The Toss of a Lemon - Hardcover

Viswanathan, Padma

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151015333 ISBN 13: 9780151015337

Publisher: Harcourt, 2008

Synopsis

The Toss of a Lemon is the debut of a major new writer. Spanning the lifetime of one woman (1896 1962), it brings us intimately into a Brahmin household, into an India we ve never before seen. Married at ten, widowed at eighteen, left with two children, Sivakami must wear widow s whites, shave her head, and touch no one from dawn to dusk. She is not allowed to remarry, and in the next sixty years ventures outside her family compound only three times. She is extremely orthodox in her behavior except for one defiant act: She moves back to her dead husband s house and village to raise her children. That decision sets the course of her children s and grandchildren s lives, twisting their fates in surprising, sometimes heartbreaking ways. Inspired by her grandmother's stories, Padma Viswanathan masterfully brings to life a profoundly exotic yet utterly recognizable family in the midst of social and political upheaval.

About this title

About the Authors

PADMA VISWANATHAN is a fiction writer, playwright and journalist. She was awarded first place in the 2006 Boston Review Short Story Contest. This book was inspired by stories from her grandmother. She lives with the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock, and their children in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

PADMA VISWANATHAN is a fiction writer, playwright, and journalist. She was awarded first place in the 2006 Boston Review Short Story Contest. She lives with the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock and their children in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

PADMA VISWANATHAN is a fiction writer, playwright, and journalist. She was awarded first place in the 2006 Boston Review Short Story Contest. She lives with the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock and their children in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Reviews

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by V.V. Ganeshananthan

A novel set in the Indian subcontinent and published in the West bears the burdens of our preconceptions. It is easy to assume that a book about a high-caste child bride who becomes a widow will fix its sights only on the girl's woes and the deep injustices of caste. But while Padma Viswanathan's first novel, The Toss of a Lemon, has at its heart a 10-year-old Brahmin girl who marries an ill-fated man, its ambitions transcend culture and country to reach for the nature of fate itself.

The book opens in 1896, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, as a village healer and astrologer seeks young Sivakami's hand in marriage. Hanumarathnam's proposal bears a strange caveat: His horoscope hints at his own premature death. But her parents need not fret, he insists: "As that prediction is contained in the weakest quadrant, it holds no weight, as you know, though ignorant people let it scare them." So Sivakami becomes a child bride, and her background assures her top rank in the social and religious order, but horoscopes drive the book's plot.

The titular toss refers to Hanumarathnam's strategy for determining his children's astrological charts. Sitting outside the birthing room, he marks the moment when a midwife tosses a lemon through a window, signaling the appearance of the infant's head. Then he calculates its future. All seems well with the couple's first baby, a daughter called Thangam for her golden color. But then Sivakami bears a boy, dubbed Vairum for his diamond-like eyes. Families normally celebrate sons, but this unattractive, intelligent child's horoscope foretells his father's death within three years. Resigned, Hanumarathnam begins to prepare Sivakami for widowhood and trains a servant boy named Muchami to be her aide in the management of her household and property.

When Hanumarathnam does die, Sivakami finds that Muchami is the only person who will selflessly help her. When she sees that her brothers will not act in Vairum's interest, she defies tradition by raising her family in her husband's village instead of her own. That choice shapes the divergent lives of her children. Literally luminous, Thangam attracts the reverence of her fellow villagers. In one of the story's several notes of magical realism, Thangam sheds a kind of gold dust, which her admirers collect and use as they would holy ash. But despite her near-sacred status, Thangam's horoscope presents an obstacle to betrothal because it prophesies her husband's death. The only willing suitor is a shiftless man whose stars predict his wife's death even more strongly. It's a match of dueling destinies.

Thangam eventually bears 10 children. When Sivakami sees that her daughter is failing to manage her unreliable husband and their offspring, she assumes responsibility for the older children. Over the years, as Thangam bears more and more children to be raised in Sivakami's strict home, Vairum's resentment grows. A college-educated social progressive who disapproves of caste tradition and astrology, he watches as his mother raises his sister's children under Brahmin traditions he believes to be wrong. Although Vairum is now Muchami's employer, the servant remains loyal to Sivakami and tries to serve as a bridge between mother and son. This servant's fascinating inner life may deserve a novel of its own. Even in such a sprawling story, we don't get far enough into his head.

All this takes place against the backdrop of considerable change in India, as the book spans more than 60 years. Viswanathan renders these developments -- changes in marriage laws, for example -- in simple, often beautiful language, with details that intersect subtly with the enormous cast of Sivakami's extended family and their friends.

Viswanathan prefaces The Toss of a Lemon with an epigraph from the great Indian novel Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie. Viswanathan's book, like Rushdie's work, aims for epic status. But it actually achieves something that is in many ways more nuanced than the broad brushstrokes of an epic: a meditation on fate's workings in a family dominated by the quiet rule of one woman -- and the struggle of her son against the strictures of her belief.


Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Journalist, playwright and short-story writer Viswanathan's absorbing first novel, based on her grandmother's life, goes deep into the world of southern India village life. Starting in 1896, the story follows Sivakami, a Tamil Brahmin girl, from her marriage at the age of 10 through her long widowhood, while Indian political and social life lumbers through immense changes. Before he dies, Sivakami's astrologer husband, Hanumarathnam, foresees his death in the malignant interactions between his stars and his son Vairum's. Though he trains a trustworthy servant to assist Sivakami until their son comes of age, the world that Hanumarathnam leaves behind is rapidly changing, and the family is not entirely fit to survive it; Vairum, especially, suffers the pain of a father's disaffection and, later, a widowed mother forbidden to touch any human being during daylight hours. Irreconcilable conflicts between tradition—especially the strict caste rules of Brahmin life—and the modernizing world lead predictably to alienation and tragedy, but on an epic scale. Viswanathan is especially adept at unobtrusively explaining foreign customs and worldviews to Westerners while wholly respecting the power and significance they hold for practitioners. (Sept.)
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With an assured voice and a deep understanding of her characters’ moral values, Viswanathan breathes life into the social changes that swept through early- to-mid-twentieth-century Tamil Nadu, India. In 1896 10-year-old Sivakami becomes the child bride of a healer predicted to die young. Left a widow at 18, she dutifully obeys her Brahmin heritage’s millennia-old customs—strict rules dictating her appearance, food preparations, even whom she may speak with or touch. Sivakami devotes her life to her family, but her decisions on daughter Thangam’s marriage and son Vairum’s secular education occasionally have heartbreaking results. Janaki, Sivakami’s similarly conservative granddaughter, later grows to adulthood in an India that comes to view Brahmins not as a proud, mutually supportive people but as racially pure bigots—an opinion her uncle Vairum shares. Despite the saga’s length, there are no dull moments or extraneous scenes. Most impressively, Viswanathan immerses readers in the realities of the caste system from both sides; in telling a universal story of generational differences on a personal level, she makes a vanished world feel completely authentic. Superbly done. --Sarah Johnson

Edition details

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151015333
• ISBN 13: 9780151015337
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 619