Book Box: Diwali and the books we give each other

My mother finds what she wants. Flushed with the hunter-gatherer thrill of a successful expedition, we go for cold coffee at Poetry and CheesecakeIt is Diwali morning in Mumbai. Four days ago we left the new home we are still making.

The carpenters caught a bus home to Mandi, the masons to Bajaura, the polisher to Bilaspur. The Other Reader and I drove down to the plains, to Chandigarh, and flew to Mumbai to spend Diwali with my parents and my siblings.

In Mumbai, my mother needs containers for her kitchen. Little jars for cardamom, cinnamon, cumin. We go together to the neighbourhood market. The shop down the road is crammed with containers of every kind. My mother finds what she wants.

Flushed with the hunter-gatherer thrill of a successful expedition, we go for cold coffee at Poetry and Cheesecake. We share a frappe and talk about how to parent adult children. The waitress, a friendly young woman in her twenties, brings us the bill inside an anthology of poetry.

My mother pays. Then she opens the book. “’There was a ship,” quoth he,” she begins, and we are both gone. Back to a bungalow in Jamshedpur. Back to the evenings when she read to us, sometimes The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, sometimes The Highwayman.

“It’s been so long,” she says, “since I read aloud.” She asks if she can buy the book. The waitress smiles and says no. They don’t sell these. It is the only copy, kept for bringing bills to customers. Then she looks at our faces and says, “You can borrow it.” I want to tell her how much this means to me.

My mother has been a little sad and overwhelmed of late, and these poems are just what she needs. I want her to know that this small gesture has made my mother very happy. Instead, I say, “Thank you, thank you. I live just down the road.

I’ll leave my number.” “That’s okay,” she says. “Just drop it back.” In the car my mother worries. “I hope she doesn’t get into trouble.” But she is already turning pages, finding her favourites one by one. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” she reads.

“These are the poems I really love. And this print is large enough for my eyes,” she says. Tonight, after the diyas, we will read them aloud. Tomorrow morning I will take the book back. I hope the young woman is there. I want to tell her what it meant to my mother.

Yesterday the book club met, and it was different. We came dressed in saris. We swapped books, which seemed apt for Diwali. We laughed and joked and squabbled a little. Everyone wanted Leftovers:A History of Food Waste and Preservation by Dr.

Eleanor Barnett. Everyone wanted Prayers for Rain, a murder mystery by Dennis Lehane. Nobody wanted Swallowing the Sun by Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri, a striking hardback with a beautiful cover and a slow-moving story inside.

If you are still looking for books to give this Diwali, here are a few possibilities. · The one everyone’s talking about: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, a satirical suspense novel about a tradwife influencer. · Feel-good novels about human relationships : Whistler by Ann Patchett or The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.

· Poetry for the shelf: Glass, Irony and God by this year’s Nobel laureate Anne Carson, which includes the extraordinary The Glass Essay. And perhaps an anthology of the fifty greatest poets : something to dip into, and something to read aloud.

· Non-fiction: London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe, a true story about a London teenager’s death set against an extraordinary landscape of crime in the city. Or Marginlands by Arati Kumar-Rao, a book that explores India’s vulnerable landscapes and the people who live in them.