A chronicle of two countries and lives in letters

In a reading career of about 40 years, I’ve come across many, many misleading blurbs, but few as downright deceptive as the one on the back cover of Antara Ganguli’s Tanya Tania.

The blurb led me to believe that the book would be a young adult take on the relationship between India and Pakistan via letters between Tanya Taliti in Karachi and Tania Ghosh in Bombay, just before the Babri Masjid is demolished.

What I got was indeed a novel based on letters between the two girls in the two countries, but nothing about the tension between India and Pakistan. Instead, it’s about the strain of growing up, and the tension within the two countries. And on balance, when I later thought about it, this made it a more interesting book than the one I was expecting. Except the blurb still makes me burn. Humph.

Tanya and Tania are the daughters of women who studied together at a US college. Tanya’s mother is an American married to a Pakistani, while Tania’s family is Indian on all sides. The two begin writing to each other when Tanya breaks her leg and is out of school for longer than she’d like. She’s wholly focused on getting into a US college, which means she’s ambitious not only in terms of academics, but extra-curriculars as well. Lying in bed, she’s bored to bits, so she begins writing to Tania.

Tania writes back only because her mother forces her to. She isn’t into boring people under any circumstances, and Tanya’s focus on college definitely puts her in that category. So Tania’s response is rude in the extreme, and she spends much of her letter talking about her status in school as the queen of cool, and the boy she’s managed to land precisely because of that.

It’s only because Tanya desperately needs to talk to someone, anyone, that she writes back. Tania is clearly her opposite in every way; they have nothing in common. But Tanya is the world’s loneliest teen. Her father who insisted on returning to Pakistan from the US, uprooting his wife and children, is focused only on the hospital he wants to build. Often thwarted by Pakistan’s money-hungry political parties, he spends almost all his time on the site, returning home only occasionally to eat and sleep and say not a word to anyone.

Tanya’s mother, Lisa, has increasingly gone quiet. She spends most of her time locked in her room, emerging only at night to croon over the plants in the garden.

And Tanya’s twin Navi is in his own world, one composed of sports and silence. He says nothing to anyone, even his father, about what’s happening to his mother. He barely speaks with Tanya. But he gets along excellently with his father, because he’s almost as consumed by the hospital as his dad. Bored witless, Tanya decides to educate Chhoti Bibi, the young servant woman who has just come to work at her home in Karachi. This will be a great project to add to her Harvard application, she believes, though Chhoti Bibi is unimpressed by any ambition higher than working as domestic help. Meanwhile Tanya writes to Tania and reads her letters in return: letters about social status, clothes, her boyfriend Arjun, the coolest boy in school, her over-ambitious mother and her unambitious father — and Nusrat, the one person in the world with who Tania can be herself. Like Chhoti Bibi, Nusrat is a servant, but unlike Chhoti Bibi, she’s wildly ambitious, brilliant at her studies and genuinely cares about Tania. Tania in turn, genuinely cares about her.

As the two Ts write to each other and occasionally talk on the phone, tension slowly grows within their countries. In Pakistan, parents are sending their sons to study abroad because of kidnap threats from political goons.

In India, a Right-wing party is on the rise, creating fear among Muslims and causing Tania’s mother and father to fight even more than they usually do. Meanwhile Lisa grows stranger and stranger, another American woman married to a Pakistani is shot dead, Navi receives a death threat and has to be sent away, Tania has sex with her boyfriend and is badly let down, and Nusrat seems to be growing colder.

And then the rising horror all culminates one day in December 1992, after the Babri Masjid is brought down by screeching mobs in saffron, when India burns, and Nusrat vanishes.

And then the structure of the book, which you were slowly beginning to figure out chapter by chapter, makes awful, dreadful sense.

And then you hurt. Most of Tanya Tania’s readers will not have been around that terrible day in December 1992. I was. I’ll never forget it. It tore my country into tiny pieces and I don’t know when the India I love will be put together again.

So I’m recommending Tanya Tania partly for didactic reasons. Its YA audience should know why their country is so very torn today.

But even without its value as a version of India’s recent history, I’d recommend Tanya Tania anyway. It’s a book that deals honestly and well with the issues of young women growing up, it’s very well written, and it’s a novel I know I will read again. I’ll just rip the back cover off, though. The sight of that blurb still makes my blood boil.

Kushalrani Gulab is a freelance editor and writer who dreams of being a sanyasi by the sea.