Sunday March 30, 2008

Dangerous talent

What happens when a gifted child is put into the pressure cooker that is parental expectations?

Review by SHARON BAKAR

GIFTED

By Nikita Lalwani

Publisher: Viking, 272 pages

ISBN: 978-0670917136

MALAYSIAN readers are going to find themselves in familiar territory with Gifted, which made it onto the 2007 Man Booker Prize long list.

The novel is partly based on the story of teenage prodigy Sufiah Yusof.

Born to a Malaysian mother and Pakistani father and brought up in Britain, Sufiah made headlines in Malaysian newspapers in 1997 when, at 13, she became the youngest student since 1984 to be accepted into Oxford.

In 2000, she became something of a cause célèbre in this country when she went missing from her Oxford college for almost two weeks before British authorities tracked her down. Sufiah, however, refused to return home, citing parental abuse and describing her home life as “living hell”.

Lalwani’s novel raises the question of how much can you push your kids academically?

Rumika is 10 years, two months, 13 days, 48 minutes and four seconds old when the novel opens. When she was just five, her teacher came to the house to tell her parents that she was a gifted child, and that this gift should be nurtured.

Rumika’s father, Mahesh, a maths professor at Cardiff University, 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.

Rumika longs for normalcy, but as she is forced to study ever harder, her relationship with her cold and scornful father deteriorates further, and her isolation from her friends increase. As she enters adolescence, she has to carve some freedom for herself, but ends up doing things that are risky and stupid – shop lifting, calling the 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.

Author Nikita 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.

Rumika’s mum, 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 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.

Rumika wins a place in Oxford, becoming one of the youngest students ever accepted, and the move gives her some of the freedom she has been waiting for.

Lalwani builds up the sequence of events convincingly and Rumika’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!