Coming-of-Age Novel About Math Prodigy

September 27, 2007

Nikita Lalwani's first novel, titled Gifted (Random House), explores the pressures felt by Indian immigrants in Great Britain through the persona of a young math genius. Lalwani's tragic coming-of-age tale centers on the clash between Rumi, a child mathematician, and her parents in 1970s Britain.

Lalwani, a BBC documentary filmmaker was born in Rajasthan, India, and raised in Cardiff, Wales. Her novel, which was on the longlist for Britain's 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, has attracted the attention of U.S. readers and critics.

The novel focuses on Rumi and the way her life is destroyed by a relentless pursuit of academic success after being identified as "gifted" at a young age. With that news, her exacting father, Mahesh — a math professor at a less-than-top U.K. university — has one aim in mind in a land that is alien to him. To make sure his daughter reaches her potential, he begins grooming her for her Oxford exams, which are years down the road!

Numbers have filled Rumi's world since she could count, but it is on a trip back to India when she is eight that Rumi's mathematical ability and fascination with numbers come to reflect her conflicted emotional state. Lonely, she anthropomorphizes numbers: 7, for instance, is "lucky" and "cool"; 512 is "friendly."

Later, as an adolescent, she concludes that "if the whole friends thing was like a Venn diagram," then "she wasn't even inside the outer circle."

Reviewing the book in the Washington Post, Ron Charles described it as a "story full of the mingled love and anger that animate families of every culture."

Source: Washington Post Book World, Sept. 16, 2007.