KARDAMOM KISSES By Shinie Antony Rupa Price: Rs 95 Pages: 289

Her sentences are frequently overwrought, her pronouns missing in action. Once we get past that, this parody of parochial pride and domestic intrigue spits and hisses like a burnt mustard seed. Its knowing digs at the North-South divide celebrate India in a way that a lot of headline-hogging novels on expat nostalgia cannot. The central story is heartbreaking. False rumours of lechery and thieving crack joint families. Dark or ugly girls pretend not to notice that they get a raw deal. Coveting bodies and properties drives people to madness and death. Yet it remains a heady mix of slapstick and sadism-as filling as Dadi's sarson da saag that sits like cowdung, as spicy as Ammooma's slipsliding sambar.

The story is told from Choti's point of view. At JNU, her Amma and Papaji pursue a PhD and a romance that swiftly turns into a marital minefield of Mallu vs Sardarji. Amma returns to her brothers, widower V and henpecked C, whose fork-tongued bride's sly hints coax Amma to shove her pre-nubile girls back to Papaji, now a fatcat singer with a fat mistress. Badi and Choti tragicomically survive Kerala and Delhi to grow respectively into high-flying whore and hysterically deformed doctor. Badi marries Anglo-Indian Dave who has no idea one of the children isn't his or why he must be gunned down in the mountains. It is, however, Choti who observes life's injustices and copes well enough.

Will Shinie Antony, who won the Commonwealth Prize for short stories twice, get lucky with this one? Who cares when readers are guaranteed a very pleasant time tripping over some unpleasant truths?

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