UNSMUDGED white and black are not always the colours of truth. For Preethi Nair it comes in free flowing, varying shades of white. In Nair’s second novel, Nalini, deserted by her husband, tries to spare her children the pain, telling them instead that their father is dead. ‘‘Maybe there are one hundred shades for explaining truth, a spectrum from light to dark,’’ she reasons.Nair’s own life seems to borrow a bit from this twilight zone of half-lies and truths. A successful management consultant in London, she chucked her job to make a full-time career of writing. She wrote her first novel and spent considerable time collecting rejection slips. Then the management consultant in her resurfaced. Deciding to work around the problem, she published her book, posed as her own PR person, calling up journalists and managed eventually to market successfully her first novel Gypsy Masala. That will to overcome problems is what Nalini in One Hundred Shades of White symbolises.Uprooted first from Kerala to Mumbai and then to London by her husband, cooking becomes Nalini’s link to the past. Serving Indian meals to her kids is her way of ensuring that they don’t forget the land that has lent its smells and flavours to these detailed dishes. And her daughter Maya’s rejection of them in favour of hamburgers and fish-fingers is her way of assimilating a new culture. It is cooking that comes to Nalini’s help later as she sets herself up again in an alien country, building a successful business selling pickles and snacks.Feast and cooking is an old metaphor for exploring larger issues and Indian cooking, with its elaborate preparations and endless list of spices and ingredients, gives a certain drama to the whole exercise.Spice is not a first-time character in fiction. Years ago Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, in The Mistress of Spices, wove an entire novel around it. And just this April New York-based Shoba Narayan published her first book Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes. Narayan, whose essay God of Small Feasts two years ago won the MFK Fisher award for distinguished writing — considered one of most prestigious food writing award in the US — elaborates on recipes as therapies.In Banerjee’s novel, set in California, customers flock to the shop of spices, bringing with them their troubles: abusive husbands, racism, drug abuse. In Nair’s novel, Nalini’s shop is like ‘‘a magnet that drew many broken hearts’’. The magic of spices cures the rest. Cinnamon takes away bitterness, turmeric heals the heart, lemon juice diffuses arguments and chilli relieves pain. Finally, it’s the magic of cooking that brings together Nalini and Maya.One Hundred Shades of White holds your interest though at times it seems Nair’s protagonist cannot see any spice without seeing a whole school of thought behind it.In an interview Nair once remembered a writer’s nightmare: a page of her Gypsy Masala was missing. She says she stuck on the errant page with glue in each printed copy. This time there’s no missing page but there are a few wayward pages that do not follow in order. Nair had once called herself superstitious. Now, she probably has reason to be.Book ExtractThe shop was like a magnet that drew many broken hearts. These fragile hearts came in with layers of armour so they appeared very strong. We had an array of customers: matriarchal Indian women who seemed to know how to hold their families together; young Jewish and Polish women who knew what they wanted out of life; middle-aged affluent English women who looked like they had everything under control; single men, married men and old men.At first, they brought random jars without saying anything, trusting that their instincts were guiding them, and then they came back, buying different flavours so they could make a decision on which ones they preferred. Some had regular orders which they would collect every week and these were predictable; raw green mango for decisiveness, apple and fried ginger to soothe disputes, sweet mango and lime mixed with a hint or red chillies to restore forgotten dreams.
