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Literary Review
First Impressions
READING this slim volume, many young interns and doctors will hark to their own days spent away from home for the first time. The medical school in Ireland has been host to many a young Indian doctor and surely similar stories abound. In her debut novel, Cauvery Madhavan has captured the near comic situation that many are faced with in the absence of proper tutoring on western mores.
Enter Padhman. Young, Indian and from a well-known medical family in Chennai. As he is drawn into the corridors of the hospital and quickly learns to deal with the different forms of interns and aspiring doctors, he soon meets another young doctor, whom he is hopelessly attracted to. His parents' advice, his fellowship exams and everything else suddenly seem to take a backseat, as he rushes headlong into his first ever mature relationship. Back home in India, when his mother hears about the Irish girl in his life she throws a fit and literally asks him to call it all of. But Padhman feels he has found his soul mate and is nowhere near obliging. Paddy India comes across as a rare book which has the courage to look at human peculiarities straight on.
Paddy Indian, Cauvery Madhavan, Penguin, Rs.250.
FROM the moment the taxi begins its journey from Kolkata airport, there is a sense of apprehension. Rupa, who has come from England to visit her stepbrother and sisters, is determined to find out the reason why her mother left the country and her father. It is not, as she realises, an easy task.
But Rupa is determined to find some answers. Her mother refuses to be drawn into any conversation. While cleaning up a tin trunk, Nirmal Babu, her father comes across a diary written by her mother. Years of pent up emotions tumble out as Rupa and Sunil, the only two to witness this outburst, listen in rapt attention. Rupa is able to piece together the pieces of this puzzle and sees her father, not anymore as a stiff unyielding patriarch, but as a man broken by the sudden disappearance of his wife and daughter. Through the narrative, the author also illustrates with a rare insight issues that have surrounded Christianity in this country, conversions, the role of missionaries, including the wider issue of gender. It is with a gentle compassion that, as the story unfolds, one begins to see the issue in a different light.
Nirmal Babu's Bride, Alison Mukherjee, Indialog Publications, Rs.195.
AT heart an immigrant remains an immigrant. At least that's what this book seems to lead us to infer. In a family of new immigrants to the land of milk and honey, everyone is accepting of change except a little girl, who promises to play spoilsport. She hates her home in the U.S., makes no friends, cannot intermingle and yearns for India. As time progresses, she comes to terms with the fact that they are there to stay. It doesn't make her yearning any less, it only helps her establish her own identity.
Who are they? Have they come to terms with the new values and new ideas? Or will they remain rooted to the past? Vijay Lakshmi brings out the peculiar dilemma of uprootedness through her sensitive short stories. Whether it is the little girl in "Pomegranate Dreams" or the grown up in "Home" the issue that is basic to the narration is one of a lost cultural identity. Vijay Lakshmi writes with a certain ease on the dilemmas of immigrants.
Pomegranate Dreams and Other Stories, Vijay Lakshmi, Indialog Publications, Rs.195.
THIS is an usual collection of short stories that explore the female psyche. The stories are of people in a real world, not perfect, in fact quite the antithesis of it; they are young women with dysfunctional lives, who trip through life in a vacuum. There are no causes for celebration, no endings and definitely no beginnings. Almost as if in defiance of the order set up by society. Feminism is shown in a dark gloomy perspective. Yet, some are compelling. They are about characters who do not want to be, about motherhood that does not necessarily celebrate, about surrogate mothers and the yearning of a man to give birth. Here is a collection that defies set norms.
Barefoot and Pregnant, Shinie Antony, Rupa, Rs.195.
SUCHITRA BEHAL
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