'Gifted' - A Review

Gifted
Nikita Lalwani
Random House
288 pages
September 2007

A quick reading of the synopsis of ‘Gifted’ doesn’t make the reader think there is anything terribly exciting or unique to expect from it. Probably one of the best examples of the adage ‘Never judge a book by its cover’ in recent times, ‘Gifted’ follows Rumi Vasi as she is carefully molded by her father to become one of the youngest students ever to attend Oxford University. This is Lalwani’s first novel, much of it, as she claims, written at Bath Spa University in the UK where she pursued an MA in Creative Writing. And what an impressive first attempt it is.

Set in Cardiff, Wales, where Lalwani was raised, Rumi is the first-born of Mahesh and Shreene Vasi, typical Indian immigrants who make the UK their home in search of that elusive goal of a better future. Mahesh is a lecturer at the University of Swansea, a post that he earned after he gained his PhD at Cardiff. We learn that he ended up in Cardiff despite his admittance into Cambridge and University College London, because, very simply, ‘they had offered the cash. They had wanted him here, a foreigner with no more than five pounds in his pocket and a slip of a wife, bare-toed and shivering.’

Rumi is made to follow a highly disciplined and regimented schedule from the age of five, after a visit from her teacher who proclaims that the precocious young girl is a ‘gifted mathematician’. This is reinforced after her first visit to India with her mother, when an astrologer who looks at her hand says that it is the hand of a genius. Mahesh never lets her slip under his supervision, and her closest friends become the numbers that she starts continuously linking together in her mind in permutations and combinations.

As Rumi enters her teenage years, her life becomes full of the contradictions that a child of her upbringing is wont to endure. Shreene, always unhappy that her husband decided to settle abroad when she wanted to return to India, is not the ‘coconut’ that her husband is (‘brown on the outside, white on the inside’). Rumi’s knowledge of India comes from her mother’s anecdotes about her life in India as a young girl and her love for Hindi films, which Mahesh allows the family to watch only once in a while, to ensure that Rumi’s English is not affected. Shreene is the typical Indian conservative mother – when Rumi asks whether, as she was taught in science, she was born through sexual intercourse, Shreene flies into a rage and then calms down enough to say that she was born through prayer, because ‘only white people have sex’.

Amidst all the turmoil that the young Rumi is going through, Mahesh’s grand plan finally yields fruit. Rumi, not yet fifteen, is admitted to Oxford. There, thrown into an adult world, Rumi finally rebels.

Lalwani’s writing is truly descriptive - the reader feels Rumi’s angst and confusion at every point, and the connection only grows as the book finally reaches its climax. The finale is built-up like a difficult jigsaw puzzle , the small pieces all falling into place one by one before the complete masterpiece is revealed.

A few years ago, I assisted a documentary film-maker in India on one of her short freelance projects. Imagine my surprise when I found out that three years later, that same person had written a book which was deemed worthy of being in the 2007 Man Booker longlist.

The book is ‘Gifted’, and the author, Nikita Lalwani.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com.

'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' - A Review

My review of Mohsin Hamid's 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' which appeared here last week:

The politics of the Middle East and South Asia and the relationship of the United States with many of the countries in the region have been fodder for many journalistic articles and fictional books in the past. Post-9/11, the happenings in the region have taken on an even larger significance and consequently spurred a huge onslaught of writing by contemporary authors. Released earlier this year, it was only natural then that I was keen on reading Mohsin Hamid’s ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’, a book that many people I know kept talking about. The word on the street was that it was quite riveting.

I’m going to burst the bubble right here and say up front that I was slightly disappointed. I have not read Hamid’s first work, ‘Moth Smoke’ which was a Betty Trask Award winner, a PEN/Hemingway award finalist and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, but I will say that ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ certainly is a book that started out with a lot of promise, but faltered somewhere along the way. In today’s political climate, it had the potential to resonate much more strongly than it eventually did.

Hamid has chosen for his style of writing the first-person narrative, which is very courageous. There are not many books that immediately come to mind that are written in the first person – Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ is one that came to me after some thought – and while it is a powerful tool in immediately engaging the reader, the writer also risks losing his attention equally fast if he is not crystal clear with his thoughts, because there is no opportunity to clarify what he means. It’s like being in a class where the professor does not allow you to ask questions, even if you don’t quite get bits of the lesson. In this story, the one-way conversation is between Changez (pronounced ‘Chun-gays’, the Urdu word for Genghis), a young Princeton-educated Pakistani who chooses to return to his home country following the turmoil that he is thrown into after the World Trade Center bombings in New York, and a nameless, voiceless American visitor, as they sit in a restaurant in Lahore one evening.

Changez, the product of a once-rich Lahori family that enjoyed elite status in the city, sails across the seas to study at Princeton University in the US. He is the beneficiary of a scholarship – but he tries to hide this from his fellow schoolmates as he feels it betrays the fact that he once used to belong to their class – a social class that can afford to pay their fees at the elite university they attend. He is at the end of his four-year undergraduate degree in 2001 when he begins his story, and goes on a trip with a group of friends to Greece before he starts his first job with Underwood Samson in New York, an extremely competitive valuation firm that he is fortunate to be selected to join. During the trip, he falls in love with Erica, a fellow Princetonian and a budding writer with problems of her own. As New York comes together in the aftermath of 9/11, Changez is forced to face the doubts that lurk in his mind over the happenings in his home country and the increasing possibility of a war with India, as well as the inaction of the US with respect to Pakistan. He finally throws up all he wanted – his well-paying job, the security and status it offered, and returns to Pakistan, even as he is not wholly convinced that what he is doing is right.

The book is not so much a novel as a novella – there is an interesting reference to Erica’s writing in the story which is an accurate reflection of this book itself, of how the novella is a ‘platypus of a beast’ – and ultimately this was perhaps its undoing. With a little more exploration of the theme – the book clocks in at just 184 pages – Changez’ character could have been developed better, and that would have made for a smoother flow of the story. All along, all we see is the confusion in Changez’ mind. He truly is constantly reluctant, as the book’s title asserts. But his evolution into a so-called fundamentalist is less evident. Given the political atmosphere in the US, it is understandable why he felt the eyes of suspicion, being a brown-skinned South Asian. But why did he suddenly feel pushed to make his ethnicity so evident – going so far as to grow a beard, and invite attention? There wasn’t much explained about Changez’ views on Afghanistan and American intervention there, but he was clearly against India and lack of American intervention there – so where exactly was his anger against the US coming from?

On the positive side, Changez’ romance with Erica was sensitively written and that bit of the story, not what one would typically expect. Hamid’s knowledge of the corporate world also comes in handy when he writes about Changez’ experience at Underwood Samson (Hamid worked at McKinsey & Company in New York for a while, after obtaining degrees from Princeton and then Harvard). All in all, ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ is a book that is worth a read, but that will in all likelihood leave you with unanswered questions in your mind when you finish.

A Thousand Splendid Suns - A Review

I'm reproducing here my review of 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' that I wrote for Hafta Mag last week:

Right from the beginning, Khaled Hosseini had something to live up to. When you author a first book as critically acclaimed and widely read as ‘The Kite Runner’, you know expectations will be running high for the book that follows in its wake. With ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’, Hosseini has successfully managed to meet those expectations. Judging by the fact that apart from the political setting of Afghanistan there is not much else common with ‘The Kite Runner’ and Hosseini has still managed to weave an extremely compelling tale, I would even say that it surpasses those expectations.

Hosseini has stuck to a backdrop that he knows well, and that also worked well for him in ‘The Kite Runner’. As the story moves across generations, Afghanistan is painted as a country with a once-rich past which starts disintegrating rapidly as the rule of power moves from the Soviets to the Mujahideen, the Taliban and finally the US-backed government with Hamid Karzai at the helm. You feel for the innocent civilian who is forced to bear the brunt of each attack as the wars between different factions progress, as his life falls apart with his loved ones dropping by the wayside or his home and possessions being destroyed in the shelling. But this is not the story of just any innocent civilian, though the protagonists are very much innocent themselves. In that respect, just as ‘The Kite Runner’ was primarily told through the eyes of males, this story is about women, whose condition can be argued to have been much the worse of the two. One reading of the rules of the Taliban for women in Afghanistan makes you grasp this reality at once – and these are only selected lines:

You will not, under any circumstances, show your face. You will cover with burqa when outside. If you do not, you will be severely beaten.

You will not wear charming clothes.

You will not speak unless spoken to.

You will not make eye contact with men.

You will not laugh in public. If you do, you will be beaten.

You will not paint your nails. If you do, you will lose a finger.

Girls are forbidden from attending school. All schools ofr girls will be closed immediately.

Women are forbidden from working.

If you are found guilty of adultery, you will be stoned to death.

Listen. Listen well. Obey.

And so, this is the story of two remarkably strong women, Mariam and Laila, born about nineteen years apart, and the strange kinship they come to share after being thrown together under extenuating circumstances. As we are taken through their initial years – Mariam first, then Laila, we realise that their pasts could not be more different. Education, the harbinger of intellectual curiosity and freedom, is the key distinguisher, with the city-bred Laila actively encouraged to speak her mind by her progressive parents, and Mariam not allowed to be educated at all, coming as she does from rural Herat. When their stories converge and they finally meet each other, the bitter, lonely Mariam is understandably antagonistic towards the much younger Laila, unaware of all that she has been through. But they begin to realise that as women, they share more than just their ill-tempered, scheming husband Rasheed, whom they are both pushed into marriage with as teens. The increasingly bloody wars have left both women without family and friends, and as Rasheed’s rule of tyranny within the household begins to tell on them both at the same time as the Taliban takes over Afghanistan with their impossible rules, Mariam finds a strength she never had, and Laila a saviour.

Khaled Hosseini’s language is tellingly lyrical as he depicts the Afghanistan of yore (‘vines pregnant with plump grapes’), but as the novel moves forward it is his story-telling abilities which carry the book through. Once I started reading it, I could not put it down till I reached the last page, and then to ruminate over what it must be like to be an Afghan woman today. This is after all fiction and therefore, in itself, part of the book’s success – if I was pushed to think about the issue because of a fictional story, then there must be others who will be too. And for that, Hosseini must be applauded.