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MADRAS ON RAINY DAYS opens with the celebration of a wedding between Layla, a nineteen-year-old college student, and Sameer, an ambitious engineer. The five-day ceremony is lush with the rich traditions of the families' Muslim culture in the Indian walled city of Hyderabad, and by all accounts the arranged marriage is a good match for both families.
Behind the scenes of the opulent festivities, though, something is terribly wrong. Layla, who has spent most of her life in the United States, is deeply conflicted about her parents' desire to have her participate in the traditional arranged marriage. She feels at home neither in India, where she is viewed with suspicion as an outsider, nor in America, where her parents deliberately segregated her from modern culture. "I was supposed to inhabit America without being inhabited by it," she says.
Despite her parents' attempt to shelter her, though, Layla still underwent many American rites of passage, often without her parents' knowledge: "getting drunk for the first time, sucking at my first joint... losing my virginity." This last transgression is deadly serious; if her previous sexual experience becomes public, not only will Layla's husband reject her, but her father will be at liberty to abuse and even kill her.
Layla successfully conceals her previous relationship (and the resulting pregnancy and miscarriage) long enough for her to be embraced by Sameer's family. Indeed, much to Layla's surprise, she finds herself attracted to this husband she did not choose and does not yet love. When Sameer disappears for days on end and fails to reciprocate Layla's sexual attraction, though, Layla begins to wonder if her new husband may be hiding some secrets of his own.
This sensual novel is set at the start of India's monsoon season, when the combination of torrential rains and stifling heat combine to create an almost suffocating atmosphere. The novel, with its detailed descriptions of confining interiors and its emphasis on women's lives in the home, effectively communicates this claustrophobic feeling. Less successful is the last-minute attempt to dramatize Muslim-Hindu tensions; the political violence that breaks out at the end of the novel seems out of place with the relentless intimacy of the rest of the narrative.
Ali's novel suffers from some of the problems endemic to first novels. It sometimes bends under the weight of its own self-importance, and its symbolism is a little too carefully explicated. At one point, for example, Layla remarks, "It was not possible anymore for him to make even a broad statement about cultural invasion without thinking specifically about my body." Why not let readers make those conclusions themselves? Astute readers, in addition to being able to decipher symbolism on their own, will also be less than surprised by Sameer's revelations near the novel's end. MADRAS ON RAINY DAYS is not a great novel, but it does offer readers an illuminating portrayal of one young woman's cultural crisis.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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