Inheritance by Indira Ganesan (English) Paperback Book

Description: Inheritance by Indira Ganesan On the surface, fifteen-year-old Sonil has come to her adored grandmothers house on a small island off the coast of India to mend her shaky health. Secretly, however, she longs to find out why her mysteriously distant mother agreed to have her sent away as a child. She spends her time studying Italian with her absentminded uncle and talking about boys and clothes with her favorite cousin until she finds the perfect escape from her mothers rejection--a passionate affair with a young American. But the affair will have a surprising outcome, forcing Sonil to forgive her mother and to look to herself for the answers she will need in the coming years. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Indira Ganesan is the author three novels, including The Journey and As Sweet as Honey. She has held fellowships from the Paden Institute for Writers of Color, the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in addition to the W. K. Rose Fellowship. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Antaeus, Black Renaissance, Bombay Gin, Half and Half: Writers on Biracialism & Biculturalism, Glamour, and Mississippi Review. She lives in Boston and Provincetown. Review "Inheritance possesses . . . delicate grace, as well as a wisdom that is both childlike and wry." —Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, San Francisco Chronicle "Moving. . . . Ganesan has created an appealing young heroine whose determination and sensitivity wins us over." —The New York Times Book Review "A good book can take us to an exotic locale, flood us with emotions or remind us of that special summer that awakened adulthood. A very good book can do all of these vividly, realistically, seamlessly. Indira Ganesans Inheritance is such a book." —The Columbus Dispatch "Graceful, economical, and charming." —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "[Ganesan] writes a young girls heart and mind with a true and gentle hand." —Kansas City Star Review Quote " Inheritance possesses Excerpt from Book One My mother awoke in the holy hour before dawn, rumple-eyed and irritable. From the branches of the coral jasmine tree, a night-flowering wonder, small orange-centered blossoms fell to the ground in slow rhythms outside her window. She let a comb creep through her hair, with her fingertips touched sandalwood oil to her throat, between her breasts, her eyes closed in dreams. Perhaps she thought of marrying again. My mother wore a sari of pale yellow, and I imagined she felt she could write a novel then and there. Didnt she have forty-six years of life to tell? But in came my grandmother, scattering my mothers thoughts away, shuffling on feet that had turned as hard as stone. Trumpeting words like an elephant, she asked my mother, "Have you brushed your teeth yet? Do you want your coffee now?" My mother, caught in her dreams, caught with her hand on her breast, nodded yes. The house was awake. The maids began to wash the dishesfrom the night before, and the cook yelled at them while cutting vegetables. The orange vendors and tomato sellers were already at the doorstep, calling out their wares. In the midst of this morning chaos, it was my mother who was labeled the maddest. She was the strange one, the daughter gone wrong, the bad woman who refused to go to temple, who needed her own mother to fetch her morning coffee, who would not wear widow-white. "Why should I wear white if I still have fifty years more of my life to live?" she had asked when her first husband died, refusing to look at my grandmothers face. I imagined my mother in the mornings like this, imagined her thoughts, her longings. She did not speak to me. When I was six, and arrived at my grandmothers house on the island of Pi, dusty and yet presentable after a sultry train and boat journey from India, only my grandmother and Great-uncle Raj were at the table set for the midday meal. Even before I saw her bold-patterned sari and unbound hair, I knew my mother was watching me, suspicious, from acorner. For days we edged past each other. She spoke no words to me. When I turned fifteen, I came to my grandmothers house for a long stay, this time to rest, to get over a dragging spell of bronchitis. I had been given four months leave from my pre-university. My life was filledwith so much illness that I had become a kind of heroine for my younger cousins. ("This is Sonil," they told their friends. "She gets a lot of diseases,") There were hardly two days apart when I was not sick. It was when the huskiness in my voice was lifting, and my chest no longer ached as if atiger were walking about inside, that my grandmother suggested I spend the summer months at her home, away from the infected cities. "The island air is so good-shell recover well," wrote my grandmother to my guardian aunts in Madras. "And Lakshmi, what about Lakshmi? Has she recovered as well?" whispered my aunts on the phone. Lakshmi: that name had been whispered, lingered over in soft tones in my undetected presence for years. My mother, Lakshmi, who hadnt seen me in nine years. Only from the merest shreds of conversation had I gathered bits of my mothers story. They would not tell me the whole truth, so I became an eavesdropper, not knowing they shielded me from whatever harm could be imparted in words. It would be unthinkable, they said, to live with my mother. Only bad would come of it, they thought. What are they afraid of? Would shespit at me, scream at me, shake me as enraged madwomen do in the movies? Or was it simply the association they feared, that her strange ways would rub off on me, the way certain flowers left gold dust on my fingers? But despite the protests, my grandmother, who can wear a face as strong as any gods, had her way. So I went to Pi, to spend a summer full of change and wonder. It was a summer of attuned perceptions, a turnover, a prelude to adulthood; even now, I have not fully recovered from it. It was a summer ofawakening. My grandmothers house was different from my home in Madras. Here, I could walk under the mango trees in a place that lacked only a waterfall tomake it a kind of paradise. In the mornings, tiny parrots, blazes of red and green, rushed into the skies that were brighter than any in Madras. The trees were full of monkeys, bright fruit stuffed into their mouths. I could make a telescope out of my hands and see their glittery old-man eyes. Since she wouldnt speak to me, I spied on my mother, wanting to learn the facts, the truths to tie a kind of monkey-knot to her, a knot that could not be undone. I wanted to know about the circumstances before and after my birth. They had said my arrival was not graceful. They wouldnt let my mother in the kitchen, I observed, to ward off the evil that must surround her, to keep it away from the most holy place in the house. She would take her coffee outside to the brick steps near the pots of roses. She would snap off a deep red bud to adorn herself, having no patience to wait for the lame girl who sold stringed jasmine wound with sage to wear in ones hair. My mother, from her perch, and I, from mine, kept abreast of the flirtations between the cooks daughter and the driver, noting the way he casually brushed by the daughters perfumed arms before mygreat-uncle rushed out for his morning drive. They didnt worry about my mothers gaze, so inconsequential was she. My mother was infuriating. She refused to eat with the rest of us, making Grandmother set an extra plate for her after wed eaten, before she, my grandmother, could eat. My grandmother insisted on serving all of us, Mother included, before she herself ate. This I did not think was nice of my mother, to delay my grandmothers dinner. But maybe my grandmother enjoyed the conversation with my mother, for the two of them often spoke together for two hours, one for my mothers dining, one for my grandmothers. Their voices were only murmurs, hard for me to hear. Maybe my mother ran away from me because there was a gene in our family that caused people to run and hide. Our family was shy, excepting my mother, and even she might be shy, for wouldnt that have caused her to flee from me, her third daughter? For she did run away, run away from the American, my father, and leave me to my aunts. My mother had three daughters. Her first she presented to a husband who wanted a son; she tried to fix things by choosing a name that could pass for masculine: Ramani. After her husband died, taking his secrets to the fire, several trendy college girls began to invite my mother, lovely at twenty-one, to their lawn parties. At one party, a rich boy, coolly dressedafter the fashion dictated by his affected English accent, a filmmakers son, promised to marry my mother. Whether she believed him or not, surely she was seduced by his voice, which ran like warm champagne. She named his child after Savitri, the most dutiful of wives in Hindu legend, a woman whose footstepsfollowed her husbands even after his death. My mother didnt trail after the filmmakers boy, though. She met an American expatriate, a photographer who came to Pi to capture on film the faces of wise seers and shy, mysterious women. The village women say she asked him to sleep with her, and he accepted, and she gave birth to me. They named me Sonil, a name with no definite roots. When I was younger, I used to make up stories regarding my fathers death and my mothers grief but they brought me nowhere. My parents remained as distant as any in a thousand tales from folklore. Why did she want a third daughter? What caused her need to be full of another baby? Why did she send him away? Perhaps my mother had always wanted to raise a troop of strong highway-bandit queens by herself and perhaps she was prevented. She would have been a good robber rani herself a brave woman with a fearless stance. She stood straight under the scrutinizing eyes of neighbors whose mouths never closed. She watched the brightly saried servant girls who gossiped loudly at the gate, catching thehush of their voices when they spoke of her. She was the only woman who didnt turn away in disgust when Ramachandran, the senile gatekeeper, hunched withage, lifted up his dhoti to relieve himself under the banyan trees in the opposite lot. They must have told her she was different, to give her that boldness. Some chanting woman in an orange sari and with a shaven head musthave gripped her hand and told her she had the fingers of an artist. Some troupe of fanatics leading a cow wearing streamers and bells, shaking with an intensity that only the most devout or near insane have, must have told her she was not meant for a peaceful widowhood. They must have told her it was fine to wear bangles and anklets, emboldened her to conceive two more children after her first, freed her to think of marrying again in her forty-seventh year. But who would marry a madwoman? If she advertised in the marital columns, only self-proclaimed free-thinking widowers would answer her ad, and who knew how crazy they were? No one would answer from Madhupur, or from the other townsnearby. On the island of Pi, reputations traveled. Lunchtime, and Great-uncle Raj was trying to teach me Italian. He was my grandmothers eldest brother, a man whose eccentricity almost surpassed my mothers. Long ago, my great-uncle had a job with a company that sent him overseas. For two months, he traveled in Europe, pretending not to be a tourist. When the company asked for his return, he refused and was fired. He stayed on abroad, coming home only for funerals. But one year, seven of our relatives died, and he ran out of money. So he made his Details ISBN0804169241 Author Indira Ganesan Short Title INHERITANCE Language English ISBN-10 0804169241 ISBN-13 9780804169240 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY FIC Year 2013 Publication Date 2013-11-05 Country of Publication India Pages 208 Publisher Random House USA Inc Series Vintage International Imprint Random House USA Inc Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! 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