The debut novel by Nikita Lalwani, Gifted, makes for quite enjoyable reading. It’s about an Indian girl’s coming of age in Cardiff, Wales, as a math prodigy pushed and prodded by an overly controlling father. 
The father’s obsession with having his daughter achieve a very rigid kind of academic greatness should ring a bell with second gen/ABD readers, especially given the apparent desi fascination with things like Spelling Bees (often discussed here at Sepia Mutiny) and World Records. For most middle class desi kids growing up in the west, childhood is often (whether you like it or not) all about “studies” — and Lalwani’s book shows a case of that parental obsession taken to an extreme.
That said, Lalwani’s Rumi (short for Rumika) is in fact genuinely interested in math and numbers from an early age, and Lalwani does a good job of taking us into her head without drowning the reader in math problems. Though I’m not particularly mathematically inclined myself, I do remember there being a certain luminosity to math problems as a child/teenager — something beautiful in algebraic abstractions, or the spiraling concept of infinity in calculus. (Unfortunately for me, I tended to be more enthusiastic about the aesthetics of the math than in actually solving the problems at hand…)
Here’s a short passage from early on in Gifted, where Rumi (age 8 at the time) is chatting with her relations while on a trip to India. They are discussing real-life math prodigy, Shakuntala Devi, who was able to multiply two thirteen digit numbers in her head:
Rumi and Jaggi Bhaiya talk about world records, in particular about Shakuntala Devi, the maths genius who multiplied two thirteen digit numbers in twenty-eight seconds the year before. Rumi has seen Shakuntala Devi on TV, her kindly smile gracing the airwaves like the most favorite auntie you can imagine, big red bindi shining out from the center of her forehead with the super-force of blood. Rumi has a funny feeling when she sees Shakuntala Devi on the screen. It is as though she is related to her. Or something. Even her mum and dad are charged and excited when they see her on the box, thrilled by the contradictions of cotton sari, center parting, blond hair-sprayed host and acrobatic maths.
‘But why did they treat her like that? In itself, it is proof of the superiority complex that the West has over us,’ Jaggi Bhaiya is saying.
‘What is superiority complex?’ Rumi asks.
‘When a culture thinks they are better than us, that we are dirty, cheating scoundrels. That is why they insulted Shakuntala Devi in this way. You cannot deny it!’
He is referring to the text added next to the entry in The Guinness Book of Records. Rumi knows the words, having Jaggi recite them and having read them in her own edition: ‘Some experts on calculating prodigies refuse to give credence to the above–largely on the grounds that it is so vastly superior to the calculating feats of any other invigilated prodigy.’
Gifted is somewhat different from other Brit-Asian fiction by writers like Hanif Kureishi, in that the social context isn’t especially politicized. In Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia and My Beautiful Landerette, the central subject is the tension about race and identity — with the rise of the National Front on the one hand, and the emergence of the racially self-conscious British Black Arts Movement and the Southall Black Sisters on the other.
Though Gifted is also set in the 1980s, politics and race aren’t really defining issues. Lalwani’s characters are in a more “mainstream” context–relatively isolated from the trials and tribulations of the immigrant South Asian community–and the story is really about the internal dynamics of a single, deeply dysfunctional nuclear family. If anything, politics enters in obliquely in passages like the one above, where the question is really whether and how respect is given by the world to the “gifted” Indians. Like Jaggi Bhaiya, Rumi’s father smolders with a simultaneous pride and insecurity about his image as a middle-class Indian in British society, and his neuroses are partly what drive him to treat his daughter as he does.
I tend to suspect that this book will be slightly more popular with women than with men, though it is (thankfully) a far cry from those deeply irritating Chitra Divakaruni type books, where the goal is for the desi woman to “find herself,” usually after extricating herself from a bad marriage with a bad desi man. Dating and boys do play a role in Gifted, but again, the story is really about Rumi’s fraught relationship with her father and mother, and all those familiar clichés of 1st/2nd gen Indian fiction (i.e., involving arranged marriage) are fortunately absent.
Nikita Lalwani’s Gifted is available at Amazon.com.
I thought it was OK. I finished reading it, so that’s good enough, but for some reason, I have abnormally high expectations for desi novelists that I don’t apply to any other writers, I really want them to hit sixes and be creative and original and brilliant. And this was, you know, fine, but nothing incredible.
I’m looking forward to Kureishi’s new novel coming next year, about an Indian Muslim family from their emigration to the UK in the 1950’s all the way up to the London bombings in 2005. It’s been so long since he wrote a great novel, and it’s exciting to think what this will be like. Plenty of love, hate, misery, tenderness, sex and transgression I hope.
I’m still traumatized on the Brit-Asian lit. front by my foray into “Londonstani,” but perhaps it’s time to dip my toe back into the waters–thanks for the post!
I started it a few months ago, but never finished; your review makes me think I should give it another try.
I liked it until the very end. The ending of Londonstani was just so terrible.
Rob, while I can’t guarantee you’ll like “Gifted,” it’s quite the opposite of “Londonstani.” No flash, no gimmicky slang, etc. Gautam Malkani is close to the early Hanif Kureishi at least in the sense that he’s trying to be hip; Nikita Lalwani isn’t.
You might judge by the part I quoted above. If it seems like good prose, you might like the novel overall. If it’s just “ok” (as Bobby puts it), you might want to skip it.
I read Londonstani right up to the part where there is a brawl between 2 guys and the fight scene was described like this.
“He did a flying side kick to Face followed by a back flip where a kicked him in the forehead and flipped at the same time, then came the siagon punch to the groin”
It didnt go exactly like that, but it was similar and it was BAAAAAAAD. Who the hell fights like that?
I am still waiting for a truly great book about the modern Indian experience and the Namesake doesnt count for me because it was to depressing. I like my books with perfect mixes of humor and realism.
Glad to hear it bears no resemblance to the writing style of the unreadable Chitra Divakaruni, however, I wish they put a little more thought into the cliched book cover (a topic I know has been covered a couple of times here).
ShallowThinker, what about The Inheritance of Loss? I thought it was pretty much perfect.
I don’t know about this book, I was never really very good at maths you know.
Speaking of spelling bees, I won an adult bee here in DC last year. When the final word given was ‘cornucopia,’ the audience started groaning and someone yelled “but he’s INDIAN!”
Inheritance of Loss was a great book, though I think technically it’s about a 1.5 (or whatever fraction you want to use) gen Indian. And as the title suggests, it’s super depressing.
They have adult bees? You mean all those spelling bee contestants can keep on spelling through adulthood? How long before we see a professional speller?
I am not familiar with “The Inheritance of Loss”, but I will get around to it and it sounds interesting.
On a side note, anyone notice the vast superiority of Indian women in terms of writing and music and global appeal compared to Indian men? Whats up with that?
I must have missed that one ShallowThinker, where is this ‘vast superiority’? Care to give some examples?
To just say “Inheritance of a Loss” is depressing is an understatement. I can’t seem to get past page 100 because there is just no hope, no light. Heck, I felt like popping an anti-depressant every page I turned.
Not to say it isn’t well written and the characters worth delving into. Just so effin’ gloomy.
Yup, with comments like that, you deserve your handle.
Are you talking about books about the ‘Indian’ experience, or the ‘Indian diaspora’ experience?
Anyway, I didn’t find the Namesake depressing, but even so, are you saying there’s no depression in the ‘Indian diaspora’ experience? Anyway, I want to read as many stories as I can, because there’s no single ‘Indian diaspora’ experience — there’s a cacophony of voices and histories and realities, some depressing, some happy, some comic, some tragic, some plain, some weird, some funny, some serious, some strange and surreal and others banal and mundane. As long as writers reflecting all these things are being published it’s all good. Londonstani and The Namesake are both different experiences but they each have their truth.
Indian men:
M. Knight Maybe the band cornershop Salman Rushdie The director of SuperTroopers guy from Heros, generously on list I cant think of any other right now,
Indian Women Mindy Kaling Jhumpa Lahiri Ash Rai MIA Bat for lashes Padma Lakshmi Parminder Nagra Gurinder Chanda Mira Nair Archie Panjabi Sunny leone, haha I had to add her
I added some actors to this list, but they are artist, I guess
There is depression in real experiences, but I want to escape that when it comes to reading fiction, but that is just my cup of tea.
ShallowThinker-
Why don’t you ignore the countless desi male academics, politicians, business leaders, public scholars and others who make a contribution to our societies that vastly outweighs those of any of those people on your list, save perhaps Mira Nair? Oh wait, that’s exactly what you did.
I forgot Kal Penn
ShallowThinker, your list of successful ‘diaspora Indian men and women’ in the arts and culture is very selective and partial and pretty much meaningless. Especially when you leave so many names out to suit your theory. I think it’s a blind alley you’ve gone down here.
I am just talking about entertainment. Leaders of business and politics are the exact opposite of entertainment.
I am not blindly anything, If you have names to add to the list then go ahead and do so. And remember these are people that are in entertainment.
There is also Alpana Singh, a women, here is Chicago that is the youngest sommelier in the world and host of the most popular food show in Chicago.
How funny, Amardeep. I always thought the ability to do math and to write well were inversely proportional. Case in point: my brother is a math genius who was taking uni math courses when he was in the tenth grade; however, when my high school English teacher found out that he was MY brother, his jaw dropped, and after keeping his mouth open for a full ten seconds, he managed to gasp- get your sister to help you with your homework! 😉
Add the most succesful musician Nora Jones for the females
Just to please some of you, her father Ravi Shanker
Shallowthinker,
To add to your incomplete list of diasporic men: Amitava Kumar Vikram Chandra Suketu Mehta Asif Mandvi Kal Penn Manish Acharya Anuvab Pal Jay Chandrashekhar
I am sure others will contribute shortly.
OK, I’m going to call Pricewaterhouse, Deloitte Touche, KPMG and Ernst & Young to get a full audit, this needs to be proved.
Not to mention: Shauna Singh Baldwin, Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, Madhur Jaffrey, Arundati Roy, Shonali Bose, Kalpana Chawla(the astronaut) and Sunita Williams, Indra Nooyi (CEO of Pepsi), Anoushka Shankar, Mohini Bhardwaj (the Olympic gymnast)
The only Indian guys that I can think of: Vikram Seth and Shashi Tharoor. Oh, and I’m going to say the J-word: Bobby Jindal.
I don’t know why this is, either.
Hold on, all these names getting mentioned off the top of people’s heads, all they prove is that you only have these names on the top of your heads, and they’re all selective that don’t prove anything other than that you have selective names on the top of your heads.
Because the media chooses to selectively portray the “Indian” angle when it suits their exotic radar, which is almost always a story of a “modern Indian woman” overcoming the patriarchy to speak truth to the Man. What about people like Kaushik Basu, Deepak Chopra, the dude from Merchant Ivory, Englebert Humperdinck, Ben Kinglsey, Freddie Mercury, Sanjay Gupta, and Dinesh D’Souza to start? There are more, plenty more…
Comparing the achievements of Indian diasporic men and women is kind of an absurd exercise.
It might be more productive to simply look at novelists, where admittedly there are probably more regularly publishing desi women than men right now. But that doesn’t mean that their achievements outshine the men, necessarily. Rather it might have something to do with market forces (more women than men read fiction these days — hence the success of a number of women novelists writing novels with women protagonists, that are marketed specifically to women readers).
It might also be worth looking at the number of reviews novelists get in prominent venues like the Times or the Washington Post. I haven’t surveyed it, but I suspect you’d find that male writers like Rushdie, Naipaul, Vikram Chandra, and Mohsin Hamid get a lot more critical attention in those prestige venues than desi women writers do. (Book reviewing as a profession is dominated by men… hm)
Then there’s the question of sales, advances, and how much money the authors make. But that’s a whole other can of worms.
The point is, how do we define success? Personally, I’m not so much interested in sales or reviews, but in whether a novel really leaves a lasting cultural mark.
I will help you out, Sanjay Gupta from CNN. The guitarist from SoundGarden, even though Chris Cornel wrote all the music for him.
By the way I havent heard of half of the people on your list. Manish Acharya? Anuvab Pal? Amitava Kumar? Really? I already mentioned Jay and Kal earlier and please stop listing business men.
Amardeep-
If that’s your criteria, then desi men are clearly way ahead of the women. None of the women writers can hold a candle to Rushdie, Seth, Chandra or Naipaul. I haven’t read much Hamid, but I have read both Desai and Roy, and neither were impressive to say the least. And don’t even get me started on the cookie-cutter MFA crap that Lahiri turns out.
I apologize for going off topic by the way.
Tony kanal from No Doubt. The guy in Sum 41. still drawing a blank but I know there are more.
I agree, it’s really stupid and a blind alleyway. Anyway, who cares? I don’t judge a book or whatever by the gender of the artist.
Shallowthinker,
Manish Acharya and Anuvab Pal co-wrote loins of Punjab presents and Anuvab is a playwright, so I am not sure who the businessmen on the list I provided are, just because you haven’t heard of them doesn’t mean no one has.
there is a left-brain, right-brain* type of writing. the left brain tries to position thought logically. there are axioms, lemmas, propositions, theorems in proof of hypotheses for who i’d call the hyperlinear thinkers. it makes for an elegant but bony presentation. It isnt necessarily poor writing. In particular I think Ha Jin among English writers as representative of this kind of writing – sparse, yet elegant. I also like Joe Fiorito, a local columnist for his stark style and abrupt prose.
The right brain type of thinking encourages more holistic thought with a focus on the picture rather than the stroke. As a child I would encounter such writers, be perplexed and even infuriated. I couldnt read the Big D until I hit grad school and took a few more years for Proust to grow on me. I only know when I am reading such writing is when I have this overwhelming sense of peace or pleasure. The feeling runs the other way as well. I tried to read Ayn Rand and quit when i realized she’s an asshole and her writing writhes with hate. Among contemporary authors, I found arundhati roy to be juicy [the choice of word is deliberate] and fulfilling and best representative IMO of that style.
*I do not mean leftbrain-rightbrain in purely physiological terms, though a linkage might exist. I meant in the sense of linear-thikning-sum-of-parts type of writing versus abstract-big-picture type of writing. I’m sure everyone of us has struggled with these two sides.
The thing about mathematics is that at the undergraduate or school level, this subject encourages linear thinking. 2+2 makes 4. At an advanced math level the subject needs more abstract thinking. On a personal level learning the language of abstract mathematics was painful because i was never really good enough to be an auteur – merely a dabbler. i could feel the presence of something beautiful but never put my arms around her. it’s left a big hole.
I had such high expectations for this novel after I heard it was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It was good but it definitely wasn’t great fiction. I thought the pace and flow of the novel was uneven and that just drove me a bit nutty. I felt like the author ran out of things to say and there was so much of the story that wasn’t developed. I definitely liked Lalwani’s prose much more than Lahiri’s but that’s a whole other conversation. Nevertheless, I liked the concept of a maths genius and probably would have been just as inclined to read it if it wasn’t all desi and paisley-fied.
This beauty of infinity was lost on me because ever since I was about 5, the other kids (having heard from their parents (usually fathers) kept parroting the statement that INFINITY was the biggest number there is (remember, this is an age when the biggest number you can recite to is somehow a metric of your accomplishment). So, when I finally saw it in class, it was a mostly relief to see a more graspable and down to earth idea.
Same thing happened with other beatiful things like entropy – people mindlessly parroting through college “measure of disorder”, “entropy is always increasing” without knowing what the hell they are talking about. So that by the time you actually really get it, it’s mostly just relief.
HAHAHA, people think entropy is “just” a measure of disorder in the universe. Dumb asses!
I know there’s a winky face, but still. As a teacher (sorry, I hate it when people start statements like that but deal), I HATE HATE HATE hearing people say they’re not “math people” or not “writing types.” Ugh. Explain it better. Why? Is it because you don’t LIKE math? Well, that’s ok. Is it because you don’t think you’re a good writer? That’s ok too, but this “types” business just reinforces the idea to kids that a) There IS a type and you can’t change that and sometimes b) that you can’t be both “types” and sometimes even c) that “types” might be aligned with gender or ethnicity/culture.
{shudder}
For a debut, I thought the book was well done. Especially the dialog between Rumi and her mother, Shreene, was pitch perfect. Sure, it wasn’t a great, great book but it was a good read.
OK people, on a scale of 1 to 10, if Monica Ali’s Brick Lane is 10; How would you rate this book?
Monica Ali’s Brick Lane is not a 10
TOTAL word. I’m an applied math major who takes as many english courses as possible. I also tutor younger girls, and it’s frustrating to hear them say, “I’m just not good at this because I’m a girl!”
This is obviously also why I must read this book ASAP.
I am also a math major (pure…the way God intended it to be). Having read that short excerpt, though, I get the feeling that I won’t enjoy this book much if I get around to it. Shakuntala Devi is (was?) a calculating prodigy, NOT a math prodigy; all she does is multiply big numbers in her head, nothing more. I would hesitate to place mental calculators on the same level as math geniuses. What insight do the former have into anything abstract? I wouldn’t even call mental calculators arithmetic geniuses (it should be acrobatic arithmetic, not “acrobatic maths”). They’re just very, very proficient adders, subtracters, multipliers, and dividers, just like the cheap Casio I got from the dollar store. Terry Tao (a real math genius) wrote an interesting post about genius in math on his blog – it can be found at http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to-be-a-genius-to-do-maths/
Interestingly, Ramanujan was both a superb calculator and a mathematical genius. But the newspapers of the time were a lot more enamored of his calculating skills than his mathematical achievements: he was the famed ‘hindoo calculator’.
I won’t hold it against the book as Lalwani might well be aware of the difference, though she makes it so that her characters may not. A little girl may not realize that feats of calculation do not imply mathematical insight, and I can’t tell from the excerpt what the background of Jaggi Bhaiyya is.
Is this true, or was it that one of the branches of math that he contributed so solidly to – was number theory, some of the more simple of whose results can be appreciated by the mathematically naive (occasionally, even by the innumerate), and the naive are then (mis)led to think they came from a human calculator?
There is the famous anecdote that Hardy narrates about the time he visited Ramanujan on his deathbed. Hardy made a throwaway remark that his cab number was 1729, to which Ramanujan immediately responded, “Interesting. It is the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.” (1729 = 9^3+10^3 = 1^3+12^3) This is a combination of both some amazing feel for numbers, and prodigious calculation ability.
Also, one of the most amazing things about Ramanujan was his intuition. He would come up with the most abstruse formulae, seemingly purely because he intuited them, and without any rigorous proof technique. This contributed to quite a bit of skepticism about the veracity of his results. In fact, when Ramanujan wrote Hardy from India with his results (many of which were independent rediscoveries of previous theorems), Hardy was so stunned by some of the new results (usually listed without proofs) that he said something to the effect that he couldn’t believe somebody could come up with them (My memory is hazy on the exact remark and quote, so I could be wildly mistating). I believe that his habit of listing theorems alone also made understanding and deciphering his notebooks difficult (some of his theorems were wrong too, but it was difficult to figure that out in the absence of proofs).
As for his contributions in number theory themselves, his major results about theta functions and partition theory are pretty mathematically sophisticated and don’t fall into the realm of pop mathematics, by any means. It is Ramanujan’s diamond-in-the-rough story (combined with the “white man’s burden” subtext) that really captured the popular imagination.
(I just saw that one of your links is to the 1729 incident. Sorry for rehashing it, but in any case, I do think the incident is evidence of significant calculation ability).
This one incident keeps coming up in all stories of his life. There may have been others like it – but it seems to me that Ramanujan saw them as special cases (or the first non-trivial case) of his phenomenally more general results in number theory. So his calculation ability may pale beside Shakuntala Devi, though admittedly non-trivial in itself – and he could still be the greatest mathematician of the 20th century – or all time.