Tamarind Mem

Description

A beautiful evocative novel about the ties of love and resentment that bind mothers and daughter.Printed in Swapna Printing Works Pvt. Ltd., Kolkata, India

---

Customer Reviews

Poignant, melancholy and delightful
As most people take for granted, memories are triggered by the faintest occurences. There is the distinct smell, for instance, that suddenly takes youu right back to your grandmother's closets or your uncle's work shop - and just like that everything becomes almost photographic in how you remember certain instances, even though you have not thought about them for twenty years. How quickly we are seduced by nostalgia...But how true are these memories of ours? They might not be false, but they are certainly highly subjective. But does that matter?

This colorful novel tackles the perception of memories in quite a clever way. The first half of the book is the narrative of Kamini, a daughter who reminisce about her past growing up in India. Through her we get a feel for the culture, sounds, smell and a certain mood of a bygone era that is often romanticized (right after Independence). Furthermore, we get a peak into the relationships among the family members, the servants and the school teachers.
Early on, there is a distinct strain between Kamini and her mother, Saroja. She loves her and yearns for her affection; however, she resents her and her "irrrational" moods. The father is distant, even when he is home from his railroad work. Her superstitious ayah, Linda, is quite an interesting person - Kamini is scared of her tales of ghosts and bad spirits, yet she feels safe in her company. The author has eloquently captured the mind of a girl - her growing-up angst, her lack of understanding the happenings in her midst, and the invincability typical of her age.

In the second half of the book, the author switches the narrative to the mother, and we get her side of the story. How do her memories compare to those of her daughter? It is an intriguing account!!! We follow her from childhood being prepared for an arranged marriage to widowhood reflecting back on her life and making plans for her independant years ahead.

I highly recommend the book - it is a sumptious and warm read.

This first-time author has avoided the trap of spelling it all out and leaves her readers the option of reading essential information between the lines. I did wish there was a map included in the book though. The family moves around to various parts of India since they belong to the railroad, and unless you are familier with Indian geography, it is too easy to get lost in the names.

I am looking forward to reading more from Anita Rau Badami!

2006-03-10 (USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

---

Poignant, melancholy and delightful
As most people take for granted, memories are triggered by the faintest occurences. There is the distinct smell, for instance, that suddenly takes youu right back to your grandmother's closets or your uncle's work shop - and just like that everything becomes almost photographic in how you remember certain instances, even though you have not thought about them for twenty years. How quickly we are seduced by nostalgia...But how true are these memories of ours? They might not be false, but they are certainly highly subjective. But does that matter?

This colorful novel tackles the perception of memories in quite a clever way. The first half of the book is the narrative of Kamini, a daughter who reminisce about her past growing up in India. Through her we get a feel for the culture, sounds, smell and a certain mood of a bygone era that is often romanticized (right after Independence). Furthermore, we get a peak into the relationships among the family members, the servants and the school teachers.
Early on, there is a distinct strain between Kamini and her mother, Saroja. She loves her and yearns for her affection; however, she resents her and her "irrrational" moods. The father is distant, even when he is home from his railroad work. Her superstitious ayah, Linda, is quite an interesting person - Kamini is scared of her tales of ghosts and bad spirits, yet she feels safe in her company. The author has eloquently captured the mind of a girl - her growing-up angst, her lack of understanding the happenings in her midst, and the invincability typical of her age.

In the second half of the book, the author switches the narrative to the mother, and we get her side of the story. How do her memories compare to those of her daughter? It is an intriguing account!!! We follow her from childhood being prepared for an arranged marriage to widowhood reflecting back on her life and making plans for her independant years ahead.

I highly recommend the book - it is a sumptious and warm read. This first-time author has avoided the trap of spelling it all out and leaves her readers the option of reading essential information between the lines. I did wish there was a map included in the book though. The family moves around to various parts of India since they belong to the railroad, and unless you are familier with Indian geography, it is too easy to get lost in the names.

I am looking forward to reading more from Anita Rau Badami!

2006-03-08 (USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

---

Well worth reading
This is a wonderful story, told from two perspectives - mother and daughter. The novel is set in India and the cultural aspects are interesting as is the story; good characters. An easy, pleasant read.

2001-10-28 (Grande Prairie, Alberta Canada) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

---

I had to read it for class
Well I had to read this book for class. An english class about Asian Feminst literature and well, as much as i hate the class... this book has been the BEST! I really am enjoying it, I really don't see hte feminst Post-modern stuff in it and had I know about the book before. I would have read it! It's really excellent and I recommend it to all.

2000-07-21 | peng-ah | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

---

Delightfully observed Indian tale
I thoroughly enjoyed this delightful book from Anita Rau Badami. It is well written and insightful. The first half of the book is the story of an Indian daughter's childhood with her ascerbic mother and absent father. Beautifully observed. The second half is the mother's story - her side of it (a reminder that there are always two sides to every story). It explores the mother-daughter relationship as well as women's issues. Read it!

1999-07-04 | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 4

---

Tamarind Woman (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Description

Growing up in India, Kamini often found herself struggling to be noticed: noticed by her beloved, storytelling father, whose position as a railway officer took him away from home for long stretches of time; and noticed by her distant, distracted mother, Saroja, whose biting remarks earned her the nickname Tamarind Woman—and whose frequent disappearances while her husband was away led to whispers of dalliances and affairs.

Now Kamini is grown, living in Canada in a sort of self-imposed exile from her eccentric family and all the turmoil they represent. After her father’s death, her mother embarks upon a solo journey across India by train— because what is the use of a lifetime railway pass if she doesn’t use it? The trip brings the past rushing back for Saroja and Kamini—as both are forced to confront their dreams, disappointments, and long-guarded secrets.

---

Customer Reviews

Poignant flavours of family
This book pulls at my heart in ways that few collections of words ever have. There are chords struck that resonate in my family recollections with a clarity and truth that strikes me dumb, were it not for the envigorating sense of recognition that she has felt the same forces as I, and articulated them wonderfully. There is a poignance that exceeds mere reminiscence, that's what happens when one recognises a similar feeling occurring in another person. Thanks to Anita Rau Badami for putting it all down in words so beautifully!

2009-01-23 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

---

Carmen's Review
Badami creates mood and vision with musical, poetic prose and is able to draw the reader into her world of early 20th century India. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who desires to explore cultures and language, and is willing to struggle a bit with some foreign words and phrases (usually but not always explained), and changing voice (she jumps from person to person and generation so that it's not always clear immediately who is speaking). The author exposes the subtle ways that culture and family relationship are transferred from generation to generation in a refreshing and unique way, always in tune to the physical surroundings in which this transfer occurs. There is also a sense of mystery which unfolds gradually and a satisfying feeling at the end of the novel because the author accomplished her task: to educate and entertain at the same time.

2007-10-19 | strawberry (Walnut Creek, CA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

---

well written
Being from south asia, I could relate to this book. The family that was written about could so easily be my family.

But I do wonder about the liberal usage of Indian words and phrases, with no explanations provided. I liked the style of writing and I think that the characters were well fleshed out.

A good read

2006-05-12 (New York, NY) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

---

Can do away with all the foreign words
Tamarind Woman is a beautiful story although the main plot has been done over and over in the past few years by a number of authors: relationship problems between mother and daughter. I think the author has overdone the use of foreign words (Indian words) and can easily push away certain readers. In one page alone, I counted six Indian words with no reference whatsoever to their meaning or origin. I love reading novels that take place in another country or are written by foreign authors being a foreigner myself but the use of words in Tamarind Woman was a little too much and can make the reader feel a bit lost in the journey.

2002-11-11 | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3

---

A wonderful trip to a far away place
I was sad to finish Tamarind Woman. It was that good. What struck me the most about this book is how alike we all are, even if we're from different parts of the world.

The author skillfully weaves the present and different versions of the past together. Aunty Vijaya from the book remarks that memories are never the same between two people--"They are pictures we create in our hearts you see...and each of us uses different sticks of chalk to colour them." The dialogue is excellent. The characters and relationships are varied and interesting. The descriptions are vivid--"...the tree was covered in blossoms, fiery with colour sucked from the sun."

As I was skimming the book to include a couple of my favorite sentences in this review, I caught myself re-reading it! I had to make myself stop. I'll recommend Tamarind Woman to my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, and I'm going to add Badami's second book The Hero's Walk to my wish list right now. If you enjoy learning about other cultures or if you're just interested in human relationships, you'll enjoy this book.

2002-08-21 | debra26 (Winston-Salem, NC USA) | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 4

---

The Hero's Walk

Description

---

Customer Reviews

Grief Over Choices that Can Never Be Undone
This is a beautifully written book, especially with its slow lead into characterization. The characters have depth and presence and the reader can feel and connect with them all.

This novel is about an Indian man who is estranged from his daughter because she forsook an arranged marriage in India to marry a Canadian. She has tried to reconcile with her father who has coldly, with prideful distance, refused any connection with her. She and her husband die suddenly in an automobile accident and their traumatized daughter is left to be raised by her Indian grandparents.

How Sripathi works through his grief, confronting the pain of his choices which can never be undone, marks the essence of this book. The family comes alive on the pages, all in subtle and unambiguous character development.

I highly recommend this book.

2009-02-27 | Fairbanks Reader (Fairbanks, Alaska) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

---

Complex living in India
A Hero's walk is both a vivid, ala non-fiction portrayal of life in India and a richly-told fictional story of an extended family.

The story is set in a big, old house in southern India, complete with the heat, dust, street vendors, smells, sounds, neighbors, routine daily occurances, and a little squalor, all authentically rendered by an observant, native writer.

The family centers around the mis-understood, under-the-gun husband and his family's issues, his long-suffering, non-entity wife, her chronically unhappy (read whining, but vicious) aging Mother, their neer-do-well, lazy son, their long-missed successful daughter who has abandoned the family and India for the good life in Canada, her invisible husband, and their much-loved grandaughter.

Without giving anything away, the story leads to trauma for the grandaughter told very feelingly from her point of view. A very good novel.

2008-07-05 (Houston, TX) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

---

Fun story about an middle class Indian family
This book is a light read. I would probably have not read it if it were written about an equivalent western family. The insights into Indian family dynamics make the story more interesting from the point of view of a person unfamiliar with the culture. Badami gets us to understand life of a middle class Indian family. The story is colorful and fun. Badami does a nice job of character development. At some point the father ends up going to Vancouver, Canada and bringing back his grandaughter back to India to live with the family. The contrast of life in India versus Vancouver is certainly interesting from the grandaughter's point of view.

This is not particularly fine literature, but a worthwhile read if you are interested in Indian culture especially.

2007-10-14 | rating inflation slayer (Seattle, WA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

---

Too hot for comfort
A modern day Brahmin family living on the eastern coast of southern India with all the attendant social ills and personal failings of real people who struggle along in every country to survive political corruption, loss of status, changing times, family death and their own pride. Told with great sympathy and gentle humor, this is a wonderful book about all of us.

2007-07-30 (Los Angeles) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

---

What an amazing book, I was instantly hooked.
I cannot rave about this book enough. I was hooked from page one. The author's use of language was just beautiful, and I loved how the story tied together and had a most satisfying ending.

In fact, toward the middle I started getting antsy about how it would end, so I turned to read the last few pages (yeah, I do that). However, the author had apparently anticipated this move, and the answer to the question I had was nowhere to be found in the last few pages. I had to actually finish the book before I found out what happened. Excellent.

Other reviewers have given you the plot, so I won't do the same. I just wanted to chime in and say what a wonderful story this was, how utterly fascinating, and gripping from start to finish. I highly recommend it.

2007-04-18 (San Francisco, CA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

---

Biography - Badami, Anita Rau (1962-): An article from: Contemporary Authors

Description

This digital document, covering the life and work of Anita Rau Badami, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 975 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

---

La Marche du héros

Description

---

Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

Description

Set against the tumultuous backdrop of a fragmenting Punjab and moving between Canada and India, Can you Hear the Nightbird Call? charts the interweaving stories of three Indian women – Bibi-ji, Leela and Nimmo – each in search of a resting place amid rapidly changing personal and political landscapes.

The ambitious, defiant Sikh Bibi-ji, born Sharanjeet Kaur in a Punjabi village, steals her sister Kanwar’s destiny, thereby gaining passage to Canada.

Leela Bhat, born to a German mother and a Hindu father, is doomed to walk the earth as a "half-and-half." Leela’s childhood in Bangalore is scarred by her in-between identity and by the great unhappiness of her mother, Rosa, an outcast in their conservative Hindu home. Years after Rosa’s shadowy death, Leela has learned to deal with her in-between status, and she marries Balu Bhat, a man from a family of purebred Hindu Brahmins, thus acquiring status and a tenuous stability. However, when Balu insists on emigrating to Canada, Leela must trade her newfound comfort for yet another beginning. Once in Vancouver with her husband and two children, Leela’s initial reluctance to leave home gradually evolves.

While Bibi-ji gains access to a life of luxury in Canada, her sister Kanwar, left behind to weather the brutal violence of the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, is not so fortunate. She disappears, leaving Bibi-ji bereft and guilt-ridden.

Meanwhile, a little girl, who just might be Kanwar’s six-year-old daughter Nimmo, makes her way to Delhi, where she is adopted, marries and goes on to build a life with her loving husband, Satpal. Although this existence is constantly threatened by poverty, Nimmo cherishes it, filled as it is with love and laughter, and she guards it fiercely.

Across the world, Bibi-ji is plagued by unhappiness: she is unable to have a child. She believes that it is her punishment for having stolen her sister’s future, but tries to drown her sorrows by investing all her energies into her increasingly successful restaurant called the Delhi Junction. This restaurant becomes the place where members of the growing Vancouver Indo-Canadian community come to dispute and discuss their pasts, presents and futures.

Over the years, Bibi-ji tries to uncover her sister Kanwar’s fate but is unsuccessful until Leela Bhat – carrying a message from Satpal, Nimmo’s husband – helps Bibi-ji reconnect with the woman she comes to believe is her niece – Nimmo. Used to getting whatever she has wanted from life, Bibi-ji subtly pressures Nimmo into giving up Jasbeer, her oldest child, into her care.

Eight-year old Jasbeer does not settle well in Vancouver. Resentful of his parents’ decision to send him away, he finds a sense of identity only in the stories , of Sikh ancestry, real and imagined, told to him by Bibi-ji’s husband, Pa-ji. Over the years, his childish resentments harden, and when a radical preacher named Dr. Randhawa arrives in Vancouver, preaching the need for a separate Sikh homeland, Jasbeer is easily seduced by his violent rhetoric.

Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? elegantly moves back and forth between the growing desi community in Vancouver and the increasingly conflicted worlds of Punjab and Delhi, where rifts between Sikhs and Hindus are growing. In June 1984, just as political tensions within India begin to spiral out of control, Bibi-ji and Pa-ji decide to make their annual pilgrimage to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest of Sikh shrines. While they are there, the temple is stormed by Indian government troops attempting to contain Sikh extremists hiding inside the temple compound. The results are devastating.

Then, in October of the same year, Indira Gandhi is murdered by her two Sikh bodyguards, an act of vengeance for the assault on the temple. The assassination sets off a wave of violence against innocent Sikhs.

The tide of anger and violence spills across borders and floods into distant Canada, and into the lives of neighbours Bibi-ji and Leela. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? weaves together the personal and the political – and beautifully brings the reader into the reality of terrorism and religious intolerance.


Bibi-ji turned to gaze out at the street. They could become far more prosperous, she was sure of that. Opportunities lay around them like pearls on these streets. But they were visible only to people with sharp eyes.

“What are you looking at, Bibi-ji?” Lalloo asked, coming around to the front with a box full of pickle jars. He lowered it carefully on the floor and stared out the window.

“What am I looking for, Lalloo, for,” Bibi-ji corrected. “I am looking for pearls.”

“I don’t see anything there, Bibi-ji,” Lalloo remarked after a few moments.

She laughed. “Neither do I, but I will. I know I will.” The war had left the whole world poorer: why had Pa-ji not thought of opening a used-clothing store instead of this Indian grocery shop? She wondered whether the shop would do better in Abbotsford or in Duncan, where there were more Sikhs than here in Vancouver. But no, she had a feeling that it was a city with a future, one in which she would be wise to invest her money and her hard work.
–from Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?


From the Hardcover edition.

---

Customer Reviews

The ring of truth
A slow start to this novel, but it moves swiftly to a tale that has the ring of true knowledge. You will feel involved with the outcome of the characters' lives.

2009-07-31 | Zenese | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

---