This book would be far more a pleasure to read if it were not peppered quite so unnecessarily with expletives and other unpleasant mentions or details in an effort to either introduce some so called realism (as if beauty is not real, and ugliness is the only reality), or to please the publisher with this instead of soft porn which is the usual ubiquitous choice of writers these days in works and places where it is quite unnecessary to the narrative and often would improve the quality of work by cutting it out.
But the work surprises in more than one way. To begin with one must caution a reader - this is too deep set in its surrounding of space and time, and anyone not quite familiar with it would perhaps find it harder than one who is. Which seems like a tautology but is really a caution a reader unfamiliar with what the title amounts to might heed - which is not to say don't read it, only that be aware it is firmly set in its time and place and social setting.
The work surprises to begin with by being not quite as light and trivial as its title might suggest, Even before more serious themes steal in it manages to be less than trivial in a Fiddler on the Roof sort of way about a couple and their five daughters and the worry about their various stages of their respective marital status and possibilities thereof, and then goes on to a bit of a Pride and Prejudice touch with introduction of young men interested in the two younger girls who are yet to marry.
By the time one realises this is not all there is to this the narrative is much further into the story and one realises that the time and setting of this is not merely incidental, but rather central to the story, and merely introduced in this way so perhaps as to lull the powers that might endanger the writer or the reader or an appreciative critic into a belief that this is merely to be ignored as chick lit. And much as that adjective is silly and stupid and derogatory, and much of good reading is thus branded with a misogynistic agenda, this work steals in a serious topic with the camouflage.
And then one is deep in it, comparing the known details with the version here that is perhaps softened so as to make it possible to publish it without risk of life and property and freedom to the author, publisher or critics, not to mention any readers that might actually not write it off as merely chick lit.
The extremely well planned and organised massacre of a small minority that goes with the official label of 1984 riots is not hard to reason out as far as perception of reality under the fraudulent veil is concerned - the silence of the then state owned media, the methods of the genocide, the one way nature of the so called riots with deaths strictly in the small community during those few days, and the pin pointing of where members of the small community lived by strangers who did not know the victims or vice versa, with the exception of some political leaders who were identified at scenes but never did get the due in the judicial probes.
Here the author limits the probing to the small level political leader of the party then as now in power, rather than probing the difficult questions of responsibilities of those really in positions of power and authority. But then one expects little else if this much from what one picks up as a light read to begin with. The love story and family details that forms the skin and flesh of the narrative are satisfactory on the whole too.
