Remember all those hippies who ran off to India in the 1970s in search of enlightenment? One of the little delights of Indira Ganesan's Inheritance is getting an Indian view of how those truth-seekers fit into the culture and affected the people around them. A kind of mild feminism guides this unassuming novel of adolescence and self-discovery, set on an island off the Indian coast. The story meanders with its 15-year-old narrator, Sonil, whose chronic poor health has landed her a prolonged break from school at the home of her grandmother. There, time drifts, and events unfold in the flat, unquestioned perspective of youth. Sonil is fatherless, and men appear only fleetingly as silhouettes, sharply outlined but unfathomable. Her relationships with the three generations of women in the household--especially her hostility toward her aloof, eccentric mother--define the girl. But she encounters a young American man, in India to study Ayurvedic medicine, and for a while, the chaos of Sonil's sensuality focuses on Richard, a passionate but emotionally immature hippie, twice her age.

Through her short-lived relationship with him (lots of lovemaking to the music of Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and the Talking Heads), the wavering line of her life begins to trace a circle, leading her back to her mother and her unknown father, an American who disappeared from India before Sonil was born. Her inheritance, it seems, is a mandala, full of repeating patterns, which, as the book ends, Sonil is beginning to draw deliberately. Ganesan's prose style has a frank simplicity that is pleasing but evanescent.


From School Library Journal
YA-In this coming-of-age novel set in India, 15-year-old Sonil spends the summer at her adored grandmother's home on a lush island off the subcontinent's coast. There, she meets her distant, enigmatic mother, who sent her away when she was a baby to live with her aunts on the mainland. Sonil yearns to know why and who her American father might be. Ganesan's lithe and sensuous tale follows Sonil as she spends languid days with her great-uncle, talks about boys with her favorite cousin, and spies on her mysteriously remote and silent mother. She is angered by the woman's frequent evening absences from the house and her refusal to talk to her. It is only through her passionate relationship with an American twice her age whom she meets in the marketplace that she is able to begin to understand and forgive her mother. Toward the end of the novel, Sonil says, "I had thought that inheritance was inescapable. It is, but not in the ways I imagined....I am a random mix of genes and attributes. I do not have to be like my mother...yet a shard of her exists in everything I do." Inheritance deals with universal dramas of love and loss, family and acceptance. It should reassure young adults that the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of families and the need to accept them cross many cultures.Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In 1985, Sonil, a physically fragile 15-year-old romantic innocent, spends a healing summer on the island of Pi off the coast of India. She wonders about her long-lost American father and despairs that her mysterious, unfriendly India-born mother will ever show her any sign of affection. Sonil's grandmother, cousin Jani, and two half-sisters (all by different fathers) wish their love for Sonil could fill the emptiness caused by so much maternal hostility, but it is only in the arms of 30-year-old Richard, an American surrogate father figure studying Eastern religions, that Sonil finds relief from her breaking heart and sickly body. Lush and stylish, this gentle, if idealized, story of a first love affair by the author of The Journey (LJ 5/15/90) is perhaps a more dazzling international version of Judy Blume's perennially popular Forever (1975), but it is well worth reading.?Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., Mich.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Ganesan, a lithe and sinuous storyteller, has set her second novel, like her first, The Journey (1990), on Pi, a tiny make-believe island floating serenely off the coast of India. Pi is relatively free of the strict social codes found on the mainland, which is a good thing for the extended family of eccentrics Ganesan portrays through the eyes of her intrepid 15-year-old narrator, Sonil. Sonil knows almost nothing about her long-gone American father and actually knows very little about her mother because she was raised by her aunts. But during this decisive summer, both she and her enigmatic mother are living with her grandmother, and it is a time of reckoning for all concerned, especially Sonil's cousin, who chooses to enter a convent instead of getting married, and Sonil, who discovers that romance and sexuality are not the same as love. Ganesan accomplishes so much in this gracefully sensual tale, pondering questions of spirituality and forgiveness and taking the measure of just how much we inherit from our family, no matter how unconventional its configuration may be. Ganesan, like Arundhati Roy and Chitra Divakaruni, is part of a glorious flowering of contemporary Indian literature. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Like a series of evocative miniatures, a second novel by Ganesan (The Journey, 1990) that suggests the idyll of an imperfect matriarchy. Narrated by 15-year-old Sonil in brief episodes and glimpses, the story follows the girl's roundabout but assured awakening to herself on the multicultural, contemporary island of Pi off the Indian subcontinent. Though writing about a nearly Edenic place, Ganesan takes care that the Pi also come across as not altogether unworldly. And so we meet a down-at-the-heels collection of cosmopolitan wanderers and odd locals, earthy yet only inches removed from myth: Sonil's much-married and socially reviled, rebellious mother, who had more or less abandoned her daughter from the start; Sonil's generous and adorable grandmother, who--in a pleasantly shambling way--can do no wrong; her repressed but passionate cousin Jani, who desperately flees her suitors for a convent; and her ethereal great-uncle, a painter whose ``body was merely pretending to be flesh.'' Sonil meets an American who is twice her age; falls in love for the first time; and is left hanging when this love object picks up and leaves. Ultimately, Sonil's grandmother dies, though before that, people float in and land fleetingly, like mirages, on the island, which begins to resemble a microcosmic kaleidoscope of the human, the natural, and the magical folded into one--a small, storied panoply of Ganesan's imagination. But her style is relaxed, even casual. Unlike the righteous, raised tone of epics, polemics, and fictional creeds, hers is kind and humorous: ``I thought about animals and their capacity for change, how species evolved,'' Sonil muses. ``And I began to think of the ability to abstain from love as a particularly human trait. But . . . surely there were earthworms that were monkish in their habits?'' But the character of Sonil's American hippie boyfriend is tritely drawn, and the book's first third is too slowly plotted, like an anticlimactic reverie. Still, Ganesan's ingenious charms as a social and spiritual observer bejewel the novel. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
In her first novel since her debut with The Journey, Indira Ganesan gives us the story of Sonil, who at fifteen has come to her adored grandmother's house on a paradisiacal island off the coast of India ("a tiny eye, to the teardrop that was Sri Lanka") to mend her shaky health. She has been living on the mainland with her aunts, to whom she was sent by her mother when she was a baby, and she yearns to find out why she was exiled and where her American father might be.

On the island, she spends her time studying Italian with her absentminded uncle . . . talking about boys and clothes with her favorite cousin, Jani . . . spying on her mysteriously distant mother. The gorgeous surroundings--the mango trees, the flowers, the heat, the monkeys--awaken her senses, and ours too, as she settles in for a seemingly endless summer.

Little by little, her spirits revive, and we see Sonil begin to move out of the magical world of her grandmother's compound into the wider life of the island, until she finds the perfect escape from her mother's rejection in a passionate affair with a young American. It is through her feelings for him that she begins to discover the means to forgive her mother and to look to herself for the answers she will need in the coming years.

Inheritance is a lush, lovely novel that transports us to a timeless place, an exotic island crossroads of many peoples and cultures--an Eden where the drama of love and family, loss and acceptance, still works its powerful and encompassing magic.


From the Inside Flap
In her first novel since her debut with The Journey, Indira Ganesan gives us the story of Sonil, who at fifteen has come to her adored grandmother's house on a paradisiacal island off the coast of India ("a tiny eye, to the teardrop that was Sri Lanka") to mend her shaky health. She has been living on the mainland with her aunts, to whom she was sent by her mother when she was a baby, and she yearns to find out why she was exiled and where her American father might be.

On the island, she spends her time studying Italian with her absentminded uncle . . . talking about boys and clothes with her favorite cousin, Jani . . . spying on her mysteriously distant mother. The gorgeous surroundings--the mango trees, the flowers, the heat, the monkeys--awaken her senses, and ours too, as she settles in for a seemingly endless summer.

Little by little, her spirits revive, and we see Sonil begin to move out of the magical world of her grandmother's compound into the wider life of the island, until she finds the perfect escape from her mother's rejection in a passionate affair with a young American. It is through her feelings for him that she begins to discover the means to forgive her mother and to look to herself for the answers she will need in the coming years.

Inheritance is a lush, lovely novel that transports us to a timeless place, an exotic island crossroads of many peoples and cultures--an Eden where the drama of love and family, loss and acceptance, still works its powerful and encompassing magic.


About the Author
Indira Ganesan was born in Srirangam, India, and moved to the United States when she was in grammar school. She graduated from Vassar College and received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is on the faculty of the English Department at Southampton College on Long Island, and is a 1997-98 Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe College. Her first novel was The Journey, and she was a Granta Best Young American Novelist Award finalist.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One

My mother awoke in the holy hour before dawn, rumple-eyed and irritable. From the branches of the coral jasmine tree, a night-flowering wonder, small orange-centered blossoms fell to the ground in slow rhythms outside her window. She let a comb creep through her hair, with her fingertips touched sandalwood oil to her throat, between her breasts, her eyes closed in dreams. Perhaps she thought of marrying again. My mother wore a sari of pale yellow, and I imagined she felt she could write a novel then and there. Didn't she have forty-six years of life to tell?

But in came my grandmother, scattering my mother's thoughts away, shuffling on feet that had turned as hard as stone. Trumpeting words like an elephant, she asked my mother, "Have you brushed your teeth yet? Do you want your coffee now?" My mother, caught in her dreams, caught with her hand on her breast, nodded yes. The house was awake. The maids began to wash the dishes from the night before, and the cook yelled at them while cutting vegetables. The orange vendors and tomato sellers were already at the doorstep, calling out their wares. In the midst of this morning chaos, it was my mother who was labeled the maddest. She was the strange one, the daughter gone wrong, the bad woman who refused to go to temple, who needed her own mother to fetch her morning coffee, who would not wear widow-white. "Why should I wear white if I still have fifty years more of my life to live?" she had asked when her first husband died, refusing to look at my grandmother's face.

I imagined my mother in the mornings like this, imagined her thoughts, her longings. She did not speak to me. When I was six, and arrived at my grandmother's house on the island of Pi, dusty and yet presentable after a sultry train and boat journey from India, only my grandmother and Great-uncle Raj were at the table set for the midday meal. Even before I saw her bold-patterned sari and unbound hair, I knew my mother was watching me, suspicious, from a corner. For days we edged past each other. She spoke no words to me.

When I turned fifteen, I came to my grandmother's house for a long stay, this time to rest, to get over a dragging spell of bronchitis. I had been given four months leave from my pre-university. My life was filled with so much illness that I had become a kind of heroine for my younger cousins. ("This is Sonil," they told their friends. "She gets a lot of diseases.") There were hardly two days apart when I was not sick. It was when the huskiness in my voice was lifting, and my chest no longer ached as if a tiger were walking about inside, that my grandmother suggested I spend the summer months at her home, away from the infected cities.

"The island air is so good--she'll recover well," wrote my grandmother to my guardian aunts in Madras.

"And Lakshmi, what about Lakshmi? Has she recovered as well?" whispered my aunts on the phone.

Lakshmi: that name had been whispered, lingered over in soft tones in my undetected presence for years. My mother, Lakshmi, who hadn't seen me in nine years. Only from the merest shreds of conversation had I gathered bits of my mother's story. They would not tell me the whole truth, so I became an eavesdropper, not knowing they shielded me from whatever harm could be imparted in words. It would be unthinkable, they said, to live with my mother. Only bad would come of it, they thought. What are they afraid of? Would she spit at me, scream at me, shake me as enraged madwomen do in the movies? Or was it simply the association they feared, that her strange ways would rub off on me, the way certain flowers left gold dust on my fingers? But despite the protests, my grandmother, who can wear a face as strong as any god's, had her way.

So I went to Pi, to spend a summer full of change and wonder. It was a summer of attuned perceptions, a turnover, a prelude to adulthood; even now, I have not fully recovered from it. It was a summer of awakening. My grandmother's house was different from my home in Madras. Here, I could walk under the mango trees in a place that lacked only a waterfall to make it a kind of paradise. In the mornings, tiny parrots, blazes of red and green, rushed into the skies that were brighter than any in Madras. The trees were full of monkeys, bright fruit stuffed into their mouths. I could make a telescope out of my hands and see their glittery old-man eyes.

Since she wouldn't speak to me, I spied on my mother, wanting to learn the facts, the truths to tie a kind of monkey-knot to her, a knot that could not be undone. I wanted to know about the circumstances before and after my birth. They had said my arrival was not graceful.

They wouldn't let my mother in the kitchen, I observed, to ward off the evil that must surround her, to keep it away from the most holy place in the house. She would take her coffee outside to the brick steps near the pots of roses. She would snap off a deep red bud to adorn herself, having no patience to wait for the lame girl who sold stringed jasmine wound with sage to wear in one's hair. My mother, from her perch, and I, from mine, kept abreast of the flirtations between the cook's daughter and the driver, noting the way he casually brushed by the daughter's perfumed arms before my great-uncle rushed out for his morning drive. They didn't worry about my mother's gaze, so inconsequential was she.

My mother was infuriating. She refused to eat with the rest of us, making Grandmother set an extra plate for her after we'd eaten, before she, my grandmother, could eat. My grandmother insisted on serving all of us, Mother included, before she herself ate. This I did not think was nice of my mother, to delay my grandmother's dinner. But maybe my grandmother enjoyed the conversation with my mother, for the two of them often spoke together for two hours, one for my mother's dining, one for my grandmother's. Their voices were only murmurs, hard for me to hear.

Maybe my mother ran away from me because there was a gene in our family that caused people to run and hide. Our family was shy, excepting my mother, and even she might be shy, for wouldn't that have caused her to flee from me, her third daughter? For she did run away, run away from the American, my father, and leave me to my aunts.

My mother had three daughters. Her first she presented to a husband who wanted a son; she tried to fix things by choosing a name that could pass for masculine: Ramani. After her husband died, taking his secrets to the fire, several trendy college girls began to invite my mother, lovely at twenty-one, to their lawn parties. At one party, a rich boy, coolly dressed after the fashion dictated by his affected English accent, a filmmaker's son, promised to marry my mother. Whether she believed him or not, surely she was seduced by his voice, which ran like warm champagne. She named his child after Savitri, the most dutiful of wives in Hindu legend, a woman whose footsteps followed her husband's even after his death. My mother didn't trail after the filmmaker's boy, though. She met an American expatriate, a photographer who came to Pi to capture on film the faces of wise seers and shy, mysterious women. The village women say she asked him to sleep with her, and he accepted, and she gave birth to me.

They named me Sonil, a name with no definite roots. When I was younger, I used to make up stories regarding my father's death and my mother's grief, but they brought me nowhere. My parents remained as distant as any in a thousand tales from folklore. Why did she want a third daughter? What caused her need to be full of another baby? Why did she send him away? Perhaps my mother had always wanted to raise a troop of strong highway-bandit queens by herself, and perhaps she was prevented. She would have been a good robber rani herself, a brave woman with a fearless stance. She stood straight under the scrutinizing eyes of neighbors whose mouths never closed. She watched the brightly saried servant girls who gossiped loudly at the gate, catching the hush of their voices when they spoke of her. She was the only woman who didn't turn away in disgust when Ramachandran, the senile gatekeeper, hunched with age, lifted up his dhoti to relieve himself under the banyan trees in the opposite lot.

They must have told her she was different, to give her that boldness. Some chanting woman in an orange sari and with a shaven head must have gripped her hand and told her she had the fingers of an artist. Some troupe of fanatics leading a cow wearing streamers and bells, shaking with an intensity that only the most devout or near insane have, must have told her she was not meant for a peaceful widowhood. They must have told her it was fine to wear bangles and anklets, emboldened her to conceive two more children after her first, freed her to think of marrying again in her forty-seventh year. But who would marry a madwoman? If she advertised in the marital columns, only self-proclaimed free-thinking widowers would answer her ad, and who knew how crazy they were? No one would answer from Madhupur, or from the other towns nearby. On the island of Pi, reputations traveled.

Lunchtime, and Great-uncle Raj was trying to teach me Italian. He was my grandmother's eldest brother, a man whose eccentricity almost surpassed my mother's. Long ago, my great-uncle had a job with a company that sent him overseas. For two months, he traveled in Europe, pretending not to be a tourist. When the company asked for his return, he refused and was fired. He stayed on abroad, coming home only for funerals. But one year, seven of our relatives died, and he ran out of money. So he made his home at my grandmother's, but he spoke of his travels constantly. He knew dozens of languages and spent long hours at the usis library, reading foreign dailies. Once I saw him there with stacks of thin-sheeted papers in front of him, wearing the smile of the truly indulged. Now he insisted on coaxing Italian stresses from my tongue, finding my progress slow. My grandmother interrupted the lesson.

"How are you feeling? Are you well? Do you have a temperature?" she asked.

A dozen times a day, she questioned me about my health. She made up careful menus of non-fried foods for me and sent back reports to Madras. (Vasanti, the cook, felt sorry for me and sometimes sneaked outlawed savories and buttery pooris to my plate.) Great-uncle, annoyed at the disturbance to his lesson, rose from the table, leaving me with unlearned verbs. My grandmother brushed crumbs from the table.

"Don't believe his nonsense, Sonil-ma," she said. "He doesn't know a word of Italian."

Vasanti was going into town for groceries, a plastic bag from Paris, a relic from my great-uncle, in her hand. She met my mother on her way to hang her wet saris, a tangle of color, on the terraced roof.

"Do you want anything from the shops?" asked Vasanti.

"A jar of Pond's--a large one," replied my mother.

"And something for your daughter?" asked Vasanti who thought she was being diplomatic. "Should I buy her something?"

My mother pretended not to hear. Sometimes I wanted to scream, to shout out loud, i am your daughter, talk to me! I wanted to force her to regard me, to stop pretending I didn't exist, to stop denying my part in her life. I could accept her madness, but not her hatred. If all her acts could be explained away by her madness, then I was safe, because she was not responsible for her actions. To ask why she didn't want to raise me herself, to wonder why she continued to live at my grandmother's house then became moot. Vasanti left by the back door, and my mother climbed the outer stairs. The milkman had come at dawn to deliver our milk. I thought of his bicycle clattering away on the pavement and began to dream of going away, of leaving everyone behind. I wanted to travel fast.

Feeling the pull of the afternoon, my grandmother lay down on the couch to read the mail. There was a letter from my sister Ramani full of house-talk and news of her children. Both of my sisters were pregnant again and neither planned to invite our mother to her baby's first birthday celebration. They liked her even less than I did. I pressed my grandmother's feet and told her my dreams. Because I had nothing else to do but read while I was sick, I pulled first marks in all the school exams. In the room I shared with two cousins in Madras, I'd tacked up a picture of an American college from a catalogue a teacher had once given me. If I continued to do well, and if I took a qualifying exam in Delhi, I told myself I could go to Radcliffe.

"What is that place?" asked my grandmother.

"Do you know Love Story? Love Story took place there," I said.

My grandmother in her wisdom glasses looked at the wall a long time before replying.

"I don't think I approve of that sort of life, Sonil," she said.

The sun had calmed for a moment, but it would be back, fierce as ever. The village herders brought back the indifferent cows from pasture. Their thin bodies passed like ghosts behind the gate. The sweets seller made his late rounds while the iron man clattered his cart down the street. My grandmother was in the back garden, watering the plants. I rocked myself on the veranda swing, sucking experimentally on the cigarette butts my great-uncle had left behind. While I tried to compose a letter to my aunts, I could pick out from the street the voice of the man who sold pinwheels and silver ribbons to children.

Two of my aunts raised me, both sisters of my mother's, Aunt Leila and Aunt Shalani. Aunt Leila was thin and Aunt Shalani even thinner. They were warm-hearted, the two of them, indulgent with their riches. Their husbands, Uncle Petrov and Uncle Dan, were in Abu Dhabi, oil investors by night, engineers by day. They were Russian and Irish; my mother wasn't the only one in her family to look outside the island or India for marriage. Uncle Petrov had grown up in North India and met Aunt Leila at a plant bazaar, an Indo-Russo event of cultural exchange. Uncle Dan had been schooled in Scotland and met Aunt Shalani at the home of his parents, who lived in Mysore. They married and had no children, while Aunt Leila had four. The two uncles decided to try their luck in the Middle East when I was ten and set off from India. They stayed overseas and sent home money. If my aunts missed their husbands, they didn't show it, having decided to merge their two households and visit Abu Dhabi twice a year. Twice a year, the uncles visited, so their marriages were seasonally conjugal, an arrangement that suited all. My favorite cousin, Jani, was looked after by my grandfather's sister (on my mother's side) in Delhi, but she visited us as well.

"So you smoke."

It was my mother. She seated herself on the swing, tucking her legs under her sari. I could smell a mixture of perfume and hard-milled soap from her hands. The first button on her blouse was undone, exposing flesh I was carefully trying not to look at. Casually, I offered her a butt, but she grasped my other hand instead.

"Look," she said, uncurling my fingers. She traced the lines around my thumb, the arch of my palm. "This is the heart line, this is the psychic cross, this is the mount of Venus," she said, running her fingers lightly across the marks on my palm. She placed her hand next to mine, stretching it open like a flower. "They're alike," she said. "We could be twins."
I was too astonished to say anything. She dropped my hand and began to walk back to the roof, leaving my hands hard fists, her face broken with laughter.

"No, I won't be like you!" I shouted.

I would not live on the edge of things as she did, I thought, a strange, bizarre, unnatural creature, a scornful observer. I resolved to dress in sober clothes, to wear my hair tight behind my ears, and to grow old and dignified in spite of my mother.

The sun was dazzling, touching everything with light. The roses were so bright, they seemed to tremble with color, and, dully, I could make out the sound of the monkeys which never shut up. A clatter of pebbles sounded from the roof. Looking up, I saw my mother standing straight as a bony tree against that vivid sky. With her mocking eyes upon me, she began to dance with broad steps, waving a sun-dried sari around her head. I was arrested by the sight.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In her first novel since her debut with The Journey, Indira Ganesan gives us the story of Sonil, who at fifteen has come to her adored grandmother's house on a paradisaical island off the coast of India ("a tiny eye, to the teardrop that was Sri Lanka") to mend her shaky health. She has been living on the mainland with her aunts, to whom she was sent by her mother when she was a baby, and she yearns to find out why she was exiled and where her American father might be. Little by little, her spirits revive, and we see Sonil begin to move out of the magical world of her grandmother's compound into the wider life of the island, until she finds the perfect escape from her mother's reflection in a passionate affair with a young American. It is through her feelings for him that she begins to discover the means to forgive her mother and to look to herself for the answers she will need in the coming years.

FROM THE CRITICS

School Library Journal

YA-In this coming-of-age novel set in India, 15-year-old Sonil spends the summer at her adored grandmother's home on a lush island off the subcontinent's coast. There, she meets her distant, enigmatic mother, who sent her away when she was a baby to live with her aunts on the mainland. Sonil yearns to know why and who her American father might be. Ganesan's lithe and sensuous tale follows Sonil as she spends languid days with her great-uncle, talks about boys with her favorite cousin, and spies on her mysteriously remote and silent mother. She is angered by the woman's frequent evening absences from the house and her refusal to talk to her. It is only through her passionate relationship with an American twice her age whom she meets in the marketplace that she is able to begin to understand and forgive her mother. Toward the end of the novel, Sonil says, "I had thought that inheritance was inescapable. It is, but not in the ways I imagined....I am a random mix of genes and attributes. I do not have to be like my mother...yet a shard of her exists in everything I do." Inheritance deals with universal dramas of love and loss, family and acceptance. It should reassure young adults that the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of families and the need to accept them cross many cultures.-Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

Edward Hower