Family secrets? Sisterhood? Colonialism? All of the above?

I admit to picking up this book solely because of its quirky title, expecting something along the lines of departmental shenanigans in a university Literature or Asian Studies department, and was therefore quite surprised that this novel is actually set in the South Asian diaspora — nary a professor in sight.

The novel is narrated by Georgette Ayyar Creel (Georgie), who lives with her older sister and their parents in Wyoming. As children of an Indian mother and a white American father, the girls are, of course, unusual in rural Wyoming, but that is only one part of the focus of this novel. As it starts, their uncle Vinod (Vinny), aunt Devi, and cousin Narayan (Ryan) have just moved from India into their house.

The Ayyars dipped into our lives like a tea bag into the whiteness of a porcelain cup. They muddied the water and made our house feel small, having taken over Agatha Krishna’s old bedroom. Now she slept with me. They left rings of talcum powder on the carpet; the bathroom floor was slick with water from their cup and bucket, and the house became smelly with the food Auntie Devi cooked: dosas and sambar, prawns fry and molee. If she wasn’t cooking, she stood on the lawn in a sari and cardigan, looking out at nothing.

This seems a little predictable: the intense Indianness of the visiting Indians discomfiting the Indian-American kids. The third page of the novel mentions killing their uncle, but it is not clear if this is a metaphor, a dream, or guilt over some imagined action. A couple of chapters later:

Ak Akka and I, we split when we were born. As soon as we were out of Amma. Half brown, half white. We split at school too, the only brown kids. […]

And then Vinny Uncle came and split us right through our middles. [..] He’d take one of us into the bathroom with him, and when we came back out, we’d be split, from each other, from ourselves.

After this revelation, the tone of the novel is quite changed for the reader. Rambling asides about how their house came to be named Cottonwood Cross seem unimportant. Lighthearted but pointed flashbacks to their mother’s and Vinny Uncle’s upbringing after India’s independence in 1947 lose their weight. Quirky stories about their grandfather learning Esperanto to bypass the profusion of Indian languages are just so much meandering. Each of these could be a quite interesting or entertaining essay, but once the abuse has been disclosed, it is hard for a reader to relax into enjoying them.

The author has chosen to write the novel directly addressing the reader as ‘you’. Some chapters are, in fact, called ‘You’. Some of these are clever, funny and sarcastically pointed at a white reader.

You love Indians. Both kinds. You cannot be from these United States and say something bad about Indians. [..] You love Dances with Wolves. You like to gamble at reservation casinos — but oh, they also make you so sad. […] Of course, later in high school, my Indianness had currency. I made up yoga moves and waxed on about vegetarianism, just for a laugh.

In between the ‘You’ chapters are those titled with the names of months — January, February etc. — which are more narrative, describing (with many more meanderings) the events that happened over the course of 1986 in this novel.

Also in between are quizzes, the kind of quizzes that appear in popular magazines, such as ‘How do you know if a Boy likes you?’, and more unpleasantly, ‘How do you know if you’re ready to have a sexual relationship?’ These, I think, are intended to underscore the fact that Georgie is pre-teen and AK just barely into puberty.

And then there are letters that Georgie writes to a penpal in Africa.

This is a LOT of tangents and sideroads to stuff into a book, and the book suffers from the chaos. Some of the ‘You’ chapters are quite sharply written and entertaining, but others just feel unnecessary. I skipped over all the quizzes. The ‘month’ chapters are also non-linear, and while some of the digressions are potentially enjoyable, there are simply too many of them.

A novel with few Indians set in rural Wyoming has to involve some racism, especially for the young girls in schools. When they are taken on field trips to a nearby fort, half the class must dress as cowboys and half as Indians, and guess which group these girls are always assigned to? And who is assigned to play Sacagawea in the pageant? There is little explicit racism, though, and the other Wyoming girls often seem to have their own problems with absent fathers or hidden poverty.

The multiple names used in the book for each person are confusing, and must be especially so for people who are not familiar with Indian relationships.

I was named after Georgette Heyer — Georgie Ayyar Creel, a clever play on my mother’s maiden name [Indira Ayyar]. Heyer was my mother’s second-favourite writer. Her first was Agatha Christie, who of course was Agatha Krishna’s namesake. She was always Agatha Krishna Akka to me, or AK Akka.

Phew. That’s a lot of names in a short paragraph. And isn’t ‘Georgie Ayyar’ a clever play on Georgette Heyer’s name, rather than on her mother’s maiden name?

As for the title of this book? In the very first chapter, the narrator talks about blame (for the abuse, presumably). ‘It started when they came’, said Agatha Krishna. But the girls went back further, and blamed Reagan, then Gorbachev, the cold war, famine in Ethiopia, AIDS, the LA Olympics, their grandparents.

But then she said ‘Let’s blame it on the British.’ [..] They were colonists.

After reading the entire book, though, I couldn’t see any connection between Uncle Vinny’s abuse and colonialism.

A combination of satire, mystery, coming-of-age story, and postcolonial commentary, for me this novel didn’t find a satisfying place among any of these genres.

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