Cauvery Madhavan's dΘbut delivers the story of Padhman, a young Indian doctor arriving in Dublin in 1989. While training and studying, Padhman works as a junior in a hospital, where his name conveniently shortens to "Paddy". He is the only son of a distinguished gynaecologist father and a doting but formidable mother who governs her household, even overseeing Padhman's meals and social life from several thousand miles away.
His parents worry for him: in Madras, Padhman is part of elite society, a product of the gymkhana club and co-ed English-speaking schools, while in Ireland, he is just another foreign doctor, far down the medical hierarchy and surrounded by uncouth, careless folk.
Not surprisingly, his family view Ireland as a temporary stage on Padhman's route to his father's practice. Everything changes, however, when Padhman falls for Aoife, a surgical intern, also from a medical family.
His aghast mother already suspects that Padhman is involved with Annie Ewart, an "Anglo-Indian" of unsuitable cultural mix. Madhavan explores the cultural variations of decorum, expectation and notions of "decency" through Padhman's rites of passage and self-conscious moulding to Irish norms. She makes comic capital of the mother's snobbery and obdurate standards, both of which Padhman has inherited. The Irish characters are sometimes insensitive, but mostly friendly, working to the rule of thumb that a convent education, a dirty joke or a loveless marriage "makes like us - normal". Apart from a dull-witted shopkeeper, Padhman's own fears of Irish hostility tend, surprisingly, to be revealed as "paranoia". And here's the crux: one opens the novel expecting insights into being an Indian in Ireland in the 1990s. But what one gets is a narrative about what it feels like to be an Indian away from home, the confused identities of affluent Indians and the influence of British India.
This in itself makes for a fairly entertaining read. The front cover endorsement from Joanna Lumley rightly suggests fiction with popular appeal, a funny book. Revealingly, though, Lumley reads not as a comedienne but because, like Madhavan, she grew up in India, an army daughter. Something of this "small world" resonates throughout the novel, which lacks satirical bite about the immigrant experience and left this reader slightly incredulous about the easy cultural fusion implied by the title. Surely it takes more than learning phrases like "fecking gobshite" and "mine's a Guinness" to get along in Ireland? If not, then the cosy Dublin-Madras social mimicry suggests there remains much to say about the fits and misfits between two national identities forged out of opposition to the British Empire.
Kathy Cremin writes and lectures on popular culture