Academics
Bonita, a young student from India, sits on a park bench in San Miguel, Mexico – where she has arrived to learn Spanish. She is alone in this place to which she has no connection. It feels like bliss.\n\nAnd then a woman approaches her, claiming to recognize Bonita, because she is the spitting image of her mother who supposedly made the same journey from India to Mexico as a young artist. No, says Bonita, my mother did not paint. She never travelled to Mexico. But this strange woman insists, and so Bonita follows her. Into a story where Bonita and her mother will move apart and come together, as the past threatens to flood the present, or, perhaps, even rewrite it.
In this sensitive portrayal of human nature, Anita Desai, one of India?s foremost writers, paints an intimate portrait of lives impacted by the quest for identity and purpose. Deven, a Hindi lecturer in small-town Mirpore, lives a humdrum existence. A chance to interview Nur?India?s greatest living Urdu poet?offers him an escape from his dreary life. But the Nur he meets is an enfeebled man, surrounded by clashing wives and preying sycophants. Deven?s decision to be the custodian of Nur?s verse gives birth to an unusual alliance between the two. Stimulating and thought provoking, In Custody is a brilliant parable lamenting the gradual corrosion of culture and tradition in the face of modernity, and a dazzling study of the complexity of human relationships.
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