Book of the Month: In the Convent of Little Flowers, by Indu Sandaresan
In the wake of the outrageous terrorist attacks on Mumbai, our heart goes out to India, setting for this month's Trip Lit journey. The first time I visited India, I flew straight from six months in order-obsessed Japan into the chaos of Calcutta. Had that been my only stop, I might forever think of India as simply a place of blinding dust, deafening cacophony, and soul-shocking poverty. Happily, I ventured on, from mountain-crisp Darjeeling in the north to palmy Trivandrum in the south, via exquisite Agra, holy Aurangabad, and bountiful Bombay. By the end of three weeks, I had begun to build a context to understand Calcutta and the rest of that country's exhausting, exhilarating kaleidoscope. And I had learned that the fundamental challengeof travel in India is understanding the contradiction-encompassing Indian worldview.
In this quest, Indu Sundaresan's moving collection of short stories, In the Convent of Little Flowers, is an illuminating guide. Sundaresan is well known for her best-selling historical novels, The Twentieth Wife, The Feast of Roses, and The Splendor of Silence, but in her new book she turns her revealing prose on the contorted relationship of past and present in 21st-century India.
In "The Faithful Wife," a big-city journalist travels to his rural roots to witness and intervene in the community-sanctioned sati—immolation on a deceased husband's funeral pyre—of a 12-year-old widow. "Fire" portrays how a young woman's tradition-bound family reacts with archaic brutality when she tries to run away with her Muslim boyfriend. "The Most Unwanted" captures the conflicting feelings of a father whose unmarried daughter brings her baby boy into his household.
These stories are portals into the Indian soul, revealing the breaches and the bonds that delineate the relationship between rural and urban India, and the intricate play of ancient stricture and modern striving in contemporary life. Many of Sundaresan's main characters break with tradition in the search for self-fulfillment. The most striking example of this is in "The Hunger," the last story in the book and my favorite, about a middle-aged married woman who discovers herself—and the courage to liberate that self —through a chance meeting with the 15-years-younger wife of a junior executive in her husband's company.
Born and raised in India but now living in the United States, Sundaresan evokes her native country's social stresses with an unflinching eye and a critical mind. The stories within these pages are brilliant, penetrating, painful, disturbing, and compelling, shards of a much larger and mesmerizing mosaic—just like travel in India.
