When we are inside India, we see a Pakistani as an enemy. Al Arabian uses an even more open-ended device the narrator Pratap is a Toronto-based Malayali journalist hired by an internationally acclaimed writer to help research a novel about present-day life in West Asia.Īmong the joys of these books are the conversations across social, religious and national lines: between Shias and Sunnis, Arabs and South Asians, Malayalis and Hindi/ Urdu speakers, Third World passport-holders and those with First World privileges. Jasmine Days was told in the winsome voice of a Pakistani radio jockey called Sameera, the narrative echoing the young woman’s move from sheltered ignorance to humanitarian and political awakening. Together with its twin novel’ Jasmine Days, Al Arabian offers a rare portrait of urban life in the Gulf through the eyes of diasporic South Asian characters. Three other Benyamin novels have appeared in English translation: Yellow Lights of Death (2015), translated by Sajeev Kumarapuram the JCB Prize winner Jasmine Days (2018) and, most recently, Al Arabian Novel Factory (2019), both translated by Shahnaz Habib.Īl Arabian Novel Factory by Benyamin (translated by Shahnaz Habib) Juggernaut Rs 599 376 pages The book also did well in Joseph Koyipalli’s English translation as Goat Days (2012).

His Aadujeevitham ran into more than 100 editions, selling over a hundred thousand copies, and a Malayalam film version, starring Prithviraj, is planned for release by end-2020. Now the author of over 16 books in Malayalam, Benyamin remains prolific and hugely popular in Kerala, to which he returned in 2013. His first short story appeared in the Gulf edition of Malayala Manorama in November 1999. So, I started, he says in an email interview.

But I realised nobody was writing about it yet. I wished to read about the situations I felt and saw around me. Writing grew organically out of a readerly desire. For the next seven years, he read voraciously, while working as a project coordinator at a construction site. He began to read after moving to Bahrain in 1992. Other than the Bible, which was read every night before supper in his orthodox Syrian Christian household, he had read no other books in his childhood. Benyaminthe Malayali writer Benny Danieldid not grow up a reader.

Jasmine days book