3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature ® The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies Vol 29(4), December 2023 http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2023-2904-19 287 Chickpeas to Cook and Other Stories Nilanjana Sengupta Penguin Random House SEA: Singapore, 2022, pb, 164pp ISBN: 9789815017038 Reviewed by: MOHAMMAD A. QUAYUM Flinders University, South Australia, Australia mohammad.quayum@flinders.edu.au In her latest book, Chickpeas to Cook and Other Stories, critically acclaimed Singapore-based Indian writer Nilanjana Sengupta takes us beyond the traditional images of Singapore as a vibrant metropolis and wealthy financial hub to a more sensitive, compassionate and humane domain: to the brighter side of Singapore. In it, she explores the religious and spiritual experiences of Singapore’s often overlooked and marginalised minority women from the smallest of the small communities within its eight sacred folds. The author proffers that underneath its sterile rationalism and soul-destroying industrialism, Singapore shares an animating principle, a law of the heart, which brings clarity, vibrancy and naturalness to many of its residents and fullness to the nation. The book is Sengupta’s creative attempt to, rephrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson, hitch Singapore’s “wagon” to the “star” and show the soul’s constructive role in the scheme of the nation’s Whole. In her “Author’s Note,” Sengupta acknowledges that her inspiration for the book came from an experience in childhood when, at the age of six, she, for the first time, came to realise that there is an inherent unity in this seemingly fragmented world and a universal essence pervading all human beings makes every individual part and parcel of one omniscient God. She bolsters this mystical theme by naming the book after Rumi’s poem, “Chickpeas to Cook,” and borrowing a line from it as her epigraph. She also appropriates Rumi’s culinary metaphor as a focal theme: like the raw chickpeas need steaming in a curry to make them soft and flavoursome, so do human beings need to be spiritually “cooked” in the flame of divine love to soften their hearts and make them worthy of heavenly bliss. The book is written in an elegant style and lofty prose, drawing on the author’s research and interviews with community members she presents. It has eight “stories” or chapters, each partly planned and partly spontaneous, simultaneously engaging the author’s creativity and intellect. Every episode has the same five segments and a female protagonist, as the two primary objectives of the book are to explore the spiritual teachings of the religions incorporated in it and the circumstances of women within those religio-cultural clans. Each episode begins with an extract from the scripture of the religion presented in it, followed by an overview of its central assumptions. Then there is a historical account of a small ethnic community within the faith group: how and when they arrived in Singapore and how they maintain their religious-ethnic identity in an ever-modernising and globalising island nation. Next, the author introduces her main contact person, her protagonist, a woman within the community whom she has met, observed and interviewed over a period, considering her as her “mita” or friend. Finally, based on her experiences with this contact person, she tells a story about the latter, her family and her community to show how her faith has helped her find balance, patience and peace in a world driven by falsehood, greed and self-indulgence.