Dahanu Road

by Anosh Irani

Doubleday Canada

  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, August 2010

Over the last centuries, Zoroastrians have fled religious persecution in Iran, many of them to India.  The essence of the Zoroastrian religion is that one must actively participate in life, maintaining good thoughts, good words, and good deeds in order to be happy.

Anosh Irani’s latest book, Dahanu Road, focuses on the Irani clan who leave Iran and settle in Dahanu near Bombay. They have prospered in their new land, becoming landowners which gives them wealth and status. Their lives are intrinsically linked with the Warlis, a tribal underclass who work the land without expectation.

Shapur Irani prospers in India, but as a young man he swindles land from Ganpat, a member of the Warlis tribal group.  He creates a flourishing plantation of chickoo trees which he badly wants to pass to his grandson.  But the past does not go away.

Kusum, Ganpat’s daughter, is married to a drunk who beats her.  Zairos, Sanpur’s grandson, becomes obsessed with her, and as their forbidden affair deepens, lives begin to unravel. But all is not as it seems.  Zairos’s father and grandfather harbour regrets which keep their souls in torment.

When Ganpat hangs himself, he sets in motion a series of events and remembrances which echo through the generations. Secrets long hidden begin to surface and, regardless of intention, good deeds are coupled heavily with bad.

Anosh Irani moves back and forth through the generations skillfully. His writing is visual and intense, and he creates his flawed characters with humor and compassion as they struggle with changing times and cultural mores, while trying to survive the ghosts of the past. Irani gives us a fascinating and exotic story which takes place within a little known historical context of Iran/Indian history.

Anosh Irani moved to Canada in 1998 and lives in Vancouver.  His play, Bombay Black, was a Dora Award winner for Outstanding New Play in 2006. This is his third novel. 

The Immigrant

by Manju Kapur

Penguin

  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, February 2010

Nina is a university lecturer of literature at a college in New Delhi. She is successful and relatively content, but she is also thirty with no marriage prospects in sight, a situation which causes her widowed mother much distress.  Through a family acquaintance, Nina is introduced to Ananda, a dentist with a thriving practice in Halifax, NS. A marriage is arranged and Nina leaves her mother, her home and everything familiar to travel halfway around the world to live with her new husband.

Halifax has been kind to Ananda.  He has made enormous efforts to fit in and embrace his adopted country.  But life here is different.  “Till Nina came to Canada she hadn’t know what lonely meant.”  She misses her mother, her friends and the crowded, bustling life now unimaginably far away.  Her husband talks “another language.  Canadian perhaps.”  She timidly ventures forth to the Halifax Memorial Library, taking solace in literature. “Silently she grieved, the only men in her life long dead authors.”

Set against the oppressive regime of Indira Ghandi, when “opposition was jailed, the press censored, demonstrations banned, (and) activists tortured,” The Immigrant tells the story of two people whose marriage is less than both of them want, in a country where their traditions and roles are neither understood nor supported.  They are expected to be Nova Scotians. Canadian.  .

In her first book, Difficult Daughters, Manju Kapur explores the roles of women in modern India as her heroine struggles against tradition, attempting to balance unbreakable family bonds against her need to find her own way.

In The Immigrant, the family bonds are just as unbreakable, but, far from home, the structure of the family is different. Nina struggles to find her place in Canadian society alone, without her extended family, and Ananda’s self centredness dismays her. They both struggle with rising tensions within the marriage which have far reaching and surprising repercussions. 

Manju Kapur is a professor of English at Miranda House in Delhi.  She studied for her MA at Dalhousie University in Halifax, and her book, Difficult Daughters, won the Commonwealth Prize for first novels.  She lives in New Delhi.