The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff (Ballantine Books)

Nobody in her village is precisely sure of how to categorize Geeta. Is she a widow? Is she a witch? Is she a murderer? Or perhaps she’s all three possibilities rolled into one. 

The only true fact that everyone can agree upon is that several years ago, Geeta’s abusive husband Ramesh disappeared without a trace, never to be seen again.  Finding--or creating--an explanation for this has kept the village gossips busy ever since and Geeta’s tarnished reputation has kept her old friends at a distance. 

That Geeta doesn’t seem to miss her husband allows the stories about her to take on an even darker shadow. She has developed her own jewelry business and appears to be more than happy to live alone. Some of her neighbors call her a churel, possessed by a demon that eats children and makes both men and women unable to come up with replacement offspring. Others speculate that she must be “mixed with dirt,” abandoned because she had betrayed Ramesh with other men. However many women secretly envy her. Geeta has no husband to drink up her earnings, to beat her, or to make any demands upon her at all. At last one of the unhappy wives comes to her, begging that she “remove my nose ring,” a veiled plea to get rid of the woman’s husband the way Geeta is rumored to have disposed of her own. Suddenly a woman who was happy to have been abandoned becomes a reluctant murderer, not once but twice, at the behest of women who are trapped in miserable marriages.

With two murders to her credit, Geeta loses the pariah status bestowed upon her with her supposed killing of Ramesh. She even acquires a male admirer. In spite of her pangs of guilt and the threat of imprisonment, her life is good--until Ramesh shows up, alive and repentant, eager to resume his marital privileges and take his share of his wife’s financial success.

This is a promising beginning to a novel that’s quickly burdened with too many characters all talking at once and far too many social issues. Domestic violence, the injustices of the caste system, the preference for light skin over dark, the dangers of adulterated booze sold at a profit, the history of the Bandit Queen Phoolan who became an outlaw to wreak revenge after she had been gang-raped, even the intricacies of village council politics are all tossed into what at first seemed to be a pleasant little black comedy with feminist undertones. 

If that weren’t enough to sink the story, it quickly becomes burdened with a surfeit of unnecessary dialogue and an overdose of slapstick plot twists, giving the impression that Parini Shroff might have originally intended this to be a movie script or a television situation comedy. Even its dramatic ending falls prey to a never-ending conversation between almost all of the leading characters. What should have been suspenseful and maybe even thrilling goes on for an interminable thirty-five pages of threats and quips until at last someone mercifully takes action.

It’s tempting to tell San Francisco attorney Shroff not to quit her day job, but that would be cruel. Instead let’s hope that she concentrates on what she seems to do best, creating entertainment content where her crowd of characters and their jumbled lives will find themselves perfectly at home.~Janet Brown