A young wife in a rural village in India lies in a small hut, screaming with the pain of childbirth.  The widwife tells her she has a daughter.  Her husband comes to the hut to meet his son, and when he sees the baby is a girl, he takes her away to be killed.  They can't afford a girl-a girl will not be able to do the hard manual labor, and for a girl they will need a dowry.  The year was 1985.

That's right, 1985.  As recently as the end of the 20th century, the culture of valuing boys more than girls was flourishing in places like India and China.  Cultural practices regarding marriage and family, as well as the need for laborers to work on small subsistence farms, caused some families to abandon their newborn daughters to orphanages, or worse.  In The Secret Daughter, Gowda tells the story of one such family.  Kavita Merchant has three children.  The first was taken away and killed at birth for being a girl.  When the second girl, Usha, was born, she sneaked away from her husband and took the baby to an orphanage, so that at least she'd have some chance of a better life.  The third, a boy, was cherished and celebrated by the family.

Usha was adopted by a couple from the United States, Krishnan and Somer Thakkar.  Kris grew up in India wealthy and well-educated.  Somer is as American as apple pie.  After having multiple miscarriages, Kris convinces Somer that adoption from his home country is her chance to be a mother.  Usha, now named Asha, comes to live with them when she is just one year old.  She grows up surrounded by love and privilege, but it's not until a trip to India at 20 that she truly learns what her birth history and adoption mean to her life and the lives of her parents, biological and adoptive.

The story is told from the perspective of the two mothers for the first part of the book, and mostly from Asha's for the last portion, though her two fathers (bio and adoptive) also get short chapters from their point of view.  It would be easy to demonize a society that throws away 5% of their girls (there is a 5% difference in the population of men versus women that can't be explained by natural or health factors), but Gowda shows both Kavita and her husband Jasu as real people who are faced with impossible decisions in order to survive crushing poverty.  And while Somer seems like an easy choice for sympathetic character (inability to have children, swooping in to save a little brown baby from a third world orphanage), the fact is that she was pretty hard for me to like in this book.  Once she has her daughter, she is constantly afraid that she won't really have a connection to her, because she looks more like her husband, and people in the streets don't know she is the girl's mother.  She tries so hard to hold on to the girl that she ends up pushing her away, into the very thing that she feared most-a search for her biological parents.  While Asha begins her journey as a spoiled, surly teen, what she finds on that search makes her reevaluate her own assumptions about identity and a mother's love.

Gowda does a great job of showcasing the differences between the lives of the classes in India, and the culture shock that westerners, even those of Indian descent, have when they see the beauty and history of the culture transposed with the poverty and environmental issues.  Asha and her Indian family  portray the mixture of pride and shame that must come from being a part of a culture that brims with thousands of years of history, yet still devalues girls such that female infanticide, child abandonment, and honor killings are still taking place today.  One can't help but wonder which India will win out in the end-modern, technological India, or the India of subsistence farming and poverty.

Life in the Rooster Coop

I have openly admitted my Goodreads bookswap addicition.  While they say admitting you have a problem is the first step in recovery, I can't seem to take step number two.  At any rate, I was browsing one day when I came upon The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga.  I've recently grown more interested in south Asian literature, and this one sounded interesting.  I made my request and eagerly awaited its arrival.  Well it arrived alright-in CD form.  Apparently in my mindless bookswapping high I had requested an audiobook.  Arrggghhh...I am not a fan.  I realize that many people love the audiobook, but to me it feels like cheating.  Like if someone asked me, "Have you read The White Tiger?", I would be lying if I said yes.  But, with a couple of long drives coming up, I decided to get over myself and listen to it in the car.  Lucky for me I did, because The White Tiger is one of those rare titles that shows life exactly how it is, with all of its warts and ugliness exposed, and still manages to make it into something beautiful.

The White Tiger is the story of  Balram Halway, a rickshaw driver's son from "the darkness"-the small, poor, rural villages in the north of India.  He manages to escape his own small village by becoming a driver for a wealthy family in Delhi.  Balram is constantly aware of the wide gulf separating him from his wealthy employers, despite the mere inches of space that separates them in the car.  Through letters to the Premier of China, who is slated to come to India for a visit, Balram shares his life story, as well as his thoughts in class, caste, Eastern vs. Western values, and entrepreneurship.  Balram believes that the poor in India are caged in a rooster coop, and that every time one of the roosters tries to break free, he is pushed back in by the masters, even as the other roosters try to peck him to death.

Balram is the perfect narrator for this tale.  Smart, though uneducated, he brings to life the inequities that continue to exist in modern Indian society.  We watch as he becomes more and more dissatisfied with his lot in life.  As a child he seemed to believe the lie that the poor are told-that they are not as smart/talented/good as the rich, and that they should not seek to rise above their predetermined station.  But as he spends time with his wealthy employers, he begins to see the petty, ruthless way in which they treat the poor as something ugly and unfair.  While he starts out admiring his master, Ashok, he comes to despise him for having the same weaknesses and flaws that plague all humans.  As his rage grows, he is led to dramatic action-an action that will change not just his life, but the lives of his entire family. 

Adiga's portrayal of Balram, his employers, and the dual nature of Indian culture could be a metaphor for just about any family or society.  One the one hand, India at the beginning of the 21st century is a place of corporate offices, call centers, luxury apartments, and glittering shopping malls.  But leave the walled compounds of the rich and successful behind, and you enter the India of the slums.  Dirty, full of people scraping whatever living they can out of the underbelly of the city-a place where dreams and hope go to die.  Beggars living on the streets, entire families living in tents beside rivers of sewage.  At times Adiga's descriptions of the living conditions literally make you hold your breath to hold off the stench that you can imagine must exist in these poor neighborhoods.  What Balram calls "entrepreneurship" seems to me to describe not a knack for business, but a knack for survival, a knack for finding a way to be a "man" in a society that wants you to remain an animal.  As Balram says, for 10,000 years the rich and the poor have been at war, each trying to bring down the other.  If only all poor Indians had the "entrepreneurial" spirit, they could smash the rooster coop.  But Balram doesn't really believe that this is possible.  Only once in a generation will someone (a white tiger) be born that has the ability and strength to break free.