With the prominence of “Slumdog Millionaire’ and the numerous novels set in India over the past two decades Lalita’s course “Glimpses of the Culture of India,” and her book Where Monsoons Cry present another piece of the jigsaw puzzle which is India. The course uses characters from Lalita’s fiction to suggest and illustrate thematic issues about contemporary and traditional India, such as caste, dowry, arranged marriages, and girl-children. Lalita’s short stories and her own experience span the west as well as the east. She is, like Dante’s Virgil and Beatrice, a guide to a culture which was not only geographically on the other side of the world, but culturally as well, especially to the do-wop and Kerouac generations of America. India? What did the average college kid know about India in the 50’s, 60’s or 70’s ?

Lalita is an individual. She is more articulate and educated than most native born Americans. She straddles two continents, a part of each, but she is now not wholly of either. She opens her class with the traditional posture and the word “Namaste” which is to say “I Honor the Spirit in you which is also in me.” Her course may be said to be impressionistic, and what personal account isn’t? Her book is fiction, not autobiography, and thus it is not limited to her exact experience but gathers up the shadows of many like experiences. Though perhaps simplistic and disingenuous in ways, a metaphor for experiencing Lalita’s world is like tasting Indian cuisine. After listening to her and reading her stories, one gets a flavor of India.

                                                                                    --Dan Cuddy

Dan Cuddy is one of the editors of the Loch Raven Review. He is a former contributing editor of the Maryland Poetry Review and of Lite: Baltimore’s Literary Newspaper. In 2003 his book of poetry Handprint On The Window was published by Three Conditions Press.