Review: 'Madras on Rainy Days' shimmers with intensity

Layla, the Indian-American narrator of Samina Ali's debut novel, "Madras on Rainy Days," has grown up partly in the suburbs of Minneapolis and partly in the twisting byways of the Old City in Hyderabad. The land of malls, dating and freedom has barely grazed her -- but for one fateful, rebellious night, so that she is pregnant on the eve of her arranged marriage to Sameer.

The premise sounds melodramatic, but much to her credit Ali is more interested in the slow and subtle self-journey of a young woman who must come to terms with her actions and confront her fiancé's own secrets. Fascinatingly, while Layla moves deeper into a traditional world, wanting to find a sense of home and security that has so far eluded her, her fiancé is desperate to flee the confines of the Old City and show her the hybridized world of contemporary India: young people on motor scooters, eating tandoori pizza, drinking Coke, wearing jeans, dreaming of their H-1B visas. In the course of the novel, Layla and Sameer tussle out not just their personal and sexual struggles, but the larger questions of where and how they can belong to both the United States and India.

The novel has a fierce and shimmering intensity, and great care has been given to rendering the authentic, anthropological unfolding of a Muslim wedding -- the ornate details of each day, the expectations of a new daughter-in-law assimilating into her husband's family. In a sense, the main character of the novel is Islam, with its strong pull and demands. Ali powerfully captures the precarious and painful position of Muslims in India today, where the threat of communal violence and riots constantly hovers.

And Ali, a University of Minnesota graduate who was raised partly in India and partly in New Brighton, succeeds wonderfully in capturing the poignant dilemma of second-generation Indian-Americans who are brought up in the West but are expected to conform to their parents' frozen idea of India -- while India itself has moved on to its own mingled reality. This is best expressed through Sameer, one of the more compelling figures in the book: "Take a look around you, baby, your America has reached even here, the darkest part of India. . . . listen to the Hindi film music. It's all disco and synthesizers . . . Nothing goes uncorrupted . . . not even you."

There are, however, some puzzling aspects to the novel's pacing and structure. For example, we know Sameer's secret long before it is revealed dramatically -- and it's not clear if this is the author's intent. As well, the novel could have used a more visceral, dramatic sense of Layla's American childhood, her troubled relationships with her father and her lover, which remain sketchy and not fully realized. This is because there's a slightly willed quality to the dialogue; at times characters too easily mouth the novel's themes and abstractions, as when Layla declares: "I was supposed to inhabit America without being inhabited by it -- that was what my parents wanted."

Nonetheless, "Madras on Rainy Days" has given us something new: a complex rendering of the tremendous pull of the old world and its troubling confinements, and the powerful attractions and potential pitfalls of the new. In doing so, Ali avoids the simple dichotomies of East vs. West or Islam vs. secularism. In her world, there are no easy answers.

Marina Budhos is the author of the novels "House of Waiting" and "The Professor of Light," and the nonfiction "Remix: Conversations With Immigrant Teenagers."