INDIAN COUNTRY

An immigrant couple finds America a mystery, in more ways than one.

Rao’s second novel—following Girls Burn Brighter (2018)—concerns Sagar and Janavi, a young couple from Varanasi, a town on the banks of the Ganges River. Thrust into an arranged marriage, the two are ambitious yet uncertain of each other—Sagar is a hydraulic engineer, Janavi a worker supporting children in crisis. So, when Sagar lands a civil-service job in Montana, where he’s charged to coordinate the removal of a dam on the Cotton River, trading in a bustling Indian city for Big Sky Country is both a geographic and cultural change. Both experience racist microagressions from the locals, but both also find common ground with them: Janavi in learning about the often troubled women in the area, and Sagar discovering the Native American lore surrounding the river and its echoes of Indian lore. One of the people sharing that world with him is Renny, one of the workers on the dam-removal crew, and in due time Sagar is embroiled in a murder mystery involving tribal history, scapegoating, and an orphaned child. Rao’s novel is somewhat oddly bifurcated—what starts as a lit-fic immigrant tale soon acquires the plot and pacing of a crime yarn—but on both fronts it admirably undoes the conventions of the assimilation novel, focusing less on how Sagar and Janavi fit into their new country than on ways they find human connection outside of the notions of being an American. Interstitial chapters feature fablelike tales of loss and death along rivers in India and Montana across history, suggesting that there are commonalities as deep and long-running as a river, but also buried like sediment and difficult to surface.

A lyrical and propulsive story that makes the most of its double-edged title.