Book Review: The Mango Season

I happened to find this novel by Amulya Malladi in my sister's cupboard when I was looking for something else, and picked it up questioningly: Hey... since when did she read, especially about desi angst? But it looked like good light travel reading for Calcutta, some arranged marriage, some mango fascination, some American- returned cultural confusion- stuff Ive definitely been through.

(Aha!!! I was wondering why the book had sounded so familiar when I came across this Hilarious Satire on Mundane Desi fiction!) Do read it it's a riot! (though the Indian cover only had a mango hanging off a tree, with the Charminar on the bottom right-hand corner and a farmer with a bullock card on the bottom left - even more fallacious cliches!)

So yes, the book is about just that - a 20-something girl returning home after engineering and a job in Silicon Valley, armed with an American boyfriend, to a traditional South Indian homestead in Hyderabad, filled with mango pickle and bickering female relatives, not to mention an autocratic patriarch with cowering sons and silently rebellious daughters-in-law - some hints of female foeticide, bloodline purity through insistent endogamy, and the politics of relativity in conjugal matches. About the guilt she feels about defying the persons, traditions and 'values' she has been brought up with, her conflicting relationship with her mother and closeness to her male relations, her single and derided aunt, and how she leads a female mutiny of sorts with her new-found and oft-exercised impulsive frankness and passion for justice. How she is tricked into an arranged marriage with a similarly-situated ideal boy rather lamely named "Adarsh" (funny her protagonist's name is Priya, just as she is the beloved of the household, of sorts). Kinda the story of the lives of many American-returned women, who discover the freshness of little freedoms beyond the four walls of their relatively provincial Indian lives, but whose stories lack the nice redemption Priya gets in the end.

But really, how much more could the author pander to Western tastes! I mean, cool, the West is so hungup on curry and Tandoori chicken and naan, that it's nice to hear about a South Indian culture, but only in the metaphors of food, especially mangoes? And that too littered with recipes in a novel, though poorly themed daily meal format? Cliched tribulations, that spoke to me anyway, nevertheless, and quite a psyche at the end, one that made me laugh at my own mental prejudices.

Have you noticed? Once lovers cross the sexual boundaries and head towards matrimony, their communication becomes so staid, and banal... propah! BO-RING!

Conclusion: Adult fluff. Good for light reading, though no sex really involved. Only really enjoyable if you empathise, otherwise it may seem trite. Readable in a few hours.