Milk Teeth

Product Information

As for Milk Teeth, this book is primarily a tale of two childhood pals Ira and Karthik, living in a rent controlled building in Matunga and the impact of the city on their lives. The city of Bombay is a prominent character with its rains, its local trains, its Udupi restaurants and architecture, and scenes at Malabar Hill and Nariman Point, at Colaba and King’s Circle.

Her latest novel, The Warrior (Die Kriegerin, 2022), was selected as one of the 10 'Books at Berlinale' for their 2023 programme. Milk Teeth is the story of the lives and loves of two childhood friends Ira Kamat and Kartik Kini who grow up in the same building in Matunga, and through them, is the story of a changing middle class and a changing Bombay in the ‘90s. I think about all the years I have struggled to articulate myself in my own language, pushing my words into my body instead. It explores relationships, friendship and the changing face of a city when urbanization takes over and communal disharmony sprouts up. In 2020 I read Saltwater and it’s sat with me ever since, its lyrical beauty has held me captive since reading and I’ve been craving more of Andrews’s painfully honest prose since I finished it.One of Kartik’s anxieties in the novel is that he has peaked early in life: a gifted student and quizzer who went to the best universities in India, but ended up in a boring corporate job with a bad manager, Kartik thinks the star of model students tends to fade after adolescence. The diet culture discussed was equally devastating and hilarious, and I urge any 90s babies to read for these parts alone. Unfortunately, rather than casting off her irritating writing style, she appears to have really doubled down on it. Childhood allies Ira Kamat and Kartik Kini meet on the terrace of their building in Matunga, Mumbai. the bulk of the novel follows an unnamed narrator, as she embarks on a new relationship with a phd student.

And if these had been addressed, perhaps I would have been more sympathetic to her and her life choices. In vivid and lyrical prose, and with deep compassion, Jessica Andrews examines what it means to allow ourselves to live. The friendships were stupidly realistic, with drifting apart, with parties that make your eye twitch thinking about now, and with so much love and dependency. One scoured her city for news/topics of interest for the job she loved; other scoured the accounts/market for his too-demanding and tiring job. This is a familiar feeling for me (as it is for most readers or watchers of movies or eaters of fine meals I assume) where quite often even before you start, you've built certain expectations in your mind.i will forever be grateful to her divine prose and her incredible ability to capture parts of my life, childhood and adulthood that were so familiar it were as if they came from my own mind. This connection to the author’s past was the catalyst for an eclectic series of observations about his life and work.

It is that - the impossibly gorgeous language that is hard to define - and the way this book grapples with so many heavy themes, all of them ghosts that trail through her life, still able to graze their phantom hands against the reins of her life. When Solnit visited Orwell’s Hertfordshire home, she discovered roses she believed to be descendants of flowers Orwell himself planted in the mid-1930s. Whereas this dispute around the ownership of the flats and the following deal the tenants strike with the landlord cover some parts of the story, the other parts are covered by the two childhood friends, Ira and Karthik whose fate together has been decided at a young age by an astrologer.Even more so when it's a newly released, debut novel which no one 'recommended', where you know that the expectations were based on some weird sense of your own intuition and not on anyone else's.