A young woman struggles through a morass of unsuitable relationships, involving betrayal, danger and heartbreak, in order to find her cultural identity. Her journey takes her from India to Britain to American and back to India. Is she destined to live her life on the fringes of the communities where she grew up? Or will she finally come to terms with who she is?
The year 1999 is drawing to a close and the advent of the new millennium harbours danger, even in Oxford, that most English of cities, where a naïve but spirited Anglo-Indian student sets out on a physical and emotional quest to reassert her British identity. She is determined to find her estranged Welsh father and to escape the prospect of a safe but passionless arranged marriage in India.
Her turbulent journey takes her to Germany, Wales, New York, San Fransisco and finally back to India via a morass of perilous affiliations, betrayal and heartbreak before coming to a momentous conclusion.
Excerpt
Desire, according to my mother, at least in the context of sex, was a false friend, seriously to be avoided. Desire had brought my parents together and desire had driven them apart. Of course, my mother never said as much, because she never talked about my father. But I had long ago learnt to read between the lines of my mother’s hang-ups. The more she railed against desire, the more determined I was to escape the life she and my grandmother had planned for me: a safe life; a calculated life; a life without pain; a passionless life.
Well, I’d escaped all right, but to what, I wondered, as I picked at the julienne carrots and baby potatoes on my plate. Could things get any worse? Around me in the oak-panelled dining hall, the sounds of conversation and cutlery blurred into a background of white noise, against which the truth invaded me, uninvited and unwelcome. I was lonely.
Two weeks earlier I’d arrived in Oxford bursting with hope and enthusiasm. I was eighteen, poised on the edge of the third millennium. Oxford would be my home for the next three years, and three years is forever, when you are young. I’d come to study history, but that was of minor importance. Freedom called and with it countless pleasures, taboo in the land of the Kama Sutra, but tasted in tantalising paperbacks from Bangalore’s overflowing bookshops on Mahatma Gandhi Road. I was hungering for a relationship of my own choosing. And a link with my father’s land. As I’d watched the red soil of India fade into a memory, I’d wiped away tears of excitement and anticipation, shrugging off the idea that they might also be tears of parting grief. I’d laughed when I recalled Amma’s warning. Remember: India is your home. It has been your home since you were ten. You belong here, not in Europe. You will never be a child of the West. I was convinced that my mother was wrong, as always. The UK was to restore my heritage, to change me back into Sara Davis. When I stepped off the plane at Heathrow I had no doubts. I had returned from exile.
Like a liberated prisoner, at first I’d feasted on the sights, sounds and smells of my newfound independence. No Grandmother around to threaten me with marriage. No Auntie Bina to tell me to go to temple. No cousin Sanjeev to tease me about boys. No Uncle Girish to lecture me on the need to work instead of play. No Amma to fill me with her complexes and fears. I could do whatever I wanted. But it hadn’t taken long after my optimistic arrival, for reality to paint a different picture of university life.
Professional Reviews
Local Author (Oxford Times)
Irene Black, who has an MA in South Indian art, has set her second novel Darshan (Goldenford, £8.99) in Oxford, Wales and Bangalore.
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