April 06, 2008

Nikita Lalwani’s debut novel Gifted was both a pleasure and a pain to read. This story about Rumika Vasi, a math prodigy born into an immigrant Indian family in Cardiff, holds its own with its vivid prose, wry humour and satirical sketches of the Indian immigrant family who has a curiously paradoxical response to their daughter’s gift. Her father, Mahesh, a PhD in mathematics himself and a professor at the University of Swansea in Wales, takes it upon himself to hone her skills by putting her through a rigorous training by regimenting her life into a series of study sessions and math problems. Shreene, Rumika’s mother, treats her skill with superstition; a gift from the Shakuntala Devi and a promise of salvation to come. Due to these twin responses Rumika’s life becomes one big academic penitentiary. Hunger and cold are seen as the necessary prerequisites for a study session, as they lead to an alert mind.

All the while Rumika simply longs to fit in: to be liked by boys, to have friends and her own Stamp Club. However, with her parents’ well-meaning but disastrous ambition to send her to Oxford by the time she is 15, fun, boys and sex are aggressively sidelined, with catastrophic consequences. Rumika undergoes several stages of rebellion, from writing secret diaries to eating bagfuls of cumin seeds, to reacting violently when pushed to far. The novel, then, is not a novel of education or a bildungsroman but a novel of rebellion, one which captures the series of events that lead to Rumika’s breaking point.

The author has captured the aspirations and insecurity of the Vasi family with penetrating perspicacity. However, they are not characters we haven’t encountered before. Part of the problem with most literature of the subcontinent is that we as readers frequently encounter figures that become stereotypes in our minds. Lalwani often plays right into these stereotypes, which takes away from the reading experience. The basically insecure father who is tight fisted and unimaginative (not unlike Chanu from Brick Lane in this respect, with his blindness brought out through his pseudo-intellectual discussions), the mother who is conversely so imaginative that she can only think in terms of religion and therefore cannot understand the practical problems her daughter goes through.
 

The presence of a math prodigy in this conservative Indian set-up presents an interesting opportunity to see immigrant life from a unique perspective. Rumika represents an imaginative approach to life. But it is disappointing to see that Lalwani does not exploit this fact to its full potential.
 

To be fair, the author does present the mother-daughter relationship in such an outrageous manner that for all its predictability, it never the less becomes amusing, especially when Shreene reacts hysterically at one particular request made by her daughter. That, and her indignant pronouncement that only white people have sex make Shreene stand out among the other characters. However, she basically remains the resentful housewife and mother who yearns for India and remains squeamish about all matters regarding sex.

The presence of a math prodigy in this conservative Indian set-up presents an interesting opportunity to see immigrant life from a unique perspective. Rumika represents an imaginative approach to life, a balance which neither of her parents can achieve; a balance which they threaten with their cold, calculated regimentation. But it is disappointing to see that Lalwani does not exploit this fact to its full potential. In her own words, ‘the math in the book is quite innocent. It doesn’t track physics and the bigger issues of the universe. Rumi uses math as a mantra — she’s almost obsessive-compulsive’. Therefore, the prospect of a fresh perspective on an issue which readers have encountered time and time again is lost, Rumi’s mathematical ramblings remain just that, and I think that this takes away from the profoundness linked with her vision which one expects before picking up the novel. The innocence of the math need not take away from the wisdom that innocence can hold within it. That the author chooses not to go there is disappointing.

The most frustrating part about the novel is the fact that it ends right in the middle. One feels that the author leaves the reader hanging in the air, and therefore uncertain about what the final message of the novel is. Is Rumika’s ultimate rebellion an act of freedom or recklessness? Does the author feel that the parents deserved what they got? It is impossible to feel the tragedy of the ending because of the perplexity that the reader ultimately feels. In fact, the novel ends just when we feel that we are going to be led to a resolution of all the problems presented before us previously.

Therefore the novel arouses mixed feelings: it is brilliant and tiresome at the same time. Having said that it is definitely worth the read because Lalwani’s prose is fluid and funny, and the novel presents the world from a different perspective which holds our attention even if it doesn’t live up to its original promise.
 

Gifted
By Nikita Lalwani
Penguin India
ISBN 014310305-9
272pp. Indian Rs395