Never has the rugged northeast corner of India appeared as it does in Desai’s gorgeous, vivid prose, which evoke a land perpetually shrouded in wet, moldering fog, perched precariously at the feet of the craggy snow-capped peaks of the Nepalese Himalayas. In a rotting colonial villa in the border town of Kalimpong, teenage Sai lives with her grandfather—a retired judge whose student days in London left him soured with hatred for the backwardness of his own race—their dog, and their cook. It is a dull existence for Sai, until first a budding romance with her math tutor, and then ominous stirrings of rebellion from the ethnic Nepalese in the area arrive to turn her sleepy world on its head. In a parallel story, which Desai spins with just as much care and imagination as the principal one, the cook’s son struggles to make ends meet in New York City, where he works thankless hours as a waiter and dreams of the day he will return to Kalimpong.
Book Review by Anna Ziajka
