Family Histories, Memoirs

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My all time favorite story is that of my parents. How they met, fell in love and got married. As a child I pestered my mother, urging her to tell me the story over and over again. And then my aunts and uncles. Some frowned, most obliged. I added the bits and pieces, skipped some parts and imagined a fairy-tale love story. I decided if I ever wrote a book it would be about them. I haven't.

But my fascination with such stories still draws me to family histories, books that blend history, facts and fiction and go beyond listing names and places with a tree. Here are the best ones I read this year.

Leaving India by Minal Hajratwala

It's a must read if you like the genre. The author describes it as 'My Family's Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents'. It's the story of the Indian Diaspora told through her family - how and why they migrated over a period of one hundred years from Navsari in Gujarat to Fiji, South Africa, Australia, the US, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom.

She starts from the very beginning - the elimination of kshatriyas or the warrior-kings from the earth, the rise of the demons, the appearance of Ardhanaarishwara - half god and half goddess- who created four great warriors including the Solanki king whose tribe ruled until the year 1242. Then God told them to become the Khatri weavers.

Centuries later, the industrial revolution pushed the weavers to migrate to Fiji. The author's great-grandfather left India with the girmitiyas- the indenture labourers. He started as a small tailor in Suva. Decades later, his sons owned the biggest departmental store in South Pacific. Another relative, Ganda, traveled to South Africa and suffered the discriminatory laws in Durban to run his vegetarian restaurant. Post World War II, the govt subsidized bread and barred native Africans from eating in restaurants. Ganda started one of the first take-away services in the world. He scooped out bread loaves and served curry in them, creating the first version of what's now popular as 'bunny-chow'.

The author's father was the first in the family to complete a master's degree in the US. Back in Suva, his father claimed he had invented Penicillin!

It's a story of successive challenges. The grand parents fought poverty and discrimination, the parents fought old barriers to study further and explore a new life and the children fought their own culture and identity to "fit-in" as Americans. You relate to events in many ways, you feel you've known someone like the character in the book and yet there's a novelty that interests you throughout. The author researched for 7 years, traveled the world to interview more than 75 relatives and it shows. The book is meticulous and engaging.

The View From Castle Rock by Alice Munro

It's a heavily fictionalized family history and memoir. Munro's forefathers came from a place with "no advantages".

This parish possesses no advantages. Upon the hills the soil is in many places mossy and fit for nothing. The air in general is moist... The nearest market town in fifteen miles away and the roads so deep as to be almost impassable...Barley oats and potatoes are the only crops raised. Wheat rye turnips and cabbage are never attempted...

Contribution by the Ministry of Ettrick Parish, Scotland 1799

Will of Far Hope or Will O'Phaup was a boy hero in Ettrick who earned fame but little money, lost his wife early and died a bootlegger and a storyteller. His grandsons James Hogg and James Laidlaw too "escaped into lasting fame". The former as the author of 'Confessions of a Justified Sinner' and the latter for migrating to Canada! Laidlaw took his son to Castle Rock in Edinburgh to show what he believed was America.

Once they land on the other side, the book gets more layered. The author tries to narrate a long complicated tale in short stories. Her family travels from Illinois to Ontario. Her father runs a silver fox farm; her mother - the expert saleswoman - makes good money. Then disease takes over. And teenage. Love, fancies, the wild imagination of a headstrong girl, a fickle boyfriend, and then none for many years, the yearning for books - it's a vivid portrait of a girl who liked lying under an apple tree in bloom and "looking up at it from underneath".

Cane River by Lalita Tademy

It's the story of four generations of black women. The oldest, Tademy's great grandmother Emily was a slave at a Creole plantation. The youngest, Lalita Tademy ended up as the VP and General Manager at a Fortune 500 company in Silicon Valley. She left her high paying job to explore her past in Louisiana. It's a fabulous tale of slavery and emancipation, of love and loss and the tough choices women make even as slaves. Powerful, inspiring and heartbreaking.

Palki S Upadhyay's Top 5 reads

1. Indian Summer - Alex Von Tunzelmann

2. Angela's Ashes - Frank Mc Court

3. The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

4. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders - Daniyal Mueenuddin

5. Love In A Blue Time - Hanif Kureishi