Goddess of Fire

March 29, 1999
Sharmila Sen, Chicago-born graphic artist and aerobics instructor, is a "thoroughly modern" 32-year-old woman who's looking for lasting love and a way to get in touch with her Indian heritage. Reeling from a series of short, broken romances, Sharmila counterintuitively tries to achieve both goals with one move: bowing to her concerned, traditional Indian mother's wishes, Sharmila agrees to an arranged marriage. Soon, New Delhi electronics executive Raj Khosla, whom she has never met, is chosen as her fiance, and Sharmila moves to India, a country she vaguely remembers from a single childhood trip. The premise of Indian-born Seattle novelist (Shiva Dancing) Kirchner's amorous misadventure seems like a pretext for a witty dissection of some of India's anachronisms and rigidities, notably arranged marriage, male chauvinism and the stigmatization of lower-caste or "untouchable" persons. Sharmila, arriving in Delhi, tries hard to fall in love with Raj, even as she discovers that her exacting fiance, a stuffed shirt, travels constantly, beds other women and may be concealing a dark secret about the circumstances surrounding the death of his first wife. Fortunately, Sharmila comes to her senses when she discovers Raj in bed with the housemaid, and by then she's found genuine love with the Khoslas' chauffeur, honest, noble Prem, a well-educated "untouchable." But in one of the many improbable plot twists, Sharmila's mother destroys her plans to marry Prem, offending his pride with a $50,000 bribe to get lost. The novel bristles with postfeminist insights into "how women perpetuate their deplorable condition" in India, but more eerily describes how the families of the betrothed conspire to keep the ill-matched pair together despite their obvious discord. Though Kirchner's cautionary tale is sometimes smart, swift and funny, with rich dollops of local color, the story's unlikely trajectory makes it hard to muster much interest in Sharmila's romantic dilemma.

January 1, 2016
Kirchner's (Darjeeling, 2007) sweeping historical novel is set in seventeenth-century India and tells the story of Moorti, a teenage widow about to be martyred as a sati on her husband's funeral pyre. She is rescued by Job Charnock, a chief administrator for the English East India Company. Renamed Maria, the young woman becomes a cook at the company's estate in Cossimbazaar. But Maria craves more than servanthood and begins taking English lessons, hoping to become an interpreter for Charnock. Their mutual respect develops into love, and despite their class and racial differences, they marry. With Maria's vision and advice, Charnock founds the settlement that will eventually become Calcutta. Kirchner imagines the life of the strong and ambitious woman behind Charnock, an historical English trader, weaving in a great deal of historical and cultural background and detail to create this tale of barrier-crashing love. What actually shines the brightest is not the romance but rather Kirchner's rich portrayal of the Indians who toil for British colonialists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)