Home to India
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
This is the last thing Helen, a young, impetuous Californian, wants to hear from her Sikh lover, Tej, whom she is determined to marry against all opposition. After the initial shock, however, Helen’s innate optimism reasserts itself and she carries on with her preparations to follow Tej back to India, a country she has known only through history books.
During the long voyage to India by ship, the various fears she has managed to suppress begin to gnaw at her: How will she cope with the other wife, will Tej’s family consider her an interloper and, most of all, will the huge and unfamiliar land awaiting her prove too much for her?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Originally published in New Delhi as Seasons, this subtle tale of cultures in conflict follows two women, who meet in graduate school at Berkeley during the 1940s, through very different adulthoods in America and India. At the end of a long career, unmarried Dante scholar Carol Thorpe mulls over the differences between her choice of lifestyle and that made by her friend Helen Granziani. While Carol followed the life of the mind, Helen followed a fellow student, Tej, to Punjab, married him and thus entered into a menage a trois with Tej and his first wife. Through letters to Carol, Helen recounts her rough adjustment to Punjabi culture, where, until 1952, bigamy was legal and divorce was rare. What gradually unfolds, along with these letters and reminiscences, is an unprejudiced comparison between the ambitious intellectual with a penchant for married men and the devoted wife in a very un-American arrangement. Singh's (Uncle's Concubine) rendition of Indian family dynamics is particularly satisfying, as are her villains: the relative who slights Helen by referring to second wives as "concubines"; the first wife whose chilly little heart explains Tej's flight through America to Helen. The tension builds, with the leisured pace of a Satyajit Ray film, into an inevitable family showdown between character and custom. Novel or memoir? Singh, whose life superficially resembles Helen's, takes a quotation from Italo Calvino for her epigraph: "The author of every book is a fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him the author of his fictions."
