Bharti Kirchner’s latest novel, “Darjeeling,” brews together skillful narrative and engaging prose to charm the reader. The tale of two daughters of a tea estate owner reminded me less of her previous two novels and more of a book by another writer I admire. The theme of love and loss shared by cousins in “The Vine of Desire” is shared by sisters in “Darjeeling.” If I were to pick the more interesting novel of the two, I would choose the latter. I sailed through it at a brisker pace.

We are first introduced to the older sister, Aloka, who is suffering the pangs of a failed marriage in Manhattan. Kirchner does an excellent job of conveying marital anguish. Aloka is the advice columnist for an Indian-American weekly. Her fans don’t have a clue to her real identity as she goes by the pseudonym of Seva. Ironically, like the real life Ann Landers, her marriage ends in divorce. Aloka dreads telling her editor the truth and after her conversation with him reflects, “A wedding ceremony was conducted with such pageantry and was attended by many well-wishers. But the same people wouldn’t be around when one’s relationship was in tatters. In divorce, a woman stood alone.”

From chapter three, Kirchner plunges us back in time to see how the two sisters, brought up by a father and grandmother, fall in love with the same man. In the beginning, the major characters seem bent on the destruction of their own happiness, which taxes the reader’s empathy. Pranab is the supervisor of the tea estate and, with his firebrand revolutionary spirit, he criticizes the way Aloka’s father treats his employees. He flits between the two sisters and though the writer hints that the younger sister, Sujata, is a better match for him, we are disgusted by his affair with her and his betrayal of Aloka. Nina, the grandmother, banishes Sujata to Canada, hoping that with her out of the way Pranab will keep his engagement to Aloka. The father is furious at Pranab and tries to get some goondas to kill him. Aloka helps him escape with her to New York. Pranab doesn’t adjust well to life in America and hankers to join a cause. Their marriage suffers, though the naïve Aloka is genuinely surprised when it comes to an end.

Nina has been running the tea estate since her son died. She invites her granddaughters back, ostensibly to celebrate her birthday. But the matriarch hasn’t given up trying to influence their lives. Sujata is still single and manages a tea business in Canada. Her grandmother hopes to fix her up with a friend’s son. She not only wants to try to bring Aloka and Pranab back together again, but she also wants to resurrect some of the bond that existed between the sisters. She knows that Pranab’s attraction to Sujata will be an obstacle, so she’s doubly invested in her plan to make Sujata agree to marry her friend’s son. She plans to make a will that will decide who gets her tea estate and house.

At first the granddaughters dither about returning to Darjeeling because of the circumstances that led to their departure. But they do arrive to a loving welcome by Nina. Kirchner handles the twists in the relationships well. If there is a moral in the novel, it is one that is often echoed in real life – sometimes it’s best not to interfere.

Unrealistic dialogue peppers the end and contributes to the effect of wrapping up the story a bit too tidily. But the penultimate sentence could easily be a quote worthy of inclusion in “Bartlett’s Book of Quotations.” “Every journey, it dawned on Aloka now, is a quest for what we’ve been missing in our lives.”

The theme of sisters falling in love with the same man is not an easy one to pull off. Kirchner’s prose and her insights on human behavior and observations steer the novel away from the romance genre. But she made the challenge of writing about love difficult by making the elder sister blameless in the love triangle. Perhaps if she had developed Aloka’s childhood further, the reader would have had more empathy for the wronged sister.

The matriarch is the one who beguiles the reader by her actions. The scene in which she defies her mother-in-law as a new bride is one which leaves us wishing for extra tidbits about her earlier life. And I would have loved to see more of the development of her deep love for her granddaughters after they’d lost their mother. Just the fact that she became one of the few women running a tea estate distinguishes her.

By setting most of the novel in a tea estate, Kirchner used the background to her advantage. Whenever we have fiction where the characters have a strong affinity to a place, we have a stage ready for success. For this and much more, the writer deserves our applause.

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