Jennifer Ott, Lakshmi GoldSix women tell their stories -- three mothers born in India (one from each of the three major regions of India, tidily) and three daughters born in the States. Each woman is dealing with one cultural problem, one marital problem, one health problem, one non-marital-relationship problem, and one vocation problem, all different for each character. Each one has a cooking specialty, a style of dress and a particular secret. Each one has certain sacred notions challenged and resolved. All the mothers have to come to terms with the foreignness of their daughters, and all the daughters must come to terms with the foreignness of their mothers.
We learn a lot about Indian culture, particularly about the distinctions between Bengal, Punjab and Mumbai customs and between Hindu and Muslim religions, and I couldn't help comparing the approach taken here with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's in Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus since they're opposite ends of a spectrum. Pradhan pauses to explain and translate everything and goes so far as to provide recipes for all the dishes mentioned; she definitely sees her audience as non-Indian and is offering the carefully guided tour. Adichie somehow instructs without tour-guiding. It says so much about how it must be to be the child of immigrant parents, as Pradhan is -- one is always straddling two cultures, always explaining the one to the other. You probably can't not do it.
In fact, I found the daughters almost too comfortably American -- their adjustment problems are exclusively with their Indian backgrounds -- there is little reference to the assimilation tensions first-generation children have in North America, which surprised me, since I don't recall the '60s and '70s (when these girls were allegedly growing up) having the levels of cultural enlightenment we do now.
But that would have been a completely different book, heh.
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