| Nikita Lalwani's Gifted, on the Booker longlist, is an elegantly unfolding tale about an Indian family in Cardiff, Wales, and the trauma of a little girl growing up in a household where her mathematical genius is maniacally nurtured by her father to excessive subjugation. And Mahesh, the epitome of the striving NRI father who is driven to excel in the country of his exile, who thinks little of sublimating his daughter's childhood to turn her into an Indian wizard. |
| From the day Rumi turns ten years, two months, thirteen days, two hours, forty-two minutes and six seconds, her childhood is taken over by her father's "tough love". Confined to a library with just ten pence in her pocket for an emergency call, and with the admonition that she should not look up from her books because her father might decide to make a surprise inspection, the little girl learns to fear the very talent that is her gift. Alone in the library, she is cold (because being warmly dressed will distract her from her studies), hungry (to lend an edge to her learning) and lonely. |
| Over time, Rumi finds her escapes "" she steals repeatedly from a candy store at the shopping centre next to the library, she reads (longingly) the adventures of the schoolgirls at Malory Towers and St Clare's from the library fiction shelves banned to her by her father "" but her subjugation, and that of her mother, are unflinchingly constant. An innocent visit home of two friends from the Stamp Club "" boy friends! "" turns ugly when they are discovered there by Mahesh. The punishment is swift and harsh. |
| Life for the prodigal genius might have been bearable if Mahesh's regimen was edged with compassion. Instead, he is the proverbial wife beater "" only, he does it with his tongue and tight-fisted control over the purse strings, robbing his family of even the smallest pleasures. In her revenge, or perhaps seeking solace, Rumi gets addicted to chewing cumin, vast quantities of the stuff. First, she raids her mother's kitchen, but how much jeera will you find in a kitchen after all? Later, she resorts to filching change to buy bagfuls of the stuff from Indian condiment stores "" and she chews it till the insides of her mouth are raw and bitter. |
| Her mother's cruelty, shaped by her husband's maniacal control over the household, is no less. Failing to stand up for herself, she slaps her when Rumi asks for a bra, beating her in the bathroom because she talks of having periods. "Have you no shame?" she berates her. "Do you not have any idea of respect, the way you should respect your mother? Do I have to teach you even this?" |
| Rumi turns to more cumin for comfort as, increasingly lonely and isolated in Cardiff, she magnifies the one India trip of her childhood into a hazy memory of loving, fussing cousins and aunts. Now, having applied to Oxford, another trip to India awaits the Vasis where, in a heat-soaked room, she and her cousin fall in love, to be separated by a wise Bina Chachi. |
| Lalwani's gently crafted novel, not unlike Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, addresses not only the issue of loneliness, longing and belonging, it also shines the searchlight unflinchingly on Indian families that manipulate their children's lives so they can win the spelling bees and the chess championships and maths competitions "" parents who cannot understand why they are subjected to "a blast of judgement and hostility", portrayed as "dangerous people" or "greedy, money-hungry immigrants". |
| Cumin-chewing Rumi runs away from it all, now isolated even from her family in foster care, when she agrees forlornly to a meeting with her mother who hopes "Rumi would remember love". It is a faint hope in a book that rubbishes the myth of Indian families and upbringing. |
| GIFTED |
| Nikita Lalwani Penguin 273 pages; Rs 395 |
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