Hyderabad Girls

Every now and then, from the busy little factory that is Indian writing in English, comes a book that seems to be about another country alto...

Every now and then, from the busy little factory that is Indian writing in English, comes a book that seems to be about another country altogether. Samina Ali’s debut novel is one such enterprise. One knows that India is really many things to many people, but the landscape that Ali writes about — a hysterical, claustrophobic landscape made up of faith healers and wife-beaters — is almost unrecognisable.

The novel comes highly recommended, with jacket quotes by Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, ZZ Packer and Po Bronson. It does not, however, live up to such high praise — for several reasons. Firstly, it tries to tell too many stories: the story of the high-strung narrator Layla and her unsettling years spent between the United States (she is a US citizen) and Hyderabad; her broken home, and her monster of a father who has divorced Layla’s mother, and remarried, with his second wife now hugely pregnant.

Layla, too, was in a failed relationship with an American man, a relationship that has left her pregnant. We are told about her drawn-out miscarriage that leaves her bleeding every day as she keeps taking pills; her arranged marriage to Sameer, an engineer in Hyderabad, with a ceremony that lasts five days and brings her into Sameer’s joint-family home, where she tries to fit in with her in-laws; Sameer’s dreams of leaving Hyderabad and becoming a success in America; and then his secret, which the reader can guess long before the unnaturally naive Layla figures it out for herself. And finally, as if all these are not enough, an explosion of Hindu-Muslim riots that take the life of Layla’s pregnant cousin, another woman treated badly by the circumstances of her marriage.

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Loaded to the point of unwieldiness with so much material, and preoccupied as it is with Layla’s woes, the novel can hardly take a moment to stop and look around at an India that is very different — at least for other people if not for Layla. The Old City, if only our narrator had troubled to look around, could have been a fascinating place to write about. “I was supposed to inhabit America without being inhabited by it,” says Layla, but she seems to have done the same with India, where she seems to be living within a time-and-space warp. Even as we follow her into the little bylanes of the story, we are only taken to visit mysterious faith healers and listen to their bizarre advice, or to a witch-like woman who tells Layla to dip her hands and toes in fresh rooster blood, to end her pregnancy.

Layla’s own, mostly passive responses to the things that happen to her are baffling. Also bizarre are the conversations she has with her “nanny”, Nafiza, who speaks an annoying pidgin: “Me no worry-worry about me-self, child. Me have full life… Me worry-worry about you. You young girl. You pretty, more pretty than he. No reason you waste life with man like him.”

As a contrast between Layla’s yearning to fit in within the Hyderabad family, and Sameer’s desperation to reach America, the story could have been interesting — but the sheer weight of its claustrophobic content prevents the interest from being sustained. Considering that it takes about 200 pages before the narrator reaches Madras, and that she is back in Hyderabad almost immediately, the book’s title remains a mystery. And finally, like everything else about the book, the full-page photograph of the author on the back cover is also rather excessive.