Amulya Malladi’s third novel is SERVING CRAZY WITH CURRY, a
dark comedy in which suicide is the center of the story. The reader
is allowed inside the thoughts of Devi Veturi as she ponders
killing herself, plans it, attempts it, and then tries to recover
from it while living with her crazy family in the middle of
California’s famous Silicon Valley. It almost resembles a
Bollywood-style movie and is just as entertaining.

The book opens with Devi contemplating reasons to die. She writes a
list of pros and cons of whether to die or not, as if she were
deciding on something as mundane as buying a house. It’s
important, but she treats the idea as a business plan, which can be
of equal importance. And she has just been laid off (again), which
doesn’t help with her depression. Despite how she feels, her
list tells her that she must save herself and abandon her previous
plans, but she has already made up her mind and is now devising
ways to do it. She has finally made her decision --- or thinks she
has --- but she’s up all night worrying about this business
of suicide.

She then decides to call her father, as it is now morning and
because talking to him would help stall her decision to kill
herself. She hears her family in the background as her father
answers the phone. There are tears in her eyes, but she tells him
that she is fine and doesn’t let on about her latest job, or
how she is really feeling. She wants her father to make things
better but knows that everything that has happened to her is her
own fault and that she is responsible for her own actions. She will
deal with her life as only she knows how.

What saves her is a "mistake" she made the previous year, by giving
her mother a set of keys to her apartment. From then on, her
mother, Saroj, would make appearances at the apartment, with one
excuse or another. On the morning when Devi attempts to kill
herself, her mother has the sixth sense to come over to see her
eldest daughter. Devi’s other mistake was refusing to talk to
her mother when she had called earlier that morning. When Saroj
finds out from Girish, her son-in-law, that Devi had just lost her
job, she rushes to the apartment to see how Devi is doing. Saroj
finds her daughter in the bathtub, blood everywhere.

The family, already living in a dysfunctional state, goes into
cardiac arrest when they find out about Devi. Her parents bring her
home to recuperate, and although they are not quite sure if
she’s making any progress with her emotional state, they do
know one thing: she refuses to speak. Instead, she voices her
emotions through cooking, which is more than her family can take.
Yes, they have discovered that Devi has a gift for cooking, which
was never apparent before. But on the other hand, she WAS
communicating through her food to express feelings, whether it was
of happiness or anger. On one occasion, she creates such a hot and
spicy meal that it was almost impossible for anyone to eat it.
Everyone, however, knew how she felt. The food said it all.

Devi starts a journal while she is recuperating and expresses her
feelings through her recipes. Each recipe reflects what she is
feeling at the moment, explained through the ingredients and how
she prepares the dish. It is a very clever way of getting inside
her head, and the reader begins to understand what Devi truly is
going through. The center of her depression, however, is not fully
realized until much later in the book when it is finally revealed
exactly why Devi wanted to end her life.

A wonderful book and probably Malladi’s best so far, SERVING
CRAZY WITH CURRY is a very inventive way of using recipes to help
tell a story. Malladi creates a family of characters that one can
imagine on the big screen: the jealous younger sister, the doting
father, the nagging mother, the grandmother, and the good
son-in-law. While some books are noted for either a great story
line or a great set of characters, this book can boast both. This
reviewer would love to see a sequel, to see where Devi and her
family go from here.