Fading city, vibrant poems

NEW RELEASES

Living Next Door to Alise
Anita Nair
Puffin
Rs 135
112 pages (with 20 illustrations)

This is a rollicking story of friendship and bravery, aimed at the 10-plus age group. Nine-year-old Siddharth is the despair of his parents. He does not want to run around or climb trees, and he is terrified of ants.

Siddharth prefers books to friends and is the target of his teacher's gimlet eyes in school because he asks too many questions. Then one day, when he is sent out to the garden to try and play, he finally makes a friend "" the fast-talking, quick-thinking, ultra-intelligent baby elephant, Alise.

Together the two friends set out on a series of exploits. From the day Alise decides to go to school wearing a checked tablecloth and ends up causing mayhem to the night they attend a party and get into such trouble that they run away to the forest, there is never a dull moment in Siddarth's life. But the friends don't stop at just having fun. The Bearded Bandit has spread terror among the elephants in the forest and someone has to stop him...

Selected Poems
Jibanananda Das
Penguin (Modern Classics)
Rs 150
104 pages

Jibanananda Das's lyricism is unparalleled in Bengali literature. His early poems are vivid, eloquent celebrations of the beauty of Bengal; his later works, written in the 1940s and 50s, are darker, comments on political issues and current affairs like the Second World War, the Bengal Famine of '43 and Hindu-Muslim riots at the time of Partition.

Born in 1899, Jibanananda belonged to a group of poets who tried to shake off Tagore's poetic influence.

While he is best known for poetry that reveals a deep love for nature and rural landscapes, tradition and history, Jibanananda is also strikingly urban, and introspective, his work centring on themes of loneliness, depression and death. He was a master of word-images, and his unique poetic idiom drew on tradition but was startlingly new.

Jibanananda died in a tram accident in 1954. His Shrestha Kavita (Best Poems) won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1955.

The Last Bungalow: Writings on Allahabad
Edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Rs 395
Penguin Books India
331 pages

This book is a memorial to a now-forgotten city whose rise was as meteoric as its fall. The intellectual energy of colonial Allahabad has all but disappeared, the bungalows and their inhabitants have gone, and their descendants can only recall a lost time.

Visited by the Buddhist scholar Hsiuan Tsang in the seventh century, the city is today visited by spiritual con men and con women, as well as ordinary pilgrims who come to attend the Magh and Kumbh Melas.

In 1824, Bishop Heber wrote that Allahabad was a "desolate and ruinous" place. Three years later, Mirza Ghalib compared it to hell.

But for Jawaharlal Nehru, Allahabad was where he was born and where he cut his political teeth; for Nayantara Sehgal it was a model for civilised living; for Ved Mehta it was, like other Indian cities, "a jumble of British, Muslim and Hindu influences"; for Saeed Jaffrey it was a place where a good time could be had while one picked up a decent education; for I Allan Sealy it was his parents' home town, a reservoir of family lore. Their reflections, and those of many others, are included in this collection.