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.