Housewives whose criminal knowledge comes from street smarts and crime shows make for interesting criminals. And then another woman asks for similar help. But she’s “eating her own salt” and free.Īll is just fine until a woman within the same loan group, one whose face bears the same marks Geeta’s once did, approaches and asks her to “remove my nose ring.” Farah thinks Geeta has already killed one man, so what’s another? When Farah’s husband puts Geeta’s livelihood at risk, she agrees to help. Now, she has no husband and despite being in Saloni’s loan group, she has no friends. Before he’d left, he’d alienated her from her family and her closest friend, Saloni. His leaving was the greatest gift he’d ever given her. She removed her nose ring, lived alone as a widow, making jewelry and saving her money for a refrigerator. Geeta’s no-good husband disappeared a few years ago, and rumors flew she killed him. This novel was on my radar before making the Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist, and it’s hilarious. Take “Goodbye Earl” (or, more recently, Taylor Swift’s take on the same theme with “No Body, No Crime”), set it in India and change Mary Ann and Wanda to Geeta and Saloni and you’ve got Parini Shroff’s debut The Bandit Queens (Ballantine Books 2022). “If she was this lonely, Geeta berated herself, she should get a damn dog.” “She’d first eaten her father’s salt, then her husband’s it was time to eat her own.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |