When Dimple Met Rishi

A month ago, I became an aunt to an adorable and winsome boy named Rishi.  Around the same time, people started telling me about the book When Dimple Met Rishi, and I thought I would read the book and then maybe give it to my sister to read and imagine a fun future for her child.

When Dimple Met Rishi is about two Indian-American kids who go to an app development summer camp the summer between high school and college.  Rishi and Dimple's parents are friends and want their children to meet and get married.  Rishi is totally on-board with this, and he goes to Insomnia-con just to meet Dimple and propose (with his grandmother's ring, no less).  Dimple has no idea; she's at Insomnia-con to develop an app to help people deal with diabetes.  They meet, Rishi basically proposes, and Dimple freaks out.  But then they get to know each other, and Dimple realizes that he's not all bad.

In general, I veer away from young adult romance because I find it too angsty and dramatic.  I would never want to return to the period of my life when I was an overly-dramatic teenager, and it is hard for me to read books centered on characters at that age without rolling my eyes multiple times.

But I also grew up Indian-American, and I love that this book exists.  There's an Indian girl on the cover, there are Hindi words in the text, there are Indian narrators on the audiobook (who pronounce all the names and words correctly!!!).  All of these things are so great.  It is like the YA romance version of Hasan Minhaj's Netflix special.  I also appreciate that in this book, it's Dimple who is ambitious and driven and totally into being a techie, with big dreams on how to make it happen.  And that Rishi loves art but feels like he needs to go to engineering school to make his parents happy.

Much about this book rings true, as someone who grew up here to Indian parents.  One of my favorite parts, a tiny detail, was when Rishi explained to Dimple's friend that he speaks Hindi, but that he speaks a version of Hindi that is from Mumbai, where locals speak Marathi.  And his parents went to Mumbai from elsewhere, as did many other people, and so the Hindi they speak is not often understood outside of Mumbai.  This is so 100% true.  My parents grew up in Bangalore, which is a Kannada-speaking city.  But their families are both originally from Andhra, which is Telugu-speaking.  But so many people from Andhra go to Bangalore that the version of Telugu they all speak is completely different than the Telugu spoken in Andhra.  It's a small detail, but many Indian people live through it, and I loved that it somehow made its way into this book.

I also appreciate that the author, Sandhya Menon, made cultural pride and knowledge such a positive thing in this book.  Rishi in particular is very well-versed in his heritage and has no embarrassment at all about fully embracing it.  I think that is a really great lesson.

But there were also many things in this book that bothered me.  Putting aside my general annoyance with young adult romance (and this book had many of those same tropes and bothers), there were things that just were too much for me.  Granted, I am 100% sure that I would notice these and judge these more as an Indian than probably other people would.  But they still grated.

For example, Rishi.  He's this really perfect guy.  He's extremely rich and goes to private school with other rich kids, but somehow he's not spoiled or bratty or entitled, even though all the other rich kids in this book totally are.  This is never explained.  Also, he is really smart and funny and kind.  And he is an AMAZING artist who tells his dad that his "brain just doesn't work the same way" as an engineer's brain does.  But... he somehow managed to get accepted to MIT, anyway, and is going there to major in computer engineering.  Because THAT's an easy thing to just swing.  Also, as a 17-year-old, he just shows up somewhere with his grandmother's engagement ring to propose marriage to a complete stranger and this strains credulity to me.

Also, Rishi had this whole encounter with this other Indian guy, Hari, that annoyed me.  Hari was a jerk in the book, but there was one point when Rishi asked him where his parents were from (meaning, where in India) and Hari very pointedly said that his parents were born in the US.  And then Rishi somehow "won" this competition by talking about how he was so happy and proud to go back to his family's home in India and really connect with his culture and background.  This seemed to imply that somehow Hari was less Indian or less whatever than Rishi.  This really bothered me because, personally, I despise when people ask me where I am from and then act as though my answer ("Chicago") is incorrect, as though they assume I am from somewhere else just because I am Indian.  I realize that this question is different when asked by one Indian to another, but I completely understood Hari's anger in the situation, and I found Rishi's "I love my heritage and go to India all the time" holier-than-thou attitude pretty grating in that instance.

And then there's Dimple's relationship with her parents.  Apparently, Dimple's mom wants her to wear Indian clothes all the time, even at school.  (And Dimple does this, as there are multiple comments on her kurtas and odnis).  And her mom wants her to wear a bunch of make-up and get married stat.  Whereas Dimple wants to wear her glasses, no make-up, and focus on school.  This part just never really rang true to me because it seemed like the author really wanted to set up this weird misunderstanding/antagonistic relationship between Dimple and her mom, but it was hard to believe in (as an adult, anyway) because her mom didn't come off that way at all, really, when you encountered her in the story.  Maybe that's the way an adult would read the story, though, whereas a teenager would read it quite differently than I do :-)

The other thing about this book that just was off to me was the relationship between Rishi's brother, Ashish, and Dimple's friend, Celia.  It felt like a waste of time and space to me, and I don't really think it needed to be included at all.  Especially as I felt like the book dragged a bit at times with the plotting, and getting rid of that would have made it a bit tighter.

I think what frustrated me most was that it didn't quite rise as high above the Indian stereotypes as I would have liked.  You still have two really good kids who do not rebel much at all against their parents.  They both somehow get into Stanford and MIT (because God forbid they go to a place like UC-Berkeley or something).  They watch Bollywood movies and, conveniently, perform in a talent show with a Bollywood dance number.  And their parents want to arrange marriage for them at 18.  Honestly, I'm surprised there wasn't a mention that Rishi had won the Scripps spelling bee as a child.

But!  This book exists, and it is so proudly Indian-American, and it owns that culture, and I love that.  I'm so glad that Dimple was going after her coding dreams and that Rishi had a great love for art,  but I wish that it could have gone a bit further.

Sea of Poppies

Here, she said, taste it.  It is the star that took us from our homes and put us on this ship.  It is the planet that rules our destiny.
- Deeti, describing a poppy seed

I have had Amitav Ghosh' Sea of Poppies on my radar since it was published.  It's the first book in a trilogy centered on a ship, the Ibis.  In the first book, the Ibis is transitioning from its previous life as a slave transporting vessel to one that transports coolies and opium.  It begins its journey on the Ganges River in India, and then sets out on an ocean voyage with an amazingly rich cast of characters on board.

I loved this book.  I am in absolute awe at the breadth and depth that is encompassed within its pages, and I am so excited to read the next two books in the series to see just how much more Ghosh has to share with me.  There are some authors who truly astonish me with just how much they can pack into their pages - character development, plot advancement, social commentary, historical accuracy.  It's books like this one that make reading a continued delight.

Sea of Poppies is set just at the start of the first Opium War.  We don't learn much about the Opium Wars in the west (or at least not in the United States), so it was fascinating to learn more about a period that had such a massive impact on the world (and was a cause of World War I).  The British Empire reeeeeeeally wanted China to open up to global trade, but the Chinese did not want to.  This angered the British, and thus, Opium Wars.  China was forced to cede Hong Kong and open up ports to global trade, and the British got to sell their stuff to more people.  They also got access to indentured laborers (coolies) from Asia and South Asia since slavery was no longer an option for them.

Thus, Sea of Poppies is set just as globalization and imperialism really get their groove on, and the scope of this book is absolutely immense because of that.  There are Indian farmers who are forced to grow poppies instead of food, and fall into debt.  There is a mixed race American man trying to make his way in the world.  There are pirates and merchant marines.  There's an Indian raja who is humiliated by debt to the English, stripped of his title and wealth, and forced to go abroad as an indentured servant.  There are, of course, the English, raking in great wealth and secure in their vision of bringing civilization to India and China.  And there's more.  The characters in this book are fantastic.

And those characters speak in a gloriously rich variety of languages.  Honestly, this is where Ghosh's comedic genius really sparkles.  Obviously, a book centered on a former slave ship that now transports opium can have many dark and depressing moments.  But the way Ghosh uses language and shows how so many disparate languages can be combined and influence each other is so great.  It took me a little while to understand some of the English spellings and mispronunciations of the Hindi words, but once I did, I usually smiled or laughed to myself.  They were nice little Easter eggs for people who have some understanding of Indian language.  I myself do not know Hindi, but am familiar enough with common words and names to have caught on.  It was so well-done, and the book includes a glossary at the back for many of the words, too.

And with all of THAT happening, Ghosh doesn't ever lose sight of telling a fantastic story.  Here is a very compelling tale about the wide-ranging impact of colonialism and imperialism, related through extremely personal stories.  I loved that we get to know not only about how the Indian ruling class lost so much of its power and prestige to the British, but also get to learn about the farmers who suffered and the enterprising middle-class professionals who cashed out.  I was thoroughly engrossed in learning more about how Hinduism was practiced in the 19th century, the obsessions with caste and purity and superstition, and how differently it is practiced today.  Ghosh uses India as the setting, but the cast is from everywhere, all doing their best to make their way in a world.  Most of the characters are pushing against rules and norms that have dictated their whole lives, whether due to race or caste or income or sex.  And yet, they all come together on a ship and those rules are tested.  You can see just how huge the social shifts in the 19th century were, all over the world, from societies of rigid class structures based on birth to more malleable ones based on wealth and influence.  I loved that, and I loved this book.  So excited to read the rest of this series!

The Association of Small Bombs

Karan Mahajan's The Association of Small Bombs is one of those books that is very popular with critics.  It's also one of those books that you read and know that is it incredibly well-written and has a really strong message.  It tackles huge issues in a very personal way.  I am very glad that I read it, but I don't think I will read it again because it is so profoundly sad.

The Association of Small Bombs starts with a "small" terrorist attack in New Delhi in 1996.  Two brothers are among the victims.  Their friend, Mansoor, survives with a strain in his wrist.

The book follows the brothers' parents, Mansoor and his parents, and the terrorist who committed the attack (and the progress of a terrorist in the making) over the next several years.  We see the way the parents come together and then drift apart.  The way Mansoor's parents are overprotective and then feel like they are losing their son.  The way Mansoor first feels so lucky to have survived and works hard to make the most of it, and then slowly loses that momentum.

While I found this book quite depressing, there were things that I also found very valuable in it.  I appreciated that Mahajan focused on a "smaller" terrorist act in India vs on a "major" one in the west.  Just as Americans seem to have become inured to mass shootings (which is horrifying), much of the world seems to think that terrorist attacks in certain parts of the world are totally normal.  But Mahajan shows readers that senseless violence is never normal to the people who experience it and have to deal with its consequences, no matter how regularly it may happen.  He shows how difficult it can be for parents to recover from the randomness of an act, to rethink so many decisions, to see their lives go down a completely different path than the one they had set out on themselves.  Similarly, he shows how survivors can continue to suffer even when it seems like they have minor injuries.  When you consider how many of these small bombs have detonated in the world, and how many lives they have upended, you can imagine that there are countless people whose lives have been profoundly changed by acts committed by complete strangers who don't care about them at all.

I also appreciated that Mahajan did not focus on an extremist Muslim's hatred of western influence.  He focused on an internal Indian issue - Kashmir.  This is important because so many people (*white* people, mainly) seem to think that the only victims of terrorists are westerners and that terrorists are all brown people against white people.  This is not the case.  Terrorists and their victims are of all races and beliefs and walks of life.  It may be difficult for some readers to understand the political background that informs this part of the book (I certainly had some trouble), but I don't know that it matters - what matters is that people believe in something enough to commit desperate acts in its honor.  Or they feel trapped that they have no other option.

And that was the last thing about this book that I appreciated.  It really takes you inside the mind of someone as he veers from a path of non-violence to one of extreme action.  It's difficult to see this happen, especially with a character you liked.  But it's important, too, to understand that people are motivated to actions by many different things.  It's not always a belief in extremism.  A lot of times, people feel trapped or forced into an action.  Or they feel they have no one to talk to, they have no real future.  That's not to justify committing an act of violence, but more to show that circumstances can inform our life decisions more than we are often willing to admit.

But, as I said earlier, this is a tough book to read.  It's supposed to be a tough book.  Make sure you have a chaser for it. 

Murder in Mumbai

I am always excited to find mystery series set in non-western places.  I am not sure how I first heard about Vaseem Khan's series set in modern-day Mumbai, but I'm glad that I came across it.  The first book is called The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra.  Inspector Chopra is a newly retired detective from the Mumbai police department.  His unexpected inheritance is a baby elephant, fittingly named Ganesha (Ganesha being the name of a very popular Hindu god with an elephant head.)

On Inspector Chopra's last day of work before retiring, a teenager's body is discovered.  The boy was quite poor, and his family doesn't believe the police department will do anything to help them.  Inspector Chopra takes this personally.  Mumbai may be a city of tens of millions, but murder must be stopped no matter what.  Not quite ready to retire and not very trusting of the inspector who has taken his place, Chopra begins to investigate himself.

There are a lot of good points about this book that I think bode well for the series.  First, contemporary Mumbai is very much a character in this book, and a heavily flawed character, at that.  We see why the Inspector fell so in love with the city, why he's so frustrated with it now, and why it can be so overwhelming to so many people.  The corruption at all levels of the Indian government are pretty obvious here, as is the extreme poverty that affects so many people.  But there is also the delicious food, the many enterprising ways people make the city and their lives work, the cultures that have melded and stood for so many centuries.  Second, the Inspector and his wife are getting older in life but have no children, which is quite rare in India.  I look forward to seeing how Khan approaches this in future.  Like many people over the past few generations, Chopra and his wife were from a more rural area and moved to Mumbai, so we see their perspective from both a more traditional upbringing and a very urban perspective.  I really appreciated the way Khan brought all of this to life.  Also, the adorable baby elephant.

But there were things about this book that also were not quite so up to par.  The mystery was solved in a bit of a clunky manner, clues turning up sometimes without any real work.  While I liked Chopra and his wife, Archana (nicknamed Poppy), their relationship and the strange plot twist that came into the book around them was pretty bizarre and hard to believe.  The writing just felt a bit amateur and rough around the edges.  But I think it's worth trying the second book, especially if baby Ganesha has more of a role.

#Diversiverse Review: Family Life, by Akhil Sharma

Akhil Sharma's Family Life is a small book that packs a pretty whopping punch in the gut.  It's no wonder it took Sharma a full decade to write it.  The book is based on the author's own harrowing life experience of his brother's fateful headfirst dive into the floor of a swimming pool and the subsequent trauma that his family went through.

In the 1970s, Ajay's distant and wealth-obsessed father moves to the United States.  Ajay, his older brother, Birju, and his mother join a couple of years later.  Immediately, Ajay's parents are consumed with Birju getting into a selective high school.  They pour all their energy and love into their son and are thrilled when he is accepted.  Before he can attend, however, Birju has a major accident.  Ajay narrates how completely life changes for all of them and how hard it can be to lose hope when so many of your dreams were pinned on one person.

This is not an easy book to read.  The language is spare and Sharma doesn't get very emotional.  But the way he describes Ajay's growing sense of isolation from his parents, his father's descent into alcoholism, and his mother's growing resentment of everyone who cannot help her son return to his former self all comes through so clearly.  All this while they dealt with being immigrants in a foreign culture.  While it didn't take me 10 years, it did take me a good three weeks to finish reading it because it's so weighty.

I admit I didn't really like any of the characters in this book.  Ajay is not a very sympathetic character, but it's easy to see why he feels neglected when his parents seem not to care much at all for all his successes.  His parents, too, seem unkind and cruel, but again, you can see how much stress they are dealing with.  The other Indians in the story seem pretty shiftless, and the non-Indians seem racist.  And maybe all that is true, but it does make for some hard reading.

But I don't think this is a book about the characters, necessarily.  It's a book about dealing with the loss of someone who is so central to your life, even while you care for that person every day.  It's about what happens when other people stop feeling sorry for you or giving you sympathy and care, but you have to keep going while nothing changes for the better or worse.  It's about navigating relationships that have lasted through so much but now are defined by one moment that was no one's fault.  It's not a situation anyone wants to go through.  But it's a situation a lot of people do go through.  And maybe Akhil Sharma has written a book that makes sense to them, and gives comfort to them.

Can Hindu epics be feminized? (My opinion - no)

After learning the depressing fact that I read less than 10% from my TBR piles in 2014, I decided to read at least 2 books a month from my TBR pile going forward.  The first book I chose was Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Palace of Illusions.  I purchased this book when it came out because, whoa!  Feminist retelling of the Mahabharata, that is fantastic!  I avoided reading this book for several years because, well, I wasn't sure if a feminist retelling of the Mahabharata was likely to be successful.

And I think my qualms were justified.  Much as I hate to admit it, it is very, very difficult to write the Mahabharata from a woman's perspective, particularly from the point of view of Draupadi, who had basically zero agency in her whole life.  She was born from fire to usher in the Kali Yuga, she was destined from a prior life to have five husbands, and people think she started a war that was probably more likely caused by one of her husbands' gambling addictions.

The Mahabharata is one of Hinduism's greatest epics, describing the end of the golden age and the start of the chaotic age (which we are still living in today, if you couldn't tell).  It is a truly enthralling and entertaining story, but it's very heavy-handed with predestination and fate and KNOW YOUR ROLE OR THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES (this is, after all, the religion of the caste system).  Really, when you think about it, no one in the story has much control over the major events of their lives because the gods all decided what would happen eons ago.

This is not to say that the Mahabharata is not worth reading.  It is.  I love it.  There is SO MUCH going on there, so many side stories, so many giants of history - it's fascinating.  But it's a difficult story to use to shift perspective.  Perhaps if you are not familiar with the Mahabharata, this book would work better for you.  But as someone with at least a passing knowledge of the story, this novel really didn't work for me.

The main reason for this is Draupadi herself.  When she came of an age to marry, Draupadi's father held a huge contest for all the warriors in the land to come win her.  They had to accomplish a very difficult feat.  Arjuna, one of five Pandava brothers, won the contest and therefore won her hand.  Through a weird twist in circumstances, Draupadi actually had to marry all five of the Pandavas, but Arjuna was the one who won her originally and the one she had been planning to marry for her whole life.

In this retelling, Draupadi apparently spends her entire life in love with Karna, a sworn enemy of the Pandavas (yes, all five of them).  She sees a painting of him, someone describes his (admittedly very sad and pitiable) story to her, and then Arjuna just can't hold a candle to him.

I get wanting to give Draupadi SOME agency in her life because otherwise, there is not much there.  But doing this is like re-writing the story of Cinderella, having her get all dolled up for the ball, and then, in a weird twist of fate, making  Prince Charming fall in love with one of the ugly step-sisters before Cinderella even has a chance to win him over.  It totally changes the ENTIRE story, and then you have to change EVERY OTHER part of the story somehow to make the circle fit the square.  I just could not get over this fact.  And the way Draupadi spends literally decades not even seeing or interacting with Karna but apparently thinking about him all the time, even while she has five other husbands right there, is just ridiculous.  It's hard to take her seriously.

I also think that trying to fit the entire Mahabharata into one fairly slim book is a tall order.  Divakaruni brought some stories to life here, especially those related to Bhima and Krishna, but she didn't flesh out most of the other people at all.  Arjuna is one of the main characters in the Mahabharata and he barely says ten sentences in this whole book.  I can see why this is the case if Divakaruni wants Karna to come out as the hero, but Arjuna is a pretty complex and interesting character in his own right, much like Lancelot, and he's given short shrift here.

There are some aspects of this book that I really enjoyed.  Karna really was a pretty amazing person with a horrible string of bad luck, and it's nice to see him get some positive attention.  Divakaruni makes pretty clear here how unfair people were to him his whole life and how the whole caste system mentality really took a number on him.

Krishna is probably one of the most-loved gods in all Hindu mythology, and he was great in this book.  All vague pronouncements and comments about letting go and moving on and not getting too attached to worldly goods, shared in a sufficiently god-like fashion.  Draupadi's relationship with Krishna starts out as friendship, turns into something similar to a parent-child relationship, and finally ends with a really beautiful section about her personal relationship with God.

I have a feeling my reaction to this book is based a lot upon having read and heard so many of these stories growing up, and watching the amazing television spectacle every week with my whole family growing up.  It's hard to have one version of the story in your mind and then read this one.  I would suspect that if you are not familiar with the Mahabharata, you might enjoy this book more than I did.

More #Diversiverse Review-itas: India and China

India Becoming, by Akash Kapur.  An uneven book about the impact of modernization on India.  Kapur doesn't say anything that hasn't been said before.  For some, opening India economically has been a boon; for others, it has only made their lives even harder.  India is a land of haves and have-nots, and while many people are coming up in the world with the new economy (particularly those in real estate), it's coming at the expense of a rich culture and way of life that had many positives.
While the caste system is breaking down, life is still difficult for women who try to balance being independent with the oftentimes rampant sexism that exists in the workplace and their homes.  Life is also difficult for homosexuals, many of whom must hide their true selves from those they are closest to.

Kapur doesn't seem to know what to make of all this himself, and it shows in his narrative.  He talks to many people about what life is like in India now, but just as he thinks all is well, he will hear a story that makes him think everything is horrible.  And the cycle repeats.  Probably a good read if you don't know much about the polarity of life in India today, but if you have read modern Indian novels or newspaper/magazine editorials over the past several years, you won't encounter any new information here.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a slim volume set in 1970s China.  Two teenage boys have been sent to a rural town to be re-educated as their fathers both ended up on the wrong side of the law.  There, they both fall in love with a beautiful young seamstress.  They also find illegal reading material by French authors like Dumas and Balzac.

The two boys are fantastic storytellers and they begin weaving stories of passion and love and revolution into the stories they share with the seamstress and the others in the village.  And, as stories are wont to do, they have great impact on the people who hear them.

Talk about diverse reading!  This book is by a Chinese author, written in French, translated into English, and then produced as an audiobook which I read.

This novel felt very episodic to me, and I don't know if it translated very well into audiobook.  In some ways (ok, mainly in that it was about two teenage boys and one girl and a totalitarian regime), it reminded me of David Benioff's City of Thieves, though I enjoyed Benioff's work more.  The humor here wasn't quite as well done, and while I think the setting was richly developed and easy to immerse myself in, the characters were not nearly as memorable.  I did love that the seamstress heard stories and wanted to expand her world, though, in a very independent and wonderful manner (hopefully that isn't too much of a spoiler).  Girl power! :-)

Taking care of business

I was very excited when I heard about A.X. Ahmad's The Caretaker, for probably obvious reasons.  It's centered on a Sikh man, Ranjit Singh, former officer in the Indian army, who now works odd jobs on Martha's Vineyard, trying to take care of his family.  He works as caretaker for a rising political star, an African-American senator named Clayton Rivers Neals (Seriously, how do authors come up with names like this?  Supposedly, Clayton Rivers Neals is also from a rough area of town, which makes the name even more difficult to believe).  And then his daughter takes an old raggedy doll from the house, and suddenly he and his family are the targets of some very scary people.

I don't know many books at all in which the main characters are people of color from different cultures - here, an Indian family and an African-American one.  It's so sad, but true - how many books can you name that fit these criteria?  So I was pretty thrilled by that.  And it was nice to read a book in which the main character is dealing with the more subtle racism that you can come across in educated and wealthy circles.

So lots of strong points!  But...

But as I continued reading this book, things started to bother me.

A Tale of Two Brothers and Two Countries

Ok, that's it.  I am taking some time off from reading Indian authors.  They are just TOO depressing for me, and I can only take so much.  After Rohinton Mistry and Aravind Adiga, I thought I would switch to a female author, but apparently, Jhumpa Lahiri is just as depressing.  At least her book is shorter, though.  And ended with some semi-happiness or hint of potential happiness.

Jhumpa Lahiri's latest book is The Lowland.  I admit I am not as huge a Lahiri fan as so many other people.  I like her short stories, but I didn't really care for The Namesake, and I was sad that her most recent book was a novel and not a short story collection.  But the plot sounded interesting, so I decided to give it a go.

The Lowland begins in the tumultuous couple of decades after Indian independence (as do many, many Indian novels).  Subhash and Udayan are two brothers who are very close to each other early on in life, but begin to slip away from each other as they get older.  Subhash takes the traditional and acceptable route of going to America to further his studies and settle down.  Udayan joins the Naxalite movement and becomes an extremist.  He also falls in love with and marries a woman, Gauri, without his family's knowledge, and this act has repercussions far beyond what anyone would expect.

The above summary makes this book seem as though it is action-packed.  It is not.  There isn't much of a plot.  That is, a plot exists, but this book is much more about thinking and how people react to things (not only in the immediate aftermath, but years and years later) rather than about the things happening themselves.  The plot summary above really only covers a very small portion of the book - the book spans probably 80 years of time.  So it's difficult to summarize the plot without giving away what could be considered spoilers.

The writing in this book is beautiful.  Lahiri is so good at writing about loneliness and how people can feel isolated even when they are surrounded by other people and generally have good lives.  Gauri and Subhash are such good examples of these people, just going through life without many real connections and trying to get through each day.

But maybe it's because she's so good at writing about loneliness that Lahiri does so well in the short story format.  In novel form, writing about lonely characters really just means that the characters have no real connection with each other, and then the readers have even less connection with them.  I probably could not come up with many words to describe any of the characters in this novel besides "lonely," "isolated," and maybe "bitter."  Not a lot of fun to be around.

I am glad I read this book because I learned a little bit more about the Naxalite movement in India (not as much as I had hoped to, though).  And overall, reading all these depressing Indian books has been a good impetus for discussion with my parents.  I realize now that my parents rarely talk about their lives when they were in India, and they lived through some pretty tumultuous times, so it's been great asking them about what it was like and seeing how their opinions of events compare to those shared by the authors here.

But for now?  I'm not reading another Indian author for at least a few months.  It's finally getting warm outside!  No more depressing books.

Caution: Read this book while sitting in front of a happy lamp

Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance is quite possibly the most depressing book I have ever read.  Much like the other novel I've read by him, Family Matters, it is pretty sad the whole way through, but then you get to the epilogue and realize that the rest of the book was like an episode of Full House compared to what he has in store for you in the last several pages.  That's where he ensures that you lose all hope in the future of humanity.

This is probably not a great way to introduce the book to you in a way that makes you want to read it.  And frankly, if I had known how depressing the book was before I picked it up, I am not sure I would have read it, either.  It is SUPER depressing.  It's depressing the way this winter has been depressing.  You think that you have seen enough and that someone will have mercy on you because things can't get much worse, and then you wake up and it's 20 degrees at the end of March and it's still snowing and you realize that you have worn the same eight sweaters approximately 50 times over the past six months because there are only so many clothes in your wardrobe that are warm enough to wear in sub-zero temperatures.  So you put one of those sweaters on again, and miserably go out to sweep the snow off your car so that you can drive two hours to work because ... well, what else can you do?

Rohinton Mistry is this winter.  He just does NOT give you a break.

A Fine Balance is a story that revolves around four people, mostly during the Emergency that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared in the 1970s.  Dina is a widow who has trouble making ends meet. She takes in a boarder, Maneck, who is from the rural mountains and has suffered a great deal of bullying at college.  She also hires an uncle and nephew team of tailors to work for her, Ishvar and Omprakash.  These two men are escaping caste violence in their village.  The story moves forward and backward, sharing each character's backstory and then coming back to the present day, often with side stories about other people that have smaller parts in the main action of the novel but have quite telling stories about the state of India during the Emergency.  One of the key components of the Emergency, both in real life and in the novel, was the horrific mass-sterilization campaign, during which many poor people were forced to get operations so that they could no longer have children.

In some ways, this book was similar to Behind the Beautiful Forevers because it made clear just how much of a razor blade the poor live on.  Life can be going along fairly well, and then one setback can completely ruin everything that you have worked towards.  And then, even worse than that, there is the horror of police brutality, government corruption, and forced sterilization.

Obviously, with all of this as the setting, there is not much that could happen in A Fine Balance to make it a happy book.  While Mistry's writing is lovely and his characters are drawn so well and truly come to life, these only help to shatter you even further as a reader when things go badly (and, I kid you not, everything goes badly).

So while I'm glad that I read this one due to all the acclaim it has received and due to the amount of time it has sat unread on my shelf, I don't think I'll be picking Mistry up again any time soon.  I need some time to recover!

A portrait of a family

Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters is one that has sat on my family's bookshelf, unread by me, for several years.  To be honest, many Indian authors sit unread by me.  In general, I've found them depressing, almost to the extent that Russian authors are depressing, and I avoided their books for this reason.

But, also similar to really good Russian authors, Indian writers can have a lovely wistfulness about what India used to be and what it is now - the potential for greatness fighting against the penchant for corruption.  And Rohinton Mistry does this in his novel, and he does it with a truly lovely turn of phrase.

I listened to Family Matters on audiobook, and this only added to my experience of the novel.  Martin Jarvis was the narrator, and though I do not think he is Indian, he did the Indian accent very well and was spot on in the way he imbued his voice with the hopefulness of young children and the resignation of middle-aged adults.  He was helped, obviously, by the lyrical writing style that Mistry used.

Family Matters is about one extended family.  The book description is actually quite good, so I am going to use it here:

Rohinton Mistry’s enthralling novel is at once a domestic drama and an intently observed portrait of present-day Bombay in all its vitality and corruption. At the age of seventy-nine, Nariman Vakeel, already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, breaks an ankle and finds himself wholly dependent on his family. His step-children, Coomy and Jal, have a spacious apartment (in the inaptly named Chateau Felicity), but are too squeamish and resentful to tend to his physical needs.

Nariman must now turn to his younger daughter, Roxana, her husband, Yezad, and their two sons, who share a small, crowded home. Their decision will test not only their material resources but, in surprising ways, all their tolerance, compassion, integrity, and faith. Sweeping and intimate, tragic and mirthful, Family Matters is a work of enormous emotional power.

This book reminded me a lot of my relationship with my own grandfather who passed away some years ago.  My dad is the 12th of 14 children, so when I was born, my grandfather was already quite old.  He lived to be 100 years old, and for some of the later years of his life, he lived with my family here in Chicago.

As I get older, I realize just how difficult growing old must be.  My grandfather, and Nariman in this novel, both had very full, productive lives.  My grandfather had almost perfect vision until the day he died.  He was intelligent and kind and very well-respected.  He raised 14 kids and worked hard his whole life.

But all I saw was a fragile old man who was so hard of hearing that we often just gave up on including him in conversation and talked around him.  Looking back, I can only think of how unintentionally cruel we must have been, and how extremely isolated he must have felt even when surrounded by his own family.

Rohinton Mistry's book brought all this back to me.  He portrays a family adjusting to the difficulties of caring for an elderly relative, one whose company they enjoy occasionally but do not necessarily want every day.  How easy it can be to lose your patience with a person when when he's not to blame for the situation at all, and is just as mortified and distraught by it as you are.  Mistry details how there can be resentment among siblings, anger between spouses, and stress on children, but he also gives us moments of light, when the bond between a young boy and his grandfather is forged, and the many ways in which you can learn so much about what people's lives were before you entered them.  He writes about love and friendship, anger and despair, and he does it all with so much empathy for his characters and their plights.  It was a beautiful book, and I highly recommend it.

A man's journey up the Indian social ladder

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, has been vaguely on my radar as a book to read since it won the Booker Prize in 2008, mostly because it's by an Indian author and partly set in Bangalore, the city that my parents are from.  It's quite polarizing - people seem to either love it and think that it really speaks to the corruption that is ingrained in every level of Indian life, or hate it and think that it is far too extreme and depressing.

It is narrated by a man whose name changes with his social class.  First, he is called Munna by his family.  Not a real name, but a description of what he is to them.  His first teacher names him  Balram, a name he uses for much of his life.  And then someone calls him The White Tiger, and then he finally chooses a name for himself.  Most of the story takes place while Balram is a driver for a very wealthy Indian family that moves to Delhi.  There, Balram is exposed to the corruption at every level of society, from the poor all the way up through the highest levels of government.  And he decides that, in this game of winners and losers, he is going to be a winner.

This is most clearly related in two similar but contrasting events, both of which involve fatal car accidents.  But in the first, Balram is poor and so he is helpless to do anything against people who have far more money.  In the second, Balram is not poor and you can see how he has morphed into someone that he previously would have despised.  And, therefore, could easily become a target for someone who resembled the old him.

The circular story of:  man is victim, man plots revenge, man becomes corrupt, man becomes target is not a new one.  It chronicles the rise and fall of many individuals.  What made this story work for me was the narrator.  Balram is larger-than-life, filling every bit of the page and then settling into your life.  You can easily imagine him sitting back in a leather chair, holding a cup of chai, telling you his story in a very self-satisfied manner.  Balram is one of those Indians who went from being victimized to victimizing others, and he is quite happy with his progress.  I read this one on audiobook, and it was truly fantastic.  I don't know if I would have enjoyed the story so much in written form because it is really quite disheartening.  There are not many characters at all for whom you would feel sympathy.  There are not many bright lights in a miasma of corruption.  It's not a happy book.  But really, most books that look at life in India are not very happy because there are so many things in India to expose in the hopes that talking about it will embarrass people enough to try and change it.  Like so.

Definitely a great book to read if you want to understand more about India's social classes and how they interact.  And if you like a really great narrator!

Memoirs of an Indian Princess - No, Not the Pocahontas Kind

Gayatri Devi, the late Maharani of Jaipur, is remembered very fondly by Indians.  She lived through some of the most exciting times of Indian history - born into the privilege of Indian royalty under the Raj, grew up in the Roaring 20s and 30s and married one of the most popular and wealthy Indian kings, lived through WWII, witnessed Indian independence and then became a politician to stand for her beliefs.  She died just a few years ago, 90 years old.

Oh, and she was absolutely beautiful, too.

Gayatri was famous even before she wrote her memoirs because she was such a public figure.  But writing her memoirs didn't hurt, especially with a title such as A Princess Remembers.

I visited the Maharajah exhibit at the Field Museum last month and it really motivated me to read this book.  So much of Indian history is wrapped up in the way the British handled the Indian ruling class - point proven, the Maharajah exhibit was presented by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, not by any museum in India.  And I wanted to learn more about someone who had lived through it all.

A Victorian Role Reversal Mystery

There are so many good aspects of Tabish Khair's The Thing About Thugs.  It is a sort-of mystery set in Victorian London, which is always a fantastic setting for a mystery.  It features a narrator with two narratives - one he tells an Englishman looking for a story about the Thugee cult, and one that is his real life story.  There are body-snatchers hatching nefarious plots, wealthy lords obsessed with detailing the biological differences between the races to prove that whites are the best.  Taking center stage in the second half of the story is a fascinating Indian immigrant woman who solves the mystery and brings things to a very satisfying conclusion without ever leaving her home.  So many good things happening here!  And yet.

But let's start at the very beginning (a very good place to start).  Amir Ali journeys to England with Captain Meadows after sharing a story about his life as a member of the famed Thugee cult.  But we quickly learn that Amir's story is not so straight-forward.  He used Captain Meadows just as much as Captain Meadows used him, to achieve his own ends.  And when he comes to England, he has big plans to start a new life.  But a series of brutal murders in which the victims are decapitated and left without their heads has shocked London and Ali, foreigner and former thug, is the prime suspect.

Musings: Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers chronicles life in Annawadi, one of Mumbai's slums situated close to the airport and all the five-star hotels that surround it.  She follows men and women of different ages, religions, beliefs, and goals to present a very nuanced and complicated story.

I said in my review of A Suitable Boy that I loved the book because it showed both the beauty and the corruption that co-exist in India.  Boo's book does the same, but focuses on a much lower class of society.  While Seth focused on the slow sunset of the Raj's ruling class, Boo tells her story (non-fiction, by the way) by focusing on people that are on the cusp of living in the middle class.  They are so close to stability, if only.  If only luck goes their way, the government officials don't ask for too much money, the police don't take away their livelihoods, and their neighbors don't turn them in on trumped-up charges born of jealousy and spite.

Musings: The Savage Fortress

I cannot properly describe to you just how excited I was to learn about the Ash Mistry series.  It's a fantasy series aimed at middle grade readers with a pudgy Indian-British boy at its center, and Hindu mythology as its core.

Amazing, right?!

I contacted the author, Sarwat Chadda, via his website and gushed over how awesome this premise was and how excited I was to read his book.  This conversation was the impetus behind the entire A More Diverse Universe blog tour idea.  So, the book had big shoes to fill.

And honestly, when I received The Savage Fortress in the mail and saw the very young-looking cover, I had some trepidations.  I wasn't sure if this was a book that would appeal to me at all.  I wasn't really into the idea of reading a book about a boy escaping from Godzilla.

(I looked very closely at the cover to see if the characters were white-washed.  I don't think they are, but the background is very red, so it could go either way.  Smart thinking, Scholastic.)

But a few chapters into the book, I was settled in.  Yes, it's definitely written for a younger audience.  The phrase "totally cool" pops up a lot.  An old man uses the phrase "Kick butt."  (I cannot imagine any old person in India ever saying that.)  But hey, the hero is thirteen years old and the old man is almost 5,000 years old.  I cut some slack.  Because this book is pretty impressive on many levels.

Ash(oka) Mistry is the star of this novel.  He's a chubby 13-year-old who won serious Aarti points by referencing Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr. Who and The Lord of the Rings throughout the course of this book.  He's a gamer and a geek, and he's the one that Chadda chose to be a reincarnation of Rama in our times.  LOVE.

Musings: A Suitable Boy

It is impossible to attempt a review of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy without commenting on its length.  This book is immense.  Almost 1500 pages of very small font.  I started it around Memorial Day and finished it on August 1st.  I don't know the last time I ever felt so accomplished for finishing a book.

I read George Eliot's Middlemarch earlier this year, and it's also impossible not to compare the two books.  Both are very long books that follow many characters but focus on a few key ones.  Both are set during a volatile time in history and are steeped in their settings.  Both discuss the impact of a new piece of legislature that would take power away from landowners and give it to the peasants.  Both are about the relationships that exist within families and between people.

They're very similar, but I enjoyed A Suitable Boy more.  Perhaps because it's set in a more modern world but written in a sprawling, unhurried manner.  Perhaps because it's set in India and I enjoyed the references to customs and clothing and food.  Perhaps because I vastly preferred Lata to Dorothea (sorry, Middlemarch fans, but Lata is great and not nearly as martyr-esque).

Musings: Emily Fox-Seton (The Making of a Marchioness)

I (tried to) read an omnibus edition of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Making of  Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst.  I got through the first book, though I didn't enjoy it much.  I did not make it through the second book because I came across one sentence that so angered and offended me that I had no desire to continue.

If you want to read more details on my reaction to these books, check out the Project Gutenberg Project blog, where I have posted my review.  Let me know what you think!