The Girl In The Garden by Kamala Nair

    It’s always exciting to find a beautifully written story filled with intriguing characters, a foreign setting, and suspense, which is precisely what Kamala Nair has given us in her imaginatively wrought debut THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN.

    We first meet Rakhee Singh as a young woman engaged to be married. However, she realizes that she has not told her fiancé everything about herself.  She writes him a letter, which says in part, “This is why I am leaving behind the diamond ring you gave me, which I never should have accepted in the first place, not when there are still secrets between us.  Until I have gone back to the place where it all started, and told you everything, I cannot wear your ring or call myself your wife.”

    The receipt of a letter from India in handwriting that she instantly recognizes has caused Rakhee to leave the man she loves behind and fly to India to confront the secret she has kept hidden.  Thus, in a flashback the reader is taken to the summer Rakhee was ten.  She is living in Minnesota with her mother, Amma, and father, Aba, whom she adores.  It is a confusing time for the child because Amma has changed, become unpredictable, tearful, sharp following the arrival of letters from India.

    Amma soon decides to take Rakhee and visit her family in rural Kerala.  It is a place Rakhee could hot have imagined, unbearably hot, mysterious.  She meets her three cousins who seem to believe that a ghost lives behind a stone wall that they are forbidden to touch.  It is a disturbing time as both Amma and a strict, stone-faced aunt often weep behind doors.  Dev, a crude, unlikable fellow, is catered to by members of the family for reasons unfathomed by Rakhee.

    As the days pass Rakhee fears that Amma will never take her home to Minnesota and Aba but plans to stay in Kerala.  So, despite stories of a Rakshasi, “a hideous she-demon who feeds off the flesh of children,” living behind the stone wall Rakhee braves the wall in an attempt to find out why her relatives are acting so strangely.  What she finds there is the beginning of unraveling the unbelievable deception that has shaped so many lives.

    Nair has crafted a spellbinding tale rich with details of everyday life and death in rural India, and the sociological aspects of that country.  It’s a bit of a fairy tale, part family drama - coming-of-age tale, and always fascinating.