June 2, 1997
Originally published in New Delhi as Seasons, this subtle tale of cultures in conflict follows two women, who meet in graduate school at Berkeley during the 1940s, through very different adulthoods in America and India. At the end of a long career, unmarried Dante scholar Carol Thorpe mulls over the differences between her choice of lifestyle and that made by her friend Helen Granziani. While Carol followed the life of the mind, Helen followed a fellow student, Tej, to Punjab, married him and thus entered into a menage a trois with Tej and his first wife. Through letters to Carol, Helen recounts her rough adjustment to Punjabi culture, where, until 1952, bigamy was legal and divorce was rare. What gradually unfolds, along with these letters and reminiscences, is an unprejudiced comparison between the ambitious intellectual with a penchant for married men and the devoted wife in a very un-American arrangement. Singh's (Uncle's Concubine) rendition of Indian family dynamics is particularly satisfying, as are her villains: the relative who slights Helen by referring to second wives as "concubines"; the first wife whose chilly little heart explains Tej's flight through America to Helen. The tension builds, with the leisured pace of a Satyajit Ray film, into an inevitable family showdown between character and custom. Novel or memoir? Singh, whose life superficially resembles Helen's, takes a quotation from Italo Calvino for her epigraph: "The author of every book is a fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him the author of his fictions."