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Haunting India
By
Margaret
Deefholts
Published by CTR Publications
Haunting India is a collection of short stories, poems, travel tales
and memoir. As the author Margaret Deefholts says, “The title
derives from the fact that India has haunted me, and I in turn have
haunted India, returning time and again, to explore a country which
remains part of my blood and bone.”
Blair Williams, owner of CTR Publishing Inc., selected Haunting India
as the second in a series of books celebrating Anglo-Indian writers
and their work. In his words, “We who have lived in and loved
India, understand that it is as much a state of the mind as it is
a physical reality. [Margaret’s] stories have a gentle wistfulness,
alternating between light and shadow, pleasure and pain, beauty and
ugliness - all reflecting the contrasts that are so much a part of
India.”
The first section of the book consists of Deefholts’ previously
published short stories, several of which have been singled out for
Canadian literary awards. Although some of her tales have Anglo-Indian
themes, most of them are painted across a wider canvas. The short
story “Random Winds” is a case in point. It focuses on a
Sikh family in British Columbia whose lives are torn apart by the
Khalistan movement and the terrorist bombing of the Air India flight
182 in 1985. More than twenty years later, in the wake of controversial
court rulings, the wound still festers.
As a professional travel writer, Deefholts takes a wry but affectionate
look at journeying through India, and the second section of Haunting
India ranges through a diversity of landscapes from Rajasthan to Kerala.
Selected passages from her article exploring Rohinton Mistry’s
Bombay have been aired on Canada’s CBC Radio as part of a dramatization
of Mistry’s A Fine Balance.
The final section of the book is memoir - recounting as it does life
in a simpler time during an era that has vanished forever, that of
Anglo-India on the cusp of Independence. Deefholts’ father was
an officer on the Indian Railways, and this section offers brief anecdotal
glimpses into the family’s travels across the length and breadth
of the subcontinent through the 50s, 60s and 70s. Deefholts, her husband
and their two children moved to Canada in 1977.
As the Epilogue says:
“Haunting India is a tribute to the land of my birth. I will
always be profoundly glad that I was born, grew up and lived in India
with its enormous diversity of people, languages, religions and traditions.
I am bound to it by ties of ancestry and an Anglo-Indian culture stretching
back over three centuries. Canada, on the other hand, is the land
of my adoption, and I am joined to it by choice. India was a cherished
part of my childhood and youth; Canada has brought me to maturity.
India was our family’s inheritance; Canada offers us the gift
of the future.”
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Haunting India (CA$20.00) is published privately by CTR Publications
(New Jersey, USA), as a charity project. In order to eliminate book
industry commissions and distribution costs, the book is not available
through retail stores, but may be purchased by ordering directly from
either CTR Publications blairrw@attn.net or from the author, Margaret
Deefholts, at hauntingindia@yahoo.com.
Log on to http://www.margaretdeefholts.com/hauntingindiabuycopy.html
for further information.
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The Autobiography of Medgar Evers
A Hero's Life and Legacy Revealed Through His
Writings, Letters, and Speeches
By
Myrlie Evers-Williams, Manning Marable
Published by Basic Civitas Books
The Autobiography of Medgar Evers is the first and only comprehensive
collection of the words of slain civil rights hero Medgar Evers. Evers
became a leader of the civil rights movement during the late 1950s and
early 1960s. He established NAACP chapters throughout the Mississippi
delta region, and eventually became the NAACP’s first field secretary
in Mississippi. Myrlie Evers-Williams, Medgar’s widow, partnered
with Manning Marable, one of the country’s leading black scholars,
to develop this book based on the previously untouched cache of Medgar’s
personal documents and writings. These writings range from Medgar’s
monthly reports to the NAACP to his correspondence with luminaries of
the time such as Robert Carter, General Counsel for the NAACP in the
landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. Still, most moving of all
is the preface written by Myrlie Evers.
This
website: Copyright © 2007
Dream World Media, LLC. / Urban Mozaik Magazine. All rights reserved.
The opinions expressed in Urban Mozaik Magazine are not necessarily
those of Urban Mozaik Magazine and the publisher cannot be held responsible
for them. This website/publication, in whole or in part, may not be
reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
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