Poetry Session – June 20, 2025

The first image revealed by the Vera Rubin telescope shows the Trifid and Lagoon nebulae in the constellation Sagittarius 5,000 light years away. The stunning detail comes from its 3,600 megapixel camera

 

To our delight readers chose a varied collection of poets, from Nobel prize winners (Glück) to those even more distinguished (Auden) who failed the inscrutable Nobel test; from satirical modernists like Ferlinghetti to humorous poets who cast a comedic light on humanity (Milligan). At one extreme we had an astronomer-poet who sang lyrically about the furthest reaches of the universe (Rebecca Elson) and at the other, stately Victorian verse describing how the mythical god Pan crafted the Pan flute by notching the reeds in a river bed (Elizabeth Barrett Browning).

The W.B. Yeats statue by Rowan Gillespie in Sligo has Yeats's poems inscribed on it – over 150 "cuts" from his poems are imprinted in positive relief on the statue's surface. One notable inscription is "I made my song a coat"

KumKum introduced a new class of poems called Ekphrastic poems, which respond to a work of visual art, creating a dialogue between the written word and the image. She took a famous example by W.H. Auden depicting the Fall of Icarus in a painting by Pieter Brueghel. As it turned out the poem Joe read before her could also be classed as ekphrastic, because it takes off from the visual imagery of Marc Chagall’s paining Equestrienne of a girl riding with a boy on a white horse with a violin in its mouth.

Equestrienne, 1931 by Marc Chagall, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Why do we advertise ourselves as “A group of readers of literature in English, poetry and fiction”? Is it because we wish to ignore other languages that flourish in India? Is it because our knowledge of other literatures is so slight that we dare not tread there?

Looking through the posts in our blog which have preserved a wealth of detail about our readings and discussions over the years, you will find poems and novels from all six continents – exhibited in English translation. It is not that we are ignorant of the riches in the original. You will find in the blog original translations of verse from languages like Urdu, Hindi, and Bengali. Readers have sung ghazals. There are even original translations from French and Spanish. We encourage readers to read in the original language, so long as a translation is provided into English for common enjoyment.

At KRG we have a great desire to know and appreciate the vessels that hold human culture, of which language, music, and art form an irreducible distillate. For us language is the primary vehicle through which we engage in that quest; finding pleasure in it, we sprinkle it from time to time with music and art. 

Kamala Das - popularly known by her pseudonyms Madhavikutty and Ami. She is prominent in Indian literature for her poetry and short stories

There is a trend now among prominent politicians exuding an illiberal brand of ultra-nationalism to assert that Indians speaking in English will soon be cowering in shame. Presumably, reading is still okay, and if so, one cannot do better than point them to Kamala Das who wrote her short stories in Malayalam under the pen name Madhavikutty, and her poems in English under her own name. Here’s how she refuted critics of English in her poem titled Introduction:

… Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
It is half English, halfIndian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don't
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware. 

(https://kochiread.blogspot.com/2018/07/kamala-das-her-life-through-poetry.html)

The Vegetarian by Han Kang - May 23, 2025

The Vegetarian first edition English

Though the title of this Man Booker International Prize-winning novel is The Vegetarian, it is not about vegetarianism at all. Rather it is about mental health, child abuse, choice, and conformance to norms.

We follow a woman named Yeong-hye who decides to stop eating meat after having horrible dreams. This decision of hers, especially in a predominantly meat-eating culture like Korea, fragments the family with far reaching effect. The story is in three parts, each part from the perspective of three people in her life. The first part titled The Vegetarian is narrated in first person by her husband who is always referred to formally as Mr Cheong, in a way keeping him apart from the intimate family structure. The second part is from the perspective of her unnamed brother-in-law and is titled Mongolian Mark, and the third is in first-person narrative by Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye.

Seoul panoramic view – a megacity of 10 million, pronounced 'soul’

Though it causes so much tumult in the family, no one tries to discover the reason for Yeong-hye’s decision to turn vegetarian.  Her family, especially her abusive father, tries to force her to eat meat with disastrous effect. She mentions many times that she has a dream, but we are left to discover the dream and the possible reason for the decision, in the few portions in the book where Yeong-hye is given a voice. 

The abuse she has suffered and the trauma that she has gone through comes out in bits and pieces. Her husband abandons her; her brother-in-law sexually abuses her when she is at her most vulnerable emotional point, and her parents refuse to have anything to do with her. At a time, when she needs the most support, she has only her sister In-hye who stands by her and attempts to make sense of her situation. As Yeong-hye descends further into her insanity, In-hye realises that it could have been herself in the same situation if the circumstances had been different.

The translation was very patchy with syntax errors and use of very British slang which jarred with the text. Translations of novels are always difficult to judge especially as we have no knowledge of the original text. Does the translator replace words in one language with those of another or does he/she smooth out the narrative with the usages of the translated language? Then what happens to the idioms and speech conventions of the original language? Whatever the case, the story should have a smooth flow, which was missing. It could have been subjected to a tighter editing, and that felt strange as the Man Booker International is for books in translation. One could not agree with the reviewer of the New Statesman whose commendation was: “elegantly translated into bone-spare English”

In the end, it is a disturbing book, which almost none of the KRG members liked, but it still led to very lively discussion and debate as we tried to make sense of it. 

Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare, April 24, 2025

 

The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra – from the first folio edition, 1623

This Roman play of Shakespeare has many similarities with Romeo and Juliet, which was also a tragedy about Italian lovers who end up committing suicide. But this play in contrast is about mature love among adults who have already been ‘ploughed’ and ‘cropped,’ had wives and lovers, and seen action at the head of their empires. The military history of the times is combined with the mutual attraction between Antony and Cleopatra which pervades the play.

Cleopatra Sculpture by William Wetmore Story, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

As usual Shakespeare borrows the story from a source, in this case, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Plutarch was a Greek biographer and historian who lived from AD 40 to about AD 120. Shakespeare mined the book (in a 1579 English translation by Thomas North) for his Roman plays, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. How reliable Plutarch was as a historian is a matter of doubt; he was like today’s celebrity journalists, eager to pick up juicy morsels about the great figures of the past who were destined to govern the history of their times. 

Cleopatra – asp at her breast

Nick Walton of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust explains in a 12-min video how Shakespeare made Cleopatra the central character in his play. He says that “Shakespeare added significantly to the mythology around Egypt's last queen. He developed his historical sources to create a woman who is at once powerful, jealous, humorous, stern, intelligent, vain, courageous, vulnerable, stubborn, fickle, loyal, down-to-earth, and otherworldly.”

What an unusual collaboration over 1,600 years between Plutarch and Shakespeare! The former merely mentions that Cleopatra came sailing “her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge.” 

WS turns that account into pure poetry:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,

The word barge is in Plutarch, but see how Shakespeare has added the alliteration of burnish’d, burned, and beaten.

The barge she sat in ... was of beaten gold

No less than other plays A&C is full of phrases you will remember once you read it,

– A lass unparalleled

– A morsel for a monarch

– I have / Imortal longings in me 

– Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale /Her infinite variety.

– The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch /Which hurts and is desired.

– My salad days, /When I was green in judgment

– There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned.

As in all the works of Shakespeare puns abound, some bawdy – meant to entertain the playgoers – some adding depth and a layer of added meaning to the play.

Bawdy:
O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony

"Horse" refers to Antony’s warhorse (military might) and sexual prowess (horsemanship = riding a lover). The line drips with innuendo—Cleopatra envies the beast that carries him.

I am dying, Egypt, dying.
‘Die’ was Elizabethan slang for orgasm – Antony’s death throes mirror an erotic climax.

Clean:
The band that seems to tie their friendship together will be the very strangler of their amity.

‘band’ can mean both a unifying bond and a constricting noose.

He wears the rose / Of youth upon him
‘rose’  symbolises both beauty and the fleeting nature of youth (like a flower that withers).

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the film Cleopatra (1963), directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini – March 28, 2025

A Thousand Splendid Suns, 2007 first edition dust jacket

The novel dwells chiefly on the fate of women in Afghanistan, seen through the intertwined lives of Mariam and Laila. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a rich man in Herat (close to Iran) too proud to bring her up in his household; he therefore gives her away in marriage to a shoemaker, Rasheed, in Kabul. The other woman, Laila, is a war orphan who becomes the second wife of the same shoemaker.

We follow them through decades of hardship and political turmoil in Afghanistan, as the author exposes their travails under puppets of the Soviet Union and the sectarian warlords, while the divisions in Afghan society tear it apart. The novel is about motherhood and sacrifice, and the resilience of these two women. Mariam as the senior wife harbours a resentment for Laila as the usurper. Then slowly, the relations thaw when a child is born to Laila and two women assume an uneasy alliance initially, which blossoms into a mother-daughter relationship as time goes on.

The sadness you feel for Afghanistan is because of the regime’s intolerance of all the arts and education, coupled with a systematic subjugation of women. The Taliban, so intent on banning, have all but forgotten the times when women were doctors, university faculty, and school teachers, playing an equal role in national life. Today we only view Afghan women as blue burqa-clad dolls silently tiptoeing behind a male family member.

The author, Khalid Hosseini, was an Afghan by birth who escaped at the age of 15 with his diplomat father and grew up in the West, settling in California as a doctor. The success of his very first novel impelled him to take up writing full-time. All three of his books have have reached the bestseller charts. He is also a UNHCR goodwill ambassador. A short profile of Khalid Hosseini is here.

The title of the novel is taken from a poem by the Persian poet Saib-e-Tabrizi who loved Kabul and wrote a poem about it in the seventeenth century; Laila’s father Babi quotes two lines in Chapter 26 when he is forced to leave Kabul: Tabrizi’s poem had been swirling in his head all day, but all he could remember were these two lines:

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

The entire poem Kabul is a love letter to Kabul.

Tabriz is in the East Azerbaijan province of northwestern Iran

Tabriz celebrates eight famous poets (including Shams-e-Tabrizi, Rumi’s spiritual guide) with individual mausoleums erected to them. There is a graveyard in Tabriz called the Maqbaratoshoara (‘Mausoleum of Poets’) where some 400 poets and mystics are buried with famous men. We can appreciate why Persia is the origin of so much poetry and the poetic forms that have permeated the culture of of West Asia and South Asia.

Maqbarat-o-shoara, also known as the Mausoleum of Poets, built in the 1970s in Tabriz, is a monument to honour the 400 or so Iranian poets, mystics, and notable persons buried in the grounds

However Saib-e-Tabrizi is buried in Isfahan, the magical city of culture with scores of famous monuments, palaces, and mosques.

1967 monument in Isfahan to Saib-e-Tabrizi (1592 – 1676) who was the greatest sonneteer of his time. It is home to a collection of around 120,000 couplets inscribed on the walls in marble

Poetry Session - 24 February, 2025

Temsula Ao is among the women poets of the North East of India who taught English at North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya. Fluent in Assamese, the language in which she was educated, she wrote her poems in English, publishing at least 7 collections. Arundhaty chose her poem Dream in which she has a conversation with Shakespeare.

We had Devika reciting from Rudyard Kipling who has been chosen numerous times. The poem about a lost road through the woods is a recollection of something lost:
where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Geetha’s choice was Jiddu Krishnamurti who was brought up to be a seer and mystic and later threw off that persona and freed himself. In this poem he discovers the entire tree from a single leaf:
The entire tree, its great trunk,
Its many branches, and its thousand leaves,
And an immense part of the sky.
I swore there there was no other tree, no other part to the sky –

His schools survive as a legacy of an approach to eduction through nature, the most famous being the Rishi Valley School in Madanapalle, AP. There is a rock, I am told, where students go to meditate. Birdwatching is a particular activity that is encouraged.

The Meditation rock at Rishi Valley School

Joe had recourse to a poem by a poet who lamented the great calamity of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Refaat Alareer who foresaw his own death left a death poem about what should happen afterward. It would cause a little boy to look up and see hope in the sky. The poem If I Should Die has been translated into hundreds of languages, and Joe preferred to recite it in a simple Hindi version with the original English alongside.

Kavita’s choice of Sarojini Naidu as a poet was a poem that describes bangle sellers who brought a ray of golden light:
Who will buy these delicate, bright
Rainbow-tinted circles of light?
Lustrous tokens of radiant lives,
For happy daughters and happy wives.

Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) was known as the ‘Nightingale of India’ because of her lyrical poetry. She was a political activist, and freedom fighter too.

KumKum chose two poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, a favourite of Bobby Paul George who was a co-founder of KRG. They are humanistic poems and both have a sad ring, one extending empathy for a cripple, and the other for a lonely star that seems to call out to him:

I long to still my beating heart.
Beneath the sky’s vast dome I long to pray . . .
Of all the stars there must be far away
A single star which still exists apart.

Pamela chose a poem by a young black poet Amanda Gorman who was called on to celebrate the inauguration of Mr Biden as President in 2021 by reading a prose-poem titled The Hill We Climb. Her costume (a red Prada headband and yellow Prada coat) was more striking than the words, mostly a borrowed feel-good kind of rhetoric:

And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.

For my money there should be a ‘not’ before the first striving ...

Amanda Gorman Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, May 2021

She became a fashion influencer immediately afterwards with a photo-shoot for the Vogue magazine.

The moment when Poetry struck Pablo Neruda and changed his course in life is celebrated in a poem of that name that Saras read:

Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
…
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering

that fire,

and I wrote the first faint line,

His romantic ardour is expressed feverishly in the poem Don't Go Far Off.

may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;

may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.

Don’t leave me for a second, my dearest,

Shoba selected poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, author of a score of books and the first black woman to serve as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, at the Library of Congress. Sadie and Maud tells the story of two sisters, and though Maud is the one who avoided trouble she is described at the end thus:
Is a thin brown mouse.
She is living all alone
In this old house.

Thomo selected the uncle of the folk singer Pete Seeger, singer and composer of famous songs like Where Have All The Flowers Gone and We Shall Overcome. The uncle, Alan Seeger, was one of the many poets sacrificed on the vast fields of massacre which the fields of Belgium became in WWI – Ypres, Passchendaele, and so on. Like Alareer in modern Gaza, Alan Seeger had a premonition of death when writing his poem I Have a Rendezvous with Death:
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
…
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Th final poem was by the poet and diplomat who wrote those unforgettable lines in To My Coy Mistress, but here he provided for Zakia, The Definition of Love. This poet knows the intimate geometry of love:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.

Marvell had the gift of stating in rhyme pithily and inimitably the essence of human experience.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Jan 24, 2025

 

The Reluctant Fundamentalist first Edition cover 2007

When Mohsin Hamid, the young  British Pakistani writer, began his second novel the demolition of the World Trade Tower by the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States had not yet occurred. He re-wrote the novel again  and again and took seven years to complete it. Ultimately, the novel turned on Changez Khan’s dawning realisation that something had changed fundamentally in the acceptability of Muslims in America after those attacks. The country would no longer be the land of his youthful dreams.

The twin towers attack of Sep 11, 2001 when airliners were flown into the towers by terrorists – the south tower is on fire and the north tower billows smoke

In  between he has a slow-burning love affair with a young woman called Erica. But she has still not come out of her depression following the grief over her boyfriend Chris, who died in the 9/11 attack. Changez loses track of Erica, but continues to think of her fondly, even after returning to Pakistan, holding onto the hope that she might one day come to him. 

When the North Tower collapsed this fire engine was damaged beyond repair — it is now an exhibit at the 9/11 Museum. Among first responders 441 died on that day

What makes Changez give up on his dreams is an eye-opening conversation he has with the head of the literary division of a company (Juan-Bautista), he has been sent to evaluate in Chile by his Wall Street company.  In a conversation he is told of young Christian boys who were captured by the Ottoman Turks in battle and then brainwashed into becoming Janissaries to work for their new masters. The implication is Changez has been similarly indoctrinated by his Wall Street firm to work against his own interests; he has become a hired gun. Juan-Bautista prompts Changez to examine his own identity and his relationship with America, which helps Changez see himself as a kind of "cultural outsider" exploited by American power structures. 

From there a transformation takes place and perhaps the poetry of Pablo Neruda one of whose houses south of Valparaiso he visits, has something to do with his deeper appreciation of his own poetic roots (his father was a poet in the Punjab).

Sumbal Maqsood of Government College University, Lahore, wrote in a paper titled Interrogating the Fundamentals of Identity: Changez’s Defining Act in the Reluctant Fundamentalist about Changez Khan’s dilemma:

“The standardized tests of America (like SAT) were traps to attract the intellectual cream of other nations, leaving the home countries deprived of brain power, while the migrants became servers of a tentacled capitalist cause. Changez realized gradually that he was just enabling the tentacles to grow more out of bounds.” 

The Reluctant Fundamentalist was adapted as a 2012 film in the political thriller drama genre, directed by Mira Nair and starring Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, and Liev Schreiber

The novel was later turned into a film directed by Mira Nair available for viewing free on Youtube. Many scenes are changed: Juan-Bautista in Valparaiso is turned into a book publisher in Istanbul who publishes in translation great authors from the Middle East and Asia. The book becomes more a thriller in the latter half of the film about secret CIA intervention in Lahore to rescue one of their operatives – there is no such story in the novel. In the film Changez Khan is less of a non-violent protester about American interventionism, and more of an activist goading students until he steps unwillingly into the terrorist backdrop to fundamentalism in Pakistan. Readers may on the whole prefer the novel because it leaves things unresolved at the end.

In the film Changez (played by Rizwan Ahmed, the British Pakistani actor) learns that the Istanbul publisher whose company they were evaluating, has published a Turkish translation of his father, Ajmal Khan's, poetry

Humorous Poems – Dec 2, 2024

Six Humorous Poets –  clockwise from top left, Soyinka, Nash, Masefield, Tolkien, Carryl, Paterson

The December session is as much about wearing fancy costumes as it is about reading humorous poems and readers have fun seeing themselves in unaccustomed attire, strutting before the audience. We meet in person always at such gatherings and spouses are invited to share the fun, and ex-readers too.

Ogden Nash is ever popular at our December sessions, with his unlikely rhymes and ridiculous situations, for example, speaking of husbands –
… they always drink cocktails faster than they can assimilate them,
And if you look in their direction they act as if they were martyrs and you were trying
          to sacrifice, or immolate them,

Indian husband deeply ensconced in the affection of his wife

…
Husbands are indeed an irritating form of life,
And yet through some quirk of Providence most of them are really very deeply
           ensconced in the affection of their wife.

Tolkien, whose seminal book The Hobbit we recently read, was also the purveyor of whimsical poems composed by one Tom Bombadil, a bearded hobbit short in stature in a blue coat and yellow boots who undertook a journey in a gondola across thirteen rivers, and among other things met a butterfly he fancied and proposed to her:
he begged a pretty butterfly 
that fluttered by to marry him.
She scorned him and she scoffed at him, 
she laughed at him unpitying; 
so long he studied wizardry 
and sigaldry and smithying.

One of the pleasures Tolkien readers derive is that of meeting a host of old English words like sigaldry, meaning enchantment or witchcraft, and habergeon, a sleeveless coat of chain mail

One of our prizewinners (Devika) wore a devil’s cape and makeup to go with it, reciting a poem about outwitting The Devil, with a mere blast of the word ‘Amen.’

That men too undergo a harrowing experience at childbirth is not known or commiserated with. You have to hear Edgar Guest’s poem on Becoming A Dad to know how deeply it affects the man on the threshold of fatherhood:
I vow I never shall forget
The night he came. I suffered, too,
Those bleak and dreary long hours through;
I paced the floor and mopped my brow
And waited for his glad wee-ow!

Pamela regretted she could not dress as a one-humped camel, known as a dromedary. The Camel’s Complaint is that their owners never build a shelter, but just let them loose.
… a Camel comes handy
Wherever it’s sandy—
Anywhere does for me !
…

If the camel's nose is under the tent, the rest of the stinky camel will follow!

… a Camel’s all lumpy
And bumpy and humpy—
Any shape does for me !

Banjo Paterson who writes humorous poems about the Australian outback had one about an old geezer who decided to forsake a horse to ride a bicycle, with unfortunate consequences: 
It struck a stone and gave a spring that cleared a fallen tree,
It raced beside a precipice as close as close could be;
And then as Mulga Bill let out one last despairing shriek
It made a leap of twenty feet into the Dean Man's Creek.

Mulga Bill careening downhill on a bicycle

After the ride he decides:
A horse's back is good enough henceforth for Mulga Bill.

Most amusingly told is a poem by Wole Soyinka, the Nobel-winning author from Nigeria, about his early experiences of subtle racism when he wanted to rent a flat in England. He’s asked by the landlady if he is dark, or very light, and to clarify Soyinka answers:
You mean – like plain or milk chocolate?

What colour are you – white, milk chocolate or dark chocolate?

‘West African sepia’ is an alternative description that befuddles the landlady, until he finally pleads:
"Madam, … wouldn't you rather
See for yourself?"

John Masefield is known primarily as a poet of sailing and his poems acquaint readers with terms used about sailing ships, such as poop, taffrail, scuppers, and fo'c'sle. He wrote in rhyming meter; here it's AABB. The poet narrates the bloody encounters when the pirates capture and scuttle merchant ships, and makes the point that the Board of Trade in UK, ultimately banned piracy: 
The schooners and the merry crews are laid away to rest. 

Long John Silver with eyepatch, peg leg, cutlass and macaw

The poem may be taken as a nod to Robert Louis Stevenson of Treasure Island fame, the yarn where Long John Silver is the one-legged example of a stereotypical pirate.

Michal as Frieda Kahlo in costume and unibrow being humped over the border wall with Mexico by Trump

Group picture at the end of the reading

 The spread after the reading was a knockout potluck

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, November 22, 2024

 

Lessons in Chemistry book covers in different countries – Covers, clockwise from top left, in the United States, in Britain, in Estonia, and in German

Briefly, in the words of the author, Bonnie Garmus:
“I set the book in the late 50s, early 60s and there's a woman, Elizabeth Zott, a chemist who's not allowed to be a chemist because she's unwed and pregnant, and she gets fired from her job for that crime, and she ends up taking a job as a very reluctant TV cooking show host.

But instead of teaching the housewives at home how to cook, she teaches them chemistry because she wants to remind them of their innate capability and in doing so, she changes the status quo.”

The novel is set in the fifties in balmy California where the great research universities and labs are; and no end of places that invite people to have a good time. In this setting arrives Elizabeth Zott, keen to make her career as a research chemist but having to battle all the way against the failures in her childhood upbringing – which she could do nothing about besides surviving – and the later disabilities heaped on her by the science establishment refusing to recognise her as a gifted and determined scientist.

Though she has already published papers and secured her M.Sc. in Chemistry from a prestigious university (University of California at Los Angeles, UCLA for short), and should have been working towards a Ph.D. at the same university, that attempt is botched by her guide and professor attempting to molest her sexually. She flees after poking a sharp number-two pencil six inches into his belly.

The only position she could get was as a lab technician in the fictional Hastings Institute, where Nobel-prize winning work is accomplished by brilliant scientists like Calvin Evans. Her encounter with him is the amusing story of the great man dismissing Elizabeth as a secretary when she appears to borrow some glass beakers for her work. It’s a put-down at first sight. The stand-off is tense until an encounter when he throws up on her dress after having one too many. She does not melt, but merely handles him as a patient.

Soon he takes her seriously and finds in her not only someone who understands his work and can critique it, but more, understands his own complex personality stemming from an even more cruel upbringing where he was molested by a pedophile priest in an orphanage after his parents (adoptive as it turns out) died. But he makes out all right and even goes to Cambridge University in UK and returns to the fictional town of Commons in California and a low paying job, selecting it purely because a pen-pal (who later became a Presbyterian clergyman) told him that Commons has the best weather for rowing. Rowing you see, is not only the author Bonnie Garmus’ passion, but one she devolves on Calvin Evans, and through him to Elizabeth Zott. There is an enormous amount of rowing lore and terminology in the novel, and descriptions of the brutal regimens of training required to succeed. 

Lewis Pullman as Calvin Evans and Brie Larson as Elisabeth Zott working in the lab from the Apple TV series

The pair make chemical headway in the lab and with each other. If chemistry is change as Elizabeth asserts then the two of them change and now attain a deep relationship with each other while intently pursuing their chemical research in Hastings. 

Elizabeth Zott and Calvin Evans collaborate in Hastings Institute

A stray dog they acquire and a leash that the town mandates combine to cause a freak accident while Calvin is jogging, and that causes the major turning point in the novel.

Calvin dies, but will Elizabeth be allowed to continue her work, funded by a secretive donor to for research in Abiogenesis – the theory that life originated from non-living matter, such as inorganic substances and simple organic compounds? No. The head of the chemistry department appropriates her research and publishes it as his own. She is thrown out of a job.

She has been left pregnant by Calvin Evans with the child named Mad, short for Madeline. How to support herself and a child? A chance encounter with the producer of afternoon TV programmes for housewives and children opens up a new horizon, a TV programme called Supper at Six, in which she opens up the vistas of Chemistry that underlie cooking, and goes on the air every weekday on a special set. 

Brie Larson as Elizabeth Scott hosts the TV Show ‘Supper at Six’

She transforms the show into a platform for science lessons for housewives while challenging gender biases. The show contains oodles of chemical knowledge about the proteins, amino acids and enzymes that make up food and how they transform under heat and various conditions into the tasty dinners every woman can make from fresh ingredients. The various segments of the show are very entertaining but they are all done in an air of seriousness, acknowledging how full of value is the time mothers pend on their family in preparing nourishing meals.

As in her previous career as a chemist, in TV production also there are bullying bosses who are constantly disparaging employees and asserting their male superiority. This culminates in the station chief of the TV, one Lebensmal (meaning ‘bad life’ in German), attempts to rape her. She is nobody, and he will have her. Fortunately, the brandishing of the 14-inch kitchen knife that every professional chef carries, is sufficient to repel his penile attack and render him inoperative.

Her extremely successful show is now syndicated nationally and Elizabeth Zott steps out of gentle penury into the limelight of a royalty earning TV star. But her ambition to return to chemistry  and take her research forward in the field of Abiogenesis, cannot long remain in abeyance. The erstwhile generous donor, Avery Parker of the Parker Foundation, who was keen to fund her work, turns out to be the (unwed) mother of Calvin Evans. She buys Hastings Institute and cleans it up, getting rid of the hostile, male chauvinist head of chemistry, Dr. Donatti, and putting Elizabeth in charge.

Madeline Zott and Six-Thirty, the dog, have a close protective relationship

The dog and the genius child of Elizabeth Zott and Calvin Evans have major roles. The novel was written to highlight how torturous the struggle was to recognise that women have minds and aspirations of their own, without reference to men in their lives. Women are as keen in intellect and as determined in their work habits as any male professional. 

It might be the basic tenet of feminism to take women seriously, as Elizabeth wished to be. There has been some progress in America and the West, and in other parts of the world in the last seventy years. But look at the way the Republican candidate for President in the Nov 5 elections in USA treats women. How many cases have been brought against him by women he molested? And his VP candidate has a such a low opinion of women that it almost amounts to the Nazi theme that officially encouraged and pressured women to fill the roles of mother and wife only. Women were excluded from all other positions of responsibility, including political and academic spheres. Nazi Germany promoted the cult that women were for Küssen, Kochen, und Kinder – kissing, cooking, and kids.

These ante-diluvian attitudes that persist in advanced countries, are demonstrated not only by the examples of leaders at the top, but in the statistics of the gender pay gap: according to current data, women in the United States are typically paid around 20% less than men for the same work. The gender pay gap in the EU is 16%. In India it is 18%. And so on. 

There are worse manifestations: in Afghanistan it is a crime for women to seek secondary education. In many countries women are forced to wear clothes to suppress their femininity – not because they want to, but because a male-dominated society decides what they shall wear.