GUNBOAT JACK, A NOVEL.

Situated in the literary landscape that encompasses E.M. Forster's Passage to India, this brilliant magical novel is about the clash of two cultures - ancient India and modern West - carried out in an epic struggle that is at once part mythic, heroic past and the everyday present.
At the book's centre if Nicky, the young Prince of Tandhapur, on the edge of manhood, torn between his roots as an Indian aristocrat and his western education, passionately devoted to his family's pride, power and dignity in an India that is fast abolishing the role of rajahs.
Nicky's father has allowed the control of his family, its fortune. The great palace itself with its splendours and Victorian opulence, to pass into the hands of his English advisor and mistress, Miss Hobbs. A woman of singular determination and boundless ambition, she has cut the Rajah off from his own children, even from the old Rani; from everyone in fact, except Nicky, who sets out to regain his heritage and defeat the invader.
But the time is 1952, not 1542, Nicky's ally is not a Mongol prince but a stranded American boxer. His test of courage is not a duel with jewelled swords but a boxing match with Miss Hobbs's son, a match which gradually comes to signify all the tensions and conflicts of India and of the family, embracing the Rajah himself, his bullying mistress, the young princess who has to choose between a western education and an arranged marriage, the fate if the American boxer, who is in love with an Anglo-Indian girl, and above all the future of Nicky himself.
Filled with rich, sensuous, potent scenes and images, fast paced, deeply moving, romantic and gripping, Field of Honour is a major work of fiction.

Graham Greene 'I was very much impressed.’

-Hugely dramatic, thrilling indeed. FINANCIAL TIMES.
-Murari can set an exotic scene, enrich it with romantic intrigue, and power it with a dramatic climax. A good novel about man's basic struggle against society, his fellow man and himself. For readers who want suspense with sustenance- LIBRARY JOURNAL.
-A first rate story-teller makes the most of the incongruity of circumstances. -DAILY TELEGRAPH.
-A backwater setting with fascinating characters is brought to life here by skilful, good old-fashioned story telling. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.
-Timeri Murari's FIELD OF HONOUR, starts at a disarming level. However, some 70 pages into the story, it quickly acquires grip and subtlety. Murari's use of language is accurate and skilled, and his story is satisfyingly well told. TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT.
-There are insightful observations, like the author's delicate delineation of the position of the English in the twilight zone of postpartition India or the small details of life in the rajah's household he provides. ASIAN WALL STREET JOURNAL
- He focuses on two groups of misfits in the new India. The Anglo-Indians talk of England as 'home' yet are reluctant to leave for a land they don't know. And the native aristocracy that has absorbed (and been corrupted by?) the western values of its colonial masters lives uneasily in this fledgling socialist democracy. Murari links these two worlds with Gunboat Jack, a spent American boxer who is stranded in Bangalore, where he lives restlessly with the Anglo-Indian community. This is a fascinating tale, powerfully told. THE COURIER-JOURNAL.
-Like filmmaker Jean Cocteau Murari believes every man has his reasons. This is a story of aristocratic cruelty and nobility, of ancient traditions meeting modern exigencies, told so swiftly and well. THE CHARLOTTE NEWS.

 

EMPRESS OF THE TAJ, INSEARCH OF MUMTAZ MAHAL.

I will tell you the story of this woman Arjumand and how she loved and how she eventually died, but first you must travel with me over 2000 miles through the cities and villages and jungles of India by train and bus. It will be a journey that will take you many weeks and three hundred and fifty years….

 

An extraordinary book that combines travel- and history-writing with brilliant storytelling to give us a portrait of Mumtaz Mahal, in whose memory Shah Jahan built the Taj, and also a portrait of India before it was changed by liberalization.

In the early 1980s, researching for his bestselling novel TAJ, author Timeri Murari began the first of his journeys in the footsteps of Arjumand Banu, the precocious daughter of a Mughal nobleman. Arjumand went on to become Mumtaz Mahal, chief consort of the Emperor Shah Jahan, and empress of the Mughal kingdom until her death in 1861, giving birth to their fourteenth child. Over the next two decades, the grieving Emperor had the Taj Mahal built in her memory – their final resting place, and the world’s most enduring symbol of love.

Timeri went on his journeys at a time before air travel was common in India, when they were protracted affairs and undertaken mostly by train. Accompanying him was his wife Maureen and sister Nalini, his talismans in the face of the many difficulties that travel in India throws up.  In these travels of discovery—in Delhi; in Agra, the centre of Mughal power and site of the Taj Mahal; in the desert cities of Rajasthan, where Shah Jahan waged campaigns, Mumtaz Mahal at his side; and in Burhanpur in the Deccan, where the empress breathed her last – the author found fascinating glimpses of an empire at its zenith, and of consuming love. Intertwined with these insights were the shabby realities of modern India – the obstinacies of the bureaucracy that controls monuments, the industries which deface them, and a citizenry that remains unaware of its own history.

A brilliant meld of travel and history writing, Empress of the Taj, is not only the story of a fabled queen, and the magnificient obsessions of royalty; it is also an invaluable record of a lost era of India.

Publisher: Speaking Tiger. www.speakingtigerbooks.com or Amazon.

 

 

 

Anodya Mishra Scroll In

Travellers and tourists from around the world visit India every year to savour a view of the iconic Taj Mahal. The white marble mausoleum was commissioned in 1632 by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. For almost four centuries now, it has been sitting on the banks of Yamuna in Agra, telling the tale of Shah Jahan’s love for his wife Mumtaz.

While the world considers it a symbol of a man’s undying love for his wife, it is also perhaps an embodiment of the power an emperor possessed to build one of the greatest monuments ever. However, the story of the woman who lies in this tomb has been lost in the pages of history. Her identity is associated with her death, and any signs of her life before the Taj was known is associated with her husband.

Thus, it is her voice that is the subject of Timeri N Murari’s quest in Empress of the Taj: In Search of Mumtaz Mahal. Essentially, the book is an account of Murari’s travels around India searching for bits and pieces of information on Mumtaz Mahal, which helped him write his earlier book, Taj: A Story of Mughal India, back in 1985.

So, Murari, who has spent much of his working life in the UK and America, travels through the hills and plains of India, in both comfortable and harsh conditions, searching for his muse, Arjumand, who is remembered by the world today as empress Mumtaz Mahal. He shuttles between the past and the present, constantly drawing himself back to his protagonist.

The search for Arjumand takes him on a tour around the Mughal capitals of Delhi and Agra, the Rajputana territories of Udaipur, Ajmer, and Jaipur and finally, towards the last leg of his journey, Murari visits Burhanpur, Arjumand’s initial resting place. The book doesn’t attempt to stick to one theme and explores a mosaic instead. Travelling as he was in the 1980s, Murari uses both memory and immediacy to write of his journey and, in the process, provide a glimpse of modern India more than three decades ago. His troubles with the Indian Railways, encounter with riots, conversations with unemployed youth, accounts of nepotism and politics, and his love for the grandiosity of royals, are all intermingle here.

Ghosts of the past

“History, as I am to gradually discover as I excavate a shard of our past, is either gossip fashioned into fact, or worse, outright distortion...”

Unlike many historians (and like some novelists), Murari has a romantic take on history. He writes in a Herodotean style – one which looks at history as an art – rather than the scientific Thucydidean one. With Arjumand being the focus of Murari’s research, it is no surprise that history is viewed romantically. But does he take this approach just for the purposes of writing this book? Or is it simply easier to view the past through the lenses of nostalgia, romance, and beauty?

Travelling around Delhi towards the beginning of his journey, Murari gives his readers a history lesson. Describing the changing landscape of Delhi from a mud settlement to a thriving capital, Murari writes, “No one knows when mud turned to brick and when the name changed but here Delhis lie on Delhis”. This refers to the seven historical cities of Delhi, which are today divided into administrative districts of the same city.

What is fascinating is that while Murari travelled around these cities almost 40 years ago, his experiences leave you with an uncanny feeling that alternates between “nothing has changed” and “it has been a lifetime”. One is bound to travel through space and time and get muddled somewhere in this transition while reading this account because, on the one hand, Murari travels in the 1980s while reminiscing the 1600s, and on the other hand, we are reading this account almost forty years later, in the 21st century.

Murari’s own observation about the past is worth noting. He writes, “The past, not only here but everywhere in the world, comes down to us in fragments, bits of a puzzle we piece together”. Here, Arjumand is the puzzle that has taken over his mind, and he is trying to search for fragments of her and put them together. He feels her ghostly presence everywhere he travels and “with the romantic imagination of a novelist”, he attempts to set up a narrative around the purpose of her presence in each of the places he visits.

On approaching their guest house in Mandu, which lies amidst the ruins of another forgotten empire, Murari “imagines himself ensconced in those rooms sitting on the balcony and listening to the ghostly music and laughter”. However, his perception of reality is far removed from the actual surroundings – his wife and his sister aren’t too keen on dining with ghosts and sleeping in rooms infested by mice and prefer to spend the night in a place away from the ruins.

Living and dying a nomad

“Briefly, in death as in life, she led a nomadic existence but then as the marble sarcophagus settled down with her, eternity claimed her forever...”

Murari travels through India, his homeland, in search of Arjumand, an empress who was travelling around the same places hundreds of years ago. Arjumand came from the family of a Persian nobleman who had yet travelled all the way from Persia to the Mughal Empire in search of a better life. She had married into the royal Mughal family, who traced their lineage to the nomadic tribe of Mongols.

Thus, Arjumand’s life, by birth and by marriage, was supposed to be a nomadic one; but was her death to be nomadic too? She died in Burhanpur, far from her native land of Persia. There her body rested for a few years, before being transferred to another temporary tomb in Agra, and finally being buried in Taj Mahal.

Arjumand’s nomadic existence reminds Murari of his own life. He writes, “What better proof of our nomadic existence than my mother’s death in Lahore, 2000 kilometers from our ancestral home in Madras.” Paralleling Arjumand’s life with his own, Murari seems to be searching for his own self and for stories from his past through this journey. There is constant banter between him and his sister throughout the journey as they try to locate their collective memories in their individual ones.

Being the child of a government employee, Murari had had a fair share of moving around, leaving him with fragments of memories from everywhere and a feeling of uncertainty about home. However, during one of his journeys, his wife Maureen is engulfed with a sense of foreignness while traveling in India. At that instance, a realisation dawns upon him when he writes, “India can never frighten me. I suppose that is the definition, for me, of home”.

Murari’s search for Arjumand ends with Burhanpur. As they near Burhanpur, Murari has second thoughts about visiting the her first grave. He considers letting Burhanpur remain a “figment of his imagination and a figment of India’s memory, long forgotten on the banks of Tapti”.

However, after his initial apprehensions, when he is finally standing at the tomb with the sun setting, there is a deep sense of closure in the reader’s mind. Murari’s “private pilgrimage” comes to an end. He makes one final journey the next day, early in the morning, to look at the grave a second time, this time all by himself. “The grave begins another day of solitude on earth, protecting nothing, marking nothing but memory”.

 

 

 

 

A COUNTRY OF NO RETURN Chapter one.

A COUNTRY OF NO RETURN

By

TIMERI N MURARI.

 

 

 

-The Struggle of Man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Milan Kundera

 

THE DEPARTURE

                       

The man, David Richelieu, knowing he was going to his own execution for unspecified crimes, looked down at the sleeping woman. Her hair, revealing white at the roots, shielded half her face, tousled from a restless night; her breath shallow, gently reassuring. He bent, breathed in the perfume, and kissed the air goodbye.

It was early morning, the light muted by the shades, as he moved to the door. A stocky man, broad shouldered, unruly grey hair, was surprisingly light on his feet, not a rustle of sound as he stepped into the corridor. He patted the pockets of his summer jacket, wrinkled and a size too large to check he had his passport and wallet. The gift was in the inner pocket.  He had a new phone, the old one hidden in a suitcase, switched off.  At times, he could be absent-minded, but on this day he was alert to the possibilities of a fatal error. He walked out of the hotel to a near deserted city, stepping out of a long darkness into the light, tensing for the journey ahead. His hired car was parked down a side street with the overnight case in the boot.

He had not told Marge of his planned misadventure. She would have wanted to accompany him, a sprightly woman who loved him and accompanied him everywhere. They were on vacation, sleeping late, seeing the sights, indulging their appetites for wine and good food. When she woke, she would believe he had gone for the morning newspaper and would join her for breakfast. If he wasn’t there, she would start searching for him, pacing the room, calling reception, calling the embassy, calling the tour organisers, calling the police finally when she could not find him. She would not panic, not just yet, allow him a day or two to find his way back or get in touch. She knew at times he needed his solitude and would vanish, then return with no explanation, relaxed, as if nothing had happened. He did not have a lover; she was positive of that but never understood what he did on these excursions. Just the need to think something through, he would reply and she accepted the explanation. He was a thinker, after all, a man with a past.

The drive had taken longer than he had calculated, nine hours, not six, as road works were in progress just as he had started out, and was trapped him in the traffic back up. The road leading to the border was only two lanes and he had to drive carefully, as the trucks and cars raced with the familiarity of knowing the idiosyncrasies of the route too well. Two hours out the traffic thinned, an occasional truck, then just the quiet hum of the car, the warm breeze through the window, lulling his senses. He was enjoying the drive through the forest, keeping within the speed limit, suspicious of police speed cameras. He stopped at a village hotel for lunch, putting on sunglasses and pulling the fedora low over his head and, as he was ahead of schedule, rented a room to nap. He had slept badly, anticipating this journey, mentally preparing himself for it. He woke late evening, checked the time and continued his journey. Darkness came swiftly, only the intensity of the headlamps drew him along the winding road. He peered to look up, a clear sky, the half moon and the stars without light pollution so visible. The radio had long fallen silent as he moved further from the city, and he hummed to keep concentrated. It was nearing four in the morning, when he stopped at a curve, got out and walked down the road, past the bend, and saw the border check post.

He remained watching a long time, deciding whether to drive on or drive back. He had come this far, and saw no harm in crossing and finding a good hotel in the city. His passport was in his inside pocket, it had a valid visa. A good man, the vice president marketing for CCP International, selling its financial products – investments, start ups, inside information – to clients around the world. A successful corporate type, bland, ambitious only for his success, one day elevated to President of CCP International, if all went well. The corporate world as dangerous as the real one in manouvering for power. This journey was a break from business, a private holiday to explore the beautiful capital with its wide roads, monuments, cafes, museums and expensive whores. No, he had no meetings planned, no investment opportunities to sell, his diary blank for the next two days. But should he meet, by chance,a possible client, he had a list of these investment and start ups memorized, every one of them bonafide, not cons, easily checked by reading the financial papers or online. Even a call to the CCP Inc. head office would vouch for his authenticity. The switchboard would connect the caller to his office, a secretary would regret that  David Richelieu was on vacation and back next week.

‘I am David Richelieu, vice president of CCP International,’ he said out aloud to the night, speaking to the trees, the bushes, up to the starry sky. Fading now, as the dawn light had begun to steal away the magic of night. He spoke to reassure himself, to be what he was, and returned to the car, the motor still idling as he hadn’t wanted to break the silence by starting up. It would be heard miles away, and knew why he had taken such precautions. He treasured silence, the hum of insects, the first stirrings of the birds, waking from their sleep, even the trees reaching out to the early light.

He drove slowly, almost coasting to the border post, his lights off. The wall emerged gradually from the surrounding grey light. He had seen photographs of it, looking so much like other walls, built to last centuries- the great wall visible from the moon,  walls of ancient forts, long breeched by invaders, inhabitants salughtered, the walls of prisons too to incarcerate men, and women. As the first rays of sunlight touched the wall, he saw that it was made of steel and granite, at least fifteen foot high, an admirable wall, topped with barbed wire, that guarded the borders of this nation as far as he could see. It followed the jagged imaginary line drawn on a map to define the nation’s existence. It didn’t inspire, it filled him with despair at such a world that imprisoned itself to keep out the alien. That was the nature of all walls, to keep the outsider out, the insider in. The wall was now 17-years-old, a new born, and had weathered well, formidable and impregnable. In far distance he saw the camps of those excluded, desperate to enter a promised land, praying that wall would vanish when it heard their incantations and chants.  He imagined the children, mothers and fathers staring all day at this barrier in their lives. In a forgotten age, a trumpet blast disintegrated a great wall. Once, before the wall, there was a view of fields, villages and in the hazy distance the hint of a city just below the horizon. There was a break in the uniformity of the wall, a metal barrier, wide enough for a motorcar to slip through and on the other side, the border control office. To right side of the post, half way up the wall was the signboard, blurred by the rain and heat, concealed by weeds, no longer proud of boasting to the outside world  ‘Welcome to AKRANDAH.’ Now, that was another country, obscured too by the passage of time, the wall and just a memory and a longing.

He stopped the car at the border post, got out, stretching, as a border guard came out of the office, stifling a yawn, rubbing sleep from his eyes.  The second one stood at the barrier, already waiting to lift it.  He took out his passport, ready to hand it over. The guard took it, opening the pages slowly, finding the visa, comparing his face to the photo. He went to the office, took out the stamp and placed the seal on the page. The barrier lifted.  Just beyond it, Richelieu caught sight of a man walking towards the post, purposefully. He looked straight at Richlieu as he neared and Richlieu knew that someone had betrayed him.