ISRAEL

 

READ

 

I know it’s been months since I last posted. The problem was that I started reading a book for Israel many months ago, but I just hated the main character (and I wasn’t too fond of some of the other characters, either). I’d read a bit, and then put the book down, and it just became harder and harder to pick it back up again. I finally decided I needed a different book, so I asked Meytal Radzinski, founder of Women in Translation Month, for some suggestions. Among other options, she recommended Ronit Matalon’s And the Bride Closed the Door.

 

The book opens on the day of the wedding between Margie and Matti, with five hundred guests expected in the wedding hall in four hours. The problem is that Margie has locked herself in the bedroom in her mother’s small apartment in Tel Aviv and refuses to come out. Trying to reason with her outside the bedroom door are Matti, Margie’s mother Nadia, her senile grandmother, whom everyone refers to as Gramsy, and her cousin Ilan. The only thing they hear her say, however, is “Not getting married. Not getting married. Not getting married.” Matti asks everyone to leave so he can talk to her alone, as he does throughout the book, but she won’t respond to him. During these moments, Matti reflects on his relationship with Margie, and it seems clear that she holds the power.

 

Matti finds himself wishing that rather than having Margie open the door and come out, he’d prefer that she open the door and let him come in. Margie does eventually slide a piece of paper under the door, on which she has copied out a poem called “The Prodigal Daughter,” but the poem does nothing to help Matti or the rest of the family understand her state of mind.

 

Soon, Matti’s parents, Arieh and Peninit, show up. They suggest calling a locksmith to break down the door, but Matti is adamantly opposed to that idea. At some point, they call a psychologist who is trained to deal with these situations, Dr. Julia from a business called “Regretful Brides.” She comes to the house but says she can’t talk to Margie if she can’t see her. Ilan suggests bringing in a truck with a ladder that can take Dr. Julia up to the third-floor window to talk to Margie.

 

The ladder truck Arieh is able to hire belongs to the Palestinian Authority’s electrical company and is driven by a Palestinian man named Adnan, who owes a favor to one of Arieh’s friends. All the neighbors come out to see what’s going on, and having a Palestinian truck driver involved adds a whole new dimension to the story. One neighbor asks, “But why did you bring Arabs to rescue her? Why Arabs? Don’t we have our own rescue forces?” The police are called, adding to the confusion.

 

Woven throughout the story are references to Natalie, Margie’s younger sister who disappeared from school ten years earlier and has never been seen again. There is some discussion about whether that tragedy is playing a role in Margie’s behavior.

 

This short novel was full of interesting characters and comical moments. The author, who died shortly after the book was published, was awarded the Brenner Prize by the Hebrew Writers Association the day before her death. The book was praised for exposing “the deep inner structures of Israeli society, the existential tensions of being Israeli, and questions pertaining to the definition of individual identity.” All in all, it was a good book to read for this project.

 

COOK

 

The only Israeli dishes mentioned in And the Bride Closed the Door were eggplant dip and fried eggplant. (No word on what the caterers were planning for the five hundred wedding guests.) I wanted to make something with a little more pizzazz, so I looked for recipes on the International Vegetarian Union website. Israeli couscous risotto with shiitakes sounded wonderful, so I decided to give it a try. It was very good, although it required a lot of chopping and hands-on cooking time. I haven’t had anything with tarragon in it for a long time, and hadn’t realized what a strong taste it had, so if you aren’t a huge tarragon fan, you may want to decrease the amount you use.

 

 

GIVE

 

GlobalGiving lists numerous projects for Israel on their website. Since COVID-19 is on my mind these days, as I’m sure it is for most people in the world, I opted to donate to a project to keep an Israeli special needs village free from the coronavirus. According to the project description, “Beit Uri is an inclusive residential community for youth and adults with special needs from different religious and cultural backgrounds from all over Israel. In normal times our devoted staff and numerous volunteers from around the world strive to keep every resident healthy and engaged no matter how severe their disability. The Corona virus has made this all the more challenging.” Funding for this project will provide “sanitizing equipment to clean each of the residential buildings, masks and full sterile body suits for all staff and visiting parents.” It will also provide arts and crafts materials and other therapeutic equipment to help staff offer a variety of activities to fill the long days. More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/support-special-needs-adults-working-in-israel/.

NEXT STOP: ITALY

IRELAND

READ

The book I chose for Ireland, Normal People, by Sally Rooney, is a New York Times bestseller and the basis for an Emmy-nominated series on Hulu. A character-driven book with no real plot, it follows the relationship of two young people living in the fictional Irish town of Carricklea, located in the province of Connacht.

Marianne Sheridan and Connell Waldron attend school together, although they don’t talk to each other there. Connell is popular, a good student and a key member of the school’s soccer team, while Marianne, while also a good student, is awkward and has no friends. Marianne’s family is wealthy, and the way that she and Connell begin to connect is during the times that he comes to her house to pick up his mom, who cleans house for Marianne’s family. They begin to develop a relationship, but Connell makes Marianne promise that she won’t tell anyone at school about it. She is okay with that up until the time that he does something especially humiliating.

They both end up attending Trinity College in Dublin. By that time, they are no longer in communication as Marianne has stopped returning Connell’s calls. When they do reconnect, it seems that Connell is now the awkward one with few friends, and Marianne is popular, having fit in better with the more affluent students that attend Trinity. Throughout the rest of the book, Marianne and Connell come together and then, either through purposeful acts or misunderstandings, drift apart. At times they are a couple, and at other times, they are in relationships with other people. But they almost always remain each other’s best friend.

Both Marianne and Connell have serious self-esteem issues and suffer from bouts of depression. Marianne’s father is dead, so her family consists of her abusive brother and her cold, unsupportive mother. She tells Connell that she wonders why she can’t make people love her. “Sometimes I think I deserve bad things because I’m a bad person,” she says.

Connell has a wonderful relationship with his mother, who got pregnant at the age of 17 and had to drop out of school. He doesn’t know who his father is, and doesn’t really care. Having been popular in high school, where everyone had known him all his life and it didn’t matter that his family had no money, he is unprepared for the solitary life he leads in college. He wonders why his mom didn’t get an abortion, which would have made her life much easier, and he has a certain amount of guilt about the dysfunctional nature of his relationship with Marianne. He “feels like he has ruined the life of everyone who has ever even marginally liked him.”

Normal People is not a happy book, but I thought it was a page turner. I found the ending somewhat abrupt, but by then I was familiar enough with the characters to have a pretty good idea of how their lives would proceed for many years to come.

COOK

Food was barely mentioned in Normal People, and Irish food not at all. I ordered a vegan corned beef, thinking I would make corned beef and cabbage, but decided I’d better find out whether that’s really a traditional Irish dish. It is not. It’s apparently a dish that American Irish people created after leaving Ireland, so that wasn’t going to work for this blog post.

Instead, I found a recipe for vegan Irish stew on the Brand New Vegan website, using portobello mushrooms in place of the traditional lamb or mutton. And for all you vegans who want your food to be oil-free, this recipe contains not a drop of oil. Although it’s really too hot to be making and eating stew right now, I enjoyed this dish and will look forward to making it again this fall and winter.

GIVE

Suicide is a recurring topic in Normal People. At one point, Marianne tells Connell that the last time she was home, her brother told her she should kill herself, and her mother just said something like, “oh, don’t encourage her.” Someone Marianne and Connell knew in high school commits suicide a few years after graduation. And Connell finds himself having suicidal thoughts and ends up seeing a therapist.

So when I found a project on the GlobalGiving website offering counseling help to suicidal Irish people, that was where I chose to send my donation. According to the project description, “There is an increase in self harming in Ireland, with official guesstimates around 60 000 cases per year. In 2015 Ireland was recorded to have the second highest statistics per capita for suicide for young men under 19 in Europe and the highest stats for young women in that age group. Most counselling support is concentrated in cities, whilst less is offered in the midlands, or the west of Ireland.”

This project will “offer low cost, holistic counselling and support in the midlands and west of Ireland where clients can explore issues cognitively, emotionally or spiritually. Our target group are people who may be isolated or disconnected within the community, or feel they are not coping with life issues. The emphasis is on finding hope and purpose in life and in so doing addressing poor mental health.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/counselling-help-to-20-suicidal-irish-people/.

NEXT STOP: ISRAEL

IRAQ

READ

The book I chose for Iraq is Absent, by Betool Khedairi. It follows the life of Dalal, a young woman who was orphaned at the age of four months and lives in Baghdad with her aunt and her aunt’s husband, who took her in following the deaths of her parents. Life was pretty good for the family until Iraq’s government decided to invade the neighboring country of Kuwait, which led to international condemnation, economic sanctions, and the Gulf War. Now they struggle to make ends meet, since Dalal’s aunt’s husband can no longer work as a tour guide and the family is dependent on the money her aunt makes as a seamstress. They wistfully refer to the good times of the past as the “Days of Plenty.”

The family lives in an apartment building populated by a number of interesting characters: Umm Mazin, a fortune teller who dispenses advice and potions to the women who seek her help; Saad, a hairdresser who gives Dalal a part-time job in his salon; Ilham, who works in a local hospital and suffers from breast cancer; and others.

Dalal developed a type of facial palsy in her early childhood, leaving her with a deformity that would require plastic surgery to correct. The family has money set aside for that purpose, but as their financial situation becomes more dire, Dalal’s aunt’s husband uses the money to buy bees and set up a bee colony instead, thinking the money from the sale of honey will be enough to sustain them. But the family is helpless against forces operating outside their control.

At the end of the book, the author has written a short piece about life in Baghdad and about the effects of war and economic sanctions on her country. The plot and characters of Absent reinforce and amplify this message. Missile strikes leave death and displacement in their wake, but also create a psychological minefield for the survivors to navigate. Economic sanctions cause hunger and homelessness, but they also lead to other types of more permanent loss. For example, at one point, Ilham tells Dalal that she has heard “… large areas of the green belt around the cities have started to disappear. This is because people have been cutting down the trees in order to use the wood as fuel.”

The author laments that “[t]hroughout history, Iraqis have been under the stranglehold of the Ottomans, the British, a local dictator, and now the Americans.” In the pages of Absent, we see how those with no political power learn to survive under increasingly chaotic circumstances.

COOK

Food didn’t play much of a role in Absent, with the Days of Plenty long past. Some nights, Dalal’s family has nothing but potatoes for dinner. At one point, however, Dalal is attending a meeting pertaining to her aunt’s husband’s honeybee business, and she offers the guests “a sweet snack, dates stuffed with nuts and sesame seeds.” So when I found a recipe on the International Vegetarian Union website for Iraqi Date and Nut Cake Gilacgi, it seemed like the perfect choice.

This cake is actually more of a pie, with a flour and Cream of Wheat crust, and a date and walnut filling. The filling was outstanding, but the crust was too dry, too crumbly, and there was way too much of it. I won’t make this recipe again, but I may try to figure out something else to make with the filling part of the recipe.

GIVE

The GlobalGiving website lists several projects in Iraq. Since none were particularly relevant to issues discussed in the book, I chose one providing COVID-19 relief. According to the project description, “Iraq has been hard hit by COVID-19. [Iraqi Children Foundation’s] "Rapid Response Fund" supports urgent action for orphans, street kids, and other vulnerable children and families. Across all projects, ICF has already provided a week's worth of food and hygiene supplies to support 3,000+ kids and family members. Up next: 1) more critical food and hygiene supplies for kids and families; and 2) hiring vulnerable moms (with children to support) to sew thousands of protective face masks.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/iraqi-children-covid-rapid-response-fund/.

NEXT STOP: IRELAND

IRAN

READ

There were so many books by Iranian authors I could have read for this blog post that I had a hard time choosing just one. I finally decided to do something completely different and read a graphic novel, written in comic book form.

The Complete Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, is a largely autobiographical tale of the author’s life after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Born in 1969, Marji attends a co-ed French school in Tehran. Her parents oppose the government of Shah Reza Pahlavi, but appear to be caught unawares by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism after the Shah is deposed. Suddenly, Marji’s school is no longer allowed to have co-ed classes, and all the girls are required to wear the veil. The repressive government imposes draconian penalties on anyone caught in violation of the new morals standards, and political prisoners, including some known to Marji and her family, are summarily executed. To complicate things even further, Iraq invades Iran, and the terror of airstrikes and other horrors of war make living in Iran increasingly unbearable.

Marji is a very precocious and outspoken girl, and while her parents are exceptionally supportive of her, they begin to fear for her safety in a society where women have few rights. I would have expected the family to relocate to another country, as some of their relatives did, but instead, Marji’s parents send her to live in Austria at the age of fourteen. At first, she stays with a family friend, but before long, the friend moves her into a boardinghouse run by nuns.

As a strong-willed young person living in a free country without adult supervision, Marji predictably begins to do things that would have been unthinkable in Iran, often involving sex and drugs. She manages to graduate from high school, but a breakup with her cheating boyfriend sends her into a tailspin and she ends up living on the streets for a short period of time. She decides to return to Iran.

Iran has not changed for the better in her absence, however, and Marji is still as determined as ever to live life on her terms. She has a boyfriend, and the two of them attend the university. They decide to get married, since the law in Iran really doesn’t allow them to have a romantic relationship otherwise. It becomes increasingly clear, however, that a woman like Marji will never adjust to life under the fundamentalist Islamic regime.

Reading a graphic novel was a new experience for me, and I enjoyed it. While the stripped-down prose leaves little room for lyrical descriptive passages, the drawings help to fill in a lot of those blanks. The author’s use of this medium presented a very clear picture of her life.

After reading about Satrapi’s life in Iran, I decided to read Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison, by Jason Rezaian. I had been meaning to read this book ever since I heard the author and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, speak at the Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference in Corte Madera last year. Rezaian was born in the United States to an Iranian father and a U.S. mother. He moved to Iran in 2009, where he became the Tehran Bureau Chief for the Washington Post. Three days before they were scheduled to travel to the United States in 2014, he and Yeganeh, also a journalist, were arrested by Iranian authorities and accused of espionage. The charges against them were never clear, although one particularly laughable accusation had to do with a Kickstarter campaign Jason had initiated to try to bring avocados to Iran. The Iranian authorities could not understand the concept of Kickstarter, and assumed that “avocado” was some kind of CIA code word. Eventually, Yeganeh was released on bond, but Jason was left to languish in prison in Tehran for about eighteen months before he was finally freed through diplomatic efforts in the midst of the Iran nuclear deal negotiations.

Read together, The Complete Persepolis and Prisoner offer a stark portrayal of post-revolutionary Iran and the dangers that are always lurking for those living under an authoritarian government.

COOK

Neither of these books gave me much inspiration with respect to Iranian cuisine. The Complete Persepolis barely mentions food at all. Rezaian is something of a foodie, and some of his articles for the Washington Post were about Iranian food. He and Yeganeh even hosted Anthony Bourdain during his visit to Iran for his “Parts Unknown” show. But since most of Rezaian’s dining takes place in prison, there isn’t much in the way of culinary highlights.

So I took to Google and found a vegetarian recipe on the Archana’s Kitchen website for Khoresht Fesenjan, a pomegranate, walnut, and vegetable stew. The only change I had to make to veganize the recipe was to substitute maple syrup for the honey. I didn’t have pumpkin, so I used butternut squash instead. There are a few problems with the recipe, so if you decide to make it, here’s what I did:

1.       The recipe’s instructions mention zucchini, but it wasn’t in the ingredient list, so I didn’t include it.

2.       The ingredient list calls for cardamom, but the instructions reference cinnamon. I decided to go with cardamom.

3.       The recipe calls for two bay leaves, but the instructions don’t say when to add them. I put them in with the pomegranate juice.

4.       It turned out more like soup than stew, so if I were to make it again, I’d probably use less liquid and more veggies than the recipe calls for.

      Served over saffron rice, this was a very good meal, with an interesting blend of flavors. In Prisoner, Rezaian says: “With Iranian food there was so much to ponder. It was the ultimate expression of the country’s identity: varied, resource rich, uniquely accented, sometimes pungent, hard to translate, and often unsightly. Persian food can be gorgeous and fragrant. But it simply doesn’t show well the way Thai, Japanese, or Italian food does.” That just about sums up this dish, and I’m using that as my excuse for why the food in this picture doesn’t look any prettier.

GIVE

Since I read two books for this post, I donated to two organizations. There were no Iranian projects at GlobalGiving, but in searching the Internet, I found the Center for Human Rights in Iran. According to their website, “The Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to protect and promote human rights in Iran. Headquartered in New York, CHRI is comprised of award-winning journalists, researchers, lawyers, activists, writers, multimedia specialists and advocates based around the world who work to support the basic rights and freedoms of the Iranian people.” More information about CHRI is available at https://iranhumanrights.org/.

In honor of the Rezaians and the ordeal they went through in Iran, I also donated to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which was one of the organizations that advocated on their behalf while they were imprisoned. According to CPJ’s mission statement: “The Committee to Protect Journalists promotes press freedom worldwide and defends the right of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal. CPJ protects the free flow of news and commentary by taking action wherever journalists are under threat.” More information about CPJ can be found at https://cpj.org/.

NEXT STOP: IRAQ

INDONESIA

READ

Many of the books I read for this blog are tedious and take me forever to get through. That was not the case for the book I chose for Indonesia. Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Girl from the Coast arrived in the mail Friday morning, and I was finished with it by the following morning.

This novel features an unnamed girl, based on the author’s grandmother, living in a small fishing village on the island of Java during the time when Indonesia was still a Dutch colony. Although her family and all the other villagers are very poor, the fourteen-year-old girl is content with her life there.

Everything changes, however, when word of the girl’s beauty reaches a wealthy aristocrat, known as the Bendoro, in the city of Rembang. He sends a representative to tell the girl’s parents that he wants to marry her, and they agree because they want her to have an easier life than they have. The girl would rather stay in her village, but her wishes don’t matter.

Life in the Bendoro’s house is very lonely for the girl, as she doesn’t see her husband very often. There are two children living in the house, and when the girl asks who they are, she finds out that her husband is their father, but their mothers have gone back to their villages. Since the girl is a commoner and the Bendoro is part of the aristocracy, she isn’t even recognized as his wife by members of his social circle. Instead, she is considered a “practice wife,” someone to fulfill the Bendoro’s sexual needs until he finds a mate suitable for his station in life. The Bendoro’s habit has been to take a practice wife, keep her until she bears him a child, then send her back to her village afterwards without her child.

At one point, the girl receives permission from the Bendoro to go visit her parents. When she arrives, however, she learns the truth of the old saying, “You can’t go home again.” Although she wants to slip back into her old life, at least temporarily, her parents and everyone else in the village no longer treat her as though she is one of them. They won’t let her do any work, and they are careful about how they speak to her. While she is happy to be outside again after having spent the previous couple of years in her room in the Bendoro’s house, she feels just as lonely as ever.

Shortly after her return to the city, she becomes pregnant, and her life changes again. Ultimately, the girl, who has never had any say in decisions involving her life, takes charge of her own destiny.

I don’t usually say much about the authors of the books I read for this blog, which is probably a serious omission on my part. In this case, I was interested to read that the author of The Girl from the Coast, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, spent many years in prison as a result of his writing. He was first imprisoned by the Dutch government from 1947 to 1949 during Indonesia’s War of Independence. Later, after Indonesia gained its independence, he fell afoul of the country’s second president, Suharto.  He wrote The Girl from the Coast in the years just before he was sentenced to hard labor in a penal colony from 1969 to 1979. At the time of the book’s eventual release, he was under house arrest for yet another political transgression.

The book ends with an odd little epilogue, which is explained in a footnote: “The Girl from the Coast was originally intended as the first volume in a trilogy of novels on the growth of the nationalist movement in Indonesia, with the story line based loosely on the life history of the author’s family. Because the other two novels in the trilogy were destroyed by the Indonesian military, this epilogue, which was not part of the original novel, was prepared by the author and translator specifically for the publication of this English-language edition in order to provide readers a greater sense of closure to the tale.” Personally, I was grateful for the closure that this epilogue brought.

COOK

No particular vegan or veganizable dishes were mentioned in The Girl from the Coast. However, rice was mentioned frequently. When the girl returns to her village to visit her parents, she takes many gifts from the Bendoro, who wants to ensure that the villagers hold him in respect. “Take with you a gunnysack of rice,” was one of his orders.

With that in mind, I found a recipe for an Indonesian fried rice dish called nasi goreng. The recipe, on the “Feasting at Home” website, includes options for making the dish vegan. I really enjoyed it, although if I were to make it again, I’d probably add a little more tofu.

GIVE

Reading a book about a time in Indonesia’s history when women and girls were little more than chattel made me want to give money to an organization supporting girls. On the GlobalGiving website, I found a project to help girls in Bali graduate from high school. According to the project description, “More than 4.14 % of people in Bali earn less than $1 a day. Often it's difficult to get enough money together to cover food and rent, let alone something as extravagant as a school. If a family can afford to send a child to school, the chosen child is almost always a boy. In Bali, 6.04 % of girls are forced into marriage before they turn 16 and teenage pregnancy is also one of the most common reasons for dropping out of school. Many girls in Bali get pregnant because of the lack of education.” Donations to this project will provide three-year scholarships to girls from impoverished families to cover “school fees, uniform, school supplies, daily allowances, and a workshop.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/support-15-girls-in-bali-to-graduate-highschool/.

NEXT STOP: IRAN

INDIA

READ

I’ve read a lot of books for this blog that I haven’t particularly enjoyed. So when I find one that really speaks to me, it’s an especially pleasant surprise. My selection for India, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, by Arundhati Roy, is just such a book. It has so many layers and covers such a vast array of people and their stories, that I can’t possibly do it justice in this short post. Here, however, is a brief description.

A baby is born to a family in New Delhi, and the parents are overjoyed that, after having had three girls, this new baby is finally a boy. Or so they think. They discover later that their baby actually has both male and female organs – a hermaphrodite. They name him Aftab and raise him as a boy, but he begins to identify as a girl. When he is fifteen years old, he changes his name to Anjum and moves into a house of hijras, people who have adopted “a gender role that is neither traditionally male nor traditionally female.” From this point on, the author uses feminine pronouns when writing about Anjum. The house she moves into is called Khwabgah – House of Dreams – and Anjum lives there happily for many years. She finds an abandoned three-year-old girl on the street and takes her in, giving her the name Zainab.

At the age of forty-six, Anjum, who is no longer happy at Khwabgah, moves out, leaving Zainab behind with the other hijras who dote on her. Having nowhere to go, Anjum moves to a cemetery. After a while, she begins to build a home on top of the graves, and other odds and ends of people begin to join her there – a blind imam, an untouchable determined to avenge his father’s death, other hijras. She names the house built on the graves of the dead the Jannat Guest House.

One day, Anjum and her entourage travel to a part of New Delhi called Jantar Mantar. It’s an observatory, but in the book, it also seems to act as a type of public square, where all sorts of people come to promote their causes. In the midst of all the activity, it is discovered that someone has abandoned a baby girl. Anjum tries to take the baby with her, but a man prevents her and a fight ensues. Anjum and the man are both arrested, and the baby disappears.

At this point, the story moves away from Anjum and focuses on the lives of four people, now close to middle-aged, who had known each other many years before in a college drama class. Musa, a Kashmiri separatist, Naga, a journalist, and Biplab, a member of India’s foreign service, had all been captivated by S. Tilottama, an architect. Their paths had not crossed very often in the years since college, but now their lives suddenly become intertwined. The catalyst for these reconnections is the insurgency in the state of Jammu and Kashmir that began in the late 1980s. The setting of the book moves from New Delhi to Kashmir, where the brutality of the Indian government against the Kashmiri people and the discrimination against the people of this majority Muslim state by the majority Hindu government are on full display.

Eventually, the story comes full circle, and a link is established between Anjum and her entourage and S. Tilottama and her admirers. By this time, there has been so much information imparted about living outside of gender expectations, religious bigotry, the horrors of the caste system, the plight of women and girls, and the corruption of government that the reader despairs of the book ending happily.

That’s exactly what it does, though, which brought a huge sigh of relief from me.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness contains scenes of utter despair, and moments of the purest joy. The author is a master of her craft, and this book is a stunning patchwork of gripping stories and fascinating characters.

COOK

A whole lot of meat dishes are eaten by the characters in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, even though one of the characters, Zainab, is a collector of animals in need of rescue. “None of her tenderness towards living creatures, however, got in the way of her voracious meat eating.” So most of the dishes mentioned in the book were not vegan or veganizable. One passage talks about a beloved dog named Biroo who has moved into the graveyard with Anjum and her friends, though – “a beagle who had either escaped from or outlived his purpose in a pharmaceuticals testing lab.” He receives shelter and loving care at the Jannat Guest House, where “[h]e drank everything Anjum drank, ate everything that she ate…” One of those things that Biroo and Anjum both eat is biryani, a heavily seasoned rice dish. On the International Vegetarian Union website, I found a recipe for Vegetable Biryani, which turned out really well. Not sure I would feed anything that spicy to a dog, though…

GIVE

I had no trouble finding potential programs to support in India – GlobalGiving’s website listed a whopping 743 projects. Trying to narrow down the field to choose just one was difficult. My first thought was to look for a project serving LGBTQIA people in India, in honor of Anjum, but none of the projects listed fit that description, and I wasn’t able to find one with an accessible fundraising platform on any other website. Next, I looked for a project supporting people in Kashmir, but again I came up empty. I finally decided to donate to a program providing food, funds, and support to people affected by the COVID-19 virus. According to the project description: “India's national lockdown, restricting transit and shuttering most businesses, has had a devastating impact on low-wage earners, roadside vendors, and struggling farmers, as jobs are eliminated, road traffic disappears, and market demand evaporates. This project will fund providing emergency food and supplies to 1200 people in Tamil Nadu who are at risk of starvation and cash grants to 100 farmers and individual enterprises for loan or rent payments.” More information about this program is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/tamil-nadu-coronavirus-relief/.

NEXT STOP: INDONESIA