Tribal Books

I love buying books way more than buying clothes. Even better than going into a bookstore and buying a book is leaving the store with three books. The best way to figure out if you want to buy a book is to sit down in the shop and read it for ten minutes. Especially if the shop is quite small. My favorite place to buy books in Delhi is Khan Market a.k.a. the place where you see lots of white people. I recently bought a novel called Twilight in Delhi from Bahrisons Books that rocks my socks. The introduction was written by the author Ahmed Ali fifty years after the original was published and he basically says, yeah my book is awesome:

Those who read it in translation said it could not have been written in English, while those who read it in the traditional English said it was untranslatable. This curious controversy was solved by an American critic when he said that the novel 'transcends language as any substantial work of art ultimately must do.'

Bahrisons is the best type of bookshop. Its cramped and a little musty and there are so many books that they are piled on top and in front of the existing articles on the shelves. Today when I was looking for a title the clerk couldn't find it but he seemed genuinely interested in my book. However, on my most recent trip to Khan I really fell for a bookshop called Full Circle. It doesn't have the old school, bump into Salman Rushdie round the corner stack atmosphere of Bahrisons, but they had my book and the cafe upstair is actually amazing and my new favorite place in Delhi even though I haven't even had tea there yet.

British morality kicks in in Bahrisons. That's unnatural that is.

The guy and I went to our friends Kim and Toto's for lunch on Tuesday, a holiday (did you know that India has the most official government holidays in the history of civilization. That's an official made up fact). Their place is in west Delhi and it took us two and a half hours to get there, including the stop at the black market. Kim and Toto are getting married in Jan in Nagaland. Yours truly is seriously considering going...

Toto started cooking before 11 and we ended up having lunch at 5 but we had a really great day. And the food was incredible. Naga food is really excellent. Pork is a very important part of many meals; we had two different types of pork.

Toto rocks out in the kitchen.


















Alem reacts as Kim livens up the dance party by putting Lobo on the stereo.

Toto and Kim both used to work for Sahara and there are a lot of people from the North-East in the organization. Toto and Alem are from Nagaland and Kim is from Manipur. Within their own states, north-easterners are tribal people. They have wanted independence from India ever since India's own independence. Theirs is a very sad history of freedom fighting (insurgency from the Indian government point of view) and in-fighting among the tribes and underground groups that has taken its toll on the states. As Toto said 'We are not Indians. We are Nagas in India.'

Slowly in my transformation from Indian to 'brown Englishman,' I found that I had lost not only my freedom but also my culture and individuality, and I have been engaged ever since in search of my self, my identity. Where between the heart and the mind had it been waylaid? Slowly, through the years, light began to filter through the pictures of Delhi to which I turned for my past.

Ahmed Ali