Obsessions and Passions of a Privileged Indian Schoolgirl
Inheritance, inescapable and requiring escape, is title and theme of this fictional memoir set in south India. Sonil, 15 years old, evades the languor and constrictions of her privileged existence by periodically coming down with bronchitis.
Associated more easily with the winters of New England than the Malabar coast, the malady is Sonil’s romantic identification, bacilli-assisted, with her land of dreams: Cambridge, Mass. It is also a sensible way of getting there. For weeks at a time, she can wall off the murmurous seductions and demands of family life and concentrate on her studies.
Somewhere north of Boston, perhaps, a restless 15-year-old hangs a photograph of the Taj Mahal on her bedroom wall. Sonil’s own bedroom Taj is a photograph of the squat brick vistas of Radcliffe College. By the time her story is told she will have passed the examinations and gone there.
“Inheritance” mostly takes place during Sonil’s four-month stay in her grandmother’s house on Pi, a fictional island off the coast. She has been sent there from Madras, where she lives with her two aunts, to recover her health.
“This is Sonil,” someone introduces her. “She gets a lot of diseases.”
Pi is a perfumed and flowered place, and Indira Ganesan’s narrator revels in the smells, flavors and colors. They are an easeful web that detains Sonil--even as she tells of struggling to free herself--in a well-to-do, eccentric household kept going by her frail but boundlessly energetic and care-giving grandmother.
Much of the care goes to Sonil’s mother, a wraith who moves silently through the house, virtually ignores Sonil, spends her days resting or tending assiduously to her looks and goes out at night, seemingly to meet lovers. A widow and then a divorcee, she had gone on to have a long affair with an American photographer, Sonil’s father, who left and never came back. She refused to care for their daughter, who, accordingly, was sent to the Madras aunts.
Her mother’s abandonment is a source of pain, but Sonil, temporarily interrupting her Radcliffe life plan, is absorbed in taking in the ancestral world on Pi with its balance of sweetness and oppressiveness. When the grandmother falls sick, she learns to draw recovery mandalas for her. She is a spectator at the formal visits, the ritual signals, the subtle appraisals involved in an arranged marriage for her cousin Jani.
Becoming Jani’s confidant, she discovers the up-to-date passion beneath the traditional surfaces. Jani, in fact, was deeply in love with another girl, who died; her grief leads her to break off the wedding arrangements and temporarily join a Catholic convent. Sonil’s own awakening passions bring her into an affair with Richard, an American teacher twice her age.
Ganesan, author of an exquisite and affecting novel, “The Journey,” devotes some of her best writing to the affair. Sonil’s voice is light, and she has a 15-year-old’s scattered mix of cliche and discovery. This is behind some of the book’s weaknesses; when Sonil muses on life, the result is green and unfledged, and even if appropriate, it doesn’t command much interest.
In her brand-new sensuality, on the other hand, she is all there. Passion compels her by surprise. When she and Richard first make love, after he has made her pancakes with maple syrup, it is like “1,000 eyes opening inside her.” Perhaps the syrup helped, and it’s nice that she can’t distinguish.
Richard, a spoiled prince, is a bore, apart from a comic scene with his overprotective mother from whom he escaped by traveling halfway around the world. (Wraith-mothered Sonil thinks it would be lovely to have one like that.) She arrives from New York’s Upper West Side to study Dynamic Meditation with Helen Koenig, an American swami.
“My God, a goyish guru,” moans Richard just before fleeing and abandoning poor Sonil. “My mother is going to learn to meditate from a Nazi housewife from Duluth, and you think I’m getting hysterical.”
Sonil’s dreamy apprenticeship is brought to an end when her grandmother, mainstay of the family, dies suddenly. The self-absorbed mother suddenly turns shrewd, practical, attentive. She takes over the funeral arrangements and the household. Later, when Sonil returns to Madras, she visits her regularly and takes her out to tea. To the daughter’s decision to make her life in the United States, she responds:
“It’s practicality what’s at issue. Do you have what it takes to live away from this island, from India itself? Can you maintain yourself beyond your imagination?”
Maintaining oneself beyond one’s imagination--what a splendid definition of growing up! The trouble is that Ganesan has too suddenly injected too much wisdom, not to mention energy and activity, into the ex-wraith. Conceivably such a change can occur, but fiction, unlike reality, can only use conceivable by arranging for it to be necessary. A novelist doesn’t make something happen merely by making it happen.