Maya Running

Set in the ‘70s, Anjali Banerjee’s first novel has the distinct whiff of something sweet and unfamiliar about it. Maybe it’s just all the strawberry Quik and watermelon lip gloss in her main character Maya’s life, but perhaps it’s something less chemically preserved. Something more like innocence. Maya Mukherjee is an only child who was born in Calcutta but raised in snowbound Manitoba, Canada. By today’s standards she’s a young 12—short, knobby-kneed, and inexperienced with boys, although she *is* seriously crushing on John Travolta and his teenage Canadian counterpart, Maya’s flirtatious, Yes-listening classmate Jamie. (For readers Maya’s age: Yes was a band that mysterious boys with shaggy hair liked to listen to. A lot.)

While Maya’s life is sheltered, it’s not without complications. She thinks she’d like to be a writer, but her dad, a nuclear engineer, wants her to become an astronomer or a physicist. “Nobel Prize material!” he occasionally hollers in her direction for encouragement. Maya herself is mildly obsessed with the waiting game all skinny preteen girls can relate to, the when-am-I-gonna-get-’em dilemma. Braces and the occasional zit make the picture complete.

Her major preoccupation, though, is being the only brown kid around. Thoroughly Canadian, she’s jealous of her parents’ friends the Ghoses, whose two children speak fluent Bengali when she only knows English and the language of Western pop culture. But at school she feels embarrassed by her Indian-ness. It’s hard not to when the class bully calls her hateful names and some of the girls make fun of her “barfy” lunches of leftover rice and dahl. But lo and behold, her differentness has attracted the attention of Jamie, who asks her about things that usually make her feel alienated from her friends, like the smudge of red her mother wears on her forehead.

The Indian-Canadian thing gets even more complicated when Maya’s beautiful cousin Priyanka—”Pinky”—comes to visit from Calcutta. Maya already loves Pinky from their airmail correspondence, and the two girls bond over a botched beauty treatment. But when Jamie looks at Pinky he sees a more grown-up version of Maya—and a more Indian one, with her swishing sari, lovely British-tinged accent and elaborate Kathak dancing. When Jamie falls for Pinky, Banerjee captures something beyond the more predictable, if nasty, problems of being an ethnic minority in a sea of whiteness—all that snow, all those Caucasians—by showing that the double-edged sword of seeming “exotic” can cut as deep as straight-up bigotry.

Luckily, Pinky brought something from India besides her bra-needing figure: a beautiful gold statue of the elephant-headed Hindu god, Ganesh. Maya locks herself in the closet with the round-bellied figure, makes him a jelly bean offering and tells him her troubles. Ganesh agrees to destroy the “obstacles and impediments” that make her life difficult, but it doesn’t take long for her to realize that imposing her will on other people can hurt them. To undo the damage of her wishes-come-true, Maya must travel to Calcutta, where she swoons with the heat and the streets teem with homeless children. She misses the blue spruce and flat highways of Manitoba. But she’s surprised to feel at home here in a way, too, with relatives who smell “familiar, of spice and silk, as if we have a secret family recipe of smells.”

The neatest thing about this coming-of-age story is that it’s about something much bigger than first kisses, or even confusing identities. Maya’s first experience of thinking like an adult is pretty heavy, to use an expression of her time: it’s really a religious truth about her relationship with the universe. By the book’s end she understands that she’s neither sort of Canadian nor sort of Indian, but both things and neither at the same time. It’s a stunning idea, beautiful and complex, and one that belies the book’s simple language and childlike perspective. It’s also pleasingly accessible. After all, as Ganesh tells Maya, all he really did was remove illusions to help her see the truth.