Bitter Sweets Book

Roopa Farooki's delightful confection of a book tells the story of three generations of a family of deceivers. Despite their many peccadilloes - sloth, dishonesty, infidelity and bigamy chief among them - Farooki has created a colourful and loveable bunch of characters that are a complete joy to get to know.

The novel starts with the marriage, under false pretenses, of Henna Rub, an underaged Bengladeshi shopkeeper's daughter, into the established landowning family of Ricky-Rashid and ends (some fifty years later) with an extended family gathering in a London park for a performance by her grandson's rock band. In between these two events we follow the family of Henna and her erstwhile husband to London where their only daughter, Shona, elopes in a "love marriage" to Parvez, a penniless Pakistani. Shona and Parvez give birth to twin sons - timid, bookish Omar and rakish, womanizing Sharif. These six characters spend the entire novel deceiving one another and, just as often, themselves, in their quest for fulfillment.

While the book has no shortage of light moments, it's essentially a drama and, as such, I was surprised at how deceptively light and easy it is to read. It has a touch of Moliere about it, with its myriad misshaps, misunderstandings and just misses. As they say, Oh what a tangled web we weave...

It's one of those rare books that I couldn't wait to get back to each night, to see what twists the story would take.

The author lets the reader see into the thoughts of all the main characters, jumping from person to person, often within one scene. The technique is effective in creating tension, since the reader always knows when two characters are at cross purposes. This comes particularly useful in a story about a group of liars. But it also creates empathy. Even the least likeable characters are allowed to tell their side of the story and Farooki trusts her readers to formulate their own judgments about them. Even the lazy, narcissistic Henna.

My only complaint is that the resolution happens too suddenly and all seems a bit too pat. Almost as if Farooki ran out of steam. I found the story so enjoyable, the writing style so effortless and breezy and the characters so appealing, which probably explains my disappointment that the whole thing ended a tad too abruptly.