1 review for In Custody
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In Custody
by Anita Desia
Description:
Touching and wonderfully funny, In Custody is woven around the yearnings and calamities of a small town scholar in the north of India. An impoverished college lecturer, Deven, sees a way to escape from the meanness of his daily life when he is asked to interview India’s greatest Urdu poet, Nur a project that can only end in disaster.
About The Author
Anita Mazumdar Desai (born 24 June 1937) is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times; she received a Sahitya Academy Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Academy, India’s National Academy of Letters; she won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea. Desai published her first novel, Cry The Peacock, in 1963. She considers Clear Light of Day (1980) her most autobiographical work as it is set during her coming of age and also in the same neighbourhood in which she grew up. In 1984 she published In Custody about an Urdu poet in his declining days which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1993 she became a creative writing teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her novel, The Zigzag Way, set in 20th-century Mexico, appeared in 2004 and her latest collection of short stories, The Artist of Disappearance was published in 2011.
Desai has taught at Mount Holyoke College, Baruch College and Smith College. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and of Girton College, Cambridge (to which she dedicated Baumgartner’s Bombay). In addition, she writes for the New York Review of Books.
Skryf Review
The allure of Desai’s narrative was in her understanding and expressing of the Indian hinterland – the soil colors, the vernacular currents, the domestic conversations, the middle class longings, the dreams as refuges and the inevitable, occasionally lame, humor to cap off a day. The chapters highlighting the struggles of a fallen star were the most splendid etchings of this work – Nur was a delight to watch; his idiosyncrasies, in his typical nawaabi style, drew angst and empathy in such equal measure that one was almost forced to stand up and tell the old man to pull down the curtains for his own good.In the end, ‘In Custody’ managed to bind me till the climax, thanks to its refreshing premise, earthy language and grains of Urdu quotes.