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Penguin Books Ltd - Shashi Tharoor

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187 pages

English

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Who killed twenty-four-year-old Priscilla Hart? And why would anyone want to murder this idealistic American student who had come to India to volunteer in a women s health programme? Was she the innocent victim of a riot between Hindus and Muslims? Shashi Tharoor experiments brilliantly with narrative form, chronicling the mystery of Priscilla Hart s death through the often contradictory accounts of a dozen or more characters. Intellectually provocative and emotionally charged, Riot is a novel about the ownership of history, about love, hate, cultural commission, religious fanaticism and the impossibility of knowing the truth.

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	31 janvier 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351181040
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Shashi Tharoor

Riot
A Novel
Contents
About the Author
Praise for the Book
Also by the Same Author
Dedication
from Katharine Hart s diary
cable to Randy Diggs
from Randy Diggs s notebook
transcript of remarks by Shankar Das, Project Director, HELP-US, Zalilgarh, at meeting with Mr. and Mrs. Hart
from Priscilla Hart s scrapbook
from Randy Diggs s notebook
letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani
from Priscilla Hart s scrapbook
from Randy Diggs s notebook
Rudyard Hart to Randy Diggs
Lakshman to Priscilla Hart
from Priscilla Hart s scrapbook
from Randy Diggs s notebook
Ram Charan Gupta to Randy Diggs
from Priscilla Hart s scrapbook
Professor Mohammed Sarwar to V. Lakshman
letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani
transcript of Randy Diggs interview with District Magistrate V. Lakshman (Part 1)
from Lakshman s journal
from Randy Diggs s notebook
letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani
from Katharine Hart s diary
from Lakshman s journal
from transcript of Randy Diggs interview with Professor Mohammed Sarwar
Mrs. Hart and Mr. Das
Ram Charan Gupta to Randy Diggs
from Randy Diggs s notebook
from transcript of Randy Diggs interview with Superintendent of Police Gurinder Singh
from Lakshman s journal
from Priscilla s scrapbook
Lakshman to Priscilla
from transcript of Randy Diggs interview with Superintendent of Police Gurinder Singh
from Lakshman s journal
birthday card for Lakshman
letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani
transcript of Randy Diggs interview with District Magistrate V. Lakshman (Part 2)
from Lakshman s journal
letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani
from transcript of Randy Diggs interview with Superintendent of Police Gurinder Singh
from transcript of Randy Diggs interview with Professor Mohammed Sarwar
from Lakshman s journal
from Lakshman s journal
Gurinder to Randy Diggs, over a drink
letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani
from Lakshman s journal
Rudyard Hart to Mohammed Sarwar
note from Priscilla Hart to Lakshman
Gurinder to Lakshman
letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani
Lakshman and Priscilla
from Lakshman s journal
letter from Lakshman to Priscilla
from Lakshman s journal
Geetha Lakshman at the Shiva Mandir
Ram Charan Gupta to Randy Diggs
letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani
transcript of Randy Diggs interview with District Magistrate V. Lakshman (Part 3)
letter from Lakshman to Priscilla
letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani
Kadambari to Shankar Das
from Katharine Hart s diary
note from Priscilla Hart to Lakshman
from Lakshman s journal
Katharine Hart and Lakshman
Gurinder to Lakshman
Ram Charan Gupta to Kadambari
Mohammed Sarwar to Lakshman
Ram Charan Gupta to Makhan Singh
from Katharine Hart s diary
Gurinder to Ali, at Police Thana Zalilgarh
Ram Charan Gupta to Makhan Singh
Rudyard Hart to Katharine Hart at the PWD guest house, Zalilgarh
Geetha at the Shiva Mandir
from Lakshman s journal
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
RIOT
An elected member of Parliament, former minister of state for external affairs and human resource development and former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Shashi Tharoor is the prize-winning author of fourteen books, both fiction and non-fiction. A widely published critic, commentator and columnist, he served the United Nations during a twenty-nine-year career in refugee work and peacekeeping, at the Secretary-General s office and heading communications and public information. In 2006 he was India s candidate to succeed Kofi Annan as UN Secretary-General, and emerged a strong second out of seven contenders. He has won India s highest honour for overseas Indians, the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, and numerous literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers Prize. For more on Shashi Tharoor, please visit www.shashitharoor.in .
Praise for the Book
An uncharacteristically intimate account of a very political event - Times of India
You race through the narrative - Hindustan Times
In a world of soundbites and infotoids, the book sketches an ironic salute to the sounds of our times. . . . Like a piece of good writing is meant to, it takes you over - Indian Express
Splendidly readable - Washington Post
A polemical statement . . . Charming and masterful - Outlook
Extremely readable, humane and perceptive, with the urgency of contemporary history -Harsh Mander
Written with elegance and sensitivity, Riot confirms Shashi Tharoor as a major voice in contemporary literature -Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate
I m enthralled by the writing of Shashi Tharoor, his remarkable erudition and insight. For me, his work has been an illuminating introduction to India -Joseph Heller
Also by the Same Author
Fiction
Show Business
The Five-Dollar Smile
Non-fiction
The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the Twenty-First Century India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond Bookless in Baghdad: And Other Writings about Reading Nehru: The Invention of India Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-First Century
to my mother Lily Tharoor tireless seeker who taught me to value her divine discontent
History is a sacred kind of writing, because truth is essential to it, and where truth is, there God himself is, so far as truth is concerned.
-Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
History is nothing but the activity of man in pursuit of his ends.
-Karl Marx, The Holy Family
from Katharine Hart s diary
October 9, 1989
I cannot believe I am sitting next to him, yet again, on a plane. How many times we have done this, how many flights, transfers, holidays, my passport and ticket always with him, even my boarding card: he was the man, the head of the family, he held the travel documents. And when it was all over, that was among the many rights I had regained, the right to be myself on an airline. Not an appendage, not a wife, not Mrs. Rudyard Hart, no longer resigned to his determination to have the aisle seat, no longer waiting for him to pass me the newspaper when he d finished it, no longer having to see the look of irritated long-suffering on his face when I disturbed him to go to the washroom, or asked him to catch the stewardess s attention to get something for the kids.
The kids. It s been years since we ve all traveled together, as a family. He enjoyed travel, he often told me, but on his own. He was self-sufficient, he didn t need things all the time like we, the rest of us, did - juice, or entertainment, or frequent trips to the bathroom. He made it obvious that being accompanied by us was not his preferred mode of travel. But we did it often enough, till the kids began to rate airlines and hotels and transit lounges the way other kids compared baseball teams. And because of Rudyard s postings, the kids had an unusually exotic basis for comparison. Emirates is cool, Kim would say, because that airline had video monitors on the backs of the seats and a wide range of channels to choose from. But they make you fly through Dubai, Lance would retort, pronouncing it Do-buy where it s just shops, shops, shops everywhere. Schiphol is cooler! At Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, his own favorite, Lance would pray for our connecting flights to be delayed so that he could have even longer in the arcade, shooting down monsters and dragons with no regard for jet lag.
How wonderful it is to have your monsters and dragons on a screen in front of you, to be destroyed by the press of a button, and not inside your heart as mine are, hammering away at your soul. Monsters and dragons, not just at an airport arcade between weary flights, but on the plane, in your seat, in the seat next to you.
In the seat next to me sits my monstrous ex-husband. Here we are again on a plane, Rudyard and me together, not husband and wife, merely father and mother. Father and mother with no kids in sight. Kim couldn t get away from work, where he tells me junior stock-brokers are lucky if they can take Thanksgiving weekend. And Lance - Lance, who could never understand why I had to leave his father, Lance is in a world of his own and has no need of other worlds. But I m not going to worry about Lance today I ve got too much else to think about.
Priscilla.
Priscilla with the baby blue eyes and the straight blond hair and that look of trusting innocence with which she greeted the world. Priscilla with her golden skin, her golden smile that lit up the eyes of anyone she was with. Priscilla with her idealism, her earnestness, her determination to do some good in the world. Priscilla who hated her father because of what he had done to me.
I look at him now, trying to read a magazine and not succeeding, his eyes blurring over the same page he has been staring at since I began writing these words. I look at him, and I see Priscilla: she had his eyes, his nose, his lips, his hair, except that the same features looked so different on her. Where his good looks are bloated by self-indulgence, hers were smoothed and softened by gentleness. And that sullen set of his jaw, that look of a man who has had his own way too easily for too long, set him completely apart from his daughter. There was nothing arrogant or petulant about Priscilla, not even when she was upset about some flagrant injustice. She was just a good human being, and no one would say that about Rudyard.
I look at him, trying to focus on the page, mourning the daughter whose loss he cannot come to terms with. Cannot, because he had already lost her when he lost me, lost her while she was still living. Despite myself, I feel a tug of sorrow for him.
It hurt so much to use the past tense for Priscilla. My baby, my own personal contribution to the future of the world. I would give anything for it to have been me, and not her. Anything.
cable to Randy Diggs
October 9,