Ratika Deshpande

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  • Non-American and non-English books

    Lately, I’ve been finding myself tired of reading stuff by and about Western people. I’m mainly talking about the U.K. and the U.S.; I don’t think I’ve read much stuff by Canadians or Australians, including blog posts and online articles.

    I don’t necessarily have anything against such writers; in fact, most of the books (and online stuff) I’ve read in my 25 years had been written by folks from these countries.

    What I’m feeling is a sort of fatigue. For someone who never intends to visit the country, I know a lot about the USA’s geography and culture; most of that knowledge came from reading. I’m tired of reading about USAmerican experiences because increasingly, and especially since reading R. F. Kuang’s Babel and then learning about the deep impact of colonization on Indian culture and education during my M.A., I see the gap between those lives and mine. Yes, reading is a way to understand lives different from ours, but certainly there’s a problem when an Indian girl like me grows up reading and learning more about a foreign culture than her own.

    It is limiting to only seek literature that’s “relatable,” but what I’m looking for is not the story of a girl who grows up in similar circumstances as I did. What I’m looking for is a familiarity of place, of culture, of language. I’m looking for imagination that’s closer home, that shows what’s possible here, with and among our own people.

    Literature isn’t obliged to do that, but reading is also hunting for hope. I’m looking to learn about my own roots, which I never sought to learn more about through books. What I know I learned from living, from school. But that is too little. There is so much more.

    Earlier, when I used to add books by Indian authors to my to-read list, I did so out of guilt. As an Indian, I should be reading and talking about my country’s literature, shouldn’t I? There’s an additional layer of guilt attached when the language of the text is concerned–shouldn’t I be exploring more of Hindi and Marathi literature and books translated from other Indian languages?

    I still feel some of that obligation, but increasingly, I also find myself looking for Indian names on book covers. I find myself feeling defensive; I want more of their work to be well-known, even among us Indian readers, even when I’m anything but well-versed in the books that they’re producing.

    For some time now I’ve been thinking that come 2026, I’ll try to make sure that every other book or short story or essay I read has been written by an Indian writer, ideally in an Indian language.

    Maybe I’ll try to write in Hindi and Marathi too; for the first time in my life, I’ve been having moments during writing when I recognise that I’m using the language of my country’s colonizers. Sometimes, I also feel a pull to write in Hindi, and sometimes in Marathi, my mother tongue and the language I’ve written the fewest words in.

    This is a feeling I need to dig deeper into another day when I’m not feeling like a spammed wet cabbage; for now, all I know is that I am tired of reading about USAmerican and English experiences. I feel drawn to anything that has a non-American/non-English author–I feel a sort of kinship with them, in our shared experience of not having English as our mother tongue, even though we may have chosen to write in it (or written enough to have our words be translated into it).

  • Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida

    This morning, while making my bed after breakfast, I finished listening to Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida (narrated by Kaipo Shwab, translated from Japanese by Haydn Trowell). It’s a series of stories that take place past midnight and before dawn in Tokyo, with new and recurring characters, most of whom do not know each other until one’s path crosses someone else’s and theirs, in turn, converges with yet someone else’s. If I had the time and the patience, I could actually make a map of these intersections (there’s a diner in the book literally named “intersection” in Japanese that plays an important role, too)–complete with pictures and bold markers and red strings wound around thumb pins on a cork board.

    I like my books to match the current season and, when possible, the current weather. Excepting this morning, when I finished the last handful minutes of the audiobook, I listened to Goodnight Tokyo only at night, while doing my laundry at the hostel, reading/listening to other books during the daytime. I saved these stories for when the sky was dark and the day was winding down. The book would make for nice company during late-night metro rides or walks around one’s neighborhood, under the stars, or in the dim lights of one’s bedroom, seated at the window–Goodnight Tokyo puts together the lives of the citizens of this improbably big city in a fascinating, delightful puzzle, reminding me why I love big cities so much. And it finally made me acknowledge that people, especially those we meet only for a few minutes in public and then never again, can be just as interesting and linger in our minds, too, the way a city does for me.

    One of my most favorite reads of this year (and yes, I do wish to write something like this). Highly recommended–5/5 stars!

  • Picture books and encyclopedias: The earliest books of my life

    The earliest book I remember reading is a picture book that I think my father bought (or was it a gift, a giveaway?) from his office in New Delhi. I remember only the brown paper packaging–a thin envelope, the kind in which you often get snacks packed from an expensive bakery–and the shade of purple that was used to depict the night sky. It was a Marathi folk story in which an old woman tricks a fox into landing on a hot pan on his bottom because he’d been stealing her bora (jujubes).1 My grandmother used to tell me this story in a sing-song voice:

    कोल्होबा, कोल्होबा, बोरं पिकली?
    नाही, नाही, म्हातारी. टेरी शेकली!

    Another book I remember from around the same time (or perhaps a little later?) was a picture book I read in our school library, picked from a selection of other picture books offered to us second (or was it first?) graders, seated at one of the high, long tables. It was about a bird who didn’t spare a worm and later got trapped in a hunter’s nest. The moral of the story was that you sow what you reap or if you do bad things, bad things happen to you. I now wonder why it was bad for the bird to eat what it’s supposed to eat.

    I’ve also wondered several times over the years about the fact that for women who grew up in homes where reading was an everyday part of life, neither my mother nor my grandmother bought books for me.

    The only purchase I can recall is an encyclopedia that my mother had bought from a door-to-door salesman in Nagpur, when I might have been in Class 3. It had an ochre cover and glossy pages. It was divided into several sections, which one could sort through by the color of the edges. There were pages devoted to, among other topics that I can’t recall, the body (which I mostly avoided because I thought eye diagrams were boring), to the natural world, to the modern world, to space (I think) and to History.

    The latter was my favorite. I was especially fond of a spread page featuring an illustration of some houses built next to each other which had “doors” on the roof–square holes in the ceilings through which people went in and out using ladders.2 The walls were smooth and white and a couple of women, cloth wrapped around their bodies and hair knotted in buns, stood chatting outside one of the houses. I was fascinated by this lack of doors on the ground. How fun might it have been to have such easy access to roofs! What if you had to carry a load as you climbed? What about old people whose knees hurt?

    What must it be like to live in a particular time far in the past is a question that still excites me; even now when I visit historical places or walk through cities and spot old houses, I wonder what they would have looked like when they’d just been made, new and colorful and not yet marked with the residue of daily inhabitation, like scratches and stains.

    I can recall myself paging through the encyclopedia in our little bedroom, lying on my stomach, rereading the History section, skipping the section on the body and machines (I’ve since fell in the love with the former). I loved that book and I don’t know why I gave it away (if that’s what I did) to the kabadiwala. I think it was falling apart.

    Wikipedia and the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica replaced that book as I grew up. Recently, though, as AI is infecting everything and I’m more stubbornly appreciating everything analog, I’ve been spending time pulling out random editions of encyclopedias new and old from the shelves of our college library, just to feel the heft of those reference books in my hand. I’ve thought of getting the World Book Encyclopedia after reading an article about it, even though it’s way beyond my means and would probably be USAmerica-centric. Sometimes, I dream of returning to Daryaganj, the second-hand book market in New Delhi, and lugging home large encyclopedias just because I don’t want them to go unappreciated and can be content in owning some of them, sifting through them randomly for some fun facts or stories I could then tell everyone in my book club about.

    Someday. Someday, I will have an encyclopedia in my bookshelf.

    See also: The Wikipedia page for “Door” and “The Encyclopedia Project, or How to Know in the Age of AI“

    1. Now that I think about it, that’s not funny. But we were kids and it was humorous to consider a fox landing on his bum on a hot pan. Tom & Jerry kind of stuff. ↩︎
    2. This was Çatalhöyük, in Turkey. ↩︎

  • Browse: Love Letters to Bookshops Around the World, edited by Henry Hitchings

    What does one do when all one can think of is spending hours in a library and buying new books for one’s collection but can do neither of those things because they’re broke and hundreds of kilometres from said library and any decent bookstore that’s not stocked just with textbooks and exam guides? Read a book about bookstores, of course.

    I found Browse: Love Letters to Bookshops Around the World while scrolling through beautiful covers on Storytel; I read it hungrily but also savoured each essay. I was actually a little sad when I finished it today–there were no more bookstores for me to visit vicariously, and I’m still weeks away from being anywhere a commercial bookstore, let alone independent ones like Kunzum, May Day, or Faqir Chand in New Delhi. (I’ve yet to discover an independent bookstore in the city I now live in).

    I started reading The Library Book by Susan Orlean, but it’s not the same thing; what I want is more of these “love letters,” for Browse to be long enough that it’ll carry me through this long wait to get to a library or a bookstore sometime next month or in January.

    I don’t know what other praise I can give to this book. An actually comforting read. Recommended.

  • The art we make as children

    Since resuming a regular notebook-keeping  habit, I’ve started collecting the “junk” of every day life–tickets, flower, receipts–to have tangible reminders of moments lived.

    Yesterday a friend of mine (the same one who bought star fruits for me the other day) gave me a little tamarind roll, the wrapper of which I pasted in my notebook. It reminded me of the scrapbook I’d kept as a child, when I was about 10-12 (I may have started it at 9; I don’t really remember). I wish I hadn’t thrown it away. I’d collected dozens of chocolate and toffee wrappers and pasted them in it, along with pretty pictures and illustrations from newspapers and magazines.

    I also wish I hadn’t thrown away the diary with a golden cover in which I’d written my first poems, as well as a slim blue notebook in which I’d composed poems as well as short stories, written in neat, print handwriting as if I were actually making a book. I can recall that the very first poem in it was one I’d written about my relationship with the girl I used to call my Best Friend Forever (BFF) but with whom I lost all touch five years later.

    I can’t recall the other poems but I do remember a couple of short stories. There was one about a Christmas party gone wrong and another that was about a group of friends having creepy experiences in a haunted house that turns out to be a movie set (or something like that). I was in my Goosebumps fan girl phase and so all the stories I wrote were not so much as “influenced” by those books as they were attempts at writing my own Goosebumps stories. I was so confident in my self-perceived ability to write horror back then! Right now, our book club is running a horror comedy writing contest and I feel utterly incapable of writing anything that won’t be, to use some internet vocabulary, a cringefest.

    Anyways, the main takeaway from this, which I can’t do anything about but you maybe can, dear reader, is this: no matter what else you purge from your life, never throw away the art you made as a child. I’m going to try to keep this in mind for my own children.

  • A picture, expanded: The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş

    I listened to The Anthropologists over the last few days while doing my laundry at 10 pm and making charts of little poems for children at the anganwadi I’m working at.

    At several points, I thought that I must buy a physical copy of the book because I like the little snapshots it contains of city life. I imagined holding the book in my hands, rereading it in bits and pieces, underlining parts where Asya and Manu, the married protagonists living in an unnamed “City,” visit cafes, have dinner with their elderly neighbour or host friends at their own apartment. All the things I’d like to do someday, too–a home shared with a person I love, spending our free hours and days getting to know our city and its people.

    I described the book to my book club thus: “You know those Tumblr pics of sunny apartments you wish you could step into or an art-filled, cafe-frequenting life you wish you could live? This is what this book is.” It’s like a picture, expanded.

    But it’s not just descriptions, which is what a lot of my writing ends up being when I attempt to capture a similar feeling. There’s dialogue, movement, emotions in response to dialogue and movement. My writing slows down everything, as if I’m repeatedly pausing a video to tell people what’s happening. Here, that’s not the case. You don’t just step into a picture–you move around the room, you follow its residents out through the door and into the city, taking a walk with them. It’s a book I wish I were able to write; there’s a lot to learn here.

    Maybe I should get a physical copy, after all.

    Buy The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş or listen to the audiobook, narrated by Kathryn Aboya, on Storytel1

    1. Not sponsored. I love both Storytel and the Midland bookshop (they ship everywhere). ↩︎

  • Letters: A Reading and Watching List

    On the bad days, I dig through my drafts. Today, I found these:

    Read

    The Republic of Letters on Wikipedia

    “Assyrian Women of Letters” by Durrie Bouscaren

    “What Urdu writers teach us about the art of letter writing” by Poorna Swami

    “The Last Letter Writers Of Mumbai” by Devyani Nighoskar

    “The disappearing tribe of India’s letter writers” by Geeta Pandey

    “The Magic and Risk of a Handwritten Letter” by Meghan Forbes

    “The Unique Pleasures of Letter-Writing in a Era of Impulsive Interaction” by Jackie Polzin

    “All the Letters I’ll Never Send” by Clare Sestanovich

    “A Letter to My Teacher” by Marion Karian

    “The Art of Letter Writing” by Meg Keeshan McGovern

    “‘The Horror Is Not Endless’: How A Russian Activist Comforts Political Prisoners, One Letter At A Time” by Andrei Filimonov

    “From me, with love: the lost art of letter writing” by Jon McGregor

    Watch

    “Letter-writing is not dead! Part 1: Tips and Inspiration” and “Letter-writing is not dead! Part 2: Handwriting is Not Dead!” by The Morgan Library and Museum–My favorite items on this list!

    “I write a letter every day” by Ruby Granger

    “why you should write love letters…” by Luci Vo

    “Why handwriting letters can change your life” by Peter McKinnon–I’m tired of the idea of doing something because it’s good for business and networking and therefore could “change your life” but I’m sharing this one because it was a very aesthetically satisfying video to watch. I literally made a note to buy tin boxes just so I could use them to store stationery, like McKinnon does.

  • Clockwork, magic, and secrets: The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

    When he’s not keeping the clocks of the Paris train station in the name of his missing uncle, Hugo Cabret steals parts of clockwork toys from the toy shop at the station. The lonely boy’s most precious possession is an automaton that his father showed him. It didn’t work, but his father had told him that if fixed, it would write out a message. Hugo’s father passed away before the automaton could be repaired, so the boy now uses his father’s notebook–and the stolen toy parts–to finish that work. His father was so passionate about the machine; certainly, he has left in it a message for Hugo that the automaton will present to him.

    But when your world is limited to a train station, you cannot hide forever from the authorities. When the shopkeeper catches Hugo red-handed, he lets the boy go, but keeps his father’s notebook, threatening to burn it. But it’s no a simple notebook; it’s all he has left of his father. It’s the only thing that keeps Hugo going.

    I usually don’t read sad books, but I was very drawn to Hugo’s story, to the fate of his notebook and the automaton. I don’t know if it was because I listened to the book while away from home that his lack of a family felt especially moving, or because I’ve never thought so much about stolen childhoods as I have since starting my M.A. and interacting with children from very poor backgrounds.

    We snatch kids’ childhoods from them in so many ways; every day at the school, at home, through the stories we teach and the language we use with them. Our morals and agendas pushed onto those who are still exploring, still learning, trying to follow rules that restrict them rather than let them live freely during a period of freedom that they will never again have because they will not be the same, nor will their minds. And this childhood doesn’t somehow end at age 11-12, the age at which we meet Hugo trying to survive a world that is small, lonely, and secret.

    I listened to this book at 2x speed; even then, the book’s emotional impact wasn’t reduced–Jeff Woodman is an excellent narrator. The particular edition that I listened to also had some background sound effects, such as ringing bells, ticking clocks, and footsteps. I usually don’t like such inclusions–in a book, it’s the words and, in audiobooks, the narrator’s voice, that are supposed to arouse all the senses, I believe. But here the sounds accompanied the narration nicely, perhaps because they were interspersed occasionally rather than a constant presence in the background.

    Technical details aside, I really enjoyed this story–judging books by their covers, as was the case here, can sometimes lead one to books one would have never looked at otherwise. This is another title that I know I’d have loved had I read it as a child. Since I can’t go back in time, I’ll keep such books ready for any children I’ll have the opportunity to guide as readers.

    The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, narrated by Jeff Woodman, on Storytel

  • To go into another room and make pictures

    It’s sublime, to go into another room and make pictures. It’s magic time, where all your weaknesses of character, the blemishes of your personality, whatever else torments you, fades away, just doesn’t matter. You’re doing the one thing you want to do and you do it well and you know you do it well, and… you’re happy. The whole promise is to do the work, sitting down at the drawing table, turning on the radio, and I think, what a transcendent life this is, that I’m doing everything I want to do. In that moment, I feel like I’m a lucky man.

    Maurice Sendak (via Austin Kleon)

    Image
    What my desk looked like this evening.

    I’ve spent this weekend creating shapes of various colors and sizes, and flashcards based on the “Winter” theme. I’ll take them to the anganwadi where I’m working, for the children to learn from and play with.

    These several hours that I’ve spent at my desk working with simple crayons and color pencils and sketch pens, cutting up cardboard pieces and taping and pasting paper on them, while listening to music or audiobooks, have been some of the happiest hours I’ve spent recently.

    I love drawing, even if it means copying stuff, but especially when I’m able to draw something without reference.

    And then there’s the coloring. I’m not a fan of wax crayons; a smooth color pencil is my preferred tool for art. It makes me want to keep going, filling up a figure until colors take over the blankness of the page. It’s so fun that I’m typing this as fast as I can so that I can return to my crafting until it’s time to go to bed. I highly recommend you give it a try too!

  • Thursday Reading List

    “Our public libraries need attention; here’s why we should care” by Madhumita Rajan

    An article filled with facts that makes one feel very hopeless, but also gives some motivation to do something about it.

    “I’m a Librarian, Therapist, Personal Assistant, and First Responder. Moments Like This Make It All Worth It.” by Katie Walsh

    What a contrast to the article above; I’ve grown up reading about what American/Western libraries have done for their patrons that so few libraries in India do. How much our people need such libraries!

    But, then, there’s this:

    “The Women Helping the Afghan Refugee Community Connect with Literature and Culture in Delhi” by Taran N. Khan and “क्यों महाराष्ट्र के कोरकू गांवों में किताबें घर-घर दस्तक देती हैं” by पूजा कुमारी

    See also: “The Legendary Children’s Librarian of Harlem” by April White and “How Small-Town Public Libraries Enrich the Generative Research Process” by Nick Fuller Googins

    Some favorite comics by Grant Snider, from his blog archives, that I wish I could hang on my wall:

    “It’s the Most Important Muscle in Your Body and You Don’t Even Know What It’s Called” by Henry Abbott

    Confession: I read this in bits and pieces; I’m not too much into the anatomy of the rest of the body (apart from the brain) or its relation to sports, but there are some interesting bits in there and it also might help someone who’s struggling with body pain that might be related to their psoas.

    “Scientific objectivity is a myth – cultural values and beliefs always influence science and the people who do it” by Sara Giordano

    I read this one a few years ago. Rereading it now, the points in it seem obvious, but I guess that’s only because my current course, although not directly related to science, brings attention to cultural influences on education constantly.

    “Evolution of the nervous system” by Tim Vernimmen, illustrated by Maki Naro

    The kind of stuff that makes me wish I taught (Neuro)Psychology just so I could make comics like this required reading.

    “11 Things I’m Trying To Do In Order To Achieve a Sane, Healthy, and Marginally Productive Relationship With the Internet” by L. M. Sacasas

    I should re-read this one at least once a quarter.