MIRROR MADE OF RAIN

Addiction dominates a comfortable Indian family and pushes its daughter to the edge.

Patel’s debut is a dark, unhappy story of alcoholism and a broken mother-daughter relationship. On good days, Noomi Wadia’s mother, Asha, “could be amazing,” but such days are rare since Asha lost her second child and, subsequently, her mental health. Now she’s an alcoholic, dominating the lives of Noomi and her father, Jeh: “My parents’ marriage is destroying them, slowly, like termites eating a house.” Noomi, 23, has grown up lonely and rebellious, blaming her parents, struggling in her own relationships, and tempted by alcohol, too. Eventually she will break free of her home in Kamalpur and move to Bombay, where she works as a journalist and meets Veer, the man she will marry. When we next encounter Noomi, she’s arriving in New Delhi with the ever tolerant Veer, to meet her future-in-laws. But, as in the preceding sections, Patel undermines her story with overemphasis, juxtaposing Noomi against casts of two-dimensional secondary figures—corrupt businessmen; mean, spoiled, and critical female elders; and contentedly privileged male peers. This heavy delineation coarsens the storytelling, sapping sympathy for its beleaguered central character, who will struggle with her own alcoholism, depression, and hard choices. At times Patel demonstrates a graceful descriptive style, but it’s her tendency to accentuate that predominates, even during a redemptive—and not quite convincing—conclusion.

A shortage of nuance drains impact from a painful tale.