Two great qualities of this novel: one, the vitality of the characters, smart and passionate, and ensnared in a plot that is full of the play of fate and reality, feeling as familiar as one's own life, however removed that life may be from theirs. Two, the sheer physical allure of the places and scenes. The description is never overdone, but this seems to be a book which can't resist the sensuality of India itself.

There is something about books about India…. It is as if images and descriptions of the place are uniquely strong and vivid in the minds of readers in English. Sights, sounds, smells, the touch of India, arise from the prose in The Silent Raga: It could all be a kind of touristic indulgence-except that we are hearing a voice of intimate familiarity with India. And beyond that, the pretext and reason for the poetics: the musical scale which informs the whole book. That is inevitable because a major motivation/driver in the story is the making of Indian music.

A rhythmic current of narrative quickly sets in, a page-turning curiosity develops, because the characterization is both rich and strange. Yet not exotic: these people are so easy to identify with. I can't say how Merchant makes this happen, but he does. He involves us in the narrative, for suspense, mystery, complete catharsis-pity and terror. There is intelligent, incisive scrutiny of multi-generational family relationships, female-centred, somewhat reminiscent of Tamarind Mem. A reader soon identifies whole-heartedly with how these Indian women feel and react, even if the reader is not an Indian woman. The now-hackneyed remark is unavoidable: the author is not an Indian woman either.

The compulsion to move the story along is finely balanced with the judicious amount of lyrical imagery in the text. The haste of curiosity is at odds with the desire of the mind to linger, over the evocations of food, climate, the air, the voice of the place. For instance, one recurring series of descriptions of electric light sources. Bulbs and lamps keep appearing, in various conditions of age and frailty, and their particular characters, and the particular qualities of light they emit, seem to stand in some way for memory itself, whether memory of a time that is gone, or of ways of making and structuring things in human civilization that are flawed, or insufficient, or less esteemed. So many visions of electric illumination, whether sad or dim, or garish, or warm and generous, come to linger in the mind like actual memories of light observed.

If the raga is a mysterious craft to most English-speaking readers, The Silent Raga's emotional depths begin to suggest something of it as it moves along and we are touched and seduced by turns. It is like being drawn into the ecstasy of musical rhythms; no scholarly knowledge or ability is needed, other than knowing how to listen.