Before We Visit the Goddess

Of Fortunate Lamps

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices was so good that one picks up every book of hers to see if it matches; only Palace of Illusions has so far.  Which is not to say her books are not well written, it’s just that tales of immigrant angst can have only this much variety and too many US- based writers of Indian origin are still hammering away at it.

Her latest, Before We Visit the Goddess, begins in 1995, Bela Dewan calling from the US, to tell her mother Sabitri, who lives in a village in Bengal, to persuade her granddaughter Tara not to quit college.

This distress call is unexpected because after Bela eloped to the US with her boyfriend, she never saw her mother again. Sabitri has never met Tara, but history is repeating itself. Tara is treating her mother just like Bela treated Sabitri.

Still, Sabitri sits down to write a letter to Tara, and in flashbacks the story of four generations of women unfolds. Durga, the expert sweet maker in a village who lets her daughter Sabitri go to Kolkata to pursue higher education.  Sabitri’s romance with the son of her mean-spirited patron, destroys that dream.

She marries another man, lives an affluent life which is ruined by an innocent remark by young Bela. After the end of her marriage, Sabitri sets up a sweet shop in memory of her mother, and makes it a success, with a man who throws away his own future to help her, and wants nothing in return. But she is unable to hold on to her resentful daughter, who runs off to the US to marry the self-centred Sanjay.

Her marriage is not all that happy, and eventually, her daughter Tara dumps her family to live precariously like an aimless American teenager.

Colouring between the broad strokes, are the seemingly unconnected stories that build a complete picture of the characters—the three women and people who offer them friendship or escape, influences that trigger life changes, love gained or lost.  It’s a difficult but interesting structure, creating a novel through stories. The book is readable, no doubt, but there is still the question of why a writer as talented as Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is not stepping out more often from the small circumference of predictable family dramas. 

Before We Visit The Goddess

By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Published by Simon & Schuster

Pages: 240

Beach Town

Shooting Range

Beach Town by Mary Kay Andrews is a breezy read, set against the backdrop of a film shoot in a small town. The way the crew goes about the shooting is fascinating, and, very amusing is the way the script is written and altered on the location—Bollywood style.

The heroine is Greer Hennessy, who is assigned to scout for a beach town location for a film starring a very popular singer and a pretty, young starlet.  Greer had been having some career trouble and this film could bring her back into the running.

She finds the perfect location in Cypress Key, but she is up against the town’s mayor, Eben Thinadeaux, who practically owns the place, and does not want a film crew causing havoc amidst the peaceful community.  He sees the value of Hollywood dollars fuelling the town’s dud economy, but at same time, he does not want heritage structures destroyed.

There is the meet-cute when Greer takes Ed to be the motel janitor and orders him to kill a cockroach in her room. The inevitable love story between them has a cast of colourful characters —the self-important director, the bratty star, the wise owner of the town’s only motel, her rebellious niece, Greer’s best friend who is the make-up in charge having an affair with the director, the film’s drinking-carousing writer, Eb’s slimy brother, Greer’s long-lost father and an old dog with a weak bladder. It is always fun to read about how films are shot, and somewhat reassuring to find that a Hollywood film shoot can also get messy, in spite of all the so-called professionalism.

Beach Town

By Mary Kay Andrews

Published by: St Martin’s Press

Pages: 448

Two 'Afghan' Novels

All That Jazz

There has been a steady stream of books about the suffering of the women in Afghanistan under a cruelly patriarchal system, and their courage in coping with it.

Two recent books bear echoes of Afghanistan and a hint of its horrors for women, but branch out of there to take in a wider perspective.

Kim Echlin’s novel, Under The Visible Life is about the friendship between two women, both mixed race, both musicians, both caught up in destructive relationships and trying to makes sense of their lives.

Mahsa’s Afghan mother had run away with an American man and settled in Karachi. Their happiness is shattered with Mahsa’s uncles track them down and shoot her parents. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, honour killing is not even considered a crime. At thirteen, Mahsa is taken in by a stern uncle and his submissive wife. Still, she is able to teach herself music and find a piano to practice in a hotel, where she meets her first love Kamal.

Mahsa is sent to Canada to study and discovers a freedom unimaginable to women of her country. Just when she has started to soar, she is forced into marriage with a much older Ali. She has two children, and carrying on with her music becomes a constant struggle.

Katherine’s mother Jenny grew up at a time when her own father could send her to jail for getting pregnant by a Chinese man. She has to fight to get her child back from foster care, fight to marry outside her race, and live all her life in a basement as if to hide from her past. Worse, her husband leaves her and returns to his wife in China, who Jenny was unaware of.

Katherine knows what disappointment is, when Theodore, or ‘T’, the black man she falls for and marries turns out to be fickle and faithless. She has to give up her dreams of a high flying musical career to look after her three mixed race children.

The two women are brought together by their shared love for music and their spirited piano playing. Women are considered lower species by the music establishment, still the two work hard and make a small place for themselves.

Even though the book is about the ability of women to beat the odds, Mahsa and Katherine are sort of half rebels—they never find the strength to break away from the men who enslave or disrespect them. The novel is readable and music is the glue that holds it, but Echelin never goes beyond a soap opera tone—the issues of race and gender discrimination, raise their heads sporadically, but are pushed to the background. It had the potential to be a much richer novel, if it had not managed to bring the outside in; isolated from the social turmoil surrounding them, Katherine and Mahsa’s lives remain commonplace

Under The Visible Life

By Kim Echlin

Published by : Serpent's Tail

Pages: 368

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Deborah Rodriguez’s The Little Coffee Shop Of Kabul, about an American woman, Sunny, who sets up a coffee shop in war torn Kabul, was a bestseller. Five years later comes a sequel, in which Sunny has returned to the US, leaving the café in the hands of Yasmina, her husband Ahmet and mother-in-law Halajan, all of whom appeared in the first book.

The Return To The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul intercuts Sunny’s efforts to rebuild her life after the sudden death of her husband Jack, and the problems the new owners of the Kabul coffee shop face in a society that is resisting change.

Sunny is talked into taking over the Screaming Peacock vineyard that Jack had bought against her will.  Joe, charming old Japanese man, and a young, vigorous Sky persuade her to stay on the picturesque island and give the business a chance.  Yasmina’s sister Layla comes to live with Sunny while she is still emotionally adrift, so she decides to hire Kat, an Afghan girl as an English tutor for her guest.

Sunny is homesick for Kabul, even though it’s a dangerous place and particularly tough on women. Only a Western woman who does not face any of the problems an Afghan would—violence, forced marriage, purdah, isolation, lack of education and opportunity—would romanticize life in Kabul.

The novel has its charms, and stories of women crossing all hurdles put in their path are always inspiring. Still, the book just about rises above regular, fluffy chick lit.

Return to the Little Coffee Shop of Kabul 

By Deborah Rodriguez

Published by: Little Brown/Hachette

Pages: 336

The Guilty

Daddy Issues

A conscience can stop the most ruthless professional killer in his tracks. In The Guilty, the fourth book of David Baldacci’s Will Robie series, the protagonist, a black ops CIA hitman, accidentally shoots a child while assassinating an evil leader on foreign soil. The sight of the child dying causes him such trauma that at his next mission, he imagines a child where there is none and freezes, unable to pull the trigger.

In the CIA’s murky world, a mentally disturbed sniper is no good. Robie’s handler, called Blue Man, gives him a chance to sort out his head before he can be sent out on the field again. It just so happens that Robie’s estranged father, Dan Robie, living in the small town of Cantrell, is arrested for a murder he did not commit.  Robie had left home after high school following a botched love story and never returned. Blue Man tells him kindly that the roots of his problem lie in the past and he must first sort out his Daddy issues before returning to work.

He has no idea what he will find when he reaches his old hometown. The townsfolk are not exactly welcoming of the prodigal son; his father does not even to talk to him, leave aside accepting the offered help.  Dan Robie, who used to be a struggling lawyer is now a judge, living in a grand mansion with a young wife and kid.

Sherman Clancy, the man Robie Sr. is accused of killing is a drunken lowlife, who was accused of murdering a girl, but got off because the judge’s wife provided him with an alibi. Dan Robie has a strong motive for shooting Clancy.

There are a lot of mysterious and unsavoury goings on the Cantrell, and the powerful people involved want to avoid exposure. Will Robie is rescued from an ambush by the timely arrival of his former partner Jessica Reel.  Together, they are capable of cleaning up the corrupt town and solving the mystery of the rising body count.

The climax is as shocking as it is contrived, but it doesn’t take away from the appeal of a fast-paced thriller, that has romance, emotion, action, friendship, family values and a character so badass that the worst serial killers in fiction would tip their hats.

The Guilty

By David Baldacci

Published by: Grand Central

Pages: 432

Cometh The Hour

Family Plots

In Cometh the Hour, the sixth, and penultimate, novel in theClifton Chronicles series (after Mightier Than the Sword), the Clifton and the Barrington families fit a lot more complications into the pages that you’d have thought possible.  But then, Jeffery Archer is a bestselling writer and knows what would please his readers.

It is possible to enjoy Cometh the Hour without having read the earlier five. By and by the various characters and their relationships become clear. The Clifton and Barrington family trees are helpfully provided.

In this book, they reach the 1970s; the book opens with a libel trial that involves Emma and Harry Clifton, Lady Virginia Fenwick and her ex-husband, Sir Giles Barrington. The outcome of the case hinges on a suicide note, which, if presented as evidence, would mean victory for Emma, but also the end of Sir Giles’s political career. His sister Emma, married to bestselling author Harry Clifton would rather lose then case than let that happen. But the letter is leaked to the media, Lady Virginia is defeated and drops headlong into financial ruin.

Her crusty old father won’t raise her allowance, she cannot lower her standards of living or lose her place in London high society. As all other machinations go on, political and financial shenanigans included, Lady Virginia’s bold and ingenuous plan to avert impending bankruptcy by trying to ensnare an American millionaire, provides the novel’s comic core.

Meanwhile, Sir Giles smuggles his German girlfriend, Karin, out of East Berlin and becomes a hero. Harry tries to help a Soviet dissident writer, Anatoly Babakova (languishing in a gulag) in the midst of a hostile takeover of his friend’s publishing company.

The Indian edition has an illustration of Mumbai on the cover— there is a totally unnecessary subplot of Harry and Emma’s son Sebastian, falling in love with an Indian girl, Priya, and coming up against her ‘khap’ kind of family. He tries a Bollywoodian elopement that ends tragically. The author has enough Indian fans, he did not have to include this corny segment and end up making India look bad.

There’s a lot more—every character faces a crisis (look for echoes of real life incidents), some sorted here, some probably have to wait for the last book in the series, This Was A Man, that will hopefully tie up any loose ends left over. Parts of Cometh The Hour read like a bad eighties Bollywood film, in which Margaret Thatcher unexpectedly makes a guest appearance. But it is also a page turner that has bestseller stamped all over it.

Cometh The Hour

By Jefferey Archer

Published by St Martin’s/Macmillan

Pages: 400