STRANGER THAN FACT

Geeta Doctor's favourite fiction reads of 2024 present a cabinet of curiosities

It's been my long-held conviction that Goa is a flamingo-land filled with pink designer birds standing on stilts dipping their beaks into the fertile mulch of its Portuguese mediated past. It was mostly in the spirit of enquiry that I picked up on the trail of Maddie/Madhur Chopra fleeing a fashion designer, copywriter lifestyle in a Delhi hit by the plague of Covid-19.

Maddie descends on Goa in full throttle on a scooter with the peripatetic ambition of being a vlogger, targeting the natives. At first, it's mostly encounters of the feni kind. It's when the melancholy strains of fado, the deep dark side of the Goan experience, kick in, that Maddie has to transform her vlog-hood days into a whole new direction. Aside from sundry tips on how to avoid being electronically violated in the vlog world, there are some delightful illustrations of Maddie growing her wings in Goa-land.

THE SOLITUDE OF A SHADOW By Devibharathi (Translated from the Tamil by N. Kalyan Raman) HARPER PERENNIAL ₹399; 208 pages

In this extraordinarily taut and multilinear portrait of the lives of ordinary people in a small town in interior Tamil Nadu, the author plays the devil's advocate.

It's not as much the banality of evil that Devibharathi, a former government employee, literary editor, and political activist on caste issues, foregrounds, but the anatomy of power.