DARJEELING

A novelist and Indian cookbook writer mixes a sensual and at times suspenseful transcontinental family saga as two sisters vie for the same man.

This time out, Kirchner (Sharmila’s Book, 1999, etc.) combines several ingredients to make for a satisfying tale, including family discord and forbidden love. After older sister Aloka and younger sister Sujata both fell for Pranab, a Sanskrit scholar and manager of their family’s tea plantation, the two were forced to leave their home in Darjeeling. The story opens in New York ten years after that event, when Aloka, now a reporter at a newspaper for Indian immigrants, finds that her hard-won marriage to Pranab (she’s the one who got him) is ending, and, cutting back to Darjeeling, the author retraces the drama that occurred a decade before. Although Pranab and Aloka were engaged, Sujata and he shared a desire to better the living conditions of tea workers, and common sensibilities bloomed into a passionate but prohibited affair. When Sujata’s family discovered it, they banished her to Canada and threatened Pranab’s life. Despite his tryst with her sister, Aloka managed to secure Pranab’s vows, and the couple escaped to New York. A decade later, no one is happy. Pranab is bitter in marriage and unhappy in the US. Aloka finds letters suggesting Pranab’s unfinished affection for Sujata, and she faces the stigma of being an Indian divorcée. Although she’s built a successful tea-import business, Sujata resents the family who exiled her, and unresolved conflicts on all sides come to a head when the sisters and Pranab are summoned back to Darjeeling for a family birthday. Spicing her narrative with Bengali phrases, Kirchner suggests sympathy for her many characters, but her resolutions of their conflicts can seem insubstantial: Aloka and Pranab’s marriage is roughly sketched, and deeper tensions in the plot are too often resolved with a quickness that makes them emotionally unconvincing.

A textured melodrama.