5 days ago
The Perp in This Murder Mystery Might Be History Itself
INDIAN COUNTRY, by Shobha Rao
Delhi, 1968. A young Indian man persuades an American woman to travel with him to the ancient city of Varanasi, along the Ganges River, telling her that he promised his mother to go there 'to take darshan' before starting a new job. The woman, a housewife from Illinois who's come to India to escape a bad marriage, asks what darshan means. 'To get the Ganga's blessings,' he replies. 'But literally darshan means to see a thing. A holy thing.'
This moment in Shobha Rao's second novel, 'Indian Country,' reveals how and why the structurally ambitious and multilayered book succeeds: It does so beguilingly, by inviting new ways of seeing. The Hindu concept of darshan is richer than the man explains; it involves both seeing and being seen by the divine. Rao challenges readers to regard reality more deeply through a densely populated web of interwoven story lines, and introduces surprising spectators to watch them unfold. In the creation story of a Montana prairie river believed to be sacred, three Native American spiritual figures are transformed into cottonwood trees rooted along its banks. These unorthodox witnesses are also storytellers, narrating what they see in an opening and ending with the quality of a fable.
Between that prologue and epilogue set in mythic time, a suspenseful, decisively plotted 21st-century crime story unfolds. An Indigenous archaeologist drowns in that same (fictional) Cotton River in Montana while she's excavating a Native burial site near a dam that is controversially under deconstruction. The hydraulic engineer hired to remove the dam, another young Indian man named Sagar, is wrongly blamed for the death and suspects he's being scapegoated.
As he and his new bride, Janavi, maneuver through a xenophobic corner of the American West, lingering grief and guilt from childhood traumas and the awkward distances in their arranged marriage, they come together as an amateur detective duo to uncover what really happened. When Sagar is fired, the clock starts ticking as the immigrant couple have 60 days to leave the country.
In the mix are the dead woman's abusive ex-husband and their young daughter, a mayor from a powerful white ranching family who objects to the dam's removal, and an Indigenous community tallying the unsolved cases of their missing and murdered women over decades. When Janavi oversteps to help the dead woman's young daughter — back in Varanasi, she'd been a social worker rescuing street children — the caretaker's rebuff highlights the double meaning of the book's title: 'You're confused about which kind of Indian you are.'
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