A Woman in White

In this project,she will have the help of Muchami,a gay youth from a lower caste whom her husband had trained as overseer of their properties. She will have the benefit of her husband’s training,for he had spent his last years instructing her in the management of their finances. She will also have the support of her faith — not only in the black stone Ramar whom she worships daily,but also in the bedrock of tradition.

While Sivakami remains confined within the house,her children and grandchildren go out into a rapidly changing world. The first journey that the characters take is by bullock cart,in 1896; by the middle of the novel,the next generation will be sitting in the train,and the old rules of caste and touchability soon collapse.

At 600-plus pages,The Toss of a Lemon,the debut novel by Canada-based Indian Padma Viswanathan,is a sweeping multi-generational epic. It begins in a Tamil village at the end of the 19th century,when the world still seems stable and secure,with everything and everyone in their proper place,and moves slowly through the decades to close in the 1960s,by which time the family is caught in the midst of social and political upheaval. The Brahmins have lost the dominance that was theirs for centuries; old certainties have begun to crumble; and the shards of this collapse are quickly being rearranged in new alignments.

This transformation is not easy: it often involves pain,even violence. At one point,two enactments of the Ramayana are staged in the village: one is the traditional version,with Rama as the heroic king; the other,a revisionist production,has Ravana as the hero. On the final day of the week-long performances,both versions come up against each other,resulting in mayhem.

Characters,too,contain contradictions within themselves: such as Muchami,the gay man trapped in a sexless marriage to comply with his mother’s wishes; Mari,his wife,who rejects the ways of her own caste to adopt some of the strict abstinences of the Brahmin lifestyle; orthodox Sivakami,given strength by her faith to take on every new challenge; and lovely,life-affirming Thangam,whose gold dust heals everyone around her but depletes her own body of sustenance.

There is also the central contradiction of the novel itself: moments of magic realism appear,gleaming like gold dust,along with the emergence of a new world that worships reason and modernity: the stone idols who appear in khaki one night to protect Sivakami’s house; the kai raasi or good luck that Sivakami bestows on each newborn that she helps deliver into the world; and the beadwork Krishnas that she gives to pregnant women in the village for safe childbirths. The catastrophic impact of change is symbolised most powerfully in Vairum’s rage at everything his mother represents. It is this rage that will bring the novel to its weakest point,the ending,where Viswanathan’s considerable narrative powers suddenly lose their way.

The novel is written in an understated present tense that gives the narration an immediacy. In the midst of turbulence,family life is at the heart of the novel,and this is where Viswanathan’s narrative powers excel. At the most heart-breaking point in the novel,the river in flood divides the family members who have already been divided by other distances. When they come together the next day,it is to realise the value of what they have lost.