by Melissa Siebert (Penguin)
I’ve had an abiding love for India and her culture for many years, so when the opportunity presented itself to read Garden of Dreams, I grabbed it with both hands.
In this story, we encounter the unconventional De Villiers family and, especially, 14-year-old Eli, who finds himself in a predicament when his mother, Margo, abandons him. She feels he is adult enough to complete the journey to Nepal, to be reunited with his estranged father, Anton. Only, Eli never makes it to his destination. He is kidnapped by child-traffickers and ends up in a brothel in Delhi owned by the horrible madam Lakshmi, who develops a decidedly unhealthy fixation with the pretty lad.
Plucky Indian inspector VJ Gupta assures Eli’s parents he is doing his best to find the boy but, as the weeks pass, hope dwindles.
Margo falls into disconsolation and despair, while Anton falls in with Maoist rebels in a desperate bid to save his son.
Meanwhile, Eli is made of sterner stuff than his parents expect and, when he gets an opportunity to escape, he embarks on an epic quest to find his father – lost in a strange land and with no one to turn to other than the ragged band of children all trying to get home – and stay one step ahead of the child-traffickers.
It’s not so much the physical journey that transforms Eli (and, to a certain extent, the secondary characters), but rather how his external circumstances impact on his inner landscape.
At the start, Eli strikes me as a self-involved boy (as many young teens are), and we join him at a time when he is at his most vulnerable – and, in his case, his naiveté has severe consequences. Yet this crucible in which he discovers himself, though fraught with danger, serves to strengthen him by stripping away the child to reveal a sensitive, resilient young man who, above all, is a survivor who possesses much compassion.
Margo and Anton each have their realisations to make, particularly that they have failed as parents.
Anton has run away from his issues by trying to save the world, while Margo sinks into maudlin introspection to the point where she is mired in her feelings of inadequacy.
Gupta and Lakshmi exist as polar opposites, each caught in an eccentric orbit around the other – their navigation of a corrupt world brings two distinctive perspectives of the same setting into play.
Much like real life, there is no tidy, convenient closure to Garden of Dreams.
It is a space for reflection against a cultural backdrop both alien and exotic, filled with equal measures of beauty and darkness. – Nerine Dorman