Book Review: The Toss of a Lemon

In the introduction to her stunning first novel, Padma Viswanathan describes her grandmother’s faltering attempts to recount their family history. “This time, she started farther back,” she writes of one occasion, “with a story I’d never heard: of her own grandmother, married as a child and widowed before she was out of her teens; of that grandmother’s son, childless and embittered; and her daughter, my grandmother’s mother, victimized by her marriage.” After trips to India, enormous amounts of research, and not a little invention, the result is The Toss of a Lemon.

Set within the Brahmin caste in southeastern India, the book opens in 1892 with a marriage proposal between Hanumarathnam, a young man “blessed with the ability to heal,” and ten-year-old Sivakami, a girl who looks “capable of bearing great burdens.” The proposal is accompanied by elaborate astrological calculations, after which Hanumarathnam tells his prospective in-laws he may die in the tenth year of his marriage.

When Hanumarathnam dies after the birth of his first son, Sivakami is left to the cruel yoke of a Brahmin widow. Stripped of her jewellery and dressed in a white sari, she is forced to have her head shaved and is forbidden to touch anyone between dawn and dark. Thus begins an epic family drama that extends into the 1950s and traces the conflicts between the traditional India and the modern, secular one.

The brilliance of The Toss of a Lemon rests not so much in its intricate plotting as in the compressed, poetic precision with which Viswanathan depicts a lost world. “On the riverbank, in a ceremony as old as men and women, her brother tears Sivakami’s blouse at the back, and she is made to remove it,” the author writes of the young widow’s mourning ceremony. “She unties the saffron thread of the thirumangalyam and drops it into the pot of milk her son holds for her . . . She will never see those gold medals of wifehood again.”