Banerji's tapestry of love
Writing on Skin by Sara Banerji Black Swan $102 DO Indian women see their menfolk as gods? No more so than the rest of us, you can be sure, but then the recognition of divinity in the Indian male seems to be the province of the non-Indian female.
Take Han Suyin. In her early, defiantly revealing novel The Mountain Is Young the Eurasian author who now concerns herself so proprietorially with China, unveiled the great romance of her life under the guise of fiction.
How ecstatically Han wrote of that sinuous Indian lover. How cruelly she depicted the heroine's English husband, all sweating pinkness and fumbling sexual incompetence.
Now from British novelist Sara Banerji comes a startlingly similar trio: Hermione, also married to a large, florid Englishman and desperately in love with a sleek exponent of the Kama Sutra - except that Hermione is 70 and long past the passions of youth. Or is she? As Hermione surveys the unlovely garden of the Oxfordshire retreat to which she and husband Hugh have retired after a lifetime in India, the creaking of her bones reminds her that she has grown old without getting the one thing she most wanted.
Yudhishthira. Even now, the very name pierces Hermione with longing. Had her dark enchanter not disappeared at the crucial moment, she would have given up everything for him, even her three young sons.
He became a yogi, a holy man, then - or so she heard - died in violence at the hands of the villagers he tried to save. For years, Hermione has lived with that bitter knowledge, then without warning, Hugh is taken from her and a fresh torment begins. Poor Hugh. How he adored her, despite her betrayals and eccentricities. And how ironic that with widowhood, she finally realises how much he meant to her.
Hermione's sons and daughter Unity now have lives of their own, so what is left? Only India, land of her birth and possibly some of her genes if what her socialite mother once divulged in an unguarded moment was true.
As the mourners depart - all that expensive food gone to waste - Hermione wonders whether she should try to rediscover the magic of the past. Then a terrible violation occurs and her mind is made up.
What begins in the garden planted by the meticulous Gerald and Slug the skinhead - the chief gardener always sartorially perfect in his pin-striped suit; his grubby assistant equally identifiable by the words ''Never Grow Old'' tattooed on his forehead - blossoms into an extraordinary adventure as Hermione, dressed for action in a cerise tracksuit, heads East.
Not a moment is squandered as Banerji explores past and present with a deftness that illuminates, often brilliantly, her tapestry of people and places. The India she knows so well through her own marriage almost seeps from the pages in all its extravagant beauty and squalor. Even her bit players - Slug's glue-sniffing mates, the dreadful Rosie Ramsay with her peroxided hair and galloping Anglophilia - are evoked with wicked accuracy.
In their midst is Hermione, still as headstrong as ever. Her India may have vanished along with the rajahs and British planters, tiffins and pukka tiger shoots, yet something draws her inexorably to a village famed for its langra mangoes. The village where, in a tall, too-thin house, Hermione lost her heart.
Sara Banerji has written a wonderful love story. It is told with honesty, beguiling humour and not a shred of sentimentality.
