Books

The Age of Shiva is both the story of a young woman and a young country as each navigates the path from hopeful adolescence to bittersweet adulthood.

Meera is the middle daughter of the upper-class Sawhney family in Delhi, caught amid her father's secular scorn for the very traditions that her mother holds dear. While older sister, Roopa, is deemed the beauty and the one on whom the family's hopes are pinned, Meera struggles to find her place.

That changes one night during India's Republic Day celebrations in 1955, when she meets Dev Arora, Roopa's dashing boyfriend. An aspiring Bollywood playback singer, Dev takes interest in the usually invisible Meera. Mesmerized, and partly to get back at her sister, Meera allows herself into a compromising position. She regards a quick marriage as the way to free herself from the tight grip of her family, especially that of her father.

But the man for whom she exchanges her father soon sheds his spontaneous and romantic shell. When he fails to realize his singing aspirations in Mumbai, his fickle and weak nature is revealed, making married life a disappointment.

The birth of their son, Ashvin, gives Meera a new purpose. Ashvin becomes the next male figure to dominate her life.

The relationship between the two dominates Age. Author Manil Suri writes the story like a long letter from mother to son, further highlighting the increasingly disturbing intimacy.

From adolescence to middle-age, Meera wishes for more control over her life. But at pivotal points, she seems to abdicate making a choice. Is she simply a woman of her time, trapped in between modernity and tradition, or a petulant member of the softer sex not capable of the responsibility she supposedly wants so badly?

Shiva is at its most compelling when its characters are part of the larger story of a newly independent India in its first decade, a country proud and unsure, and still dealing with the religious legacy of partition in 1948. Mr. Suri weaves rich descriptions of life in working-class Hindu neighborhoods in Delhi and the big-city, multiethnic swirl of Mumbai.

Age's ending seems a bit rushed, but overall is a compelling tale of the awkward coming of age of both a woman and her country.

Manil Suri

(Norton, $24.95)

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