Mandahla: Bitter Sweets Reviewed

Roopa Farooki begins her story of the permutations and consequences of deception with 13-year-old Henna's marriage to the eldest son of one of Calcutta's best families, a union achieved by a network of lies "as elaborate and brazen as the golden embroidery on her scarlet wedding sari." Henna's father had successfully presented his lazy, illiterate daughter as an older, tennis-playing, poetry-quoting prime catch. The groom, Rashid Karim, quickly discerns the truth but is compelled to follow through. He had hoped for a life lived in truth and sincerity, but his wife "stained him and blotted all his future aspirations." When his daughter is born, one good thing seems to have come from the misalliance, but "Shona had been conceived with a lie, and was born in a liar's house, and into an inevitable understanding that it was always better to comfort or conceal with a lie than to hurt or expose with the truth."

Shona attends Karachi University, falling in love with Parvez Khan, a Pakistani. Neither of their families approves, so they elope to London, where Parvez gets a job at his uncle's sweet shop and parlays that into a successful restaurant. In the meantime, Rashid has become a quite successful businessman--and a quite unhappy husband. At the Orly airport, he meets a timid but lovely woman named Verity and falls in love. He sees an opportunity to find the happiness he had given up on and creates a new life in England built upon an elaborate scheme of lies. He becomes Ricky Karim, husband of Verity, then father of Candida, and believes he is finally living a life of truth and decency.

Shona is happily married to Parvez, her only sadness being an inability to conceive, for which problem she gets money from her father, prevaricating, naturally. They become parents of twins, Sharif and Omar, and stay together for 20 years, until their union begins to unravel. Add their sons' coming of age, with a new set of lies (Omar is afraid he's a fraud of an Oxford scholar, Sharif falls in love with the wrong girl), and family deception reaches a critical point. Lives cross in unexpected ways, while author Farooki hints at disasters to come: "[Ricky] wasn't to know that, in twenty years or so, their little girl would meet a notorious heartbreaker, the lead singer of a band with a cult following, who paid his rent by occasionally waiting tables at his father's restaurant."

Bitter Sweets is filled with characters you root for even as you cringe at some of their choices. Only Parvez seems to get shortchanged--it would have been nice to hear more in his voice. The ending wraps up a bit too neatly, but still, satisfactorily. Would that finally telling the truth turn out as well and fix lives so easily in real life.--Marilyn Dahl