Read my Q&A with Padma Viswanathan here.

No, it’s not a book of recipes and she’s not the sister of the much-maligned Kaavya. “The Toss of a Lemon” (Harcourt, Sept. 2008) is Arkansas-based and Canada-born writer’s first novel. And what a beautifully-wrought, political, social, and at times heart-wrenching work it is—ten years in the making.

The Toss of a Lemon begins in 1896 in the caste-organized village of Cholapatti in Tamil Nadu and carries us to 1958 where the strictures of caste have broken apart amidst the new economic and political framework of post-colonial India, specifically South India.

In the opening scene, ten year old Sivakami (a character based on Viswanathan’s great-great grandmother)and her parents are on a pilgrimage to “her mother’s place” and decide to pay a visit to a young healer and astrologer Hanumarathnam. While making Sivakami’s astrological chart, the healer announces that their stars happen to be in alignment – “He blinks rapidly, the lamplight making him look younger than his twenty-one years. He takes a breath and looks at Sivakami’s father. ‘I have never looked at, nor ever proposed to any girl before now. Please … consider me.’” There’s only one small glitch. Hanumarathnam’s horoscope predicts that he will die in the ninth year of marriage–unless his first-born son’s horoscope matches his.

Sivakami’s parents are optimists and the two are subsequently married “like everyone else, at an auspicious time on an auspicious day in an auspicious month.”

At the heart of The Toss of a Lemon is a horoscope. It dictates the destiny of Sivakami, who is widowed at age 19, the mother of one girl and one boy and the inheritor of her husband’s family home and properties. It also dictates the destinies of Sivakami’s children: Thangam, a quiet beauty whose skin gives off gold vibuthi, or dust, with healing properties—a result of her father’s alchemist experiments—and Vairum, a math genius with “irises nearly black yet strangely brilliant, diamond sharp” and a skin condition (vitiligo) which makes him an anomaly in the Brahmin quarter early on in his life.

There’s a memorable description of Sivakami early in this book: she “carries herself with an attractive stiffness: her shoulders straight and always aligned. She looks capable of bearing great burdens, not as though born to a yoke but perhaps as though born with a yoke within her.” Indeed, though strict Brahmannical traditions call for Sivakami to shave her head, wear white, and to not contaminate herself with human touch between dawn and dusk, she is also a rebel who chooses to raise her children in her husband’s ancestral home (instead of returning to her natal village and living with her brothers). Helping her in this herculean task is Machumi, a non-Brahmin villager and closeted gay man, who manages Hanumaranthnam’s land properties and business. Sivakami’s main reason for staying in Cholapatti is to give her son, Vairum, the opportunity to “become what he already is, what he was meant to be.” That translates to sending him to an English school, not to a paadasaalai, a Vedic school, where he would be educated as a priest and thereby “remain both Brahmanically pure and Brahmanically poor.” Vairum is reluctant to leave his cousins and start a new school:

“So take me back there so I can start school. I told you, that’s what I’m waiting for.” [Sivakami] jabs her hand in the general direction of her brothers’ house. “If you go back to Samanthibakkam, the school you will go to will make of you nothing more than a Brahmin.” “I am a Brahmin,” says her son. “Yes,” she cries. “you are already a Brahmin, and I think you can become something more, if you go to a proper school.”

Eventually, Vairum is persuaded to attend his English school, bribed with a “shiny pair of brown leather shoes, foreign made.” “Hooves! They will be like bullock hooves. What Brahmin wears the skins of killed animals?” is Sivakami’s initial reaction. But, she acquiesces and this trade off is a signal of the changes that are to come in her life. Without realizing it, she has set in motion a chain of events that will forever alter her son’s relationship to his caste identity.

Thangam marries a handsome good for nothing and gives birth to ten children, all of whom are raised by their grandmother. Vairam becomes an immensely successful businessman in Cholappati and Madras, but like his father, his fate is beholden to a horoscope, which predicts that his wife cannot bear children. As the novel progresses and new generations come into the picture, Viswanathan deftly switches points of view so that we can see the world of Cholapatti and beyond through younger perspectives. In this novel where social structures are constantly breaking apart, strict observers of the Brahmin social structure rub shoulders, knowingly and unknowingly, with a gay man, devadasis, and the Self-Respect movement. By doing this, she takes us into a world where rituals, superstition, and the holy grail of caste undergo a transformation none of the characters could have predicted. This is not a preachy novel, nor is it melodramatic. That’s what I liked about it. We see how social movements and political events impact families and societies at the micro level, in day-to-day affairs. And yet, the novel has a layer of magic realism, you might say, where the author doesn’t make bones about the fact that there are forces beyond our control—including things like stars, magic, and unexpected secrets—that shape families’ destinies.

I couldn’t put down this 616-page book once I started it earlier this summer. On our way back from our family vacation in Maine, I sat in the passenger seat engrossed in the complex family saga that spans 102 years of India’s history. When it was my turn to drive, I moved over to the driver’s side reluctantly, leaving the heavy book on my seat. As I glumly sped down the Mass Turnpike, my husband took pity on me. He picked up the book and started reading it out loud, picking up the thread of the story where I had left off. His parents, who were visiting from Coimbatore, perked up in the back seat where they were dozing off. Here was a story that spoke to the world they had seen once, which their parents and grandparents came from, and which has changed so drastically over the past century.

“Who is this Padma Viswanathan? my father-in-law asked.

I handed him the publicity materials that came with my galley. “A new writer. “She based this book on the stories her grandmother told her.” I replied. “She’s very good. Very very good. Take a look.”

Read my Q&A with Padma Viswanathan, a thoughtful and incisive addition to the South Asian literary landscape here. I’m also hosting a give-away of my galley copy of the book, so if you’d like a chance to win it, visit my personal blog Literary Safari and drop me a comment letting me know.