First of all, the Cute and Curious. Apparently we humans can’t worry while we hum - because humming requires too much bandwidth. When we hum, we don’t have enough power left in our head engines to think about other stuff. I don’t know if I believe this is always true but I’m sharing it in case it is.
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I read a lot this week. It’s what I do when there is way to much to think about and I don’t know where to start. Read or eat. I haven’t gained any weight so you know it was a heavy reading week.
The Bad Muslim Discount by Syed M. Mahsood
This novel amazed me. I’d never heard of it before; it was on no list of “important books you should read right now:. I just picked it off a display table at the library and brought it home.
A (fairly) functional Pakistani family emigrates to California. A young Pakistani woman’s existence is horrendously scarred and marred by Muslim extremist theology. She also ends up in California. The novel is a page turner and at the same time, I didn’t see cheap shots or easy plot twists.
This novel rests on the toxic irony of right-wing Christians despising all Muslims and right-wing Muslims hating all Christians.
Mahsood laments how difficult it is to be a modern young adult Muslim from an observant Muslim immigrant family. He says one is always throwing away parts of their heritage and sometimes one throws away what they ought to keep. So they backtrack to get that practice or belief, but now something else makes no sense. They are not comfortable as young American adults. Neither are they comfortable as young Muslim adults. They are always pinning and unpinning their faith and practices.
Reminded me of how impossible it felt, when I was young, to leave my faith to find my faith.
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I’m rereading A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee. On one hand, it’s a detective novel. On the other hand, it’s moving to Calcutta in 1919. There’s the white English guy with PTSD from WWI. There’s the brilliant, highly educated Bengali guy. The two of them are delving into why a powerful British “fixer” (think Michael Cohen) is dead. All the white cops and military want to pin this murder on a particular Indian revolutionary. How will Sam Wyndham and Surendranath Bannerjee pursue this case? If they don’t assume they know the answer, what will they uncover?
This first time I read this book I just wanted to see ‘whodunnit’. This time I’m reading more slowly so when Mukherjee mentions a new-to-me place, practice, or famous person - I Wikipedia that. I also sometimes save internet photos while I’m looking around. Suddenly my phone’s photo album looks like I’ve been traveling in colonial Calcutta.
This: Kolkata, as Calcutta is now spelled, is not an ancient city - the Brits started building it 1690 to facilitate exports of Indian products and the import of stuff from everywhere else. To this day most big municipal buildings are the architecture of colonial England. Kolkata is built on greed, commerce, racism. and a swamp. There are thousands of tangled miles of mighty rivers in that northeast part of the Asian sub-continent. The melting snow of the Himalayas outflow to the ocean there. It’s the land of monsoons. Then the English cut through all that topography with unending train tracks that slow down and often block the drainage of a significant percentage of all the water on earth. We can’t blame flooding in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India solely on the English Empire, but it was certainly part of that.
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https://substack.com/@marybethdanielsonstories
I wrote Two Handsome Farmers twenty years ago, back when I was selling bread and stories. I just posted it at my substack account where it will show up tomorrow morning.
I still think of this story each time I drive by the actual country bar where fictional Tim and Glenn hang out. Tim and Glenn are brothers in their 20’s. There’s a scene, early on, where they wrestle in rain and mud.
When I first wrote this story, an elderly retired doctor in Racine who knew me, called to say how much he loved that scene. It made him think of his brother, long gone, whom he still missed. He also told me that when he was growing up as one of many kids in a poor family during the Depression, “The first one of us up was the best dressed.” And “If you don’t like oatmeal, breakfast is over.”
Have a good weekend. Don’t colonialize anything.
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