Finished reading THE WAY THINGS WERE by Aatish Taseer, a British-born writer whose mother Tavleen Singh is a veteran journalist in India, and whose father Salmaan Taseer served as Governor of the Punjab in Pakistan before being assassinated in 2011.
This novel, published in 2015, is set primarily in India. It opens with the 2013 death in Europe of Toby Kalasuryaketu, a former rajah [prince] and dedicated Sanskritist. Toby’s son Skandu, living in the US, takes his cremated remains to India. It’s a journey into family and national history, intertwined. From 1975, the year Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency and curtailed democratic freedoms and human rights; the same year Toby rajah married Skandu's mother, daughter of a retired Sikh brigadier in the Indian Army. Through 1984, when Mrs Gandhi was assassinated by a Sikh bodyguard, and when Toby and his wife separated because he loved the Sanskrit language more than he loved her. To 1992, when Hindu fanatics destroyed the 16th century Babri mosque in Ayodhya, and when Toby left India for good with his second wife, a foreigner and soulmate.
The main characters in this novel, including the women, are high society Indians who read serious literary fiction, and who in their conversations refer to authors like VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Charles Dickens, Gabriel Garcia Marquez etc.
