SHIVA DANCING

A disappointing first novel by cookbook author Kirchner (The Healthy Cuisine of India, 1992) begins promisingly, but quickly reduces its portrayal of an Indian woman unhappy in America and drawn back toward her native land to melodrama and sentimentality. Kirchner hooks us early with a beautifully detailed description of the arranged marriage of two seven-year-olds in a village in Rajasthan. The plot quickly thickens when the girl, Meena Kumari, is kidnapped by bandits, escapes from them at a train station, and is ``rescued'' by a wealthy American couple, the Gossetts, who soon thereafter adopt her and return to live in California. Twenty-eight years later (as she begins the sixth of her ``seven-year cycles''), Meena Gossett is a successful software expert at a San Francisco computer firm and living in a vulnerably solitary state (her adoptive family are all dead, there's no man in her life). A chance meeting with Antoine Peterson, a novelist to whom she's immediately attracted, disturbs Meena's recurring thoughts of returning to India to locate her ``husband'' Vishnu Chauhan—whose career as a journalist working for a (Moxan) separatist tribe's newspaper in Calcutta is followed in a parallel narrative. A crisis at work, and the news that Antoine has decided after all to marry his disagreeable fiancÇe (as well as an e-mail reunion with Vishnu accomplished by a mutual friend) sends Meena back to India—and Kirchner's novel into romance-fiction overdrive. Meena goes back to her village, only ``to realize how little Indian she was,'' and finds Vishnu shortly before a terrorist bomb explodes, sending them all (for Antoine too has arrived in Calcutta, having seen the error of his ways and forsworn marriage) to the hospital, and Meena and Antoine finally into each other's arms. Good material, and some initially gritty characterizations, are wasted on a trivial story undone by clichÇs and coincidences. Danielle Steel does India.