Freedom to Tango

Michael Wood

• Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels by Tabish Khair
  Oxford, 407 pp, £21.50, March 2001, ISBN 0 19 565296 7
• An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma
  Faber, 282 pp, £9.99, January 2001, ISBN 0 571 20673 5
• The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri
  Bloomsbury, 329 pp, £16.99, February 2001, ISBN 0 7475 5270 3
• The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh
  HarperCollins, 551 pp, £16.99, July 2000, ISBN 0 00 226102 2

In Anita Desai’s recent novel Fasting, Feasting, there is a delicately framed moment of what looks like reconciliation. An unmarried daughter has seen her last chance of a career and a life independent from the family vanish into the demands of her mother’s real or feigned illness. Feigned, the daughter is sure: the crafty parental stranglehold. But then daughter and mother attend a ceremony of mourning, where a dead woman’s ashes are consigned to the river. Each clasps the other’s hand, the mother weeps, and the daughter thinks ‘they are together still, they have the comfort of each other.’ ‘Together still’ means neither is dead, not that the daughter has failed to get away, and the chapter ends as the daughter ‘dips her jar in the river, and lifts it high over her head. When she tilts it and pours it out, the murky water catches the blaze of the sun and flashes fire.’ The blaze of the sun is the final flaring of the daughter’s anger, perhaps, the prelude to a long acceptance of an unchangeable condition.