The Way Things Were

Starred review from May 4, 2015
Taseer's (Noon) sprawling epic about two generations of a privileged Indian family will leave readers intoxicated. Toby, a maharaja, has immersed himself in the study of Sanskrit; this intellectualism is, for a time, exciting to his wife, Uma, but it's soon revealed to be a way of distancing himself from Indian life. The story begins with Toby's death and his son Skanda's return to India from Manhattan to carry out the funeral rites, and it moves back and forth over a 30-year period, mirroring the unrest of the country from the state of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi to the present. Skanda is forced to confront the fact that he has inherited his father's detachment and must try to make sense of his own broken childhood. He resolves to move forward without repeating his father's mistakes and makes peace with his history. Authors often attempt to frame a given period of a country's history through a single family's story, but Taseer's book is a cut above the rest. Colonialism, racism, sectarian violence, class tension, and the rise of the Indian nouveau riche are all handled with a delicate touch. This is a difficult book to put down, and readers will enjoy every minute of it, as well as learning about contemporary Indian culture.

Starred review from May 1, 2015
In this ambitious novel, Taseer chronicles 40 years of modern Indian history through the eyes of a father and son, both scholars of the ancient Indian language Sanskrit. In the midst of translating The Birth of Kumara, Skanda leaves Manhattan for Geneva to be with his gravely ill father, Toby, the maharaja of Kalasuryaketu. After Toby dies, Skanda must return his body to India, a country his father has not set foot in since 1992. From here, Taseer (Noon, 2011, etc.) skillfully shifts the narrative between Skanda in present-day Delhi and Toby, beginning in 1975, the year of Indira Gandhi's "Emergency," continuing through the riots against Sikhs in 1984, the dissolution of his marriage to Skanda's mother, and, in 1992, the demolition of the mosque in Ayodhya, along with the arrival of American daytime television. Sanskrit phrases bind and illuminate this enchanting saga, and it's through father's and son's devotion to the language and their shared "deep knowledge of classical India" that both Skanda and Toby make sense of the history and struggles of their country of origin. "Was the language all that had held the world together? Had that alone been the source of meaning?" As Skanda contemplates how India's past political strife irrevocably damaged his parents' marriage, Toby considers, years earlier, whether his love of Sanskrit has distracted him from seeing the truth about his beloved country. "His feeling for the language had now, for as long as he could remember, been part of his way of seeing, part of the way he configured the world. But had it blinded him to the reality of the place?" A year after Toby's death, when Skanda must release his ashes into the Tamasa River, Skanda begins to appreciate his father's "whole approach to things, to history, to memory, to place, to civilization." A timeless, masterful epic.

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June 1, 2015

Taseer's latest opens with a mother's call to her Manhattan-based son, asking him to ferry his just-deceased father's body from Geneva back to Delhi. Though a minor Indian prince, "Toby" G.M.P.R. Kalasuryaketu--half-actually Scottish, half-Indian--was more a foreign "novelty" in his ancestral homeland. A Sanskrit scholar with an "exaggerated reverence for the Indian past," he bequeathed his linguistic obsessions to his "collector of cognates" son, Skanda. Chapters alternate between Toby's abandoned India of decades past and the present, in which Skanda returns to India and unexpectedly remains. Amid a country in flux, Toby's gift of language offers Skanda the possibility of understanding "the way things were." VERDICT Taseer, the son of an assassinated Muslim Pakistani politician and a Sikh Indian journalist, is undoubtedly a formidable storyteller (Temple-Goers; Noon), yet his constant, digressive displays of erudition--from Marcel Proust's Swann and Joseph Conrad's Kurtz to neglected vocabulary such as fissiparous and pleonastically--prove more distracting than enhancing. The result is an unnecessarily sprawling, nearly 600-page epic that should have been stunning. For more satisfying examples of what Things could have been, try Amitav Ghosh's "Ibis Trilogy," Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, and M.G. Vassanji's The Assassin's Song.--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

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