It is the story of three Bengali Brahmin girls from a westernised yet deeply traditional family from Calcutta. Marriage has separated the sisters, installing them in three different cities, two in the US and one in India, with mutually conflicting lifestyles. Family annals (of which there’s plenty) alone could have filled the book. But if you can plod through the 20-odd pages of the uncharacteristically stilted preamble, you’re in for a surprise.
The narrator, Tara Chatterjee, the youngest of the three sisters—the only one to have married according to their father’s wish and the only one to have divorced her husband, a fabulously successful Silicon Valley mogul—has a visitor at her San Francisco home. An impertinent twentysomething man introduces himself as her long-lost nephew, the illegitimate boy her eldest sister Padma allegedly had with her childhood heart-throb Ronald Dey. The young man hands her a letter written by his father, who is now a doctor in Bombay, corroborating the fact.
Christopher’s visit brings unwelcome tension in Tara’s placid family life, with her teenage son Rabi and her live-in lover, Andy. It turns out that their old acquaintance did indeed have an affair, and subsequently a son, with Padma who was forced to give him up for adoption. Her father did not approve of her liaison with a Christian man. The fault-lines under the professed righteousness of Tara’s parental family begin to reveal themselves, while Christopher’s identity and motive appear increasingly suspicious. With her life falling apart yet again (Andy walks out on her and Rabi announces that he is gay), she pleads with her sisters to tell her the truth.
The truth, however, comes in the form of a letter from Dr Dey, who answers Tara’s somewhat impolite query about his son and the letter he gave her. Tara learns that while Christopher has indeed arrived in America, he is not the man she met nor was the first letter written by his father. (You want to ask: How could the impostor pen such polished prose when he wasn’t proficient in English?) Who is the fraud and what happens to the real Christopher and his father is part of the suspense.
Tara goes to have a sister-to-sister palaver with the glamorous (and heartless, it turns out) Padma and gets sucked into the tawdry world of North American Bengalis with deep pockets and inflated egos. She returns without her sister’s clear confession and, with Rabi and her ex-husband, narrowly escapes a murder attempt.
Mukherjee uses the raw material that is available to every Indian expatriate writer—the immigrant experience, identity, family relations, tradition and the sad spectacle of lives locked in a "half-India kept on life-support"—but pulls off an absorbing tale full of unpredictability, wit, bewitchment and empathy. Even with its not-so-frugal dose of cultural didactics and vernacular lessons, it is an Indian family saga with a difference.It reads like a thriller. Well, almost.
