lallan Bhabhi, a cog in the petrol adulteration cartel, Sapna Didi, a rare woman who had the guts to stand up to Dawood Ibrahim, liquor queen Jenabai Daaruwali and the iconic brothel madam, Gangubai Kathiawadi. A rare touch given by the authors is the perennial riches-to-rags possibility hovering over each head and which seems to deter not a single of these women. As Zaidi and Borges lead one down the dark dinghy alleys of Dongri, Bhendi Bazaar, Nagpada, Dharavi and Mumbra, it becomes difficult to forget characters like the dainty bereaved Ashraf who turns into a gun-toting avenger, the charismatic Gangubai who lights up the streets of Kamathipura with a rare dignity or the bootlegging aunties. There is no attempt to romanticise the real-life stories or add unnecessary embroidery for added texture. Consequently, there is an element of starkness, a bleakness of approach that is very brave, yet strangely unsettling for the reader. One wishes the authors had added further dimensions by a deeper exploration of the complexities within each character. Some of the motives and choices made by the protagonists remain fuzzy and perplexing to the very end.

His hour of infamy

Churchill’s hand fed the appallingly dire Bengal famine. He comes off here as the fevered colonial of a caricature.

It is an interesting footnote that the death of Winston Churchill in January 1965 was solemnly commemorated throughout the lands that had till recently been part of the British empire. In Calcutta, a city that enjoyed a strange love-hate relationship with the British Raj, The Statesman covered his state funeral in London with a meticulous sensitivity that would have baffled Britons, not least the deceased. The bumptious principal of my school even had a portrait of Churchill put up at a discreet corner near the library.

This posthumous adulation of a man who had waged a determined campaign in the 1930s to prevent limited self-government for India and had once described Mahatma Gandhi as a “half-naked fakir” may seem inexplicable. Yet, it is important to remember that the nationalist mythology of an impoverished mass of Indians rising to boot out arrogant, exploitative colonials in a frenzy of anti-imperialism is a recent creation. The reality was an India that saw British rule in different shades of grey. The enlightened Indian quest for political freedom stemmed only nominally from hate; the seeds of national assertion were contained in the conviction that British rule had become ‘un-British.’

Full review here Outlook

Churchill’s Famine?

A new book indicts Britain’s wartime PM for millions of deaths in the 1943 Bengal famine

Madhusree Mukerjee, physicist and former editor of Scientific American, “currently a housewife” living in Germany with her husband and son, has a curious way of writing books: she catches hold of any subject that she wants to learn about, no matter how difficult or complex, and doesn’t let go until she’s ferreted out whatever it takes to answer her questions as a rank outsider. She puts it down to her training in  scientific method—Mukerjee lived in Calcutta until she moved to the US to study physics, receiving her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1989. “As a physicist, you are trained to simplify problems so that they become more comprehensible,” she says in a telephone interview from near Frankfurt in Germany.

The first time she strayed away from science journalism was when she decided to learn about the aboriginals in the Andamans islands. “I felt at some point that I understood pretty well the basics of science, but there was a lot about the human environment that I didn’t understand.” For a start, she decided to explore the stories she had heard while growing up in Calcutta of how freedom fighters dumped on the Andamans islands escaped head-hunting savages. “I wanted to understand the reality of that.” It led Mukerjee to the Andamans and her first book, The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders, relating the devastating experiences of the hunter-gatherers as they come face to face with modern civilisation.

Full review here Outlook

Blood, Sweat, Tears

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill is among the most overrated men of the twentieth century. As a student boxer at Harrow, he no doubt learned the value of getting in the first, telling punch: witness his self-serving telling of the history of World War II, which came out shortly after the war ended, and for which he won a literature Nobel Prize — not the last time a prize was political, but surely the only time it went to someone who relied on ghostwriters. That multi-volume work, through sheer dogged heft, re-routed his legacy: a prime minister who was comprehensively routed the first time he faced an election became the Last Lion, a fawning reputation that has survived various efforts to examine his record more rationally.

Just as Winston’s stubborn commitment to greatness is foundational for so many men — usually men — of the Right, halfway across the world, equally foundational for generations of Bengalis is the memory of the famine of 1943. Satyajit Ray was haunted by it all his life; and American economists would ask me, puzzled, why Amartya Sen had abandoned “real work” to study famines. When I would explain, haltingly, about ’43, nobody had ever heard of it. It wasn’t part of the story of the War. Why would it be? In all his volumes, Churchill never mentioned it.

Full review here Indian Express

Churchill’s Famine?

A new book indicts Britain’s wartime PM for millions of deaths in the 1943 Bengal famine

Churchill's Secret War
Madhusree Mukherjee
Tranquebar
Rs 495; Pp 352

Madhusree Mukerjee, physicist and former editor of Scientific American, “currently a housewife” living in Germany with her husband and son, has a curious way of writing books: she catches hold of any subject that she wants to learn about, no matter how difficult or complex, and doesn’t let go until she’s ferreted out whatever it takes to answer her questions as a rank outsider. She puts it down to her training in  scientific method—Mukerjee lived in Calcutta until she moved to the US to study physics, receiving her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1989. “As a physicist, you are trained to simplify problems so that they become more comprehensible,” she says in a telephone interview from near Frankfurt in Germany.

The first time she strayed away from science journalism was when she decided to learn about the aboriginals in the Andamans islands. “I felt at some point that I understood pretty well the basics of science, but there was a lot about the human environment that I didn’t understand.” For a start, she decided to explore the stories she had heard while growing up in Calcutta of how freedom fighters dumped on the Andamans islands escaped head-hunting savages. “I wanted to understand the reality of that.” It led Mukerjee to the Andamans and her first book, The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders, relating the devastating experiences of the hunter-gatherers as they come face to face with modern civilisation.

Full report here Outlook 

Fashionably racy, it is nevertheless not superficial.

Following a global trend, Indian bookshops are overflowing with chick lit and, let’s say, chuck lit. Bridget Jones and budgetary bones—the ailing international publishing industry—seem to have left their mark on Indian writing too. If you are a young writer, you can hardly ignore these developments. You are forced to adopt a chatty, on-the-ball style, then try to do what you can with, or despite, it.

In Balloonists, Rajorshi Chakraborti does quite a bit with and despite it. Fashionably racy, it is nevertheless not superficial. Dev, a British-Asian writer in London, is informed by his (current live-in) girlfriend that she’s pregnant. This launches the novel precisely, setting the context, pointing into the narrative, as is evident from the first sentence: “Upon learning of my girlfriend’s missed period and the subsequent result of a home-pregnancy test, my way of absorbing the information was to leave London without warning to visit a ninety-something-year-old lady in Munich....” The old lady is the feisty great-aunt of Dev’s ex-girlfriend, and when the ex-girlfriend disappears, Dev has to team up with Rodrigo (the man she had left him for) to find her. The disaster-ridden search of these two incompatible men manages to keep the reader captivated. Chakraborti knows what he is doing, and escapes cliches just when he seems to be wading into them. For instance, this about a fit of temper: “It doesn’t sound very nice recollected in tranquillity, but that is frequently a problem with emotion.”

Full review here Outlook

The Missionary's footprints

In search of India’s first printing press in Tranquebar, a former Danish colony and now a quiet town
A January noon in Tranquebar, a town on Tamil Nadu’s Coromandel coast, is pleasant. And we’ve reassured ourselves that gulping in lungfuls of this cool air will do us good, for Tranquebar is one of the world’s most ozone-rich places.

It has other equally unusual attractions that intrigue Srilata and me. K Srilata, novelist and academician, is in Tranquebar—officially Tharangambadi, ‘place of singing waves’—to research a novel. I am here because I’d read that Tranquebar was once a Danish settlement. What were the Danes doing in India? In 1620, having travelled all the way from Denmark to Sri Lanka to establish a colony—and subsequently discovering that Sri Lanka had no more room—the Danes came here. A treaty with the local ruler resulted in the setting up of a fort, which still stands, though the Danes relinquished control of Tranquebar in 1845 to the British.

Here we are, therefore, on the seashore of a town so ridiculously tiny it doesn’t even have an idli stall. We begin by visiting the Dansborg, the 17th century fort built by the Danish naval captain Ove Gjedde in 1620. It’s a pale yellow building and looks more like a large bungalow than a fort. But it’s deliciously colonial, and houses a museum with a modest collection of artefacts—from a whale’s backbone to tiny cannonballs.

Full report here Indian Express

Indian frames of mind

The sensual experience of learning Hindi and the transforming glimpses of ‘elsewhere’ that it afforded was what attracted her to learn the language and write about it, says American author Katherine Russell Rich. Excerpts from an interview…

American writer Katherine Russell Rich's Dreaming in Hindi is an engaging, informative account of a year spent in Udaipur, learning Hindi from scratch. In this email interview, she discusses the process and what it did for her.

You mention in your book that you weren't quite sure why you chose to learn Hindi in particular. But do you think your achievement, of re-imagining your world through a second language, would have been as personally rewarding if the language had been some other?

Full report here Hindu

Beyond Namaste

American writer Katherine Russell Rich talks about reading, writing and Dreaming in Hindi

Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English. Katherine Russell Rich would probably agree with fellow American writer Mignon McLaughlin who wrote this in The Neurotic’s Notebook in 1960. “Growing up in America, homeland of the diehard monolingual, speaking another language fascinated me. Only people like James Bond could,” says Rich who decided to learn Hindi for a year and enrolled in a course in Udaipur. That was in 2001 and this summer, her memoir Dreaming in Hindi is saying much more than Namaste.

Dreaming in Hindi (Tranquebar, Rs 395) begins when Rich found her world turned upside down. She’d lost a job at the magazine she worked for, had battled breast cancer twice. She was single, unemployed and had the freedom to do new things. Perhaps, learn a language. “I’d been studying Hindi in New York for about six months when one day, I heard all these sentences around me. I saw three Indian guys talking about the weather, not any secrets of the universe, but I was flabbergasted to be able to understand them. I felt I’d been shifted to another place. I was hooked,” says Rich who had been working on a piece about taking Hindi lessons and the effect learning a second language had on the brain. The story got killed. “But I took the material and turned it into a book proposal in which I said I’d go to India and spend a year there,” says Rich.

Full report here Indian Express

Dreaming in Udaipur

What was an American journalist doing learning how to speak Hindi in Rajasthan, asks Inder Sidhu

US journalist and author Katherine Russell Rich spent a year between 2001-2002 in India learning Hindi at an Udaipur school. Recently released in India, Dreaming in Hindi (Tranquebar, Rs 395), an account of her stay in the country, has garnered high praise from the likes of Oprah and been warmly received by The New York Times. In an email interview, Rich discusses how the trip shaped her understanding of India and its culture, the intricacies of Hindi, and how the Gujarat riots affected her work and perception of our country. Excerpts:

What about Dreaming in Hindi will surprise Indian readers?
I think a lot in the book will surprise them.  The language took me deeper into the country than many Western writers go, or than the ones who come over and write about finding themselves in India go. I was more interested in finding India, which I’d fallen in love with through the Hindi language when I was studying it back in New York. A lot of Americans come to India and are overwhelmed by the differences, but because I was going in on words, I was able, through language, to make faster sense of India. The more I understood life there, the more that aspects of it became so compelling. I begin to love the closeness I found in Indian families, for instance, and maybe that’s one thing that will surprise Indian readers—that a fiercely independent, privacy loving New York journalist could come to cherish the nosiness and clamor and boisterous emotion that you find in Indian families. I still sometimes wish I had an Indian family here in New York to go stay with.

Full interview here Tehelka

India, on a miniature scale

Architect Gautam Bhatia has used Rajasthani miniature paintings to illustrate his just-released graphic novel Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India. Excerpts from an exclusive interview:

Flip through the pages of Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India and you’ll see hundreds of colourful drawings. But this graphic novel, written by architect-author Gautam Bhatia and drawn by miniaturists from Rajasthan, is a relentlessly dark and hard-hitting work that lampoons the unsavoury aspects of contemporary Indian life, including the class divide and the apathy of politicians. Bhatia discusses the book in an interview:

In addition to being an architect, you’re an acerbic social commenter and a prolific writer. How do you find the time to juggle these disciplines?
Writing for me was an activity that grew out of architecture. Seeing how some clients had strange fetishes and dreams – demanding baroque villas and Venetian mansions in south Delhi’s Greater Kailash, for example – it was much easier to write about architecture than build it!

Time is always available. Buildings go on forever, people run out of money during construction, or projects don’t get approved because the building agency has not received the bribe. Anyway, most of my writing is a reflection on the visible state of things. It can be done at bus stops and railway stations.


Tell us about the genesis of Lie. Did you conceptualise and write the narrative first, and subsequently work with the artists?
Lie was initially an unwieldy 600-page book called An Indian Story. It was written for the project Desh Ki Awaaz, an arts collaboration between traditional, popular and graphic artists. I was the odd man architect in the group. This bigger story weaved together elements and themes from contemporary life, including politics, film, religion, cricket and family life.

By using subjects to which everyone could relate, the idea was to explore the moral and social dilemmas that dominate Indian life – corruption, dowry, dysfunctional families, gender inequality, caste prejudice, communalism and other areas of conflict. Real and fictitious characters – ministers, movie stars, bureaucrats, underworld dons, migrant workers, child labourers, government teachers, cricket players, business executives and a range of other personalities – moved in and out of the story. Lie was the shortened version of An Indian Story.

Full interview here Hindu

REVIEW: Lie

REVIEW

Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India
Gautam Bhatia
Tranquebar
Rs. 395
Pp 401
ISBN: 9380283739
Paperback

Blurb
The graphic novel looks at issues, personalities, people and ideas that project the popularly-held view of the country. Its characters interact with each other in a way that gives vent to a range of popular and suppressed prejudices-desires, taboos and age-old injustices - that dog the life of every Indian. A sardonic look at the current state of affairs in the country, using a traditional form of expression, Lie has been drawn by miniaturists from Rajasthan.

Through a glass, very darkly Hindu
From the palette of sombre colours used in the illustrations to the black humour running all through, Gautam Bhatia's graphic novel Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India is, at every level, a very dark piece of work.

A broad picture-book narrative that is part-soap opera and part-family melodrama, the self-proclaimed critic and satirist explores every nook and cranny of society, laying bare the flaws with brutal honesty. Thus, Bhola the protagonist, flawed in every conceivable manner morally, takes to politics and the apathy, corruption and wily mechanism of the bureaucracy is revealed in a manner that is as entertaining as it is disturbing.

At the other end of the spectrum is the impoverished and ideology-driven farmer Alibaba who chooses to walk the Gandhian path of uprightness and justice. Mid-spectrum is the sex-worker turned prime minister, Rekha.
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True copy Timeout Mumbai
More than a decade ago, architect Gautam Bhatia skewered the icing-cake aesthetic favoured by India’s nouveau riches in his brilliant Punjabi Baroque, which cast a jaundiced eye over the home designs of the newly affluent. His latest book, Lie, is a graphic novel drawn in collaboration with three Rajasthani miniature artists. The visuals are colourful, but the narrative is a darkly humourous sketch of Indian life. In an email interview with Naresh Fernandes, Bhatia said India evokes laughter as a form of relief, “like people who laugh in a perilous roller coaster ride when they are at their most fearful”. 

Lie is an angry book. What motivated it?
I live with this fear that I’ll wake up one morning and India would be gone. Just vanished! As if in the middle of the night someone just removed it from the map, and I’m waking up in Europe or America where everything is ordinary and normal. India is great rallying point, a dark smudge of a place that keeps people like me afloat, provides all the hate and love, and fear and prejudice, and despair and joy that makes life worth living. Everyday provides such an intense dose of ugliness, such noisy cries of despair, or moments of such real pleasure that you are left reeling. India is the motivation. Anger is also a strong motivational force in a farce. It makes you see things as so bleak and desperate that the only recourse is laughter.
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True lies. The great India story Financial Express
Good ultimately triumphs over evil. But what if it doesn’t, or has co-opted the majority along the way? In an age where the virtues of positive thinking and ignoring any signs to the contrary are almost the only option, here is an alternate view. Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India is as bleak as they come. It’s a parable of a land that has lost its way, of its citizens who are trapped in a system with escape routes cut off.

Lie is also different. To start with, it is a graphic novel, a genre in which dark is usually associated with forces of the night with superhuman powers rather than politically loaded tales of cynicism or despair. Its graphic artistes are not some young dudes doing their cool stuff, but three traditional miniaturists from Rajasthan—Shankar Lal Bhopa, Birju Lal and Ghansham. “They were the only ones who agreed to illustrate what we wanted instead of the usual images they do,” says Gautam Bhatia. The miniature form was chosen, explains Bhatia, as it can cram considerable amounts of information in small spaces and what is unsaid in words could come through as “there is no space for silence in the visual medium”. The book, in fact, started by being part of a larger project called Desh Ki Awaz and the plan was for a 600-page An Indian Story but was finally whittled down the present 180 pages. The book went through several stages as each illustration had to be discussed, not an easy project. The result is a traditional looking vividly coloured manuscript with the colours of Rajasthan seeping in.
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REVIEW: Dreaming in Hindi

REVIEW
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language
Katherine Russell Rich
Tranquebar
Rs 395
Pp 401

Blurb

Having miraculously survived a serious illness and now at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor, Katherine Russell Rich spontaneously accepted a free-lance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language. Before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi.

In this inspirational memoir, Rich documents her experiences in India — ranging from the bizarre to the frightening to the unexpectedly exhilarating — using Hindi as the lens through which she is given a new perspective not only on India, but on the radical way the country and the language itself were changing her. Fascinated by the process, she went on to interview linguistics experts around the world, reporting back from the frontlines of the science wars on what happens in the brain when we learn a new language. Seamlessly combining Rich’s courageous (and often hilarious) personal journey with wideranging reporting, Dreaming in Hindi offers an eye-opening account of what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.

Review The Economic Times

Katherine R Rich has a wicked sense of humour and this becomes apparent from the very start of the book. The account of her stay in India brings forth the many Indias, a cauldron that would leave any straight-head American bewildered in no time. But Rich is in no rush to go back. Besieged by the idiosyncratic, passionate, and the argumentative Indian, she takes her time to settle down and belts out her chronicles in lucid chapters—one after another. And she soon begins to see and present India from the prism of Hindustani language.

To an Indian reader, this book offers a mirror, though often not as brutally as did VS Naipaul or Pankaj Mishra in their accounts under similar surroundings. Rich has a subtle touch, and she makes good, timely use of Hindi words to drive home her observations. Not for nothing that the book was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s list of ‘Ten most thrilling reads of 2009’.  
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Getting transformed by learning a new language Suite 101.com

Near the start of Dreaming in Hindi, author Katherine Russell Rich says: "I took up with Hindi at a time when it seemed my life had buckled out from under me." In the wake of a bout with cancer and the discovery that her job didn't make her happy any more, Katherine decides to head for Udaipur in India to learn Hindi. She continues: "I no longer had the language to describe my own life. So I decided I'd borrow someone else's."

So begins a year long odyssey which is chronicled in Dreaming in Hindi. The book blends the author's memoirs from that period with the latest thinking on linguistics and second language acquisition. An assignment for a magazine starts the ball rolling, and on her return from India she begins taking Hindi lessons. Soon that's not enough and she makes the decision to leave her old life behind and take a course in India.
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Rich encounters Hindu

It so happened that I read this book at a time when I was having to speak five languages on a daily basis. None of them was new; but reading this made me aware of what I was doing. I could almost sense the different brain paths in use, and I was certainly sensible of a different cultural approach to each. It was the best way – and one I could never have planned – to appreciate Rich's experience of learning Hindi from scratch.

Writerly forays

Rich's background is with magazines, not academics. Why she chose to learn Hindi is never clearly spelled out. She'd lost her job, and was recovering from cancer. (She wrote an award-winning book about her battle with “The Red Devil”.) She lied to an editor who'd asked her for some freelance work, saying “I'll be in India,” and was told, “Do something for us there.”

From Delhi, she was sent to an academy in Udaipur which taught foreign students. She arrived at a difficult time: five days before the attacks on New York, and that was followed in short order by the attack on Parliament, then came Godhra and the subsequent carnage. Her magazine background serves her well. She details with painstaking and sometimes painful honesty her reactions to the hatred spewed by fanatics everywhere, the branding of humans by community. There was then a palpable, shimmering unease in the air which she describes elegantly.