Book Summary:In Custody by Anita Desai

One of the most famous work of Anita Desai,A novel which is very familiar about it’s surrounding.

This is a novel about a small-town man, Deven, who gets the opportunity to go interview his hero, the great poet Nur, the greatest living Urdu poet. Having always loved Urdu poetry and missed the chance to be an Urdu language professor, he is charmed into going to Delhi the big city. Even though he shrinks at the idea of possibly being exploited by his sharp and selfish friend Murad, the dream of meeting Nur draws him on.

What Deven finds at his hero’s house is misery and confusion. Having sunk into a senile old age, surrounded by fawning sycophants, married to a younger calculating wife who wants to use his glory to win herself fame, Nur is not what he once was. Or perhaps he always was this.

Deven, a shrinking and weak man, is somehow drawn to this old poet, wishing to help and protect him even as he cannot defend himself. Perhaps it is the tie of Urdu poetry that he remembers from his treasured times as a child with his father.

In order to save the name and works of Nur for posterity, he decides to record his voice on tape for his small-town university. In the process Deven is exploited monetarily and emotionally, where Nur’s family and hangers on demand money to keep themselves happy, Murad refuses to pay him for submissions to his self-proclaimed literary magazine. His wife Sarla is indignant at his time away, his fellow professors think he is having an affair in Delhi or push him to get a taping of Nur’s voice. The saddest part is the result of the sessions. Drunk and encouraged by his admirers who follow him along to the sessions, Nur offers nothing new.The session between Nur and Deven gives amazing perception about life.

In 1993 film ‘In Custody’ was directed by Ismail Merchant.Shashi Kapoor,Shabana Azmi and Om Puri as main cast.

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The Zigzag Way by Anita Desai

The Zigzag Way is filled with ghosts and chance meetings, with eerie atmospherics and people trying to fit in where they don’t quite belong.

Anita Desai’s always a writers of refugees,her latest work is set into a world of ghost revolve around Mexico.Her protagonist , Eric, a Harvard graduate student, follows his scientist girlfriend to Mexico, only to learn that he would not be welcome at her research site. At a lecture on the Huichol Indians of the Sierras, given by the mysterious, exotic Doña Vera, Eric suddenly realizes that the place names she mentions are those he once heard from his Cornish grandfather, who once worked in the Mexican silver mines.

In the second part of the novel, the author abandons Eric in order to explain how Doña Vera rose from prostitution to her present status as a wealthy grande dame.The third section of hit the past, this time telling the story of Eric’s grandfather and the other Cornish immigrants, who ended up either dying, being killed, or having to leave Mexico.

The novel ends in the present, when at a local celebration called “La Noche de los Muertos,” Eric encounters a ghost from the past and sees his own path into the future.

Desai’s odd title refers to the zigzagging path the miners followed when coming to the surface, a route that makes it easier for them to breathe as they ascend.A amazing dark side novel a light in the tunnel of dark mines.

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