She calls India her spiritual home. World-renowned award-winning author-cum-playwright Catherine Ann Jones (80) has the deepest understanding of Indian culture, stories, people, and their way of life.
From the very first page itself, you will get immersed in her latest book East & West: Stories of India. The book is a collection of stories with brilliantly etched characters of ordinary people. But each story is deeply rooted in self-introspection and discovery.
In ‘The Men’s Club’ you have a group of old friends who meet in a jamboree organized at the India International Centre. After the initial courtesies, their conversation veers towards personal experiences in life, and that is when some dark secrets spill out. Catherine knows how to turn her ordinary characters into extraordinary storytellers. These are stories of common folks – fraudsters, victims, do-gooders, invisible heroes that are omnipresent in society.
The author’s prose is lucid. The imagery in each story is as sharp as a razor beam. Catherine’s association with India began with her marriage to the late novelist Raja Rao. These literary giants (Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, and RK Narayan) took Indian fiction writing in English to an international audience.
The story My Life as a Devadasi is about the conversation between two American women at a cocktail party and Rukmini’s God cuts through. In Rukmini’s God, the unlikely friendship and everlasting bond between two beggars – a deaf young woman (Rukmini) and an old blind man (Aziz) is worth a read. While the so-called vanguards of Indian culture and moral values jeer and question the ‘unusual’ friendship between Rukmini and Aziz, the two continue to care and share things till the end.
The author writes in the book: “One day the old beggar was alone and uncared for, the next, there she was beside him on his patch of pavement. There they were: Rukmini, the crazy Hindu village girl in a soiled and tattered sari, and Aziz, a blind and wrinkled old Muslim, suddenly inseparable.”
It is powerful imagery like this throughout the book that shows the reader the beautiful and ugly side of life and the “light” that shines through every page of East & West!
