Seasoning for the Melting Pot

'Smell' by Radhika Jha

SMELL
By Radhika Jha
Soho. 307 pp. $24

April in Paris means chestnuts in blossom and holiday tables under the trees, at least that's what the song tells us. Leela Patel, the young heroine of Radhika Jha's novel, is unfamiliar with that tune, however. For her, April in Paris means East meeting West in the open air: the heady perfumes of cardamom, turmeric, cinnamon and coriander riding gusts of cold wind to do battle with the scent of fresh baguettes. Such clashes often took place when spring breezes floated past a nearby bakery and through the doors of her uncle's shop, pausing to swirl among the sacks of spices in the store's back room. When she stood in that room, the aroma of baked French bread always reminded her that she was far from home.

"Smell" begins on just such an April morning, not long after the death of Leela's father shattered the relative contentment of her childhood in Nairobi. After the funeral, Leela's mother moved to England with her two youngest children and sent Leela to France to live with an aunt and uncle. Leela feels bitter and abandoned, and her shrewish aunt only makes her feel worse. Your mother may be from from Gujarat, India, Aunt Latha tells her, but that doesn't make you an Indian. After all, Leela was born in Nairobi, and Gujarati gods "don't travel across the seas." Leela's dad would not have found such comments troubling. He, too, was born in Nairobi, and he "understood that to be African one had to love the Africans, and love . . . only came with understanding." In the end, however, the Africans didn't love him back, and killed him during a riot. Whether she's African or Indian isn't an immediate concern of Leela's. She knows, though, that she doesn't want to be French, and she doesn't believe she'll ever understand or love her new countrymen, whose cool confidence makes her feel like "a stranger to the life here, a street urchin looking into the candlelit glow of a family supper."

Aunt Latha, for all of her faults, is a talented cook. She teaches her niece to prepare traditional Indian cuisine and discovers that she is a natural in the kitchen. Leela instinctively knows how to blend the various spices in ways that maximize their flavor. "It is as if the smells themselves talk to me," she explains. "They tell me how they feel, and whisper to me what I must do to make them comfortable, to permit them to live out their lives in the way they have to, and how to help them die, so that they may give off the best perfume while doing so."

In a subsequent culinary experiment, Leela encounters a Frenchman's miserable attempt to cook an Indian meal. Opening a lid, she finds a stomach-turning mess: "Inside the pot a bitter war was being fought between the spices and the chicken because no attempt had been made to marry them." Leela's eventual forays in the city allow the author to suggest that Parisian society is a similar "meal," a polyglot potluck in which Leela and other dark-skinned immigrants are the spices, while the chickens are those hostile Frenchmen who remain reluctant to embrace their exotic new neighbors. Carried along via Jha's even-keeled sentences, the analogy is subtler than it sounds. It is introduced when a series of misunderstandings leads Leela to a contentious separation from her family. Cast adrift in Paris with no legal papers (her uncle has kept her passport), she embarks on a series of troublesome affairs with obsessive men. Exploiting her innate sensuality to establish a place for herself in the City of Light, she seems determined to cut herself off from the memories she believes are holding her in place. "Perhaps it is natural to be parted from those whom one loves if one is to live a life of movement," she supposes. "Perhaps the choice is whether to love or to move."

As Leela wanders, the novel meanders as well, and seems to lose momentum as its heroine moves from man to man and bed to bed. Melancholy haunts her despite her motion, and though she gains confidence by acquiring jobs and friendships, whether she has actually matured remains an open question. Her assignations with considerably older men -- particularly those undertaken during her stint as an au pair -- are all the more disturbing since they occur without any discussion of her age. (We are never told exactly how old she is, although we do know she's old enough to attend college.)

Leela lives and learns nonetheless, gleaning unexpected insights from a series of conversations with unusual strangers -- a legless dog breeder, a forgetful old man, a puppeteer on the Metro. While I found these interludes entertaining, I couldn't avoid feeling that Leela perhaps has one eccentric encounter too many. The overlong Metro sequence, for instance, only distracts us from Leela's odyssey as it winds to its conclusion. Unsurprisingly, "Smell" works best when Jha writes about Leela's olfactory experiences, the effect of aromas on her thoughts and behavior. There are many such passages, richly described and erotically charged, although they are in the end undermined somewhat by the relative shapelessness of the book's final section. By then Jha has already made it clear that coming of age is rarely easy, no matter where home is.