The first few times I found a cracked piece, I tried to apply a thick paint all over and bake it again, but the crack grew bigger from the crack and the heat of the second baking. Then it was really of no use. Or if I dropped it, it would break along that line, even if it was invisible. You can never fix it completely. Clay has a memory. Once it's scarred, the heat helps it remember. It's always the weakest point, where there's been a fracture.I remember when Shilpi Somaya Gowda's The Secret Daughter was a thing and it's too bad that I wasn't writing reviews back then because all I have is a vague memory of having been disappointed – it didn't live up to its hype for me – but I can't really remember why. With so many gushing reviews here for The Golden Son, I figured that my vague memory shouldn't be enough to prevent me from picking up the latest thing, but once again, I'm disappointed: this book is all Bollywood soap opera – with drama piled on romance piled on exoticism – and nothing deeper. I can see the mass market appeal, but with simplistic writing, unnecessary melodrama, and logical inconsistencies, this really wasn't for me. Spoilers ahead so I can memorialise why I wasn't impressed.
The eponymous golden son is Anil Patel: as the oldest son of an important landholder, he is expected to not just learn farming from his father but also to one day take over his role as the arbiter of local disputes. When Anil proves himself to be clever at school, however, his father encourages him to become a doctor instead. Anil is accepted for a prestigious medical residency in Texas, but before his first year is done, the father dies and Anil's mother expects him to become arbiter, even if it's by long distance phone calls. Feeling out of his depths with both the fast-paced hospital work – where mistakes have deadly consequences – and the complicated squabbles for which he has no particular wisdom, Anil is miserable at every turn; except when enjoying his secret affair with the hot personal trainer next door.
Meanwhile, back in rural India, Anil's childhood friend Leena was happily looking forward to her arranged marriage until she arrived at her new home (which was much poorer and broken down than her parents had been led to believe) and discovered that she's thought of as little more than a servant; with her possessions taken away and daily physical abuse. After a year, Leena's new husband has extorted more and more money from her poor parents, and when they have nothing more to give, he sets her on fire. Leena runs home to be nursed back to health, but the whole thing is shameful for the family and her father kills himself after finally paying the Patels back for the extra dowry he was forced to borrow from them.
After Anil and his girlfriend break up – because a couple of rednecks from their apartment building beat his friend near to death when they mistook him for Amber's boyfriend – Anil returns home for a visit, sees Leena, and realises he's always been in love with her. They begin to plan a future together, but when Leena's niece from her inlaws' house arrives beaten and bruised, Leena realises that she could never leave. After formally rescuing both the niece and her little brother from the bad men (ie, their father and his brothers), and after deciding his family can hold arbitration tribunals without him, Anil returns to America and his unsatisfactory professional life. But wait! Anil's Indian boss not only counsels Anil to pick a more suitable specialisation, but she also has a beautiful little sister who has just finished medical school, and although she's never been mentioned before, it is suddenly six years later, Anil and Geeta are married, expecting their first child, and vacationing, like always, in Panchanagar to visit the basic clinic that Anil's sister runs (with naturopathic medicines) and which is named in honour of Leena's father. Happy ending for all!
That's the soap opera – leaving a lot of the drama out – but even in the small details, I was so often annoyed while reading The Golden Son. I was annoyed when Anil went with Amber to a family wedding, and after much teasing and posturing around whether Anil would be a real man and go hunting with the menfolk in the morning, the next scene is the wedding and we never learn if Anil went or not (and yet, we do learn that he didn't go when, near the end of the book, he laments never learning to handle a gun). I was annoyed that Leena gathered all those reeds for no purpose until she randomly decided to weave baskets out of them, which sell out at the market and her family is saved! But wait! Other merchants remember that they have longtime basket-making traditions in their villages, so they glut the market and Leena is driven out of business (Seriously? These people never sold baskets before?) But wait! Leena is able to teach herself how to throw and fire pottery, becoming so adept at it, that within months she's receiving corporate orders and her family is saved! I was annoyed that when Anil went to save the little boy and girl from the evil inlaws, he demanded the return of Leena's jewellry, and when Girish said no, Anil said “Okay, you keep the jewellry and leave us alone forever.” And the next day, Anil is back at the house with Leena, rummaging around until she gets her jewellry: and while this is the just result, it totally undermines what came immediately before.
But the worst problem I have is this: When Baldev was nearly beaten to death by the two cartoonish rednecks at their apartment complex, it takes pages to discover that he doesn't intend to press charges. This is accepted as reasonable and only Amber is scared enough to move out of the building; the goons are never mentioned again. Yet when Leena's young niece shows up with the physical results of a beating, Anil is dumbfounded that they won't go to the police; to the same village cops who didn't lay charges when Leena was set on fire. Am I really supposed to believe that the same man who didn't expect justice for an attempted murder in Dallas is going to demand that the police in rural India take a hard line against a father disciplining his daughter? There's simply no logic in this whole scenario.
There was no lovely writing, no deeper meanings, no insight into human behaviour. I chose that passage I opened with because it was as close as I found to a metaphor, but immediately after Leena makes this statement about her pottery, Anil thinks “That's just like people”; and then he thinks back on it later in the book; so the only stab at subtlety becomes ham-fisted. I won't go into the irrelevant Trey subplot or complain that Charlie needed a bit more characterisation than just adding “mate” to everything he said. I won't even. This book was simply not for me; and to anyone wanting a literary peek into Indian society I want to say, “You can do much better than this.”
