The Divine Invasion by Philip K Dick

The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The premise of the book seems to be based on one of the central tenets of The Bhagavad Gita

यदा यदा हि धर्मस्य ग्लानिर्भवति भारत। अभ्युत्थानमधर्मस्य तदात्मानं सृजाम्यहम् ॥4-7॥ परित्राणाय साधूनां विनाशाय च दुष्कृताम् । धर्मसंस्थापनार्थाय सम्भवामि युगे युगे ॥4-8॥
Whenever there is decay of righteousness, O Bharata,
And there is exaltation of unrighteousness, then I Myself come forth;

For the protection of the good, for the destruction of evil-doers,
For the sake of firmly establishing righteousness, I am born from age to age.

Vivekananda, Swami,’s translation:
“Whenever virtue subsides and wickedness prevails, I manifest Myself. To establish virtue, to destroy evil, to save the good I come from Yuga (age) to Yuga.

Of course, the book is based on Abrahamic religions and is the second part of The Valis Trilogy. A lot of allusions and terms are based on the Torah and the Bible. The evil that rules The Earth and struggles for supremacy in one of the alternate timelines is Belial, the one from the song Year Zero by Ghost B.C.

He could not get around the government ruling because this was Earth and the zone of evil lay over everything.

PKD at his quirky best – saying a lot succinctly

‘All I have is a cupee of Kaff.’

Here is the ‘Messiah’ in action

First he speeded up his internal biological clock so that his thoughts raced faster and faster; he felt himself rushing down the tunnel of linear time until his rate of movement along that axis was enormous. First, therefore he saw vague floating colours and then he suddenly encountered the Watcher, which is to say the Grigon, who barred the way between the Lower and Upper Realms…

As one of the cops apprehending one of the main characters of the book, this could all be the rantings of a schizophrenic living in a fantasy world – one wonders what is real and what is illusion – that is Philip K Dick at his whacky best!

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Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An attention-getter of an opening sentence

First I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being, let’s just say, out of it.

This is an engrossing yarn that is a biting indictment of the opioid epidemic let loose in America by the nefarious coven of “Big Pharma,” venal doctors, conniving pharmaceutical representatives, pharmacists, social workers and nurses. Loosely based on David Copperfield, the book also depicts the sordid and harsh foster care meted out to orphans. Finally, the disparaging views of the rest of America towards the so-called stereotype of “Hilly Billys, Red Necks” are scathingly illustrated. Parochialism out-does racism in this case – where the culture and accent of those people is ridiculed.
The scenes of the utter and degrading poverty have echoes of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.
Here are some memorable extracts

Maybe there was a God in his Heaven after all, and we would all fart perfume...
It was that fall type of day where the world feels like it’s about to change its mind on everything. Cicadas going why-why-why, the air lying still, all the fight gone out of summer...
The wonder is that you start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.

Immensely readable, just unputdownable!

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The East Indian by Brinda Charry

The East Indian by Brinda Charry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Bildungsroman par excellence – rawer than The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, more macabre than A Catcher in the Rye, more mystical than A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man: 1916 Classic Novel and more racist than To Kill a Mockingbird. Written in an engaging manner with a lot of allusions from Shakespeare (after all, the author is an authority on The Bard), but is marred by a couple of glaring medical errors

Ganter’s face fell slack, his pupils became pinpoints, he whimpered
And
…the ship doctor grunted and spoke for the first time: “Aye, I witness it at sea too – men turned to drooling idiots by the jimson and a few of the dead by it.”

Actually, Datura stramonium toxicity leads to dilated pupils and a dry mouth!
The rampaging reaving murdering Europeans Britishers, Spanish, Portuguese, French ruined two Indias, South America and the African continent

Mary (Bengal) was telling me that the English also took tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar. How they ate the entire world, it seemed, and hungered for more.

And
How death had walked in the wake of the English settlement of Virginia – how the Indians had perished in shockingly large numbers of new and unexplained diseases at every village the English stopped at and began to believe that the white man shot invisible bullets into them…

Some memorable extracts

Love Potions for Men, Cold and Impotent; and Women, Prudish and Overmodest. The concoctions could be delivered in cakes, syrups, plasters, pomades, pills. They could be rubbed in, poured over, smoked, or swallowed. I was dismayed at some of the recipes: they required the use of assorted ingredients such as a deer’s heart, human bone, spleen, pubic hairs, rose petals, and consecrated host – of all these only the deer’s heart and pubic hair seemed remotely obtainable. And then I came upon an Aphrodisiac Pill Following an Old English Recipe, which required nothing more than asafoetida or stinking gum, extracted opium, the women’s menstrual blood, and something called castoreum, which I assumed was castor oil, till it turned out to be an odoriferous oily secretion found in two sacs between the anus and external genitals of beavers...

“I heard of one fellow stricken with the ague who was so heated up that he turned to smoke,” Flynn informed me one day. “A gray wisp – that is all that was left of him finally.”
“Black man or while man?” I asked. I was skeptical (sic) of the tale.
“Tawny moor like you.”
…So, the first East Indian I had heard of in Virginia in six years was a dead one, one who micht have spontaneously combusted.

It was a coincidence that I came across the following quote, just when I read the Hindi version in आर्यभटAryabhat

The physician treats the wounds: it is God who heals, Monsieur Pare also wrote.

Aryabhat’s physician father Udaybhat, on being lavishly praised for his skills, modestly claims

"उपचार हमारा कर्तव्य है, परन्तु रोग से मुक्ति तो ईश्वर के कृपा से होती है।"

Simply unputdownable. A rather abrupt ending, but this book that cries out for sequel(s)

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Half Of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The title alludes to the symbol on the flag of the short-lived country of Biafra.

The pre-secession massacres of the Northern Army personnel and the subsequent retaliatory ethnic cleansing of the Igbo are an echo of the genocides that rocked a newly independent India. I was not really aware of this aspect of Nigerian history. It appears to be an autobiographical account.
The macabre humour of kwashiorkor being called the Harold Wilson Syndrome took me back to the Kwashiorkor Ward of Arthur Davison Hospital in Ndola.
A poignant and gripping narrative.

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