Basso Profundo: India fiction

British India was divided into India and the two Pakistans upon gaining its independence in 1947. Systemic violence accompanied Partition, as the division was called, as groups perpetrated all manner of crime against each other. “Partitions,” the debut novel of Amit Majmudar, contains for us a close-up view of the horror, and adds a layer to our understanding (or to mine, at least): it wasn’t only Muslim vs. Hindu – there was a third substantial group fighting for its independence and identity, the Sikhs.

Each of these groups is represented by Mr. Majmudar’s fateful quartet: the riots force Dr. Ibrahim Masud, a Muslim physician in the Punjab city of Amritsar, into the flood of refugees heading for the new Pakistan. Simram Kaur is a fifteen-year-old Sikh girl whose family tries to drug and then kill her rather than let her be defiled by a non-believer. And the heart-breaking little Hindu twins, Shankar and Keshav, get separated from their mother in a crowded railway station. Mr. Majmudar uses an elegant device to bring the four together and keep them that way: the spirit of the boys’ dead father watches over the four and tries in his nearly helpless way to keep them safe, because he knows they need each other.

It takes the four nearly the entire book to meet up; each endures numerous close scrapes where any one of them could have wound up dead or worse. Dr. Jaitly, the twins’ deceased father, urges the quartet onward in his if-wishes-were-horses way, and we suffer and hope along with him. Dr. Masud is the saintly, stuttering, indefatigable center of this inchoate family: he suffers injury and dehydration without complaint, treats every case of sickness and injury that comes his way and there are many in the swelling tide of Muslim refugees. He attracts a battalion of orphan boys and stray dogs to help him on his way and keep him safe. Of all the partitions implicitly or explicitly built up in the narrative – ethnic, religious, social, moral – it’s clear Mr. Majmudar is an equal-opportunity admirer of courage and generosity. By completely ignoring the partitions everyone else seems to require, these final four are a microcosm of the possibility of love and hope.

Mr. Majmudar has crafted a touching, suspenseful, uplifting, gratifying story. This is another reason I love reading debut novels so much. We meet another highly capable practitioner, with a wise heart and a real gift for unfolding a beautiful story.

“Miss New India” contains the story of Anjali (Angie) Bose, who grows from sheltered nineteen-year-old in a backwater India town into a sadder but wiser young woman with growing skills and ambition. It embraces a much larger canvas, though, nothing less than the dizzyingly rapid modernization of the second most populous nation on Earth. Angie Bose’s journey opens this transformation before our eyes, cutting a clear slice for us and laying it on a slide for our microscopes.

Growing up quietly, steeped in traditional middle-class (and middle-caste) Indian virtues, Anjali, from the northeastern Indian state of Bihar, learns good, accentless American English, and shows a spark of intelligence. She gets an associate degree in business and hopes the husband her father finds for her can be intelligent, good-looking, and kindly. Unfortunately her betrothed young man mistreats her badly - criminally - in their one brief meeting, and she escapes to modern, bustling, 21st-century Bangalore. Things don’t go very much better for her in the big city, though: at rock bottom she ends up in a holding cell in a Bangalore jail, facing every manner of threat and menace.

What a creation is Miss Anjali Bose! Pretty, innocent, lucky, unlucky, endlessly engaging, unforgettable. Author Bharati Mukherjee draws such a realistic girl; she’s nineteen going on thirteen, it seems, for much of the book. I kept waiting for her to grow up a little, get some perspective, make a mature choice for a change! Then I would cast my mind back to her origins, and the scant weeks since her emergence from her sheltered existence, and I reflect that she’s perfect. She has the exact worries, hopes, and reactions that such a girl would in real life. Congratulations and laurel wreaths to Ms. Mukherjee on her perfect creation.

Through this endearing and frustrating heroine, the author shows us the wrenching changes now contorting India and changing its face. In graphic detail: the closed, insular town with its backward-looking mores, the mod big-city aspirations, and the mod-big-city criminality. The flooding of India with apparently limitless new rupees (lakhs and crores of them!) brings with it every new convenience and technology, and unfortunately every new kind of venality, too. Some plot elements seem, on surface, over-contrived – Angie’s falling in with a vastly wealthy family, the spurious international terrorist roommate, her serendipitous relationship with the entrepreneur Girish, the looting of the crumbling Raj-era estate – but these chances and drawbacks represent the new chances that India is taking with itself. May she ride a hot streak to glory!

It’s been quite a while since I met a character as charming and demanding of our attention as Angie Bose. I trust she will make thousands more readers as besotted with her as I am. Watch for this publication in May, and don’t let it go by. It will clearly be worth your attention for its great virtues: its unblinking look into modern India, and its main achievement, the quirky, delicious heroine.