DESI DATE NIGHT

Sari, Not Sari by Sonya Singh, Simon & Schuster, $22. What does a second-generation American desi do when the realization dawns that she’s pretty darn clueless about her cultural markers?

She doesn’t watch Band Bajaa Baraat (though that’s recommended), she crashes a big fat desi wedding to gather knowledge from the source!

Manny Dogra is the beautiful young CEO of a highly successful company called Breakup which helps people manage their relationship breakups by crafting the perfect email for them.

She’s planning her wedding with handsome architect Adam Jamie-son while dealing with the loss of her beloved parents.

Raised as an “all-American” girl, she has watched Slumdog Millionaire and wonders about her roots when Kamala Harris talks about her roots, but thinks the correct way to pronounce Diwali is duh-vaa-lee. And that pan comes with bay leaves, paprika, nutmeg and butter and cream.

Which is where her trusty assistant Anjali and the friendly owner of the food truck Aja Raja step in to bring her up to speed.

Anjali informs her that culture and tradition go hand-in-hand, sort of like rice and dal. A stylist insists that she needs an Indian nickname – Mintu.

And along comes a tall, dark and handsome stranger to add some masala to her life.

Pick up a copy to learn what the young adults in your family don’t know – including why we add ji after every uncle’s and aunty’s (not aunt) name! Of course, you might also be reminded of Lata Mangeshkar trilling “I’m sari, I’m saa-aaari”! And young adults might find comfort in knowing they are not alone in not knowing when Diwali falls this year!

BEING YASODHARA

Mansions of the Moon by Shyam Selvadurai, Knopf Canada, $34. So little is known about Buddha’s personal life that even those who know he had a son called Rahul would be hard put to name his wife.

In Mansions of the Moon, Shyam Selvadurai skillfully brings to life the beautiful and willful Yasodhara, the young girl who knew Siddhartha before he became Buddha or the Awakened One.

She loved him when he asked the gods to bless them with male and female children because he knew that though she must perform the duty of giving him a male heir, she longed for a little girl. And felt the pain when he named their son Rahula. For while everyone celebrated the birth of a son given a strong name, she knew it also meant impediment. Was Siddhartha, unknowingly perhaps, thinking of their son as someone who would hold him back to this worldly life that he was seeking to escape from?

She witnessed his bouts of melancholy, “a strange moodiness and brooding that would come over him almost always in response to the philosophy of the Niganta and Ajivaka ascetics”.

Watched his success as a statesman, impressed by his skill and learning. Aware of his struggle  against the suffering he witnessed in the world, but without fully understanding, she would have done anything to stop him from leaving her in search of his truth. 

When there’s news of his return after an absence of ten years – years during which she lived the life of a widow –  she is assailed by memories of life as a young bride, and is wretched and angry at this weakness, whose appearance and disappearance she cannot control.

She is astonished to learn that the dasas, “so low that they exist outside the caste structure” are allowed to practise Siddhartha’s philosophy. And notes how Siddhartha is transformed. Something luminous and sparse lights his features, making them different in the way a lamp held below or above a face changes its aspect.

“She is a woman who waded into a swift river and tried to dam it, to hold in place the rushing onwardness of life; a woman who tried to control and contain also the destinies of her husband and son, who single-mindedly pursued their own paths”.

In a particularly moving passage, Selvadurai captures the emotions surging in a woman’s heart at the impending loss of her parental home after the passing of her mother. Soon, soon, I will be exiled from all this... she had offered herself the comfort of this home; she had made it, in her mind, the stable place she could always return to, would return to when she had finally carried a child to term.

In this sweeping story, at once epic and startlingly intimate, Selvadurai traces the early life of Siddhartha Gautama, a promising and politically astute young man settling into his life as a newlywed to Yasodhara, and then the turmoil as his spiritual calling takes over and their partnership crumbles.

How does a woman live in ancient India if her husband abandons her? Even a well-born woman with a revered husband? And what path might she follow towards enlightenment herself? Selvadurai examines these questions with empathy and insight, creating a rich portrait of a singular marriage, and of the woman who until now has been a shadow in the historical record.

A woman who is often referred to as Rahulmatta or Rahul’s mother, in the early version of the Pali Canon, as he writes in his author’s note.

MOTHER LOAD

What We Carry by Maya Shanbhag Lang, The Dial Press, $23. We have a tendency to eulogize loved ones we’ve lost, specially when it comes to parents – make them out to be paragons of virtue, and self-sacrificing role models.

The truth, of course, is that while many are exactly that, a few are not quite. But we create a myth and hold fast to it. Maya Shanbhag Lang created a myth around her mother while she was very much around, a myth that came up hard against reality one day.

This is the legacy of myths. They set an impossible standard. They are alluring for precisely the same reason they are dangerous. They refuse to disclose details. Yet those details, so pesky to myths, are where life occurs. The details tell the true story. The myth is the story as it wishes it could be.

Her mother, Shanbhag Lang writes in this memoir, was a geriatric psychiatrist. Razor sharp and focused on opportunities for her children.

An immigrant, she came to this country for her children. Throughout my childhood, she fixated on the costs of sending me and my brother to college. If my outgrown jeans showed ankle, she told me to wear longer socks. “Everyone at school thinks I’m poor,” I mumbled. “Let them think that,” she snapped. “Their parents will have credit card debt to go with their nice jeans.”

She tells her daughter the story of a woman carrying her child through a raging river. When the water rises to her chest, what does she do? Maya’s response is based on stories she’s heard of all the mythological characters. Of course, the woman sacrifices herself to save the child. No, says her mother. A young mother herself by then, with a daughter who is just a few days old, Maya is aghast. “She lets her child die? What mom would do that?”

We do not know the outcome, says her mother.

Until we are in the river, up to our shoulders, the current too strong – until we are in that position, we cannot say... We must not judge. This is the lesson of the story. We cannot know the weight of other women’s burdens. Whatever a woman decides, it’s not easy.

And that is the takeaway from this achingly beautiful tale. The lessons Shanbhag Lang learns as she goes from shock at learning that the stories she based her life around were just that, stories, that often they strayed far from actual reality, to acceptance and finally, an understanding. As a writer, I should have known better. I of all people should have understood that a story needn’t be accurate in order to be true.

Shanbhag Lang shares a brutally honest, moving story, sparing no one. Not her parents, nor her brother, and least of all, herself.

ONCE UPON A TIME

Losing Eden by Lucy Jones, Penguin, $21.99. Xena’s grandmother introduces her to a strange old world. One in which real birds sang on real trees, bright green frogs leapt in a rain forest and beautiful flowers perfumed the air.

“And you saw that every day if you wanted to?”

“Yes, darling.”

“What was it like?”

“It was... wonderful.”

“Why did nature end, granny?”

Granny sighed. We didn’t love it enough,” she said. “And we forgot that it could give us peace.”

So begins this fascinating book about why our minds need the wild.

The seeds for this book were laid one summer as Lucy Jones sat with her baby daughter in the garden. The seasons felt “off”.

The papers were full of extreme weather events. What lay ahead for her daughter’s generation?

Losing Eden alerts us to the consequences of turning a blind eye to all that nature is striving to tell us.

A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

The Wild World Handbook by Andrea Debbink, illustrated by Asia Orlando, Quirk, $24.99. This handbook has chapters on insects, birds, reptiles and amphibians, land animals, ocean creatures, fresh-water life and city wildlife. A wonderful guide to Earth’s many animals and how young readers can help protect them – with a little help from adventurers, artists and scientists. Walks in the park have changed forever!

TEEN REVIEW

By HARMIT SAINI

Without Merit by Colleen Hoover, Atria Books, $15.29.  Without Merit is a young adult modern love story by Colleen Hoover. It tells the story from the perspective of Merit Voss, a seventeen-year-old girl who faces depression and learns the importance of family and self-love.

She has been keeping her family’s secrets safe within herself, and writes them in a book. When the secrets are revealed, she is blamed for breaking the family up.

The ending was mesmerizing, where Sagan shares a kiss with Merit. “It’s not accidental, like our first kiss, it’s not deceiving, like our second, and it’s not frantic, like our third. This kiss is the first genuine kiss we’ve shared.”

It is a story with layers and depth. I have not read other books by Colleen Hoover, but I feel she is the queen of balancing difficult subjects with great personalities. I like the way mental illness is addressed – not necessarily a pretty picture, but covered with great knowledge. The first half feels really slow, but after that it started to get really interesting.

I liked the way this book developed and enjoyed the wonderfully flawed characters. I recommend this to anyone who enjoys an authentic story about a girl with a dysfunctional family and to those who also love uplifting endings.

• Harmit Saini is a youth volunteer at Brampton Library.