Skip to main content

Storytelling

I have Trinidadian friends and love their food. That is the extent of what I know about the culture. While browsing around the public library recently, the cover of Lime Tree Can't Bear Orange caught my eye. The phrase which forms the title of the book has a close cousin in my own language - Bengali. Also the cover image of the lotuses in the lake fringed by palm trees must have invoked memories of Bengal countryside. Hit by an unexpected bout of nostalgia, I decided to check the book out. I was only able to skim through it after reading the first chapter which ends with a graphic account of the protagonist's rape by her uncle right after she attains puberty. Maybe it was the brutality of the description but it turned me off the story immediately.

It reminded me of the other book I had attempted to read recently -
A Happy Marriage by Raphel Yglesias. Chapter One was a thing of remarkable beauty and I had great hopes of this being one of those books that I would remember for a long time. Yet in taking us to the tragic denouement in the very next chapter and then going back and forth between past and present, the joy of discovering an unfolding story was gone completely. Very quickly the book became an assault in the senses. I could not bear being yanked from courtship to terminal cancer time after time. It was a good story gone to waste because of how the author had decided to tell it, as far as I was concerned. And so is the case with Amanda Smyth's Lime Tree Can't Bear Orange.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques