Old Mills & Boon style romances never die; they just fade away to return in new packaging. Their fictional heroines may have gotten older, wiser, ethnic and career-oriented, yet what women want hasn’t changed. It stands to reason then that what romantic heroes look like hasn’t changed much, either. The Sari Shop Widow is a new ride in a much-visited amusement park. The backdrop is a little different, but the twists and turns are familiar and we all know where it’s going to go.
Shobhan Bantwal creates a promising heroine in 37-year-old Anjali. Widowed two years into her marriage, Anjali lives with her family in New Jersey’s Little India and devotes most of her time to designing creations for and running the family-owned boutique, Silk & Saphires. When the boutique is threatened with bankruptcy Anjali’s father turns to his eldest brother for help. Unfortunately, the colourful Jeevan Kapadia does more than write his distressed sibling a cheque. He boards a plane from India bringing with him the mysterious Rishi Shah, a half-British, half-Indian financial whiz.
Suspicious at first of the proposed “transformation” of the sari shop, Anjali struggles with the sensation that everything she has worked for is slipping from under her feet. Rishi Shah’s proposal is to pump in big money, expand the store and look at worldwide franchising. This may seem like a win-win formula for a proprietor faced with bankruptcy but the formula of the romantic novel dictates otherwise.
Anjali takes time to warm up to the proposal. Soon enough, there’s another complication presented in the form of Rishi’s innate attractiveness. How does a woman hate a man perfectly tailored to be loved? “He was tall and broad-shouldered… He wore an open-neck tan shirt and tobacco-coloured dress slacks, both beautifully tailored and very expensive-looking… He had smooth, white skin. His hair was dense, dark, and neatly groomed… his eyes were… grey.” He may look like an advertisement for Gucci, but surely the middle-aged man must have some personal baggage that requires a good customs-style inspection. And there it is, complication number two.
The path to true love is not easy. With novels like these one can be assured there will be complications and that they will be resolved. What makes The Sari Shop Widow stand out from the stack of ordinary romance novels is that the problems and solutions take on a uniquely Indian tone. The great big Indian family exists, even if half the members are scattered across the US. Anjali and Rishi’s romance begins with the encouragement of the extended family and is saved by family intervention.
Writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Bharati Mukherjee have explored the idea of a desi identity and Indian values in a foreign land with some sensitivity.
Second-generation Americans of Indian ethnicity have earned a catchy acronym — ABCD, or American Born Confused Desi. This kind of confusion or dual assimilation is an attractive facet of Anjali’s character. She wakes up early for a ritual puja but doesn’t balk at visiting a pub late at night and hanging out with a ladies man. Bantwal explains, “She belonged to a conservative Gujarati family that would be shocked if it discovered what was going on. In fact, despite all their Americanisation, they could very well be living in 19th-century Gujarat. Some things never change.”
So Anjali keeps up appearances, makes up stories about meeting girlfriends and manages to satisfy her needs for companionship on the sly.
Unfortunately, we don’t get much deeper under Anjali’s skin or identity as an Indian American. This is partly because Bantwal is at great pains to assure us that Anjali is the perfect match for the perfect man. She doesn’t do this with any great subtlety either. Anjali may be 37, but we are repeatedly assured that she looks much younger and is a good candidate for child bearing.
Most of the dialogues read like statements of fact rather than genuine conversation. Rishi elaborates, “I grew up in a mixed culture. The women I’ve met so far have been either purely Indian and very conservative or totally European and much too forward for me.” Anjali is the one who “embodies the best of both worlds.”
Characters in this novel have a thin inner life if at all. Everything about them is upfront and stated.
Rishi says, “Since I was a child, I was more British than Indian. I’ve lived most of my life as a white man in England.” Later, Jeevan bhai does damage control when a situation develops between Rishi and Anjali’s parents: “Did I not tell you that although he has a girlfriend, he is basically an honourable fellow?” There’s little here for the reader to fill in. Bantwal’s story may have begun with a single woman in her late thirties who lives with her parents and runs a failing business but it quickly transforms into the Cinderella story when she is rescued by a fund-managing half-Gujarati, half-British prince. And despite the minor variations, we’ve all heard that story before.
Karishma Attari is a book critic and writer living in Mumbai. She is working on her coming-of-age novel, I See You.