The ARC for this book, the author’s debut and the first in her Bollywood series, has been in my digital shelves for an embarrassing number of years, which is a crying shame, because it manages to balance a lot of humor and almost-campy shenanigans with a whole lot of heart in a way that only rarely works for me.

Beware: racism; misogyny; child marriage; alcoholism; abusive paternal grandfather; PTSD; death of parents; depression; attempted suicide; risky pregnancy; premature birth; cancer; some swearing; sex on page.

This book does for me what Tessa Dare’s books never quite manage to do: it tackles really dark themes, like colorism, child abuse, depression, abandonment and more, in a story that goes from heartfelt to comedic and back again, over and over. And it succeeds exclusively on the strength and sincerity of the characterizations.

The book opens with a prologue showing one of the most deplorable customs in the world: a mass child marriage ceremony. This one happens to take place the village of Balpur in the state of Rajasthan in northern India; but before anyone gets on their high horse of horror over this custom, it bears remembering that in some jurisdictions in the U.S. legislators fight fiercely against the imposition of minimum ages for brides, and that many white Evangelical USian parents marry off girls as young as eight, often to protect adult men from the legal consequences of raping them.

Thankfully, that is not the case here; both parties are children of varying ages, and their nuptials are not meant to be consummated until the brides reach puberty, at the earliest. In most cases, the girls stay with their own families until then.

The story proper picks up twenty years later, as one Malvika “Mili” Virat Rathod takes her destiny into her own hands, sells her dowry jewelry, and applies for a visa to attend a graduate course in Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, MI. Its approval, as it happens, hinges mostly on the fact that she’s legally married, and her husband is a pilot in the Indian Air Force.

“It was the first time in Mili’s life that her husband of twenty years had helped his wife with anything.” (Mili’s point of view, chapter 1)

Since the age of four, Mili’s grandmother raised her to be the perfect wife to her absent husband; even her pursuit of higher education was meant to ensure that she would fit in the life of a sophisticated man who has lived in large cities for most of his own life.

Virat Rathod was twelve when his grandfather arranged his marriage; neither he, his mother, or his younger half brother have been back to Balpur since the night after the ceremony, when they fled the sadistic brute’s abuse. Since for most of the twenty years since, they’ve all believed that the marriage–already illegal in India–was been formally annulled before the local council, he felt no qualms in marrying, and now that his wife Rima, whom he adores, is pregnant, their lives are fully blessed.

Only, between their grandfather seeking to save face in the community and the complexity of Indian laws, it turns out that his first marriage is legally binding, and that until and unless his untouched “first” wife signs off on the annulment, Vitar’s and Rima’s relationship would be socially tainted, and their baby born illegitimate.

“It was easy to forget that their grandfather’s back had marked more than just Samir’s back.” (Samir’s point of view, chapter 2)

After a military accident almost kills Virat, landing him in hospital for weeks, and with the attendant stress endangering Rima’s pregnancy, Samir travel sto the U.S. to secure Mili’s agreement to legally dissolve the marriage. On its face, aside from the expense, which is really nothing for a man of his means, and the time away as his brother recovers, this would not seem too onerous a favor to do for one’s only brother.

It is, of course, more complicated than that. Samir is the illegitimate son of Virat’s father, born in Michigan to a white USian mother, and raised there for the first few years of his life, and that what few memories he has of his early childhood are anything but happy ones.

So his plan is to fly in, convince the girl to sign the papers with as little delay as possible, and fly back to India post haste. But this, too, proves to be more complicated than that.

Samir’s and Mili’s first meeting is the stuff of slapstick comedy; he arrives at her door thinking she’s, if not exactly a gold digger, at least moderately mercenary. She, on the other hand, thinks he’s a male relative of her just-eloped roommate, come to threaten the happy couple’s location out of her, and flees.

As Mili is fairly clumsy at the best of times, the stunt ends with her in a hospital bed with a broken wrist and a badly sprained ankle, and with him sans ruined shoes, holding her hand as she floats in and out of medication-induced unconsciousness, ignorant of his identity or the reason for his presence at her door.

Because she has no one to help her, or the resources to hire someone to do so, and because his mother of the heart raised him to be a good man, Samir stays to help Mili. And of course, the more time passes without telling her who he is–which he rationalizes as getting to know her buttons and levers so he can better manipulate her into signing the annulment–the more elaborate his lies become, as he starts to care for her more than taking care of her.

Meanwhile, Mili hasn’t told this new friend, an Indian man from her hometown too!, about her marriage; even back home, her status as an abandoned bride has given her opportunities most of the women in the village never had, while also marking her as both off limits and undesirable. As such, she avoids even the occasion of temptation, limiting her contact with men to work and school to the such an extent that Samir is, essentially, the first man near her age with whom she interacts as an equal.

Mili friendzones Samir consciously and firmly from the beginning, because *as far as she is concerned*, virgin or not, unwanted or not, she is a married woman, and anything beyond utterly platonic friendship would be a betrayal of her husband–and because it would not be fair to Samir either.

Of course, as they spend time together and get to know each other, their mutual attraction grows stronger, as does their friendship, as they overcome minor misunderstandings and cultural and social differences (not for nothing she notes that they come from two different Indias). Over food and conversation they reveal their true selves to the other; he pushes her to attend her roommate’s crazy, days-long traditional Indian wedding, because he knows the loud, slightly unhinged woman matters to Mili–and he helps her deal with her complicated emotions around weddings; she pushes Samir to seek out closure with regards to his birth mother, while offering him unwavering emotional support.

At first glance, Samir’s backstory is the more painful; between his birth mother’s abandonment and years of relentless physical and emotional abuse at his paternal grandfather’s hands, it’s a wonder that he’s as emotionally stable as he is, and a testament to his bond with his mother and older brother.

But Mili’s marriage-in-name-only has isolated her from everyone; from her grandmother, who wants Mili to exist only as the perfect-for-wife, of a man who clearly doesn’t want her. From young girls and women her age, who are either properly married, perhaps with children, or single and pursuing their own lives. From men, with whom she cannot be friendly, lest it be miscontrued. The only thing she knows for sure is that she is unwanted and unfree.

And then the piano, in the form of his identity and his reasons for being in the U.S. in the first place, falls on their heads.

The last act separation that follows, how it ends, and their final reconciliation, work even with a bananapants scene in there that would have made my eye twitch in someone else’s hands; they work because the stakes for the characters always felt real, and because both Mili’s and Samir’s actions and emotions feel sincere as well as consistent with their previous characterization.

I loved the sense of place, both while they are in the U.S. and when they’re in India; as the book is written from the perspective of its Indian protagonists, the “how do you say that?” scenes in the U.S. are both acutely funny and painful. I even appreciated the food-making scenes! (One of my endearing peculiarities is that I’m never tempted by food in books, no matter what it is; text alone does not invoke cravings for me, so lavish descriptions of food and/or cooking generally bore me.)

It is worth noting that the characters use numerous nicknames, pet names, familiar names and so forth, which need some getting used to, but as the cast of characters if small, it was not hard to follow. Something that gave me pause, on the other hand, were the legalities of birth certificates, passports and other legal documents, which are more or less handwaved in service of the plot.

A Bollywood Affair gets 9.00 out of 10

Mili was able to convince her grandmother to allow her to leave her Indian village to study in the US. But one thing she hasn’t been able to leave behind is her wish that her husband reunites with her – she hasn’t seen him since she was wed at the age of four.
Bollywood film director Samir heads to the US, to get Mili to sign the annulment papers for his brother, who has remarried and is expecting a child. But he can’t bring himself to tell her who he is and why he is in town.
I liked the concept, the glimpses into Indian culture and the slow-burn romance but it felt like something was missing. Certainly not tears - there was a LOT of crying, and not just from the main character.

Read this a while back, but had trouble articulating why I did not fall in love with it, as so many other readers had. Then I read Meoskop's review at LOVE IN THE MARGINS, and I had my answer:

http://loveinthemargins.com/2015/04/22/a-bollywood-affair-by-sonali-dev/