Listening Now

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In India as elsewhere, the closest families often hide the most painful secrets, betrayals and hostilities. Appachana's (Incantations and Other Stories) achievement in this intensely lyrical, if overwritten, first novel is to expose and explore these darker family matters in their peculiarly Indian incarnations with insight and candor. A college teacher in New Delhi, careworn Padma tells her sensitive, fantasy-prone daughter, Mallika, that the girl's father died in a car accident just before her birth. The truththat Mallika is the product of a love affair destroyed by misunderstanding and parental meddling comes out through flashbacks and the gossip of various characters, including Padma's estranged, widowed mother and unhappily married sister. The return of Padma's lover, after 13 years, to beg forgiveness from her and from the daughter he never knew, gives the story dramatic power. Appachana, who won a NEA fellowship based on an excerpt of this novel, invests nearly all her characters with secrets, abortions, love affairs, wife-beating, sexual molestation, terminal illness, explosive resentments that gradually come to light through roundabout conversations as believable, in their indirection, as the wounds they lay bare. (Mar.)

Anderson Tepper

Blending emotional depth with elements of melodrama reminiscent of popular Indian films, Appachana succeeds in drawing us deep into this complex vision of shattered happiness and withered dreams. At the same time, she convincingly portrays the strains on women in modern India -- confined by their extended families, diminished and betrayed by the men they look to for security. -- Anderson Tepper, New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

A flawed if earnest first novel explores life among a close- knit group of Indian women. India-born Arizona resident Appachana addresses issues of guilt and deception through a variety of narrators—narrators who confess their own ploys, machinations, well-earned guilts, feints, and ruses. But in spite of such seeming variety, a number of factors blunt the book's capacity for surprise: a too-leisurely pace, the sometimes overwhelmingly detailed descriptions, and the author's anticlimactic expositions of mounting revelations. The story centers on a love affair that begins at college when ardently independent-minded Padma falls for Karan, a friend of her older brother. Defying convention, the two become lovers, and Karan promises to marry Padma as soon as he has won their respective parents' permission. He returns to his native city, and she goes home to await his word. There, she learns she's pregnant, and her father rejects her; her letters to Karan go mysteriously unanswered. Meanwhile, her mother and older sister Shanta visit Karan's family, discovering that he's since married another woman. They curse the family and move on. Eventually, in Delhi, Padma comes to pass herself off as a widow whose husband was killed just before their daughter Mallika was born. Three women neighbors become Padma's friends and protectors; Mallika grows up idealizing her "dead" father; and Padma, sadly, is unable to forget him. Karan's own marriage remains barren. Only later does he learn that his mother has hidden Padma's letters to him all along. As the deceptions intensify and unravel, with some unexpected twists and turns, Padma and Karan meet again, but (surprise) they've irrevocably changed,and can only mourn their lost selves. A vividly rendered Indian setting, intelligent glimpses of forbidden emotions—and passion lost in an overlong telling.