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Dear potential readers! Sad to say, my valiant attempts to enclose a couple of videos describing this my latest Leela/Meena murder mystery failed rather spectacularly! So here are some words that touch upon the themes that drive my story!

Transgressive?

Who defines the boundaries of morality?

Transgressive?

Who defines the boundaries of morality?

Who sets rules of behavior?

“Being oppressed means the absence of choices”

(bell hooks)

Indomitable sleuths

A story about bodies, voices, and stories brutally destroyed,

and yet never giving up the fight to claim their rightful place in society

Introducing my latest Leela/Meena murder mystery set in the South Indian city of Chennai, and fraught with murder and mayhem! The book is available on Amazon.in

The following videos give you a frightening glimpse of how the most vulnerable in our society have very little recourse to safety from violence.

You, my reader, might question the value of the limerick that heralds each chapter in “Lalli unveils a window.” However, each limerick provides an appetizer for what is to come! Here are a couple of examples:

1. There once was a gal who did swear
2. She’d created a limb beyond compare
3. If you pinched it, you’d hear
4. An ‘OUCH’ oh so clear
5. This limb that our Lalli did wear!

1. There once was a boy who thought
2. His parents and siblings were naught.
3. He looked for a spark
4. In places so dark
5. That he cried out: “This isn’t what I sought!”

1. When SWAT teams on television’s screen
2. Do bulldoze their way to the scene
3. We clap and we cheer
4. To what does appear
5. to be fatal for these guys so mean

1. But Lalli and friends bore witness
2. to real life police under duress,
3. How they vanquished so quick
4. With a charge oh so slick!
5. Now the bad guys are stuck in their mess!

Happy reading!

Launch date coming up very soon! My female sleuths Leela and Meena face the biggest challenge of their lives in trying to solve the murders of members of the LGBTQ+ community in Chennai.

A Child Rolls Beedis

"Mumtaz! Get up, my baby girl!"

Five-year-old Mumtaz shoved her skinny fists into her sleepy eyes.
“Already, Ammi? Do I have to?”
She felt her mother’s strong hand pull her up from the floor.
“Hurry up! Time is money! Here – take the neem 2 stick – chew properly on it if you don’t want your teeth to fall out! And your eyes – rub the sleep out of them.”
Mumtaz chewed on the neem and brushed her teeth with the bristles as she walked outside to the water pump. She turned her face upward to receive the gush of warm water. It felt so good.
“The eyes!” she thought and rubbed them. She ran back to the house. “Can’t miss today’s game.”
Her best friends Nimmi and Aliya were already so good at it. But she wanted to be the best. Her mother, older sister Salma, and three aunts were already busy at work. She snuggled close to her mother, and watched as the older woman picked up a pile of tobacco. For each beedi, she painstakingly placed the tobacco inside a dried leaf sourced from a local ebony tree, tightly rolled and secured it with a thread, then closed the tips using a sharp knife. When she had a bundle of 25, she placed the bundle in a wooden crate.
“Can I make one, Amma? Please?” Shaheeda Begum sighed.
“You have to promise to be careful. Yesterday, you destroyed so many. We can’t afford to …”
“No, no, Ammi! PLEASE! I promise, I’ll be so very careful.” She giggled. “I’m sure I can beat Nimmi and Aliya.”
Shaheeda Begum looked thoughtfully at her.
“Go to your sister! She’ll teach you.”
“Do I have to, Ammi? She scolds me and beats me.”
“Go, go! Don’t bother me. If we don’t meet today’s quota, you won’t have anything to eat. Salma, look after your sister.”
Older sister Salma cried out:
“She’s such a pest, Ammijaan!”
“Salma!”
Shaheeda Begum’s stern voice reverberated in the small room of their hut. Mumtaz ran over to her eleven-year-old sister, a ragged straw doll clutched in one clammy hand.
“Show me, Baji! Please? I won’t make trouble today, I promise. I’ll be very good.”
She sucked her thumb as she observed Salma working tirelessly, bent over the pile of tobacco and the stack of leaves. The daily quota for their household was 1500 beedis. Mumtaz slowly picked up a leaf and mimicked her sister’s movements. Soon the excitement of the game wore off and she got up.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Salma shouted.
“I’m tired, Baji! I want to play outside.”
Salma glanced at her mother and aunts. Shaheeda Begum beckoned to the little girl.
“Come here, child.”
Mumtaz ran up to her, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Why does she scold me, Ammi? She is always scold… scolding me! I don’t like her.”
Shaheeda Begum sighed.
“Haye Allah! What have I done to deserve this?”
She stroked her daughter’s cheek, and wiped the tears with the end of her sari.
“Sit here with me. Just watch me. Don’t you want to be better than Nimmi and Aliya?”
“Yes, Ammi. But all day long? Can I play? Please? And my dolly wants to go outside.”
She shook her doll’s head.
“You want to play, don’t you, Puchki?”
“Look!” she cried, placing a beedi in her mouth. “Aalam Sahib across the road does this the whole day long!”
Aunt Nargis Begum put down the beedi she had been rolling.
“It is time, Shaheeda Behen, to tell her.”
Shaheeda Begum placed an aching hand on the small of her back. She could barely sit straight. Twelve hours a day of squatting on the floor and hunched up to roll beedis had taken a heavy toll on her health.
“Tell her what, Nargis Behen? Tell her that I can’t send her to school? Tell her that she cannot play with her friends, with her doll? Tell her that her childhood is over?”
The silence in the room was deafening.

A sequel to “Bandilanka’s Forgotten Lives,” these stories focus on those children who have fallen by the wayside.

CHAPTERS IN SCHOLARLY BOOKS AND MONOGRAPHS:

“Sanskrit Drama and Fin-De-Siecle Germany Frank* Wedekind’s Sonnenspektrum and Lion Feuchtwanger’s Vasantasena” in: University of Florida Department of Classics Comparative Drama Conference Text and Presentation, edited by Karelisa Hartigan, vol. IX; (Gainesville, Florida: The University of Florida Department of Classics Comparative Drama Conference papers, 1989), pp.99-114.

“Impotenz als Impuls zur schöpferischen Tätigkeit: Georg Kaisers König Hahnrei,” in: Wegbereiter der Moderne, Sonderdruck, Festschrift für Klaus Jonas, ed. Helmut Koopmann and Clark Muenzer (Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer, 1990), pp.114-123.  (English Title: “Impotence as Impulse towards Creative Activity: Georg Kaiser’s König Hahnrei”)

“The Aestheticization of Wedekind’s Natürlichkeitsbegriff in His Early Play Sonnen-spektrum”, in: Frank Wedekind Yearbook, 1991, ed. Volkmar Sander (Bern: Peter Lang, 1992), pp.71-79.

“Dom Moraes”, in: Writers of the Indian Diaspora, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson (Westport, Connecticut; London: Greenwood Press, 1993), pp.229-235.

“Teaching Literature at the First-Year Graduate Level: The Quantum Leap from Language to Literature,” in: Challenges of Literary Texts in the Foreign Language Classroom, eds. Lothar Bredella and Werner Delanoy (Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1996), pp.185-204.

 “Visionary or Hysteric?  Mechthild von Magdeburg and Ingeborg Bachmann” in: Medieval German Studies as a Paradigm for German Studies. Albrecht Classen, ed.  Rodopi Verlag, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2000.

“Die Desorientierung des Orientalisten im Schatten von Edward Said,“ in: Okzidentbilder: Konstruktionen und Wahrnehmungen.  Martina Winkler and Ute Dietrich, eds. Leipziger Universitätsverlag, Leipzig, Germany, 2000.

„Whose Identity? The Nonnative Teacher as Cultural Mediator in the Language Classroom,“ in: ADFL Bulletin, Vol. 34 No. 1, Fall 2002, 26-29.

„Inventing the Orient: Discursive Alliances of the Philosopher, Historian, and Fiction-writer,“ in: Imperialisms: Historical and Literary Investigations, 1500-1900. Ed. Balachandra Rajan & Elizabeth Sauer. Palgrave-Macmillan, October 2004. (DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980465_14)

Articles in Refereed Journals:

“Der Reinkarnationsbegriff in Hesses Glasperlenspiel” in: Indo-German Studies and German Studies in India, 8 (1977), pp.10-12.

“Eine aussichtsreiche Lehrmethode für fachspezifische Kurse am Ende des zweiten Jahres” in: Die Unterrichtspraxis, Volume 21, Number 2, Fall 1988, pp.186-190.  (English Title:  “A Promising Method for Teaching Specialized Topics Courses at the End of the Second Year”)

“Parodie und Trivialisierung als Schreibvarianten beim Leser-Autor: Versuch eines paradigmatischen Modells für die Indienrezeption bei Thomas Mann und Hermann Hesse,” in: Colloquia Germanica, Band 22, 3/4, 1989, pp.222-243.  (English Title:  “Parody and Trivialization as Modes of Writing for the Reader-Author: https://www.jstor.org/stable/i23965934 Attempt at a Paradigmatic Model for the Reception of India by Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse”)

“Gespräche mit Minoritäten” (with Shirley Jones and Gabriela Strauch) in: Die Unterrichtspraxis, 1992, Number 2, pp.166-173.  (English Title: “Conversations with Minorities”)

“Teaching Literature at the First Year Graduate Level:  the Quantum Leap from Language to Literature and its Curricular Implications.”, in: ADFL Bulletin, Association of Departments of Foreign Languages, Fall 1993, Vol.25, No.1, 41-48. https://www.mla.org/bulletin/issue/adfl.25.1/

CrossRef DOI:10.1632/adfl.25.1.41

“Father-Daughter Relationship”; “Minority Literature”; “Die Exotin”; “Mysticism,” entries in: The Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature (Westport, Connecticut; London: Greenwood Press, 1997)

“Was ist die Mehrzahl von Heimat?“: Nationalism, Identity, and Citizenship in Gertrud Kolmar’s Eine jüdische Mutter and Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei,“ in: Der untote Gott: Religion und Ästhetik in der deutschen und österreichischen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Olaf Berwald and Gregor Thuswaldner. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2007.

Articles

“To Veil or not to Veil? The ħijāb as a Marker of Alterity,” in: Steven D. Martinson and Renate A. Schulz, eds., Transcultural German Studies / Deutsch als Fremdsprache. Building Bridges / Brücken bauen. Peter Lang Kongreßberichte, Bd. 94. Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2008.

“Friedrich Max Müller – Vedic ‘rşi’ or untouchable mleccha … or …?” in: Jörg Esleben, Christina Kraenzle and Sukanya Kulkarni, eds., Mapping Channels between Ganges and Rhine: German-Indian Cross-Cultural Relations. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, 51-81. https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/9781847185877

‘Deliberative Dialogue’ as a Tool for Promoting Social Justice and Transcultural Awareness in the German Language Classroom,” in: Renate A. Schulz and Erwin Tschirner, eds., Communicating across Borders: Developing Intercultural Competence in German as a Foreign Language. Munich, Germany: Iudicium Verlag, 2008.

“To Veil or not to Veil: Germany and Islam,” in: The proceedings of the Conference on Knowledge, Creativity and Transformation Of Societies, Vienna, Austria, December 6 to 9, 2007.

“Deliberative Dialogue as a Pedagogical Tool for Social Justice,” in: Social Justice Education – Inviting Faculty to Transform Their Institutions. Eds. Kathleen Skubikowski, Catharine Wright, and Roman Graf. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2009.

„Ob die Weiber Menschen seyn?“ Hesse, Women and Homoeroticism,“ in: Ingo Cornils, ed., A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009.

„Deliberative Dialogue,” in: Arne Weidemann, Jürgen Straub, Steffi Nothnagel, eds., Wie lehrt man interkulturelle Kompetenz? Theorie, Methoden und Praxis in der Hochschulausbildung. Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag, 2010.

 “Germany’s India: A critical re-interrogation”, in: Imagining Germany Imagining Asia (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture), edited by Veronika Fuechtner and Mary Rhiel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013.