Curses in Ivory

Curses in Ivory is as good a read as you are likely to come upon this year, or any year. Anjana Basu has crafted a richly textured, superbly narrated tale of three generations of Indian women living under the spell of an ancestral curse–the desecration of an image of the goddess which reminded the perpetrator of his recalcitrant bride who refused to give up purdah so that he might display her beauty to his friends. The wife eventually left him, a remarkable gesture for a woman back when the Raj was still riding high, and the curse is visited on the next generation when the ancestors infant grandson (male children are to Indian families what priest-sons used to be to Irish) falls or is dropped from a window seat and becomes permanently brain-damaged. The curse continues on through a delicate young woman, a poetess, who is married off to the unstable brother-in-law of a sister of the brain-damaged boy. Jealous of her poetry, the husband brutalizes her, at first psychologically, then physically, until one afternoon she is found burned to death. The police call it a suicide, but the sister-in-law, the young womans closest friend, believes otherwise. She-Regina (all three of the ancestors children are named for the queen of England; the brain-damaged boy is Victor, the other sister Queenie)–is haunted and tormented by the young womans death for the rest of her life, blaming her husband for not exposing his brothers gruesome crime, and abusing her own daughter because she so much resembles her father and because she is a convenient object for her rage. This daughter of the third generation, Sreya, the narrator of the story, grows up longing for her fathers affection which, of course, is reserved for her brother. She is herself full of the same irritability as her mother, especially toward the opposite sex, though without knowing why until the novels final chapters. The “curse”-and by now the meaning of that word has subtly changed, just as India itself has changed from a hide-bound patriarchy ruled by tradition and superstition to a world of miniskirts and cell phones-ruins whatever chance Sreya has for a successful relationship of her own with a man. By the time she discovers the reason for her mothers long grievance with life, it is too late for Sreya to save her own marriage, but the curse in a sense is lifted when she realizes that all the mean slaps she endured from a mother–who saw in her the image of the man she considered little more than an accomplice to the murder of her only true friend–actually had nothing directly to do with herself. As a result, what previously was a dark cloud hanging over the family, a fact of life like the weather or the tides or fate itself, now has a cause and a history, and in knowing these there is a kind of liberation?