REVIEW BY KIRAN BHAT

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We begin the pages of Purple Lotus in transit, or in travel. The main character, Tara Raj, is a young girl on a train heading to Mangalore. Though “peanut shells and crumpled newspaper [strain] over the floor,” and “stink of urine [emanates] from the toilets three compartments down the corridor,” Tara is a little girl filled with wonder, and hope. She sees her mother with “her hair coiled into a neat bun – like Belle in Beauty and the Beast,” she notices the presence of the child in her mother’s belly like “a birthday balloon,” she describes the passing landscape dotted with, “dark clouds too, smudges of dense black ink that threatened to let their wrath loose again.” Do not be fooled. We spend actually very little time in Tara’s childhood, as the chapter immediately after morphs Tara into an adult, having landed into Atlanta, after having been arranged to marry an Indian-American she barely knows. Yet, in the same way that Rao has taken extra care to decorate her language with the right amount of detail, but never too much so as to render her language garish, Rao has started off our imaginary of Tara as a child for a reason. The journey to loving oneself is long, the journey to understanding yourself is just as hard. A superficial read of Purple Lotus would make it appear like the biography of a woman who dealt with constant gaslighting, spousal abuse, and denigration, during her marriage, and found recognition in herself later on in her divorce. At the same time, I think Rao is attempting something much bigger here. Rao is trying to tell the story of the innate smallness each and every one of us have in a society, culture, or family, and yet to remember that, despite that smallness, we offer a vastness of our own to the world.

One of Rao’s great talents at play in Purple Lotus is her ability to reveal the full depths and feelings of a character in an extremely small space. A few days after Tara is brought to Atlanta, she lays in bed, jetlagged, thinking about whether to call her parents or not. Her husband Sanjay has called her, but she does not understand what he said. Later at night, he confronts her. Tara quite earnestly explains that she could not understand his accent, which causes Sanjay to scold her. After insult upon insult, he roars, “‘Aren’t you supposed to have a master’s in English literature?’” and Tara’s instinct is to escape to the bathroom. “She couldn’t let him see the tears. She felt so stupid. She had already rubbed him the wrong way. The tears flowed, hot and earnest.” These handful of lines do pages of work for Rao’s characters. They reveal the lack of compatability in Tara and Sanjay’s worldview, they foreshadow the further toils and turmoils that Tara’s marriage will result in, and they are just simply relatable. Anyone who has been a migrant to the US will know where Tara is coming from, and instantly feel a connection with her inability to fit in.

Another talent of Rao’s is to imbibe the immediacy of an image or sensation into the reader using language. Much like Jhumpa Lahiri, Rao writes about food in a way that not only makes the reader salivate, but also educates them about the importance of food to culture and the building of relationships. For example, in an effort to make their marriage more amenable, Tara tries to learn how to cook Italian and Mexican food. “Her first attempt at making veggie lasagna was a disaster, but her refried bean enchiladas turned out better—the cheese had melted sufficiently, the sauce was still bubbling when she pulled the dish out of the oven, and the chopped black olives and cilantro added aesthetic appeal to their plates.” Ignoring the fact that Rao’s sentences make me wish I had some Mexican food right in front of me, what is important to the narrative is that Sanjay responds to Tara’s hard work by saying, “It’s good,” and still going out to eat most nights elsewhere. Tara savors what little positivity Sanjay gives her, but to the reader, it’s very clear their relationship is going south, or has been south since it has started.

As per the affair, and what happens after, this is where Rao starts to stumble. It was so obvious that Sanjay was cheating on Tara that I would have almost liked to have seen the story go in another direction for subversion’s sake, and while Sanjay appeared like a well-drawn Indian-American initially, his abuse later on reveals him as a character of very little subtly or three-dimensionality. One wonders, is there anything Sanjay likes to do other than rag on Tara and cheat on the side? A similar problem seems to exist for a lot of the other characters Rao introduces. Tara’s Russian neighbour Alyona often comes off as a generic Eastern European immigrant, with very little detail that reads true to anyone who knows Russian culture well, and Rao’s second love interest Cyrus seems to only exist for Tara to dote on. In fact, it’s such a shame to see Rao’s flimsily realized side characters, because Tara is so strongly developed, and realized, and even real.

Still, all writers are learning their craft, and Rao is no exception. No matter what misgivings I have about certain aspects of the novel, Rao’s prose is so well-paced and structurally formed that hundreds of pages can be read in a few hours, and there’s a lot in her writing that is not only likeable, but courageous, and commendable. Purple Lotus proves Rao to be an apt writer of character study and an effortless storyteller. I’d recommend it first and foremost to people who are fans of the expansive storytelling of Tayari Jones, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni or Jhumpa Lahiri, and then to anyone who wants to add to their bookshelf of growing Atlanta literature.

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Kiran Bhat is a global citizen formed in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to parents from Southern Karnataka, in India. He has currently traveled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. He is primarily known as the author of we of the forsaken world… (Iguana Books, 2020), but he has authored books in four foreign languages, and has had his writing published in The Brooklyn Rail, The Colorado Review, Eclectica, 3AM Magazine, The Radical Art Review, The Chakkar, Mascara Literary Review, and several other places. His list of homes is vast, but his heart and spirit always remains in Mumbai, somehow. He currently lives in Melbourne. You can find him on @Weltgeist Kiran.