Feb 15, 2012 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS Thrity Umrigar
Harper
ISBN 978-0061938344
308 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Frances Itani, who latest novel, "Requiem," will be published in the United States in August.
In her previous and highly successful novel, "The Space Between Us," Thrity Umrigar examined how two women of different backgrounds in India were capable of carrying on in the face of despair. Her latest novel, "The World We Found," is set in India and the United States. It examines choices made by a group of friends and the consequences that must be borne because of each choice.
Four young women - Armaiti, Laleh, Kavita and Nishta, bound by friendship and idealism - were university students in Bombay during the late 1970s. The novel starts about 30 years later but resonates against memories of this youthful past, shared during a period of political and social upheaval in India. It had been a time when the four friends, all from different family backgrounds, had faced the world with optimism and marched into what they thought would be a future improved by their ideals and well-meaning actions.
Now, each of the women is nearing 50. Armaiti, the only one of the four who lives in the United States, learns that she has a brain tumor and six months, at most, to live. The narrative is set in motion by her wish to see her three closest friends before she dies.
But time and circumstance have separated their lives in unexpected ways. Nishta, a Hindu woman who married a Muslim, has not been heard from in many years. In Bombay, Laleh and Kavita set out to find her so that she can be told about Armaiti's illness and invited to go with them to the United States.
They don't know that after the Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay in 1992-93, Nishta and her husband left their residential area and moved to a Muslim part of the city where their circumstances have become strained and difficult. Nishta has had to adopt a Muslim name and is forbidden to communicate with her former friends. This story takes over the narrative and provides the intrigue and tension of the latter half of the novel.
Umrigar is skilled at intertwining the compelling stories of her characters within the setting of political and religious forces that dominate present-day India. Who has the power? Who has the money? The lives of these women and their partners again intersect, but questions and revelations arise. Each is forced to examine some aspect of loyalty, of guilt, of shame, of forgiveness and love.
"What's the clarifying principle here?" Kavita asks her friends. "Remember how we used to try and solve all political arguments by asking that question? It's amazing how we were ever stupid enough to think there was a single answer. Because there isn't one. What happened? Life happened. In all its banality, brutality, cruelty, unfairness. But also in its beauty, pleasures, and delights. Life happened.'"
Indeed, the clarifying principle that was once at the core of their discussions has become murky. The past has not, after all, been "beaten down, like cotton stuffed inside a mattress." The past will be carried within them, and they must all be responsible for decisions they are about to make. The situation becomes more frightening and the moral questions more complex as the story reaches its thrilling climax.
It takes courage to explore the idealism and hopes of youth and to compare these with the realities of lives lived three decades later. What has been compromised? What has been gained or lost? And the always unanswerable question: What might have happened if other choices had been made?
Umrigar handles these important themes with expertise and without judgment. A storyteller through and through, she ensures that her characters face up to the costs and consequences created by their choices, right or wrong, principled or unprincipled. As Laleh observes: "I'm saying that it all matters. Everything matters. Our virtues (BEGIN ITAL)and our sins."
Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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