Someone Else's Garden

December 13, 2010
In Rai's first novel, a young rural Indian woman named Mamta is given in marriage to a man so vile that he sells her kidney to buy prostitutes and fund his gambling. When Mamta learns that he plans to sell her other kidney, killing her, she flees to her home village, where her indentured father and brother help her escape to a city in central India. Once there, she finds her way and sends money to her mother, who, realizing that Mamta has left her husband, disowns her. Her brother-in-law, Lokend, arrives in the city to run for office and is badly attacked by his rival's aide, prompting Mamta to care for him. They fall in love and start a new life, bringing them back to their village, families, and a more humane existence. Though beautifully written, the story of Mamta is overwhelmed by cruelty and brutality; details on Mamta's late reconciliation with her mother and the sanctuary that the two create for abused women are but cursorily addressed. Despite the depth of feeling and the final note of redemption, many readers will find Rai's debut relentlessly bleak.

December 1, 2010

Rai's novel takes readers to an India where women are little more than a commodity and burden and life is a daily struggle.

Mamta is old to be marrying. At 20, with a disfiguring facial birthmark, she has known nothing but deprivation and scorn her entire life. Her father hates her so much that once she became betrothed, he ordered her mother to feed her only enough to keep her alive. Her conception brings back only pain and bitter memories to her mother. Mamta remembers nothing but deep poverty in the rural village where she has lived since birth. But all of that changes for her, or at least she hopes it will change, when she is finally to be married. In her part of India, where most girls are symbolically wed at age 8 and taken to the marriage bed as soon as they start menstruating, Mamta is an oddity. She has dreamt about the day her prince will come for her on a fine horse, but when he does show up, he is anything but a prince. Like the other men in her life, her new husband is no bargain. When Mamta dons her red wedding dress for the ceremony, she discovers she has traded one terrible life for another. Soon, she is given a choice and she makes it, but that decision only haunts her over the coming years. Rai, a journalist, writes with deep understanding of the poverty and pain of women whose lives are literally at the mercy of men. Although she is skilled, she also tends to be longwinded and her story meanders, leaving the reader wondering what one passage has to do with other. She has also populated her tale with a dizzying amount of characters: Readers will have to stay on their toes to sort them out.

Relentlessly depressing and grim, Rai's book offers an array of unlikable characters against a backdrop that would make Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm grab a bottle of antidepressants.

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February 1, 2011
Lata Bai gives birth to her seventh child in a field outside her small hut in the village of Gopalpur, India, while her eldest daughter, Mamta, prepares for her impending arranged marriage. Mamtas father, Seeta Ram, cannot wait to be rid of her. She is, after all, a girl, whom he has (barely) fed and housed, and someone elses garden, whom he no longer wants to water. Mamta has great hopes for a loving marriage in which she will have a place of her own. But when Mamta can no longer stand her husbands cruelty, she runs away to the city, where she attempts to create her own true life. In the manner of Rohinton Mistrys A Fine Balance (1996), this is a multigenerational tale of Indian life. It is a detailed examination of Indian philosophy and values, refracted through the eyes of a young woman who attempts to break away from long-established attitudes toward women. It is also a universal story of good-versus-evil and tradition-versus-modernity as well as of the redemptive power of belief.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)