Booking a passage to India

Ever notice how ideas cluster? I didn’t actually set out to read a ton of material on India, but for some reason several books have recently insinuated themselves into my six foot high bedside stack. So, the next few blog posts will be discussing books set in India or about Indians. For some reason, most of these have a 20th or 21st century setting, so I’m going to skip the Mahabharata and Ramayana retellings which both Nikipedia and I read last year. If you’re interested, the R. K. Narayan versions were terrific.

I don’t read anywhere near as many YA novels as I should, given that I’m working on one, but those I read I generally enjoy, and highly recommend them to adults as well. Usually they’re easy to follow, tell a good story, and can be completed in two or three nights of bedtime reading. Homeless Bird, by Gloria Whelan, is one such and it won a ton of prizes, including the National Book Award in 2000. Spoiler alert—don’t read further if you don’t want to know the plot of the book.

Homeless Bird is about Koly, whose dirt-poor parents marry her off at a very young age to the son of a family they barely know. He turns out to be hopelessly ill (the family is trying to use dowry money for one last desperate attempt to save him).

After he dies, she has a miserable existence with her mother in law, who’s in pretty desperate straits herself, and who ultimately abandons her on the streets of Vrindavan, a city known as the City of Widows. Widows become a huge economic liability, and this is a city where some can stave off starvation by chanting at temples all day long. It’s a hopeless survival. There are several twists of fate, and Koly ends up (presumably) living happily ever after.

To some degree, this is a Cinderella trope. At first, I had a hard time placing what era the story was set in, until I started to see mention of computers and realized to my horror that Ms. Whelan was describing present day conditions. It’s particularly horrifying to be reminded that in this huge country there is no real social safety net and that in a place where I talk to well spoken people every day in call centers, other people—young and helpless girls—can starve to death any day of the week. It’s easy to shrug off horrors set in the past, but Ms. Whelan’s choice to set this story in the present day is arresting and impactful.

Ms. Whelan does an excellent job of portraying three dimensional villains. Her bad people make cruel choices, but you do have some understanding of why they make those choices, and you find yourself pitying or at least being able to forgive them. Also, characters are introduced subtly, and unfold over time, rather than the stock and unchanging minor characters one often encounters in a short novel.

The introduction of Vrindavan is fascinating—well off the familiar settings Westerners might stereotype as India. It had me running to a map and doing an internet search for more info. I think she includes the right amount for the average YA reader. However, I always wish for notes in the back of any novel that deals with historical or foreign settings. At least some links on the writer’s website would be nice. It’s a quibble. Maybe it’s a tribute—the writer has made you want to know more. To her credit, Ms. Whelan does supply a page of further information, but no links. Maybe that’s appropriate for YA readers. On second thought, maybe this book is intended for middle grades—I’m never quite sure where the cut point is.

I’m not very fond, any more, of books where the happy ending is that the girl gets the guy. Based on my own experience, that’s neither the end, nor necessarily very happy in real life. Given the realities of poor women in India, it appears that was one of the few resolutions available to the heroine, but I’m glad Ms. Whelan also gives her a trade where she can earn money and have some independence.

This book might be distressing to sensitive readers, adult or YA, but it provides a rich and thoughtful picture of a contemporary culture with troubling issues. It caused me to think a lot about the differences and, more disturbingly, the parallels between women’s situation in India and my own home culture. BTW, I've classified this as historical fiction, even though in my estimation it's not, because that's what the librarian who told me about the book billed it as.