“108”: An Ecothriller by Former Poet Laura Dheepa Maturi

Dheepa Maturi served as Tweetspeak Poetry’s Poet Laura for 2024. We learned quite a bit about the monarch butterfly, as she wrote several posts for the Tweetspeak-proclaimed “Year of the Monarch.” And we learned she cared deeply about the environment, and she helped readers celebrate Earth Day. We discovered how poetry could be applied to environmental and climate concerns.  

And now we know what she’s been up to since then – publishing an ecothriller, entitled 108.

 

It’s sometime in the near future. The planet’s climate is in crisis, with the air in the cities almost unbreathable. Farmland has been affected as well, raising the possibility of famine. Agricultural production has been divided into 20 zones, and research has been underway to find ways to make those zones more productive.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

“He showed me where my heart is” (and other ways to praise a dog) -- Pádraig Ó Tuama at Poetry Unbound.

 

The Poem I Read to My Daughter – Pater Savodnik at The Free Press.

 

Saint of the before times – poem by Lisa Marie Basile at Every Day Poems.

 

“I Slept, and Dreamed that Life was Beauty,” poem by Ellen Sturgis Hooper – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“The Charge of the Light Brigade,” poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson – Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

Poetry Prompt: Gathering Flowers – Tweetspeak Poetry.

“Where Gods Dwell” by Leigh Copeland

Jonathan Prosper, mid-20s, has left Oxford and England behind him. With his father’s bank embezzlement overshadowing his own reputation, he hopes to make his way in India, gain some measure of wealth, and return to Oxford. But the tea and imported carpet business provides only so much income, and he’s found himself acting as a “confidential agent,” or private detective. It’s the 1930s, the last years of the British Raj.

He’s hired by a jute manufacturing manager to see if the rumors about his wife are true. But before he can complete his investigation, the client is murdered. His personal servant is missing and suspected of the crime. But the client’s wife is not convinced; she hires Jonathan to look into the crime. The suspects include her own brother, an officer in the local British garrison.

And it seems that more people are interested on what’s happened, including what would be the rough equivalent of the Raj’s FBI. The body of one of their agents has been found in the river, and there may be a connection to the death of the jute plant manager. Prosper soon finds himself immersed in union politics, religious conflicts, and odd things happening with the garrison.

Leigh Copeland

Where Gods Dwell by Leigh Copeland is the first of the Jonathan Prosper mysteries, and it’s a deep, fascinating dive into the Indian sub-continent of the period. Much of the story is set in East Bengal, or what is now Bangladesh, and Copeland artfully blends historical research into a compelling account. (I read the third in the series, Kiss Miss, first, but the stories are standalone and work individually as well as together.)

Born in Melbourne, Australia, Copeland graduated in Politics and Sociology at Monash University. He and his wife operate a business dealing in antique carpets and rare textiles from Afghanistan and India, and he’s made more than 50 trips to the two countries. He’s published five novels in the Jonathan Prosper series: Where Gods Dwell, The Body in the Bokhara, Kiss Miss, Full Moon, and Calcutta Cabob. 

Where Gods Dwell is a fine mystery. Prosper is just the right blend of slightly cynical and knowledgeable Englishman. He knows his own place in the Indian / British hierarchy, and he understands how both the British and the people they rule work. It’s a great read.

Related:

Kiss Miss by Leigh Copeland.

"Kiss Miss" by Leigh Copeland

Jonathan Prosper, 25, lives in Calcutta. It’s 1935, the twilight of the British Raj in India. Prosper is trying to make enough and save enough money to finish his education in England. He has a tea business doing moderately well and a few other small business interests. To supplement what he makes, he undertakes investigations, primarily for the resident Britons.

He lives in not the best part of Calcutta, but not the worst, either. His next-door neighbor operates a rooming house, and she calls him to help with an unexpected visitor. American travel writer Kandy Kincaid has arrived in borrowed clothes, rather disheveled looking, and with no money. She’s been in the north, surviving an arduous trek and housed for a time in a Buddhist monastery. She’s been out of circulation for months, and she’s pleased to discover that her books are selling well. She has a new book to write, and Prosper offers her a room and his typewriter. Soon she’s dominating his typewriter. And more.

The Destranges, English friends of Prosper living in a well-known Calcutta housing compound, seek his help. Construction work on their tennis court has uncovered a skeleton, dressed in Victorian clothes and still wearing jewelry. The newspapers have a field day. The police are baffled, but the Destranges think that Prosper might uncover the dead woman’s identity by going through the voluminous records in their library. 

Leigh Copeland

Prosper will find more than he’s looking for. It isn’t just one dead woman. And then a young woman staying with the Destranges is found dead in the pavilion next to the tennis court.

Kiss Miss by Leigh Copeland in one of five novels in the Jonathan Prosper series. And it’s pitch perfect, credibly transporting the reader back to the waning days of the Raj, and giving an insightful taste of the reality of the class structure, the streets, and the passions underlying all those proper British manners. 

Born in Melbourne, Australia, Copeland graduated in Politics and Sociology at Monash University. He and his wife operate a business dealing in antique carpets and rare textiles from Afghanistan and India, and he’s made more than 50 trips to the two countries. He’s published five novels in the Jonathan Prosper series: Where Gods Dwell, The Body in the Bokhara, Kiss Miss, Full Moon, and Calcutta Cabob. 

Kiss Miss is a fascinating mystery and a great story. I was so impressed that I bought Where Gods Dwell, and I can’t wait to read it. If you like historical crime fiction written extremely well, this novel has just about everything that could be offered. 

Saroo Brierly’s “A Long Way Home”

Sheru was a five-year-old boy helping his family live by their wits in a small town in north central India. His father was a Muslim, and had left the family to marry a second wife. His mother was a Hindu, struggling to raise three boys and a girl. Sheru was the youngest of the three boys. He couldn’t quite pronounce his name correctly and so called himself “Saroo.” He had one significant responsibility, other than begging for food and sometimes stealing it: taking care of his little sister while his mother worked carting rocks for a construction crew. His mother would often be gone for three or four days at a time for her job.

His older brothers worked, begged, and sometimes stole as well. In search of work, they would often sneak aboard trains to travel to the next town or two down the line. One day, Saroo’s oldest brother took Saroo with him. The little boy was thrilled to go along. When they arrived, his brother tells Saroo to wait at the train station until he returns. He falls asleep on a bench. When he awakens, the station is deserted, and there is no sign of his brother. A train arrives, and the little boy gets in and looks for his brother. He discovers the train car is empty, with barred windows and doors that open only from the outside. And then the train begins to move.

A Long Way Home is Saroo Brierly’s remarkable and true story of what happened when he boarded that train. The train traveled across India to Calcutta (now called Kolkata). And the five-year-old boy found himself in one of the largest, most densely populated, and most dangerous cities in the world. With only two fragments of information about where his family lived, Saroo would live on the streets of Calcutta for six months, avoid police, child molesters, gangs preying on orphaned and abandoned children, and an always-constant hunger for food.

Saroo was eventually befriended by a teenager, taken to the police station, confined to a juvenile facility (along with children like himself, young criminals, and children needing medical care), and then adopted by a couple in Tasmania, the island off the southern coast of Australia. And there he lived, with a bedroom larger than the room his family in India shared and with a real bed, until he reached adulthood and began working with his adopted father in the family business.

Saroo Brierly

With the advent of the internet and especially Google Earth, he begins to search for his family in India. It takes years, but the recognition of a water tower in a small town begins the journey home, a journey that ends in finding his birth family. The house they had lived in was abandoned and crumbling, but his mother lived nearby. She insisted on staying near where they had lived because she believed her youngest son would one day come home. And he did.

Saroo’s story is a story of desperate and unimaginable poverty, what people do to survive, the love of two families in radically different circumstances, and the determination of a young man to find out what had happened to his brother and his family after that train began to move.

The book had been made into a movie, Lion, starring Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) and Nicole Kidman. It is scheduled for release in U.S. movie theaters on Nov. 25.

Top photograph: a scene from the movie “Lion,” based on A Long Way Home.

Mark Twain: "Chasing the Last Laugh" by Richard Zacks

The Panic of 1893 began with European banks worrying about a coup and wheat crop failure in Argentina. Within a very short period of time, the panic had spread to the United States, and a severe depression began. Stock prices collapsed, more than 500 U.S. banks closed, farms were abandoned, and more than 15,000 businesses failed. The effects didn’t occur overnight, but they happened fairly rapidly.

One of the businesses that eventually failed was the Charles Webster publishing firm. It was owned by Mark Twain. Twain desperately sought to keep the business afloat, while at the same time investing heavily in a linotype machine that would have brought a fortune had it worked. It didn’t. Twain and his family lost nearly everything and he was left heavily in debt, a debt his wife insisted that he pay.

As popular historian recounts in Chasing the Last Laugh: Mark Twain’s Raucous and Redemptive Round-the-World Comedy Tour, Twain did the only thing he knew to do, the thing he had come to intensely dislike. He went on the lecture circuit. In fact, he went on the global lecture circuit.

The itinerary took Twain, his wife Livy, and their daughter Clara (two other daughters stayed in New York) first across the northern United States to Seattle, and by boat to the Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), India, South Africa, and then England. The trip took close to a full year: Twain spoke hundreds of times, occasionally to half-filled auditoriums but more often to houses so packed that extra engagements had to be scheduled.

The tour was a moneymaking event, to be sure, but it became something of a triumph for Twain the writer and speaker and Twain the man.

The tour has always been covered in other biographies, but not to the detail Zacks includes. And the story is in both the overview and the details – the overlay of late 19^th century imperialism, the British Raj in India reaching its apogee, the stark realities of race in South Africa, the responses of the audiences, the specific stories Twain told at each of the performances, how the newspapers covered him and his stories, what played well, and what didn’t.

This could get tedious, but in Zacks’ hands it becomes rich and illuminating. He tells a wonderful story, pulling from the correspondence of Twain, the family, friends and relatives, and robber baron H.H. Rogers, who did more than anyone else (including Twain) to extricate the author from his legal and financial ordeals.

Richard Zacks

Zacks is the author of a number popular histories, including History Laid Bare (1995); An Underground Education (1999); The Pirate Hunter (2003); The Pirate Coast (2006); and Island of Vice (2012). He’s also been a freelance journalist, writing for such publications as The Atlantic and ESPN.

Chasing the Last Laugh is a fascinating account of a major American author who stared financial (and social) ruin in the face, and ultimately didn’t blink. And managed to entertain a lot of people along the way.

Top photograph: The frontispiece of Following the Equator, the book Twain wrote after he concluded his around-the-world speaking tour.

Karan Bajaj’s “The Yoga of Max’s Discontent”

Max (short for Maximus) Pzoras works at a Wall Street investment firm, extremely successful at finding ailing companies to invest in, slash costs dramatically, and make the firm a tidy profit. He’s moving up, not bad for a boy from the projects in the Bronx.

But his mother has just died from cancer, he’s haunted by what happened to the girlfriend he left behind and his own past, and he’s come to see his work as something less than what it appears to be. So Max takes off to India to find a wise man to teach him, and perhaps to find himself.

The Yoga of Max’sDiscontent by Karan Bajaj is about what happens to Max in India. From the mountains of the Himalayas to Mumbai, and from the far south of India back to the Himalayas, we follow Max as he becomes a yogi, and tries to reach a state of perfection right there at his fingertips.

This is one fascinating book. While it is about Max and his journey, it is also about yoga in all of its varied forms and stages. And it provides an easy-to-read account of what yoga means and what it required to become one of its practitioners. I thought I would have to be convinced to read and enjoy a book like this, but I was hooked from the first few pages.

The novel captures the sights, sounds, smells, and people of India. We travel with Max on a two-day train ride (second class and general seating; no one can believe a foreigner will ask for general seating). We struggle with Max in the mountains, as he gets lost and nearly dies. We train with Max in the southern lowlands, feeling the parched thirst of the monsoon season that seems as if it will never come. We walk with Max through the marketplaces and bazaars. We even sit with Max in the ramshackle bathroom facilities, dealing with the scorpions and occasional cobra.

Karan Bajaj

As times passes, and the training increases in intensity, we join Max in shedding our Western notions, cultural biases, and what we perceive as our needs. Our understandings of time and self change profoundly.

Bajaj was born and raised in the Indian Himalayas and now lives in Brooklyn. He teaches meditation, and you find training courses and resource links on his web site. He has been a bestselling author in India for his novels, Keep Off the Grass and Johnny Goes Down. The Yoga of Max’s Discontent was first published in India as The Seeker and is the first of his works to be published in the United States.

It is one fascinating story.

Photograph of the Indian Himalayas by Piotr Wojtkowski via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.