"The Henna Artist", "The Liar's Dictionary"

[fiefoe]

Alka Joshi's debut has an interesting beginning, but later devolved into a merely comfortable read with predictable beats -- the social downfall, the cringey affair, the obligatory teen pregnancy. In two words, Indian ‘姐道’.

• On the way to our first appointment of the morning, Malik and I nearly collided with a man carrying cement bags on his head when a bicycle cut between us. The cyclist, hugging a six-foot ladder under his arm, caused a horse carriage to sideswipe a pig, who ran squealing into a narrow alley. At one point, we stepped aside and waited for a raucous band of hijras to pass. The sari-clad, lipstick-wearing men were singing and dancing in front of a house to bless the birth of a baby boy.
• I smiled as I met her eyes and pressed her shoulder back, gently, onto the cushions of the divan. Arching a brow, I said, “Is that what your husband will notice? That the figs are Turkish?”
  I pulled a mirror from my satchel, and held it to the arch of her right foot so she could see the tiny wasp I’d painted next to the fig. “Your husband surely knows that every fig requires a special wasp to fertilize the flower deep inside.”
• The tea set was the kind the English loved, depicting women in corseted gowns, men in pantaloons, curly-haired girls in frocks. Before independence, these objects had signified my ladies’ admiration for the British. Now, they signified their scorn. My ladies had changed nothing but the reasons for their pretense. If I had learned anything from them, it was this: only a fool lives in water and remains an enemy of the crocodile.
• “Well...unconventional, perhaps.”
  “Unconventional? You know me better than that, Lakshmi. I went not once, but twice, to the Soviet Union last year. Nehru-ji insisted I go with the Indo-Soviet League. Come now, let’s hear it.”
• I had spent years in the homes of my ladies, watching their progeny mature. I knew their children’s personalities, the tics that even a professional matchmaker wouldn’t catch. But these were flaws for a husband to discover, not for me to reveal.
• “Arré! What does a silly monkey know of the taste of ginger?”
  “One who cannot dance blames the floor.”
  This was a game we often played, trading proverbs. I’d learned mine from my mother’s prudent tongue; his had come from years at boarding school and Oxford.
• Checking my wristwatch, I said, “We’re going to the seamstress. If we catch her early, she’ll be bargaining on an empty stomach.”


• “Do you know what you get when you feed a cow mango leaves, then mix the cow patty with urine and clay?”
  “What?”
  “Orange paint!” She grinned. “Munchi-ji said my paint was smooth as silk.”
• “Gupta’s loaded.” Samir sucked on his cigarette. “He’ll keep Naraya busy for a few months and pay him well.”
  “To do what?”
  He smiled at me. “Install WCs—hundreds of them. To a clerk a bribe; to a Brahmin a gift.”
  I laughed. The irony was not lost on me. Naraya was willing to build toilets, which the Shudra caste normally did, for the handsome profit to be made. Like me, he, too, was a fallen Brahmin.
• Of course he would know. He’d been around nautch girls who concealed their names within the henna design on their body. If a man found it, he won a free night in their bed. If he didn’t, the women were paid double rate.
• “Could you whisper my name in the right ears there? Two echoes in a well are louder than one.”
• My sister had behaved admirably. In less than two months in Jaipur, she had learned a lot that was new to her. I felt the beginnings of a small hope: everything would be fine from here on out. Ravi Singh and Sheela Sharma would be married. Samir would make sure I was introduced to the palace. Hari would give me a divorce. I would pay off the builder and he would finish my house. We would move out of our rented room. And my life of true independence would begin.
• Today, only one flag was displayed at the guard station, which meant the maharaja was away from the city. When His Highness was in Jaipur, an additional quarter-size flag hung at each of the palaces; he alone was considered to be a man and a quarter.
• “You’ve been to the Elephant Festival?”
  “I’ve not had the pleasure, Your Highness.”
  “Great fun it used to be. Rajputs came from all over to play polo on their gorgeous elephants. Everything was painted: tusks, trunks, feet. They would even paint the nails.”
• The maharani, who’d been watching Malik all the while with interest, asked, “How old are you?”
  He seemed to give the matter some thought. First, he looked up at the ceiling, then back down to the maharani. “I prefer to be eight.”
• It will annoy him to slave over a hot stove to feed yet another mouth.”
  My shoulders relaxed. Like my ladies, the maharanis had devised their own rules of gamesmanship.
• services were being requested by new clients for every celebration and ceremony: engagement, seventh month of pregnancy, baby’s birth, baby eats his first solid food, baby gets his first haircut, boy comes of age, first entry into a newly built house, birth of Hanuman, fire worship for Goddess Durga, the Great Night of Shiva, job promotion, acceptance to university, a safe journey ceremony, a safe arrival ceremony. In India, there was no shortage of rites and rituals,
• Malik remained discreet. I’d advised him how to answer questions from gatemen, servants and tonga-wallas. He could describe the paintings of maharanis on royal hunts to Rajput families but not to Brahmins (vegetarians). He could talk about the scented gardens, but not the details of European plumbing in the royal loo (too vulgar). He could say that the palace band employed forty musicians but not reveal that each of the three chefs—Bengali, Rajasthani and English—had a separate kitchen and his own assistants (too showy).
• That’s fine. I wouldn’t have believed me either ten years ago. Except...Maa taught me what she taught you, after you left. And I understood, at last, why those women sought her out. She was their last hope.”
• She lowered her chin, looked down at her lap. I could feel the slippery edges of her guilt. She had been willing.
• I saw myself at Radha’s age, too shy to look at boys or men, much less talk to them. Maa had made sure of it: Men will eat even unripe fruit if it’s placed in front of them.
• “Liquid opium.” She smiled, her eyes twinkling. “If it’s good enough for the maharajas to seal a treaty, it’s good enough for us.”
• I imagined she was offering me something more: apology, forgiveness, understanding, respect. I was surprised, and confused, by how much I wanted to be in her good graces again. I thought of Pitaji and of my fellow Indians, how they felt about the British after independence. Accustomed to subservience, they were more comfortable reverting to that role, however humiliating, as I seemed to be now.
• They were filled with milk because I hadn’t let her feed the baby. It was as if she needed him as much as he needed her. But I’d seen what Radha hadn’t: desperate women begging my saas to rid them of their burdens. Where she saw joy, I saw hardship. Where she saw love, I saw responsibility, obligation. Could they be two sides of the same coin? Hadn’t I experienced both love and duty, delight and exasperation, since she entered my life?
• Success was ephemeral—and fluid—as I’d found out the hard way. It came. It went. It changed you from the outside, but not from the inside. Inside, I was still the same girl who dreamed of a destiny greater than she was allowed. Did I really need the house to prove I had skill, talent, ambition, intelligence? What if—
  All at once I felt lighter. It was the same weightlessness I had felt in Shimla. I breathed deeply. As if I could already smell the bracing air of the blue Himalayan mountains.
• I am not buying your favor (we are even on that score), merely acknowledging that we may never again have someone with your hand making our hands a wonder to hold.ParvatiNot quite forgiveness. Nor an apology. But it unwound something in me: a coil of resentment, a long-held grudge. I sat with the note in my hand for a long time.
• All at once, she looked haggard. “I don’t know how to be a mother. I want to—I really do, but...Radha seems to know so much more. Like how to feed him, when to feed him. When to lay him down for a nap. It’s like she is a better mother because, well, she gave birth to him.” {太工具人了！}

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I got suckered into this by the whimsical cover art, and the pelican's tracheostomy is the only scene that lives up to it. Eley Williams wrote no plot to speak of, and the characters are not nearly interesting enough or even big enough to compensate for the lack.

• Perhaps you have encountered someone who browses a dictionary not as a reader but as a grazing animal, and spends hours nose-deep in the grass and forbs of its pages, buried in its meadow while losing sight of the sun. I recommend it. Browsing is good for you. You can grow giddy with the words’ shapes and sounds, their corymbs, their umbels and their panicles.
• Dictionary as about clarity but also honesty.
• This book is queasy with knowledge. To name a thing is to know a thing. There’s power there. Can you Adam and Eve it? Words are snappable and constantly distending and roiling, silkworms trapped somewhere between the molars. Dictionaries as the Ur-mixed metaphor.
• Each definition as eulogy, each account an informed hunch.
• Winceworth closed his eyes, marshalled his resolve and repeated the phrase back to the room. Every syllable took the effort of a poorly thought-through lie.
• In 1899, elephants were being slaughtered in huge numbers to keep up with the demand for high-quality billiard balls, with no more than four balls being made from a single tusk. I found these facts listed under Ivory,
• David was always quick to point out that the OED left appendicitis (n.) out of its earliest editions, an omission that was roundly criticised in 1902 when Edward VII’s coronation was delayed thanks to this particular affliction and the word’s use became widespread in the media.
• Trading upon this saturnine thrill of memento mori set-pieces, pirate ships of the seventeenth and eighteenth century bore hourglasses upon their flags alongside the more famous skull insignias. Hourglass iconography is also prevalent on a number of gravestones, often supplemented with mottoes such as Tempus fugit (“Time flies”) or Ruit hora (“The hour is flying away”).
• As London passed through smog-fumey summer and autumn, with horses slaughtered in the street to make way for automobiles and the city filleted for the Underground railways,
• early in the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, all of the drafted definitions that began with the letters Pa written up on slips, ready to be edited, were accidentally used for kindling. This error was blamed on an inattentive housemaid.
• Winceworth tried to dissuade the waiter’s advance by requesting the most outlandish drinks that he could imagine. He hoped the task would prove a long-winded one and that he would be left in peace, but almost immediately he was presented with an elderflower spirit and something that apparently was derived from rhubarb honey served in a glass urn. Thwarted. It tasted of soap used by a despot with a secret.
• He did not want it to appear as if he was sidling. He had spent the day in the office defining this verb, and was keenly aware that to sidle can convey a certain sinister intent if one happens to be observed. It pleased him that sidle (v.) could slide into slide (v.)—the surreptitious becoming the graceful.
• “Manet’s scene through a Rousseau jungle. And for the most part it allows me to avoid small talk.”
• “Hiding behind plants is the closest I get to intrepid, but I can do so quietly.” “Let us intrepede together, then.”
• cannot sing and I cannot be handsome, but I can perhaps charm you with a fascination with the particulars rather than the general, that’s my talent. This tendency to drift off and delight with small details, the transformative power of proper attention paid to small things.
• Both woman and bird were strangely matched in appearance and there was something ridiculously ballroom about their skirmish—the bird’s plumage was stained red, its bill a hot yellow, while the woman’s skirt was made of some candy-stripe-coloured stuff and she carried a yellow umbrella wedged beneath her arm. They waltzed, irregularly, tugging and gasping, moving closer towards Winceworth and his companions.
• When a cartoon character is represented swearing or cursing, there is a word for the series of hashtags and exclamation marks and toxicity symbols in their speech bubbles: grawlix. @#$%&! It is a growling grunting irk of a work of a word. But surely compiling a dictionary or an encyclopaedia, even one as ramshackle as Swansby’s, was like conceiving of a sieve for stars.
• I glanced at the cards strewn across my desk. Oh, my God, shut up, you are too interesting and too much, I wanted to tell them. That’s what people say to belittle women in workplaces, isn’t it? Or women in general. I wanted to say it to the materials of a dictionary. It was because I was intimidated and I hated it.
• She plucked at something there—the stem of his hollow metal Swansby House pen that he kept in the pocket there. She slid the pen free and flexed it in her hand. No, she was not flexing it, she was bending it. It snapped with a dull crack. Sophia grabbed the pelican’s beak and felt down its throat with her hand. She found its collarbone. Pelicans almost certainly do not have collarbones. Sophia pushed the broken pen into the pelican’s throat. There was a loud hiss of expelled air—the pelican swelled under Winceworth’s grasp and a second later they both heard it take a huge gulping heave of a breath. The geese cackled and hooted. The bird, the man and the woman panted.
• Pip was often a person of actions. Action is often better than words. I was a person of anxieties rather than anything.
• Perhaps all encyclopaedic lexicographers experience love like this, Winceworth thought—as a completist might, a hoarder of incidence-as-fact. It was not that he even particularly liked the details: he wanted to dash the teacup to the ground for coming between them—damn you, blasted furnaces of Limoges!—but he wished he could identify the blue, twist-leafed flower that patterned its porcelain.
• didn’t want that to be his remit, the world he was casting to define. It was fine if that meant his world was small. He didn’t have to make grand claims. I’m much more comfortable with people who just about manage the bare minimum.
• “The very definition of an idiot,” Sophia said. “He is a useful idiot, however. And quite sweet: he said he would make sure Swansby’s puts an emphasis on Russia in the entry on chess just for me, which I think as close to a love-gift as an encyclopaedic article can get.”
• The artefacts were not limited to sculpture. As Winceworth edged about the room, he glimpsed scenes depicted in frescoes and on terra-cotta tiles that would make ivory blush. Here was a sketch of two witches delighting in the lack of laundry bills; there a zoetrope of a man finding a delightful new hobby with the assistance of a shoehorn and a pat of butter.
• “You say this because you have not yet found the balance.” Sophia halted their pace and held him at arm’s length, regarding him as a physician might an ailing man. “You keep yourself all tight and closed up. You are all confidences and no scandal, all battening down of hatches and no great spuming fray.”