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When you generally finish reading the latest offering of Indian English writers, or in some cases, as soon as you start, you are beset by an overpowering sense of ennui. Surely you've read that somewhere else? And isn't that sleazy passage a plagiarized Shobha De? What about the stilted vocabulary that you need your Oxford English Dictionary to wade through?

Thankfully, I was spared that ritual when I read "Nani's Book of Suicides" by Sunny Singh. The vocabulary is not pedantic, Singh does not dwell on polemics, and most surprisingly, she explores virgin territory. Unlike her peers, Singh tries to find out the effect the stories and myths that we hear as children have on our adult lives.

She does this in an equally unusual manner. Following a theme evocative of magic realism, Singh maintains a triple chronicle. In all three veins, Singh shows how the fatalistic choices women like Kunti, Draupadi, Meera and Sita are mirrored in the daily lives of simple women today. Each character, symbols of female strength, is forced to make a decision that will force her hand regarding a vital aspect of her existence. Singh shows how the conditions of women have not really changed that much through the ages.

The book unfolds through the eyes of Mini, a young girl in a small town in India. Mini is raised by her grandmother, a mysterious woman healer with a murky past. Her dabbling in the occult leave her scarred and bitter, and she rules the lives of her loved ones with single-minded dictatorship. "Nani's" life forms the second strand of the story, with her own life and value choices affecting her in terrible ways.

The third portion traces the mythological characters. Singh highlights the emotions of each of her mythical/historical women with a sensitive pen. She tries to delve deep into the mind and soul of each woman, and brings to light an aspect we might not have thought about. What did Meera think of as she drank the bowl of poison? What did Kunti feel when Karna was removing his divine armor?

Mini goes through her later life with the memories of her childhood haunting her. Each woman from her trove of folklore and mythology ends up as a voice of her own conscience, influencing her decisions and mirroring her own emotions. Her own grandmother is the most powerful impression in her life, with her every move centering on what her "Nani's" reaction to that decision would be.

An ambitious debut, Singh tries to take the road less taken, and thus may have chosen the less market friendly one. Her novel is not easy reading, and the average reader may not be able to comprehend the intricate web of the plot. The triple narrative requires concentration, and at places, the transitions are not as smooth as possible. Still, Singh does a good job of a difficult task; her story keeps all the initial promises it makes in the introductory passage. Her story telling skills are very good, and her writing does promise much in the future. It just may be that Indian English writing may have found a new writer, someone to steer away from the potboiler and popular fiction, and do some introspective, ground breaking work.

A thoroughly rewarding book, "Nani's Book of Suicides" manages to fulfil one of the main criteria of literature: the ability to force the reader to think. Hard.

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What the Body Remembers -By Shauna Singh Baldwin Usha Rao Usha Rao came to the US to do her graduate school after a brief stint in West Africa. After many years of academic servitude as a doctoral candidate and a post-doc, she now teaches Environmental Geochemistry, where she gets to torture her own students. Usha is a voracious reader, an amateur (and mediocre) painter, and loves Japanese films.

Shauna Singh Baldwin's "What the Body Remembers" is at once both a political drama, of the tragic and bloody partition of India, and a sympathetic domestic chronicle of a Sikh family, belonging to a minority community in Northwestern India.

Sardarji is a middle-aged, Oxford-educated, wealthy engineer and landowner, in deep conflict with his Indian roots and the internalized values of his English colonizers. His wife Satya is childless, and Sardarji brings home a second wife, the sixteen year old Roop, in secret. Roop, motherless, with a father deep in debt, is initially thrilled to become the prosperous older man's wife, and enters his home naively expecting to become a "sister" to Satya. But Satya's jealousy and mortification at the presence of the younger rival, especially one whose social standing is decidedly below her own, have turned her heart "black and dense as a stone within her". The turbulent and fractured relationship between the two women, who are both in precarious positions that they can only maintain through desperate measures, forms the heart of this novel.

When Roop bears two children, Satya demands that the children be given to her to raise as her own. Sardarji compels Roop to agree, in order to placate Satya, to alleviate his guilt over his treatment of his first wife, and to allow himself to maintain his elaborate self-deception of being a benevolent husband to both women, whom he sees as simply engaged in "women's silly quarrels".

However, as Roop slowly gains a foothold in his home and heart, she insists that she be allowed to raise her own children, and that Satya be ousted from the household. She is aided in her efforts by Sardarji's own perception of the two women: "Roop will listen to him admiringly, carefully, her eyes upon his mouth as if ropes of pearls fell from his lips, while Satya has never lowered her eyes before him...". So, Satya, angry and heartbroken, is left behind as the rest of the family moves to Lahore. Her final act of leave-taking neatly packages self-sacrifice, pride, and rebellion into a tragic but cunning offering to Sardarji, who eventually comes to miss her when he can no longer have her. Satya's spirit, bold, proud, and capable, later imbues the young Roop with her courage and a more cynical, clear-eyed view of her own situation and life, especially during the younger woman's perilous journey with her children from Lahore, Pakistan to Delhi, India in search of safety.

Threaded through this sensitively and compellingly narrated saga of a family, is the story of the Sikhs, a minority community neither Hindu nor Muslim, with no homeland and no "Sikhistan" to live in while India is being cut up by the British in their final act of departure. The growing distrust and animosity between neighbors, the rise of religious factionalism, and an impending sense of doom pervade the latter part of the book, culminating in the bloodbath of anarchy during the Partition, triggered by the mass exodus of tens of millions of frenzied refugees on both sides of the border.

This is a lyrical and impressive debut novel. Baldwin convincingly recreates the color and customs of colonial India, and her characters, especially the women, on whom she focuses loving attention emerge fully formed and complexly drawn. The male characters occasionally lack the same depth (for example, the use of an English alter ego as a device to indicate Sardarji's inner conflict between his Indianness and the English values he cultivates, sometimes wears thin). Still, this is a richly textured, colorful and moving portrait of a family in conflict and a nation in turmoil, rendered by a capable and original writer.

Usha Rao's book review was first published at http://www.blueear.com

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