Indian Maidens Bust Loose

Indian Maidens Bust Loose
by Vidya Samson

Published April 21, 2012
313 pages

This book was provided by the author in exchange for an honest review.

East and West may meet, but sometimes they shouldn't. That's what Nisha Desai's conservative Hindu family thinks when a black-sheep American aunt and her trouble-magnet teenage daughters come to visit them in India. The guests are seen as an invading force, equipped with weapons of mass corruption.

But to Nisha, the rich aunt looks like a one-woman foreign aid program and a way to escape the horrible suitors her father keeps foisting on her. She makes every effort to charm the visitors. This is not an easy task, for the aunt is a New Age space case, and the cousins’ appetite for disasters threatens to level the city of Ahmedabad. In short order, the demented cousins instigate an elopement, a public protest, and a riot that gets Nisha thrown in jail.

It's only when Nisha's father adopts a pet cow and convinces half the city it's the reincarnation of a Hindu deity that the two families are united in a common goal: to bilk thousands. The result is Madison Avenue's idea of a religious experience, which is not a controllable situation.

Indian Maidens Bust Loose is a hilarious romp in the land of cows, curry, and the Kama Sutra.

* * *

This book starts with two sisters, Nisha and Vinita, are doing everything they can to avoid having to marry the horrible prospective husbands their father keeps picking out. And they are horrible.

When the American cousins come to visit, Nisha is hoping to convince them to take her home with them and let her study journalism. She's determined to make a good impression, while everyone else---with the exception of the grandmother---are determined to make the aunt and cousins miserable.

This book is hilarious, and a very quick read (I read it in a day). There were only a few times where I wished things would speed up a little.

I have to admit, I kept forgetting the girls were as old as they were. They'd finished college, and several times I had to remind myself they weren't high school girls. It's just a cultural thing.


4/5 stars