by Padma Venkatraman.

Putnam. 247 pages. $16.99.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

This debut novel by Padma Venkatraman, an adjunct professor and director of graduate diversity at URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography, is a fine, straightforwardly spun tale of 15-year-old Vidya, growing up in Bombay in 1941, then exiled to Madras. She yearns for college, fears being sent off into an arranged marriage, questions her brother Kitta’s desire to go to war with the Japanese, and thinks it was her fault that her doctor-father was beaten and severely brain-damaged during a nonviolent protest march against the British.

With her father silent and vacant, her mother, Kitta and she must move in with her father’s family in Madras, an Indian custom. There she’s confronted by a malicious aunt who uses her as a servant (Kitta thinks of the place as a “Dickensian orphanage”). She is stunned by the fact that the men live upstairs, the women toil daily downstairs, and they are allowed to meet only at mealtimes; that she is banished for three days to the outhouse during her period, and that the family pursues its Brahmin airs by castigating all non-Brahmins, enjoying the social evil of the caste system that upholds their proclaimed superiority. Vidya has to rinse the clothes after the non-Brahmin maid has washed them.

By climbing the stairs to her grandfather’s library, Vidya finds the sanctuary and retreat — as well as Ivanhoe, Wordsworth, and Hardy — she needs to remain intact.

Venkatraman fills her story with the annual cycle of Indian religious festivals, from celebrating Lord Krishna’s birth and the victory of the goddess Durga over the demon Mahisha to Sivarathri, the night-long vigil of prayers and meditation, and Pongal in January, incarnated in the decorations on the milkman’s cow.

Venkatraman’s direct and almost plain style works perfectly to focus upon Indian manners, which will appear strange to many readers. She deals with them matter-of-factly: this is just what Brahmin Indian families and others did in 1941.

Belief in nonviolence, upheld by Raman, Vidya’s father’s sister’s husband’s brother, who is drawn to Vidya and who lives with the family, confronts the use of violence as understood by Kitta in wartime to prevent the Japanese from conquering India. The issue surfaces also in relation to British colonialism based on its racist, divisive and cruel foundations.

Hinduism has no Bible or Koran: “There were no dogmatic rules; instead, the religion gave suggestions on how to act with compassion.” “Fettered by ritual,” however, it upholds the rigidity of the caste system, which Vidya and her father despise.

After reading this fine, often heart-breaking novel, I noticed that it’s for “young adults.” Well, I’m a “youngish adult,” and I loved it. CLIMBING THE STAIRS,

samcoale@cox.net