Twice Told Tales

'Tamarind Woman' by Anita Rau Badami

TAMARIND WOMAN
By Anita Rau Badami
Algonquin. 266 pp. $23.95

This is its author's first novel and, like most such, surely is strongly autobiographical. Anita Rau Badami, like Kamini Moorthy in "Tamarind Woman," is a native of India now living in Canada, and presumably the complicated relationship between Kamini and her mother, Saroja, reflects certain realities in the author's past. But beyond that, what is especially notable about "Tamarind Woman" is its near-total absence of first-person self-absorption. Badami is a mature writer, capable of engaging the reader in a story in which little happens and that moves at a leisurely pace.

Although "Tamarind Woman" is indeed the author's first novel, it is her second to be published in this country. "The Hero's Walk" appeared here a year ago and received a number of enthusiastic reviews, including one in this newspaper. Emboldened by this, Algonquin Books has now made "Tamarind Woman" available to American readers. Since it is a novel about a mother and her daughter, it may be pigeonholed as a "woman's book," but that would be a real pity, for it is -- or should be -- of interest to all readers.

In large measure, this is because it is at least as much a book about the universal habit of storytelling as it is about the misunderstandings that arise between a mother and daughter and the reconciliations that time and maturity effect. The storytelling that takes place here occurs at many levels and in many ways. Saroja, on a long train journey, regales her fellow passengers with stories and looks back on her strange marriage, unhappy yet in its way rewarding. Kamini, off at graduate school in Canada, remembers her childhood in India, telling herself stories and recalling those that were told to her by Linda Ayah, the "old witch" who had been her family's servant for years and engrained the storytelling instinct in Kamini:

"In stories things could be made to happen. You could grow wings on heroes, or give the heroine a voice like a koyal bird, and people never died. In real life, if you brayed like a donkey, no amount of honey could sweeten your throat; people went away and returned only as memories. In real life, I reflected, you warmed yourself on cold winter days in a foreign land by pulling out a rag-bag collection of those memories. You wondered which ones to keep and which to throw away, paused over a fragment here, smiled at a scrap. You reached out to grasp people you knew and came up with a handful of air, for they were only chimeras, spun out of your own imagination. You tried to pin down a picture, thought that you had it exactly the way it smelled and looked so many years ago, and then you noticed, out of the corner of your eye, a person who had not been there before, a slight movement where there should have been the stillness of empty canvas."

That lovely passage is the heart of the novel, for it reminds us that storytelling -- like memory -- is a risky business in which the potential for self-deception and inaccuracy is as great as the power of narrative. Kamini and Saroja remember many of the same things and tell many of the same stories, but each remembers them and tells them in different ways. No two people see the same thing the same way, and no single person's version of anything can be absolutely complete or wholly accurate.

Thus, mother and daughter see the arranged marriage of Saroja and Vishwa Moorthy similarly -- they both know it was unhappy, with precious little that passed for love -- yet differently. The daughter focuses primarily on "the invisible rivers rushing through the house, the chaos, the rage" and wonders why "Dadda looked at me as if he didn't recognize me." The mother, by contrast, is jealous of the attention and care that she sees her husband lavishing on their two daughters, yet after his death she thinks: "A person grows on you like an ingrown nail. You keep cutting and filing and pulling it out, but the nail just grows back. Then you get used to the wretched thing, you learn to ignore and even become fond of it. Same with Dadda. His quiet became a part of my noise."

Though storytelling and the mother-daughter relationship are at the core of "Tamarind Woman," it is also a splendidly evocative picture of India after independence, of middle-class Indians moving into the void left by the departed British, of the railway colonies in which the Moorthy family lived --

Dadda was a mid-level bureaucrat for the railway system -- and of the teeming life of the many towns in which they were set down. It is a book brimming over with smells, sounds and colors, putting the reader so firmly in place and time that you feel you are there. All in all, a lovely piece of work.