Life is a story we tell ourselves over generations

In early 2025, "Tara Walker stepped on stage amidst resounding applause to receive The Academy Award for best director of Once Upon A Summer." A few minutes later she walked up to the stage again to collect the Oscar for leading actor for portrayal of the female protagonist in the film. Tara Walker dedicated the Award to her mother, grandmother and her great grandmothers before her mother, a string of tremendously gifted women and their lives which finally culminated to the Award- Winning film. 

Cut to 1959. Alfred A. Alleye is sitting on a lonely chair lamenting to a photograph of his wife Rose, who has recently and suddenly past away, after their fifty years of partnership. 

 Alfred A. Alleye met Rose on SS Alexandria, the ship taking passengers from the port of Aden to America, the two travelling there, each seeking a new life in the country of possibilities. They fall in love and are married off on the ship, with much celebration thrown in by the ship's Captain. 

 At this point the story takes a turn to a series of flashback, taking the reader to the early 20th century, 1895 onwards, the years of the British Raj in India.  

Between 1895 to 1906, Azeem, the male protagonist, born in an upper class family in Rannpur, is met with personal tragedy, in which his parents and the entire family is killed and he is admitted in an orphanage in abject poverty to study. Azeem with a keen love for horses, finally moves to Saharanpur, where he trains to be a syce, and has now found employment with Norman Evans, who with his wife, Martha and daughter Madeline, are visiting Nainital, the beautiful and cool North Indian hill station. Norman Evans is employed with a British Company, while his wife and daughter have travelled from Middlesbrough, England, to spend time with him, in his station, Jaunpur.  

Our female protagonist, Madeline Evans, is an exceptionally brilliant and gifted woman, with extraordinary skill to pick up languages. She already speaks six foreign languages and has embarked on learning Hindustani while she is in India. When her mother and she return to England, Madeline is set to join Oxford University. But alas, this plan is derailed as Madeline and Azeem fall desperately and passionately in love, with each other. This happened behind Madeline 's parents back and the two lovers make plans to marry and elope to a country where they can live happily thereafter. 

More easily said than done, but the star of good luck favour them and while Madeline is on ship returning to England, she escapes from the vessel to meet Azeem midway, who has travelled over from India to Baluchistan and into Arabia, on horse and camel back, having stolen the British Identity Card of his Army Chief, uniform and money to meet his lady love in Port Aden. 

In her latest romance novel, Once Upon A Summer, author Manjul Bajaj, takes the reader on a journey of the most powerful love story covering almost one hundred twenty five years starting in the British Raj. A love story so intense that the main protagonists of the story are willing to give rebirth of their identity, just to survive the harsh circumstances to keep the fire of their love, alive. 

The love story between Azeem and Madeline is not an ordinary one, as it breaks barriers of caste, community and race, to abound in not only devoted love but a learning exchange of language and literature. Not to forget the inclusion of Christian hymns sung by Madeline 's ayah, Mariam. The book spans across northern Indian towns and hill station, like Nainital, Jaunpur, Rannpur, Saharanpur, Lucknow, although the latter towns have not received much descriptive attention, except for Nainital, which takes the reader to the most beautiful hill station experience with picturesque description.

Indicative of extremely strong writing skill in English, that the author possesses, the long paragraphs are a joy to read, without any need to use a dictionary. She explores Hindustani, Urdu through her characters unfolding the rich heritage of these languages in India. It is evident that an enormous amount of research has gone into the writing of this book. 

What is adorable too is the inclusion of birds, animals, trees and plants, as if their presence and communication is as human as the people themselves. This has been quite a regular feature in Bajaj's writings, from the time of her book, In Search of Heer. 

Finally, it is that gene that travelled through the generations to give Tara Walker the Academy Award and Oscar, for the best actor which was revealed to her by her grandmother after she handed her the gift, coming down from one generation to the other, of women with immense talent like her grandmother, great grandmothers all concealed in the book Tales from Around the World, the Atlas and Umrao Jaan Ada. The tale of Madeline and Azeem. 

 About the author Manjul Bajaj grew up in Lucknow and graduated in economics from Delhi University. She passed out with a master’s degree in rural management and another in environmental science. She worked in the field of environment and rural development before she became a writer. She is the author of Come, Before Evening Falls (2010), Another Man’s Wife (2012), In Search of Heer (2019), The Book of Bullah (2024). In June, Harper Collins India published her book Once Upon A Summer. She has also written two books for children—Elbie’s Quest (2013) and Nargisa’s Adventures (2016). Manjul’s work has been shortlisted for various literary prizes over the years. She currently lives in Goa with her husband, her two sons having flown the best. Catch Manjul Bajaj on Facebook 

Author interview 

Publisher Harper Collins Publisher India 

Date: 27th June, 2025 

Title Once Upon A Summer 

 Author Manjul Bajaj 

 Price : Rs 499 

PP: 368

Book Review - In Search of Heer by Manjul Bajaj

Photo Credit HERE

In a modern re-telling of an ancient story, first told by Damodar Gulati in the 16^th century, author Manjul Bajaj, joins the many versions of the same story told over the years, by many authors and poets. However, this time, the distinctive pen which is the author’s mark, is written in the 21^st century with an engaging, often, addictive method of narration. Having done this, Manjul Bajaj joins an illustrious group of writers and poets, filmmakers who have written on the same theme, Heer and Ranjha. 

In Search of Heer is a simple tale, starting with the love story of Heer, the beautiful daughter of Mihir Chuchak, a rich landlord of Jhang Syal , and Ranjha, the spoilt and handsome son of an affluent landlord in village Takht Hazara, who are destined to meet and fall in love and marry with the support of Heer’s father, in somewhat of a concealed manner, unlike a big, fat Punjabi wedding, with relatives, from far and near thrown in. The secret is found out by Heer’s paternal uncle, Kaidu Langra, and all hell breaks out as he connives with Heer’s mother, and weds her off to Saida, of the Khera clan, equally, wealthy. But the reader must find out what happens to Heer in this marriage. 

In the meantime, Ranjha has realized that he has lost Heer, and must now find the balm to his broken heart by embracing the spiritual path. A flutist, whose music has a soul, Ranjha is well nigh liberation but is again pulled back by the appearance of a crow, which reveals to him, that Heer is waiting for him and so he must waste no time but proceed immediately to where Heer is. Ranjha leaves with his flute totally naked of any other desire but to find his Heer.

In a strange twist of events, Heer finds a friend in her marital home, who is her sister in law, with no less a hidden love story in her heart and the reader is allowed a peep into what might happen next. Breathe easy. You are about to commence into another rough ride with many twists and turns.  

This said, In Search of Heer, is much more than just a story re-told. There are many lessons to learn from the many voices that narrate the story – crows, pigeons, goat and each is has a unique voice, I most loved to engage with. A humungous amount of research has gone into telling the reader more about each of these animals and birds so that the reader is enriched in many other ways, understanding the nature of these creatures. Research has also gone into the life of an ascetic and someone in search of a spiritual life, which gives solace.  

However, for me, the most endearing parts were the role of Heer as a feminist icon. She exudes courage, valour, willfulness, and is stubborn and outspoken, uncompromising. Yet, vulnerable and receptive to love and longing. Her questions are relevant to our times, and many of us can hear our own voice in her words.

No less enchanting was the spiritual side of the book, without being religious. It calls the reader to conclude that there are no short cuts from sex to super-consciousness, except by actually living it. And the way out is through. The symbolic crow is the id in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis as it were. Love lived in totality may well be the eternal transcendence we seek as humans.

The book is a living testimony of a skillful hand at work and an astute intellect that can gather the story from many quarters and reproduce a new version which appeals to the modern, 21^st century reader and their understanding and engagement with love in its many facets.

Book Review: Nargisa's Adventures by Manjul Bajaj

The sequel to Manjul Bajaj’s children’s book series, Elbie’s Quest, is a delightful book, called Nargisa’s Adventures.

Nargisa, the Golden Heart Giving Flower, with red and blue petals, which changed hues, graced since times immemorial, Rangeeli Duniya, showering it with honey and gifts, patron of good times.  When her petals changed hues, very slowly, the worker bees made honey and when they changed to red, it was time to give honey away as gifts. But of late, the colours changed so fast that the worker bees in the factory are exhausted and Queen Bee is very annoyed with Nargisa, for causing the worker bees to work too hard and almost die of exhaustion. This gave Nargisa, the mother of headaches at nights, crowded by Dream Boats and Night Mares. She confides her problem to Titli, her Chief Gusher, who very prudently advices her to take a break. And guess where they are both are headed to? None other than, Elbie’s Soul Café, where, Elbie, the Big Little Tree brews and serves, vials of “Pick Me Up”, “Slow Me Down, “A Dash of Hope”, “A Stirring of Sympathy” .

Nargisa is refreshed and confides her problem to Elbie’s companion, the very smart wolf, Aluf, who then becomes instrumental to finding out where the problem really lies – why is Nargisa’s Golden Isle threatened to near extinction.

Packed with riddles, wild flight of imagination, lots of adventure, sci-fi too, the book is a sheer delight for the reader, I would think between age 12 – 80 and above.

Evil connives against good and entice all who live in Rangeeli Duniya, to follow them.

But does he succeed?

Read it in the most fascinating story you will ever read in Children’s Literature from writers in English, in India.

With excellent illustrations by Shreya Sen, the story comes to life and would be a fun read for kids and all, who love and care for a Sunday afternoon, with a refreshing book to read.

The humour is side-splitting and lifts the spirit sky high.

Here are some parts I loved much .

Tongue twister: “How much Greek can a gaggle of geese speak after a gaggle of geese have been to a geek to learn to speak Greek?”

Riddle: “Tell me, what grows down as it grows up?”

Play of words, bring so much humour:

“Nice place you have here, “said Titli.

“No, no. No plays, my dear. I’m afraid, we don’t have any shows or performances for our guests.”

“Absolutely brilliant – the stuffy nose,” Elbie repeated with a fond smile washing over her face.

“Does your friend Aluf have a cold?” Asked Titli

“Aluf has a cold? Who told you that?” Asked Elbie……” I said, my friend Aluf is brilliant. He is very well-read and the stuff he knows is amazing.”

“Gosh!” said Titli, putting her palms on her ears daintily. “I don’t think we are going to find any peace here.”

“That’s right, my dear,” a tiny voice piped up from nowhere, “If you want peas, it is better you head for the vegetable market down the road….”

And many other laugh out loud stuff all over the book.

Go, savour and enjoy, the delight of “Nargisa’s Adventures.” No harm in getting Eblie's Quest too! It's FREE on Kindle Unlimited!

Publisher: Scholastic India
Author: Manjul Bajaj
Illustrator: Shreya Sen
Pages: 176
Price: Kindle Rs 125; Paperback: Rs 156

NH10 - When Crime is Not Crime

                                                          Film review NH 10 

Let me start from the end. My favourite actress Deepti Naval does what a #khap matriarch will do.

When Meera (Anushka Sharma), finds the sarpanch’s (Deepti Naval) home in the dark night, she collapses into her arms. After all, she has been running through the night trying to find someone to report the murder of two people, a girl and a boy, she has seen only a few hours ago. Her husband, (Neil Bhoopalam), who is lying almost dead, needs help, but the police station will not have Meera’s Report. Totally exhausted, she faints in Deepti Naval’s arms and is kindly carried to the bed and is taken care of, only until she discloses that she has seen this grown up girl with her husband being beaten and killed and buried in the dark, by four men and she needs to report this in order to find help.

Within seconds the sarpanch turns foe and to Meera’s great surprise dashes out of the room and locks her in. Meera has intervened in something that is private and personal to the sarpanch and the people of that village. Meera is now a criminal in their eyes.

“She was our daughter; what we did is what we had to do.” The sarpanch, the khap matriarch’s judgment is final.

In a gruesome tale of violence that literally begins at the very start of the film, honour killing, a tradition followed by the khaps in India a couple is murdered because the boy and the girl had the guts to fall in love and marry outside the community, by none else but her brother, uncle and people from the family, with full consent of the women in the house, the oldest being, Deepti Naval.

Meera and Arjun are Corporate honchos who decide to go on a weekend visit outside Delhi where they are employed. Not that Meera does not face discrimination and sexist remarks on the corridors and conference halls of corporate houses, who see her success as something that has come to her easily because she is a woman, but when she is out with her husband she can see that her body is the target of many abuses like randi, written on the wall of the ladies rest room at the local dhaba, which means in slang language ‘prostitute’.

It is at this dhaba, that she and her husband encounter the four men dragging the screaming woman and her boyfriend/husband into a SUV and driving off. Arjun is anxious to follow, although Meera is not, but as fate would have it, they were destined to see, like the audience, the gruesome death of the couple, in the hands of her family.

The darkness of the night and the foggy weather in northern India, where the film was shot, makes for a difficult run, but finally, Arjun and Meera face as gruesome an end, or almost!

Meera, comes through as a powerful woman figure, fighting patriarchy, or maybe just fighting for her life and Arjun’s in the midst of moments of deep helplessness. Yet, will she be able to save Arjun’s life, who is now flirting with death himself, or if not, then will she join the criminals too, by doing unto them, what they have done to her own husband and the couple they killed beside the highway, NH 10?

If you can stomach violence, blood and gut wrenching screams without throwing up, then watch the movie.

If you can’t then, do so, because you must know what crime, which is not thought of as crime really means to the khaps. You will know, why there is no remorse for taking life, because, given individual(s) fails to follow the rules set by a highly patriarchal society, where norms must be followed and taboo is taboo which results in death if not followed, there is NO Crime bigger than disobedience to the rules.

And law is in the hands of the community not the state.

Does Meera, follow the same norms then, to kill without remorse or to kill for revenge.

Director Navdeep Singh, a masterpiece this! Three Cheers to you!

Cast

Anushka Sharma as Meera

Neil Bhoopalam as Arjun

Darshan Kumaar as Satbir

Deepti Naval

Tanya Purohit Dobhal as Satbir's wife

More Here

Another man's wife by Manjul Bajaj

“ It was an old, old tribal custom and only hearsay now. If a girl spat on a boy’s face it meant she had marked him out as hers.” p 199, Another man’s wife.

We however are not talking about that, but let’s face it, if you ever henceforth pick a book by the author Manjul Bajaj, be sure you are going to tread on grounds, that make for some absolutely wonderful stories, from the very heart of rural and urban India, which not only tell a story well. In this sense, Manjul Bajaj is marked..

In her second innings, Another man’s wife, a collection of 9 stories, Bajaj, takes the reader through a series of issues deeply rooted in our Indian society, and makes a delightful combination with the hot and hungry inner climate of her protagonists. Call it the need to explore or actions following needs of other kind, all the stories, twist and turn, and surprise the reader with a plot that is well thought out and crafted with the reader in mind.

What is the price of displacement? Why must we leave our home and hearth in the villages, to earn our living in cities, what is the cost of this displacement? What are the boundaries of love or sexual communion, what are the consequences of actions, does love last or must it be fueled by fantasy to live on, or does raw intimacy revive distanced relationships, is there a right thing to do, or all actions have their own cycle to complete, is there a continuation of life which once blown out, returns again giving even a murderer a chance for redemption? The author grapples with you by her side, with all this, through a journey of words, stories that make you sit up and think and discuss, long after you have pun the book, down.

There is no shame, no need to tame language and make it polite. The raw rugged rage of thoughts and words come straight from the belly, with no lace, no veil to cover. .

All the stories have strong protagonists, whether male or female, and all cut out a story, you least expected they would when you began to read it first. The twists and turns, the surprises and the large heartedness, all come together, so beautifully, that at the end, although as a reader one might have had a list of ifs and buts coming up, occasionally and punctuating the flow of thought, at the end, one feels that all is right in love and war. Besides, even in the worst case of being wronged, there is an inclusive end and characters are not left out there in the dark, to make sense of themselves.

The editorial work is fantastic and in the title story, the play of emotions, basic instinct, the war of bodies and of minds is a masterpiece to die for, the perfect dance of writer and editor - so exquisite the beat of the drums and the blow of the conches, one might have been a spectator of the very kurukshetra itself, only it is happening in the bedroom and your fire too is rising blow by blow, as this animal display of an instinct called sex moves, caresses, urges, pleads, attacks your senses too, with words that are noisy and restless to penetrate your body and your mind. Well done, Manjul Bajaj.

In this book, there are no lose ends and no question marks left. Bajaj has tied up the stories beautifully and in all of them, she has found her solution, bold, benevolent, without borders or boundaries. So if in her first book, Come before evening falls, she did sit on the fence at times, in this one, she has resolved her differences and cast pearls of wisdom strewn all across the book, like little nuggets, you’d love to keep forever.

I, however, will keep the best pearl of wisdom held close to my heart, a story I would like to re-read again, that one story, I truly call the ‘Meet the author, story,” – Marrying Nusrat.

 Author: Manjul Bajaj
Edited by Nandita Aggarwal
Publisher: Hachette Book Publishing India Pvt Ltd
4^th/5^th Floors, Corporate Centre
Plot no 94, Sector 44, Gurgaon, India
Price: Rs 350
Buy: In bookshops across India, Amazon.com  &  Flipkart

.....and so it is

“Lady the waters are choppy
Do not step in”
The lifeguard cautions

He does not know
Across a thousand miles
The stormy seas
Have beckoned me

To teach me
Their lesson of salt
And grit

To tell me
Not to take the turning of
Tides
Personally

To show that
The rough waves meet
The same fate
As the smooth ones

Both are but passing spray
Dashed upon the shore of
Life
In froth and foam

Both joy and sorrow
Are ephemeral

Mere ruffles on the
great ocean
of Being

My sorrow I surrender
To the sea
As I walk away

Memories of joy too
I have cast upon the breeze

I know now
The great vastness
In its depths
Is churning up
New experiences
Specially for me.

- By The Shores - A poem by Manjul Bajaj


….and so it is with life
Cast upon this earth
An ocean composed of many drops
Of waves of laughter and joy
Followed by the ebb of tide
Where sorrow resides

….and so it is with life
That sorrow and joy are partners
One following the other
Oft times

…and so it is with life
That the only permanent is
Impermanence itself
They come and go.
What is, isn’t
What isn’t, is
Or is yet to be
But surely will.

Sitting by the shore
Trying to catch each wave
Between the fingers
Alas! It ne’er will be

…and so it is with life
Giving birth to the new
At the same time
Shedding what is old
Yet, the point of beginning
And the end
Are same.

Illusions.
All is in the passing
This life; this death too
One moment birthing the next
All are illusions.

Moments.
One strung to the other like beads
In a mala
One after another
A continuous process
No beginning, no end
Just a wheel, a chakra

Moving….moving….
Forever moving….
Fleeting
Forever moving….

.... and so it is with life
Forever moving

- …and so it is - By Julia Dutta, a poem inspired by By The Shores



Poet Manjul Bajaj writes in English, Urdu, Hindi. She has edited and co-edited respectively, two volumes of poetry, which include, among many other poets, verses by Julia Dutta as well. The two volumes, In Many Voices (Price: Rs 125) and Here And Now (Price: Rs 495) can be bought through DelhiPoetree Email: delhipoetree@gmail.com Mobile 91-09313120050

To view By The Shores on YouTube and listen to the sound of the ocean :
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=I6b4PsYsFGo