Kaikeyi

Kaikeyi is the story of an infamous queen from the Indian epic tale the Ramayana. The author has taken the biggest villain of the epic and made her into a sympathetic character. It was just published in April 2022 and with 496 pages it is a chunky book. I bought the book at Barnes and Noble and enjoyed reading this hardcover as I held it. Holding a book seems like a blast from the past with all the ebooks around these days. 

The publisher's summary:

"I was born on the full moon under an auspicious constellation, the holiest of positions - much good it did me.

So begins Kaikeyi's story. The only daughter of the kingdom of Kekaya, she is raised on the tales of the gods: how they churned the vast ocean to obtain the nectar of immortality, how they vanquish evil and ensure the land of Bharat prospers, and how they offer powerful boons to the devout and the wise. Yet she watches as her father unceremoniously banishes her mother, listens as her own worth is reduced to how great a marriage alliance she can secure. And when she calls upon the gods for help, they never seem to hear her.

Desperate for some measure of independence, she turns to the texts she once read with her mother and discovers a magic that is hers alone. With this power, Kaikeyi transforms herself from an overlooked princess into a warrior, diplomat and most favored queen, determined to carve a better world for herself and the women around her.

But as the evil from her childhood stories threaten the cosmic order, the path she has forged clashes with the destiny the gods have chosen for her family. Kaikeyi must decide if resistance is worth the destruction it will wreak - and what legacy she intends to leave behind."

I haven't read many historical novels taking place in ancient India so this was a lovely departure from my usual reads. The pacing was what I expected from a historical fiction novel, as opposed to a historical mystery. It was just right. Because it is fiction, there is more emphasis on the Kaikeyi character than action. That said, there was still a good amount of action due to the main character's life story. 

The character was easy to like. She was a woman who helped other women and strove to enter a man's world. That's always a type of character that I will be drawn to. Her resilience was encouraging and inspirational; never let anyone get you down. Her use of magic is not something that I would typically want to read about. Kaikeyi always tried to get others to do her bidding by concentrating on the Binding Plane where she thought about the threads that bound her to other people. Her use of the binding place was integrated well into the story and seemed a normal part of the plot. However, she did not want anyone to know that she used magic. That would have had a negative impact on her life.

So how do you pronounce the name?  I believe it is "ki-kay." It may be my 2022 book of the year. I have only said that once this year so it will definitely be a top ten book. 5 out of 5 stars.

The Candid Life of Meena Dave

I almost always love a novel about India and Indian Americans. The Candid Life of Meena Dave is the exception though. I could not become interested in the book at all. Meena Dave has no family to speak of.  Her adoptive parents have passed away and she is on her own, moving frequently. When she is notified that she has inherited a house in Boston, she cannot place the name of the person, Neha, who left it to her. However, she travels to Boston, gets the keys to the house and plans only to stay overnight there. She is required to not sell the home for one year and then only to one of the other people who also have title to the property. While Meena is staying in the home, she discovers a connection to her past.  

While the plot premise was good, I struggled to maintain interest in the story. I found the writing to be rambling in various directions. Another fatal part of the book is that I did not like the main character Meena. She traveled the world on her whims and looked down on people with roots. She spoke to other characters with disdain. Meena just isn't a friendly person. Around page 50, I decided to go online and see what other reviewers thought about the book. I read many glowing  reviews so I went back to the beginning and started over, thinking I was missing something. I wasn't. 

I didn't finish this novel and cannot even rate it 1 star. Not my cup of tea. 

The Other Man

I had high hopes for The Other Man given it's gorgeous cover. However,  I never engaged with the story. It seemed that I was reading about Ved Mehra's day as he might write about it in a mundane way in a journal. His days were boring. The plot concerns his mother's attempts to get him married. As a 38 year old single man, Ved finally agrees to an arranged marriage with Disha Kapoor. While the wedding preparations are underway Ved meets Carlos Silva and begins an affair with him. The thrust of the novel is whether Ved has the strength tell his parents that he is gay and live openly in Bombay as a gay man.

As the plot moves on the reader learns how Ved became a closeted gay man. This is an interesting part of the plot as is his blossoming friendship with Disha. It is hard to tell which way Ved will ultimately go and it is all complicated because he is the heir to a big family business. Also, there is some sexual description but not alot.

This one left me bored. No rating.

The Taste of Ginger

The Taste of Ginger is Mansi Shah’s debut novel. While advertised as the story of a first generation American trying to figure out where she belongs, it touches so much on race that it is hard to view the book as traditional Indian fiction. The main character is Preeti Desai, a thirty year old woman living in Los Angeles who is working seventy hours a week as an attorney. She has an older brother Neel who she is close to as they shared the experience of emigrating to the U. S. from India when they were children. The two of them emulated their white fellow students in an effort to assimilate into American culture. How much that affected both of them is not discussed between them until the family returns to India for a family wedding.

Neel's wife Dipti is pregnant with their first child when the family travels to India for a wedding. During a rickshaw ride through town, a car crashed into them and Dipti is injured. She is immediately hospitalized and soon falls into a coma. Neel calls Preeti to give her the news and she agrees to fly to India immediately. For two weeks Dipti hovers near death until a decision is made to terminate her pregnancy in order to save her life. While Preeti is in India she has to deal with her mother whom she has been estranged from for several years.  Her mother did not like that Preeti lived with a white Christian American man without the benefit of marriage. It was bad enough that she chose a white man but living with him pushed her mother over the edge. Preeti refused to give Alex up. Alex was her first relationship with a man and she took the relationship seriously.  While supporting her brother, they begin to talk about the difficulties they had in moving to America. It was never spoken out loud before. The reasons that their parents made the decision to leave India did not make sense to them as they suffered financial problems that they would have avoided by staying put. 

I enjoyed this book immensely but feel that the race card was played too heavily. Preeti saw everybody in terms of the color of their skin. She attached judgments also based not only on color but also on the darkness of a person's skin. Sure, she developed these feelings from her parents but no one else in the family had as many issues with race. She worked hard to be like the white people she worked with and thought it made her happy. During her trip to India she saw her countrymen in different ways depending how light or dark their skin was. Darker skins were from a lower class while Preeti was a Brahmin. Around the halfway point in the story I got tired of the use of labels and decided that I no longer liked the Preeti character. As the main character she should be admirable but her constant thoughts of race turned me off and I don't think that she was happy with all of her hangups. 

There was one other problem that I had with the book. The author writes about Preeti finding an old photo of her mother with a man that she did not know. Preeti asked several family members who the man was but they all told her to ask her mother. She never asked her mother and the book does not tell us anything more about the photo. It seemed like to photo was going to reveal a family secret but we never discovered what that secret could have been.

All in all, this was a good read.  I am rating it 4 out of 5 stars.

Purple Lotus

I indulged my love of India fiction with Purple Lotus.  This beautiful book is the debut novel of Veena Rao, who was a finalist in the 2021 Georgia Author of the Year Award.  In addition, she was a finalist in several other book of the year awards for this novel.  Purple Lotus tells the tale of a woman's journey from a pariah in India to a free-spirited woman in the American South. 

The publisher's summary:

Tara moves to the American South three years after her arranged marriage to tech executive Sanjay.  Ignored and lonely, Tara finds herself regressing back to childhood memories that have scarred her for life.   When she was eight, her parents had left her behind with her aging grandparents and a schizophrenic uncle  in Mangalore, while taking her baby brother with them to make a new life for the family in Dubai.

Tara's memories of abandonment and isolation mirror her present life of loneliness and escalating abuse at the hands of her husband.  She accepts the help of kind-hearted American strangers to fight Sanjay, only to be pressured by her patriarchal family to make peace with her circumstances.  Then, in a moment of truth, she discovers the importance of self-worth - a revelation that gives her the courage to break free, gently rebuild her life, and even risk being shunned by her community when she marries her childhood love, Cyrus Saldanha.

Life with Cyrus is beautiful, until old fears come knocking.  Ultimately, Tara must face these fears to save her relationship with Cyrus - and to confront the victim shaming society she was raised within. 

This story ends with a bang.  Tara's newspaper article in the Morning Herald about her journey ends the novel. Her aunt makes an observation about her that gives us the title of the book. Aunty says that Tara has always been a shrinking violet. Tara responds that she is not a shrinking violet but rather a purple lotus. It was lovely ending to a lovely story.  Perhaps, you could say that Tara finally grew up.

It's impossible not to have empathy for this character. Tara has to endure emotional abuse from her parents and then from her husband. After several years of marriage, that abuse becomes physical. Thanks to strangers in her Atlanta, Georgia neighborhood, she finds the courage to face Sanjay and demand a divorce. Sanjay, of course, complains about this demand to her parents. Tara then receives more emotional abuse from her parents who tell her it is her job to make the marriage work. She must sacrifice her needs to her husband and eventually it will all work out. However, her American friends from the local church encourage her to leave Sanjay. Tara breaks free from her marriage but still has to consider her self-worth in order to be free.

Purple Lotus shows us that you may not come of age until you are much older than the 18 year old norm. Tara was 36 when she realized her worth.  Not every person starts out in life with all the necessary tools for a healthy existence. Some of us take longer.  The point here is that you can grow if you have the courage.

5 out of 5 stars.

The Secret Keeper of Jaipur

The Secret Keeper of Jaipur is book two in the Jaipur trilogy by Alka Joshi. The trilogy began with The Henna Artist. The action in this story begins in Spring 1969 with heroine Lakshmi, now married to Dr.Jay Kumar, directing the Healing Garden of Shimla. Her protege Malik has just finished his private school education and at age 20 he has also just met a young mother named Nimmi and has fallen in love with her. When Malik travels to Jaipur to be an apprentice at the Facilities Office of the Jaipur Royal Palace in order to work on a state of the art cinema, he must separate from Nimmi. Malik soon finds that not much has changed in Jaipur since his last visit during his childhood. Power and money still hold sway and favors flow from the Palace, but only if certain secrets remain buried. When the cinema's balcony collapses on opening night, blame is placed where it is convenient. Malik, however, suspects something far darker is hovering over the city and sets out to uncover the truth. 

I LOVED this book!  In my mind, you can't get a better book than an Indian fiction novel. Malik is featured more prominently than Lakshmi in this installment of the trilogy. It's not that Lakshmi doesn't get a good amount of pages, it's just that Malik is the person solving the crime in the story. Of course, I loved everything about the Shimla and Jaipur settings. These two cities are complete opposites. Shimla is in the mountains and the weather is cool most of the time. Jaipur instead is excruciatingly hot. Wherever the characters are located, the reader is treated to the Indian culture. While I am sure that poor Indians who had labor intensive jobs were not as thrilled with their lot as the wealthy folks, I have romanticized this servant/master relationship. It seems dreamy to have someone always available to get you a cool drink or cook a meal when you come home. Most writers of Indian fiction show the servants as happy and agreeable but I know this must be a fallacy. 

We learn alot about the Nimma character. When she is introduced to Lakshmi she is described as having dark skin with rough hands and wearing cheap clothing. Nimma hails from a tribe that roams the mountains shepherding sheep. The women in the tribe had other duties and Nimma's was to gather flowers and herbs for healing. While her personality is quite different from Lakshmi, both women look for flowers and shrubs that can be used in healing. Lakshmi knows more about the flowers that she can find in the Jaipur area and Nimma knows more about those that can be found in the mountains. They make an ideal pair for Lakshmi's healing garden. 

Much is written about family here. Malik has no idea who his parents are or even when he was born. He was a street child who did odd jobs for Lakshmi before she brought him in to her home and raised him. He has no biological family to speak of. Lakshmi only has one sister whom she also raised but Radha has moved to Paris. Nimma is a widow with two kids. Emphasis is placed in the story on finding friends who become a substitute for family. These ties are bound just as tight as to those whom you are biologically related.

The Secret Keeper of Jaipur is a fantastic read. Historical fiction fans are going to want to read it. 5 out of 5 stars.

Well Behaved Indian Women

Well Behaved Indian Women is Saumya Dave's debut novel.  It is fantastic! Delving into the issues of Indian American culture, Dave explores a mother and daughter's relationship in America. Their origins from India play heavily into how they communicate and how they feel about their lives.  The book is also a family saga as the lives of three generations of women are explored.

The story begins with Simran Mehta always feeling that she is being harshly judged by her mother, Nandini, especially when it came to her writing hobby.  Nandini emigrated to American with her new husband twenty five years ago where she had her children. As a first generation American, Simran was expected to have a professional career. While she is working on a Masters Degree in Psychology Simran drops out of school to pursue journalism. During this time she is planning a wedding to her childhood sweetheart Kunal. They are expected to marry because they have been a couple for a long period of time. However, when Simran meets an Indian celebrity writer sparks fly.

Nandini, on the other hand, has spent her life putting others ahead of her own life. She wants to create an easy life for her children as well as her in-laws.  Nandini has provided her husband's demanding family everything they desire, including free medical treatment.  She also has had to endure the casual racism of her patients. When a colleague offers Nandini a job in another city she has to consider whether to pursue her dream job or focus on being the perfect Indian wife.

Grandmother Mimi Kadakla lives in India. She feels that she has failed her daughter Nandini but has a chance to support her grand-daughter Simran in whatever life Simran wants to live. As life begins to pull Nandini and Simran apart, Mimi is determined to be the bridge that keeps them connected, even as she deals with her own secret burden, an illness. 

I loved this novel.  I read through it in two hours and couldn't put it down. It was interesting to see how these women were trained from birth to be people pleasers, a common trait among Indian women. They all put their dreams on hold to fulfill family expectations, usually expectations that they were not on board with. I cannot imagine doing this myself and wonder why none of these women rebelled against tradition. In addition, the concept of arranged marriages is explored here. The reader learns the pros and cons from how these women's arranged marriages affected their lives.  

Several reviewers have said that books like this one confirm stereotypes of Indian women.  I disagree. It seems to me that when you deny the cultural traits of a given people, you are denying their distinctions in favor of political correctness. People are different. We all know that. The customs and mannerisms that we see of residents from other nations should be celebrated not used to further divide us. We can be multiculturally sensitive without rejecting the culture itself.

5 out of 5 stars!

The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergil Sisters

I loved author Balli Kaur Jaswal's Erotic Stories for Punjabi Women. Ms. Jaswal is now one of my favorite authors.  This Adventures book has more of a suspenseful plot than Erotic Stories and follows the three Shergill sisters as they navigate a trip to India together.

British sisters Rajni, Jezmeen, and Shirina must take a trip to their homeland to satisfy the wishes of their recently deceased mother. Their mother wants her ashes to be disbursed at the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Before her death she wrote down a daily itinerary of what she wanted her daughters to do when they arrived in India.  The sisters are at odds with each other and always have been. Rajni is the oldest and has previously been on a pilgrimage to India with her mother. However, she had vowed to herself that she would never return there.  Jezmeen is a struggling actress and cannot afford to spend time traveling as she has an appointment for an important audition for a part that could catapult her to stardom. Shirina is married but is always pressured by her in laws to do something she does not want to do. They have given her an assignment to do while she is in India. The question is whether she will stand up for herself or cater to their wishes once more.

The theme of the story is, obviously, family, including what it means to be a second generation immigrant. Current topics such as assisted suicide are also addressed. There is another important topic discussed that relates solely to Shirina but I don't want to be a spoiler. 

I highly recommend this funny and heartwarming story, particularly for women, as the bonds of sisterhood are what this book is all about.

5 out of 5 stars.

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows

I loved this story of older women breaking their societal rules on how women should behave.   I especially loved how they treated the young 22-year-old writing teacher who thought she knew much more than them. These ladies exposed her youthful assumption that she was superior to them.  This is something I have to deal with myself on my job. I don't know why the young assume they know more than the old, but they do. This aspect of the story was funny.

The story opens with Nikki accepting a job teaching women how to write at the Sikh Community Center located in London's Southall neighborhood.  When the women, primarily widows, refuse to learn the alphabet they begin to tell stories about meeting men. These stories have an erotic sense to them. The women tell their fantasies about preludes to sexual encounters with strangers.  Nikki is totally shocked that senior women have these kind of thoughts. The women initially believe that Nikki cannot help them write their stories because she has never been married.  Nikki fears that she will be fired if her supervisor find out what is happening in class and wants to make them learn to write.  However, the women are not interested in the a, b, c's but rather storytelling.  Needing the paycheck, Nikki agrees to help them and hopes to compile enough stories to publish in an anthology.

Part of the fun reading this book is being introduced to many interesting older Punjabi women characters. While they all live traditional Indian lives, their imaginations run wild. In addition, the reader gets to know their life stories both in England as well as in India. Indian customs are prominent in the book, including the customs of Nikki's own family, and how these customs affect their daily lives.  You feel like you are at afternoon tea with these ladies while they gossip and tantalize each other with their fantasies.  The widows stretch themselves by continuing to meet even though the community would react strongly against them writing sexy stories. Later in the novel they stretch themselves again by agreeing to have class in the pub where Nikki also works. Punjabi women are not supposed to drink, let alone sit in a pub.

The erotic stories were not too sexy until the midway point in the novel when the action becomes more explicit.  I guess I am prudish enough that I had to skip over a few pages here and there.  The women's lives were compelling enough to keep me reading.  I wanted to discover what happened with Nikki's relationship with her boyfriend as well as her sister's efforts to obtain an arranged marriage.  There is also a mystery playing out in the plot. Did a woman from Southall really kill herself or did someone kill her. 

This was an enjoyable read.  4 out of 5 stars.