The Reader Travels

My first review for The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge takes us to the three Indian states of Punjab, West Bengal and Maharashtra, with a brief trip to the beach in Goa.

Monica Pradhan’s The Hindi Bindi Club shares some history, customs and flavors from the various parts of India, flashes of color floating in the melting pot of America. The recipes made my mouth water, and the cultural references were educational. But overall, the characters and their stories lacked substance and seemed only to stand as a vehicle for the research performed by the author.

It’s the story of three young American women who don’t like each other very much, but their mothers are best friends, sharing a homeland in common. Even though the mothers are all from India, they come from different states, each with its own customs and language.

The mothers were halfway interesting, and the best parts of the book involved the one named Saroj Chawla, a spunky business woman born in the town of Lahore which became part of Pakistan when the borders were drawn in the 1940s. Her family was uprooted, and her struggle with animosity toward Muslims and the memory of her childhood Muslim friend makes for a real and sympathetic story.

I would have liked to see Saroj’s story in more detail, for all the others were dull, cliché tales of modern Americans shooting e-mails and calling each other on their cell phones, embracing pharmaceuticals and online dating. I suppose you might consider that Monica Pradhan was trying to make it a point that regardless of their Indian origins, these people lead ordinary American lives, but I think she might have taken that concept a little too far.

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» For an Indian American book I actually liked see Present Tension from the November ‘06 archives.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 5:53 pm and is filed under India, competetive reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.