L. M. Valiram

“Do you make your choices or do your choices make you?”

I was mesmerized by this book – that’s the only word I can use. It’s such a short novella but manages to touch your heart in a very unexpected way. The strength of the book is its prose – it’s lyrical and beautiful and so full of meaning that I had to reread certain lines to imbibe them better.

“There is no path to happiness. Happiness is the path. And happiness depends on what you can give, not what you can get.”

As the premise suggests, this is the story of three people – a millionaire, a widow and a monk. Radha, an adopted child adored by her parents has everything that she could ask for but senses something missing and decides to seek out answers. Mira, married off to a stranger is happy in her motherhood and finds fulfillment in her son and his family even after she is widowed. But sudden changes force her to evaluate her purpose in life. Gaurav has grown up poor with dreams of a rich life that stares at him right across his window. He has known a great love and thinks he is content with it until he has to make a choice between his dreams and reality. How all their lives come together forms the rest of the story.

“Faith is to believe that you do not see so that you may come to see what you believe.”

I love the way the three characters are interwoven in each other’s lives. It’s so subtle that even the reader may miss it. The descriptions of Mumbai city, the traffic, the rains, the food are so vivid that I felt nostalgic and reminded of home. The book is full of wonderful philosophical words of wisdom, especially the letters of Babaji – touching upon life, death, happiness, destiny, karma and most importantly choices. That’s what this book is about. That’s also what makes this book so authentically Indian.

“We are alive only because we love. Even if we love nothing else, we love our own Life. And Love is that which keeps us alive. But loving only your own life is such a waste of love and of life.”

PS: I thank Cameron Publicity and Marketing and NetGalley for giving me an opportunity to review this amazing book.… (more)

Radha, an orphan, Mira, a young girl marrying a stranger in an arranged marriage, and Gaurav, a poor worker who dreams of moving up the corporate ladder, are the three characters in this novel who all face choices that take their lives in directions they never could have imagined. Their lives are linked only peripherally (Mira runs a business in which she employs the boyfriend of Radha, for example; Gaurav turns out to be the best friend of the monk Radha meets one day on vacation, etc), for the most part, (their lives link more significantly at the end, briefly), but the themes that run through their stories are universal: the quest for who we are, freedom to do what we want vs the knowledge of our better selves; love and the things it forces us to do and be, and the limitations it puts on us and our futures.

The 3 stories are told separately, one at a time, and they span great time periods, skipping here and there for the sake of space, continuity and brevity. So we see Radha grow from a 4-year-old orphan to a mid-20s adult; Mira goes from 16 all the way to her 60s; and Gaurav from his 20s to his 40s.

I found the individual characters' stories more compelling than the theme of interconnections, as, again, there's not much of it here. The author seems to be trying to make a grand connection in theme, and I suppose the ideas stated above, love and its necessities etc., the freedom to carve one's life, the limits to that freedom because of family, obligations, and love, do appear in all 3 stories. I just didn't feel there was that much to bind the three together. Even at the end, their connections were flimsy, and the final word on their fates seems to be "can't ever know what the future holds. Oh, well."

Valiran's prose was superb. The stories are told with an everyday sort of rhythm, while at the same time there's a lyricism to the everyday events she describes that lifts up the everyday to the level of sublime and almost mythic.

I loved the descriptions of the land. Indian is brought to colorful life with descriptions of the streets, people, sounds, smells, and heat.

Thank you to the author and publisher for a review copy.… (more)