Review: Baby Does A Runner: The debut novel from Anita Rani

Baby Does A Runner: The debut novel from Anita Rani by Anita Rani
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Baby Saul is a successful modern Indian woman, with a good job and her own apartment in Manchester. However, she seems to have hit a glass ceiling at work and the death of her beloved father has knocked her sideways. When she finds a bundle of love letters addressed to her deceased grandfather from a hitherto unknown first wife, Baby is determined to get to the bottom of this family secret by going to India and discovering what happened to change the loving man described in the letters into the angry alcoholic she recalls.

Baby hasn't been to India since she was a child and holds many common misconceptions about her ancestral homeland, a fact that her auntie's neighbour Sid takes great pleasure in disabusing, accusing her of undertaking some kind of Eat, Pray, Love journey and mocking her for her assumptions about how backward India would be compared to London.

Despite their mutual antipathy, when he hears that Baby intends to travel to Amritsar alone, Sid offers to accompany her. As an avid historian, Sid is fascinated by the letters which were written in the mid-1940s, the time of Partition and can't wait to show(off) Baby the real India as well as his own knowledge of India throwing off British rule. As Baby learns more about the history of India, and the horror of Partition in 1947, she feels as though a previously stunted part of her has been given room to grow.

I wanted to like this, but I really struggled to understand where Anita Rani was going with this. The romance is fairly weak, enemies-to-love, forced proximity, mixed with a smidge of instalurve. It didn't help that I found Sid to be an obnoxious know-it-all he liked nothing more than to lecture Baby - from the very first moment they met he was telling her she was wrong - who needs a substitute-Daddy? Yes, Baby didn't know much about the British rule of India, but that could be said about the British rule of Kenya, or Barbados - by and large British children aren't taught about the atrocities and oppression of British colonisation of any countries and Baby's family were keen to avoid discussion of the past, they believed moving to the UK had wiped the slate clean and it was a new start for all. Then when Baby learns about the horrors of Partition, it is almost as a throwaway line in a voicemail to her BFF at home in the UK, if Anita Rani wanted to educate her readers about Partition then maybe the novel should have been structured differently? Sid also seemed remarkably silent about the atrocities that former neighbours visited upon each other during partition, or blamed the violence, murders, rapes, etc on the British for drawing an arbitrary line across India to form Pakistan - when the reason for partition was because the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims in India could not agree on how an independent India would be run and violence was already escalating in many Indian cities. Now I'm obviously British, so maybe I'm leaning too heavily in favour of my own country.

Anyway, it wasn't really a romance, it didn't really go into any depth about Partition (maybe if she ditched the romance and made it all about tracing what happened to Baby's grandfather's first wife and two children through Partition), it was a little bit Eat, Pray, Love in the way Baby 'found herself' travelling around a foreign country where she barely spoke the language, just because her grandparents and mother were born there. TBH it felt a bit like when Americans claim they are Irish because their great-great grandparents were Irish (and I know I few English people who do the same). Maybe worst of all, most of the book felt like we were being told things rather than seeing them. Even the exhaustive lists of food at every meal felt like it was being rammed down the reader's throat.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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