Gifted

Nikita Lalwani's Booker longlisted novel "Gifted" may or may not have been inspired by the much publicized real life case of a child prodigy hothoused by her ambitious father for fame and glory who later dropped out of Oxford University to become a part time prostitute. Though their backgrounds are by no means identical, there are strong parallels - both come from Asian families. There must be something about Asian families - and that include Oriental families - for whom education is the only passport to a better life and for which parents are willing to sacrifice everything for their children's future. A fair enough starting point for parents perhaps except that when they start putting on blinkers and the child becomes an object or a pawn for its family's ambitions, that's when the trouble begins. "Gifted" doesn't pretend to make any profound statements about this phenomenon. It is a cautionary tale that unless the "gifted" child however young is consulted or even included in the fasttracking process, things can and will get out of hand. Mahesh and Shreene aren't remotely the monsters you might think them to be. Their apparent cruelty and lack of sensitivity towards Rumi's growing up teenage needs merely reflect their anxiety for the child to fulfill her exceptional potential. Everything else - even the recognition that but for her intellect, Rumi is like any other teenage girl - becomes secondary or unimportant. Their own cultural and religious belief - especially in the case of Shreene - and the fact that Rumi is growing up in a western secular society only compound the problem. Interestingly, unlike typical children of immigrants, Rumi doesn't reject her parents' values and is happiest when she returns to her motherland for holiday. For a newcomer, Lalwani is remarkably accomplished. Her prose flows smoothly and her plot is always believable. An easy entertaining read, "Gifted" addresses a phenomenon only too familiar to Asians. Readers from Confucianist societies will certainly empathise with Rumi's anguish and hopefully learn from it.

Lalwani's novel raises the question of how much can you push your kids academically? Rumika is 10 years old 2 months 13 days 48 minutes and 4 seconds old when the novel opens. When she was just 5, her teacher came to the house to tell her parents that she was a gifted child, and that this gift should be nurtured. Rumi's father, Mahesh, is a maths professor at Cardiff university, and knows that hard work is the immigrant's path to respect and recognition. He takes the idea of coaching his daughter on board and runs with it, imposing a strict regime on her that borders at times on abuse. Rumi longs for normalcy, but as she is forced to study ever harder, her relationship with her cold and scornful father deteriorates even further and she also finds her isolation from her friends increasing. As she enters adolescence she has to carve some freedom for herself, but ends up doing things which are risky and stupid - shop lifting, calling emergency services just because she wants to speak to someone, and harming herself. She also, quite comically, becomes addicted to cumin and munches her way through vast quantities of it. The only period of respite is a trip to India with her mother, Shreene. Lalwani does a very good job of depicting the sense of loneliness and dislocation in the family, and gets right inside her characters and exposes them. No matter how unlikable Mahesh is, we can understand his motivations and fears. Shreene is caught up in traditional notions of propriety and finds it difficult to navigate the compromises that must be made, not only to adapt to British society, but also to be able to understand and reach out to her daughter. This might make for painful reading but there are also some wonderfully comic moments in the novel, my favourite - Shreene trying out a bikini wax after reading about it in a woman's magazine. Rumi wins a place to Oxford, one of the youngest students ever allowed to do a degree course and the move gives her some of the freedom she has been waiting for. Lalwani builds up the sequence of events convincingly and Rumi's actions come as no surprise. In fact we're cheering for her as she asserts her independence in the final scenes of the book. This is a novel that young adult readers, particularly those experiencing examination pressure themselves will enjoy very much indeed. It is also an excellent cautionary tale for overly ambitious parents who should be treated to a copy of it by their kids immediately!

This book is part of a genre that is getting increasingly popular every day, that of the experience of the immigrant Asian in the West. In this case, it is an Indian family, who emigrate to Wales in Great Britain during the early seventies. The father, Mahesh, who has made it to the prestigious job as a mathematics professor, at the University of Wales, has survived the horrors of the Partition of India in 1947 and is a self made man. The mother, Schreene, is a pretty, pleasant housewife, brought up in the time- old self- sacrificing Indian tradition, ever ready to forego one's pleasures, for the good of the whole. Their first child, Rumi, is the central character of the story. Rumi turns out to be exceptionally intelligent, so the father, a strict disciplinarian, takes upon himself, the task of showcasing his daughter to the world, in order to experience, albeit vicariously, the attention and publicity she would receive as a child prodigy. Seeing her properly established in the right circles, for him, would be some sort of a corroboration of the values that had inspired him to acquire the status and community standing that he had acheived over the years. Both parents, believe, (not unlike improvident Asians from other countries) that the grandeur of their daughter's success would also reflect on the superiority of their own culture and norms and show 'the decadent West' their place in 'civilisation'. Rumi, obviously, does not know of her parents' agenda. Soon enough, however, she gets to feel the heat as Mahesh puts her on a very strict regime of discipline. The rules set for Rumi, leave little room for her to be a child, leave alone playing with her peers. The greater part of her waking time was to be devoted to mathematics, not even story books were allowed. Mahesh's goal was to set a record by getting his daughter to Oxford, before her fifteenth birthday. How far he succeeds in this attempt, how Schreene reacts to the sequence of events, and how Rumi develops, is the main theme of the book. The story has been very poignantly written. The characters are very vividly portrayed, especially Schreene, who reacts violently as she finds herself cloven apart between her Eastern values and Western mores, and how, she can, nevertheless, as a mother, set aside her own pride, and reach out to her daughter in love, and forgive. In contrast, Mahesh, the rule maker, finds himself trapped within his own self image and is unable to react. The scenario is familiar to many immigrants from developing countries who have yet to realize that the values that procured for them, their present material abundance, do not work for the second generation who need a totally different kind of nurturing. Rumi's situation, is one that is relevant to women who have been brought up before and upto the late eighties. In actuality, the onslaught of the Internet, has changed the situation for women, quite significantly. There are other books which have been written, by and fo

Fifteen minutes ago I finished 'Gifted' and want to present a different account than most of the reviews here. I won't recap the plot about young Rumi, her critically insensitive (but loving) father, and her sad and rather bewildered mother, as many people have offered the main points. My own central point is this: Agreed, the novel isn't perfect; but, parts of it are. Lalwani is so attuned to, and articulately expressive of, the emotions felt in a family (even an atypically dysfunctional family) that the book is engaging. It represents in acutely painful terms the nightmare of emotionally missing each other that most of us experience in our families --but for us, it's a flash of a moment here and there, whereas for Rumi it's extenuated and expanded into a continuous reality. I did care about Rumi, as I read. A previous reviewer complained that none of the characters communicated - well, right! This is Lalwani's desire, to make us look at what happens to a bright, open, unusual child who is forced to play out a parent's impossibly rigid vision for her, week after week and year after year. Rumi feels unknown and unseen, and she is. I found a lot of the negative comments to be about a focus on the trees (details), instead of the forest (overall book). Yes, the family walks to the cinema and returns by 'car'. Perhaps a taxi? Is this really a problem worth noting? Consider instead a passage Lalwani includes in this very section of the book. As the family walks along, Rumi, at this point a pre-teen, experiences some rare light-hearted, in-sync moments with her parents. Everyone highly anticipates some fun together. But then the mother becomes tense about an exchange with her husband, and the world tilts: "She [the mother] laughed, a bitter rind to the sound. Rumi held her breath in her chest and looked at Mahesh [her father], fearful that it was all going to come tumbling down, that they would now sit in the cinema in silence, Shreene's [her mother's] mouth curdled with irritation, immersed in a cycle of resentment that there was no way to break. If this was the beginning of one of Shreene's moods it would start with the silent treatment, her mother possibly abstaining from food and drink not only in the cinema but until Maresh said sorry (which, from experience, could be very late at night or even, terrifyingly, the next day). Rumi's mind juddered." How beautifully does this passage capture the anxiety felt by a young girl who gets far too little joy and fears that her current experience of it is about to evaporate forever. There are many such passages in the book. Give it a chance.

Nikita Lalwani's Booker Prize nominated debut novel "Gifted" tells the tragic story of the slow nine-year implosion and disintegration of an immigrant family trying to raise their mathematically gifted daughter in Cardiff, Wales--a culture that the parents poorly understand and privately loathe. The book delves deeply into how even the most well-intended objectives can have harmful--and even tragic results--particularly when they are played out upon a stage of cultural bias and emotional blindness. This is the tale of Rumi Vasi, a child who finds immense satisfaction, beauty, and mystery in numbers. As a very young child, Rumi interpret the world through numbers--numbers are fascinating, harmonious, and enticing. In particular, she loves the number 512. It is friendly because it can be created through a process of repeated doubling and this reminds her of her father's two open hands lovingly cradling her face between his palms. But all this natural joy for numbers comes crashing down around the child when her parents are told by Rumi's teacher that she is a mathematical genius--that they need to intervene in her education to make sure she makes the best of her talents. The teacher suggests she be introduced to Mensa, a society for highly gifted children and adults. Instead, Mahesh, Rumi's controlling and emotionally blind father decides to take the task entirely on himself. There is a great deal of cultural mistrust and misunderstanding behind this fateful decision. Mahesh develops a rigorous study routine that leaves Rumi virtually no chance for play, self-development, or self-discovery. Mahesh knows all too well how difficult it is for an immigrant to become successful in Great Britain--doubly so when this person is a member of a culture, like India, that Mahesh strongly feels is misunderstood and undervalued. To succeed in this new environment, he believes that Rumi must not only be outstanding, she must be the very best--a nationally recognized child prodigy capable of gaining admittance to Oxford when she is only 14 years old. That is the lofty goal that Mahesh sets for his daughter. By the end of the novel, Rumi is deeply harmed but on a possible path toward recovery. On the other hand, Mahesh is humiliated in the national media and abandoned by his daughter. He becomes a fully tragic figure despite the fact that we have little reason to identify with, or like his controlling, highly judgmental, and emotionally damaged character. Rumi's mother, Shreene, is also a character with major tragic overtones. By the end of the work, we care a great deal about this highly intelligent and self-sacrificing human being. Shreene's tragedy begins before Rumi is born and it only gets worse as her daughter's story unfolds. Although this story is written about an Indian family immigrating to Wales, it is not a story that is particularly unique to Indian immigrants or to Wales. This tale could easily have been written about a family from a vast n