A frequent mistake many in the West make about distant countries
like India is that they represent homogenous cultures. In Britain, for example,
many natives wouldn’t have a clue as to whether a brown skinned person is from
India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. It is another matter that the aforementioned
three countries used to be one country until sixty years ago, and ruled by the
British for almost two hundred years. Undivided India was partitioned into the
Hindu majority India and Muslim majority Pakistan in 1947, when the British
rule came to an end; later, Pakistan, following a war between India and
Pakistan, in 1971, was divided into Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The partition of India forms one of the strands of Monica
Pradhan’s 2007 debut (and, to my knowledge, only) novel, the suggestively
titled The Hindi-Bindi Club.
I first noticed The Hindi-Bindi Club two years
after it was published, prominently displayed in the about-to-go-bust Border’s
Book store. There was a glowing blurb from the
Observer which described the novel as a ‘cracking . . . and charming tale.’
On the back-cover was a summary of the noel which purported to tell the stories
of two generations of Indian women, living in America. That sounded a bit like
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck club. Having recently read The Joy Luck Club (which
I had liked) I made a mental note to read The Hindi-Bindi Club (I am always
willing to read ‘cracking and charming tales’) one of these days, preferably
after I had forgotten The Joy Luck Club. In due course I
did forget The Joy Luck Club. But I forgot about The Hindi-Bindi Club,
too. Until last week, when I spotted it in the second-hand book-shop I have
taken to frequenting in the past few months. (The old man who runs the
book-shop is knowledgeable and likes to chat, and his shop-assistant is not
entirely unattractive.) It cost only a couple of quid and I bought it. I
finished reading the novel in a couple of sittings, which—I have no hesitation
in suggesting this—suggests that the novel is a very easy read.
The Hindi-Bindi Club runs a fine line between genre
fiction (Chick Lit) and literary fiction that tells the story of the immigrant
experience in America (Indian, this time round) and the associated issues
(clash of cultures, values, and the balancing acts that the immigrant parents
as well as their ‘American’ children have to make all the time etcetera.) I am
inclining towards The Hindi-Bindi Club being a Chick Lit. Not that it bothers me.
It has all the positive attributes that I have come to associate with chick Lit.
The Hindi-Bindi Club tells the stories of three Indian
women, who become friends in America. The women come from very different parts
of India; indeed one of them, Saroj Chawla, comes from Lahore, which is in
current day Pakistan. Chawla’s Hindu family escapes to India during the partition,
after losing all its wealth (and the lives of a few family members). While the
family succeeds in India, Saroj continues to hanker (in her mind) after her
idyllic childhood in Lahore, before she was violently uprooted. She has never
had a sense of belonging, she says, in India. The other two women, Uma and
Meenal, come from Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Bombay (now Mumbai) respectively.
The three women’s sub-cultures, in India, have about as much commonality
amongst them as the Brits have with the Portuguese Culture. (Going on a drunken
rampage through the city centres on Friday nights is frowned upon in the
Portuguese culture.) Yet the three women have become friends in America by dint
of the following factors. (1) They all belong to the Indian Diaspora, which,
when they first arrived in America, was small. (2) They live in the same area.
(3) They are all housewives whose husbands hold down White-Collar jobs and,
over the years, have become prosperous by hard work. Of the three Uma has shown
herself to be a rebel by marrying a Phirangi
(which, the novel informs you, is an Indian word for a white foreigner). Uma’s
husband is an Irish American, and by marrying him she has incurred life-long
enmity of her father who, back in Kolkata, refuses to forgive her for bringing
on shame to the family, a grudge he takes to his death. (The Indians in the
novel reveal interesting race prejudices; it would appear that Indians of
certain generation heartily disapprove of Indians marrying whites. If an Indian
does marry a non-Indian, it is a calamity. They couch their concerns in
cultural terms and the difficulties in adjusting to living with someone from
another culture, but, you can’t help feeling that, underneath it all, is the
belief that only a ‘good Hindu spouse’ would do, and everyone else is inferior.
Later in the novel, Meenal’s husband, who is a surgeon, cuts off their
daughter—also a doctor and therefore, one would assume, more than capable of
making up her own mind—completely when she marries a white Rock musician. When
the daughter’s marriage fails because of husband’s infidelity, the father’s
first response is ‘I told you so.’ I wonder how representative the views of some
of the characters in this novel are of the real Indians. I once heard the
author Louis de Bernieres say in a literary programme (I forget the context)
that the only system more labyrinthine and convoluted than the British class
system was the Indian caste system; so complex was the caste system that—Bernieres
hazarded a guess—even the Indians probably did not understand it fully.
Pradhan’s novel does not touch upon this subject at all, perhaps because
Pradhan, a second generation Indian in America, does not understand it herself
(if one follows Bernieres’s hypothesis).)
The three women—Meenal, Uma and
Saroj—are close friends, which means that their daughters, when they are
growing up, are forced to spend extended periods in one another’s company, as
their mothers host, along with other Indian women in the area, gatherings which
the daughters label as the Hindi-Bindi Club. (Bindi, Pradhan helpfully informs
us, is an Indian word for dot, which traditional Indian women wear on their
foreheads. Hindi is a language, not to be mistaken for Hindu, which, we are told,
is a ‘religion/way of life’.)
The three daughters—Kiran, Preity and Rani—are the younger
generation of Indian women in the novel with their own narratives.
None of the women is lacking in drama in her life. Saroj,
outwardly happily married to her husband—she has no intentions of leaving him—,
who is no Don Juan (‘A few thrusts and the party is over’), is secretly having an
affair with another Indian man, on whom she had had a crush as a teenager in India
before her marriage, and who, conveniently, is also settled in America, making
a fortune). Her husband, Sandeep, is a flirt and never loses an opportunity to
flirt with Meenal in any function. Meenal has a secret crush on Patric
McGuiness, Uma’s husband, and suspects that her surgeon husband, Yash, might
have had flings with work-colleagues although she has no proof. The only
secret-free marriage amongst these three, it would appear, is between Uma and the
phirangi. Meenal, when the novel
opens, is recovering from a double mastectomy following breast cancer. Meenal’s
close brush with death has opened the doors of her minds to let in all manner
of Eastern philosophies which she believes has brought her closer to God and
made a better person. Uma might be happily married, but she has her own demons
to conquer, such as her mother’s suicide when Uma was young. The dead mother,
it turns out, was an amateur writer and has left behind her musings on life, in
Bengali, in tablets, which are distributed amongst Uma’s five sisters. Uma’s
plan is to make an anthology of her mother’s writings, but some of the sisters
are reluctant to part with their inheritance.
Now to younger generation of Indian women. They are all married to
white American men. Although the marriage of one, Meenal’s headstrong daughter,
Kiran, has ended badly, the other two are happily married. One of them (I
forget which one) is a rocket scientist (I mean an actual rocket scientist) but has discovered the inner artist in
her. Another one suffers from clinical depression—it might be the rocket
scientist who is clinically depressed; I really can’t be sure; there are so
many dramatic things happening in the lives of these women that it is difficult
to keep tracks. One other—probably Preity Chawla, Saroj’s daughter— used to be
a secret bulimic in her younger years and, once, as a teenager, while in India
on a holiday with her parents, had a crush on a Muslim boy before her mother
came down more heavily on her than a Japanese sumo wrestling champion on his
opponent. Now in her thirties, Preity is plagued with a desire to trace this
boy, a desire that her alarmed mother warns her, would bring nothing but
trouble. Kiran, the headstrong doctor, announces that she is not averse to the
idea of a semi-arranged marriage, which sends her aunties from the Hindi-Bindi
Club into a kind of frenzy American psychiatrists would have no hesitation in
diagnosing as a manic episode, as per the DSM criteria. Names of all sorts of
single / divorced Indian boys from ‘good families’ are suggested, but it does
not work out as either Kiran does not like them, or they don’t connect with
her. No marks for guessing that Kiran finally settles for another white
American boy (cue for her father to throw an apoplectic fit), but there is a twist.
This American man is living as a paying guest in Pune, India, where Kiran’s
grandparents live, and is learning Marathi, the mother-tongue of Kiran’s
family. What are the chances of that happening, eh?
As this saccharine-sweet novel comes to an end, Kiran is getting
married in Pune, in the traditional Hindu ceremony in the morning and a
Christian one in the evening; all the protagonists have sorted out their
problems neatly (even Kiran’s father, under immense pressure from his family,
gives his blessings, although it could have been more effusive than ‘It’s your
life; do what you want’); and Kiran is dancing merrily into the sunset. It all
ends happily.
Pradhan certainly knows how to weave a story; the prose flows
easily, with sprinkling of witty observations and remarks at regular intervals,
which bring a smile to your face.
There are a fair number of main characters (a total of six), most
of them painted in broad brush strokes. It is not surprising that the character
that lingers the longest in your mind when you finish the novel is Meenal, who
is the least dramatic of the lot. Pradhan has obviously developed the character
of Meenal with a lot of love and care. By comparison, there is a sense of
incompleteness to other members of the Hindi-Bindi Club.
Pradhan introduces big themes in the novel, but therein also lies
a problem. There are more big themes than the novel can justice to. The tragedy
of partition of India might have been a subject for a novel in its own right;
here it forms the background of one of the protagonists (who, incidentally, has
other interesting things happening in her life) and you are left with the
feeling that this strand has not been exploited to its full potential. The
family tragedy lurking in Uma’s background, similarly, remains just one of many
dramatic events in the novel and the author perhaps has missed a trick in not exploring
it further. Uma’s search for her mother’s ‘tablets’ peters into nothing of
significance, as if the author lost her interest in this strand of the novel.
The Hindi-Bindi Club is full of interesting titbits
about Indian / Hindu customs. Indeed, at times, the novel reads almost like
‘Introduction to Indian Culture and Subcultures’, which suggests that the novel
is aimed primarily at Western readers who, Pradhan must have a reason to
believe (probably not without reason), are largely clueless about India and its
culture. Most of the time it works; occasionally, though, it drags a bit, such
as the overlong last section describing Kiran’s marriage to the
Marathi-speaking American for Texas that includes half a page description (I
kid you not) how a sari is worn. Apparently wearing a modern Indian sari is more
than just draping a several feet long piece of cloth around your body; it is
almost a science and requires a technique not easy to master; supreme hand
control is essential, and if, like mine, spatial orientation is not your strong
point, you are in serious trouble.
Pradhan probably also has an interest in Indian cuisine. At the
end of each chapter are recipes of Indian dishes (with list of ingredients
longer than M1), allegedly signature dishes of some or more of the characters
in the novel. These recipes are not weaved into the narrative (for example, as
in Anthony Capella’s Food of Love) and remain interesting
add-ons. If you are not particularly interested in how to make a ‘chapaati’ or
a stew of ‘Moong Daal’, you can skip the pages; you will miss nothing. (The
recipes are delicious, though; I tried the Goan Shrimp Curry and it was yummy.)
The Hindi-Bindi Club is a novelistic version of a
feel-good movie. It will not fail to cheer you up if you are feeling gloomy. On
a rainy day, make yourself a hot cup of coco, wrap yourself in a cosy blanket
(or a sari, if you are (a) competent and (b) a woman or identify yourself as
one) and lose yourself in the world of Meenal, Saroj, Uma, Kiran, Preity, and
Rani.
