Listening Now

In India as elsewhere, the closest families often hide the most painful secrets, betrayals and hostilities. Appachana's (Incantations and Other Stories) achievement in this intensely lyrical, if overwritten, first novel is to expose and explore these darker family matters--in their peculiarly Indian incarnations--with insight and candor. A college teacher in New Delhi, careworn Padma tells her sensitive, fantasy-prone daughter, Mallika, that the girl's father died in a car accident just before her birth. The truth--that Mallika is the product of a love affair destroyed by misunderstanding and parental meddling--comes out through flashbacks and the gossip of various characters, including Padma's estranged, widowed mother and unhappily married sister. The return of Padma's lover, after 13 years, to beg forgiveness from her and from the daughter he never knew, gives the story dramatic power. Appachana, who won a NEA fellowship based on an excerpt of this novel, invests nearly all her characters with secrets--abortions, love affairs, wife-beating, sexual molestation, terminal illness, explosive resentments--that gradually come to light through roundabout conversations as believable, in their indirection, as the wounds they lay bare. (Mar.)