Rose is not exactly your average Maharani, despite her somewhat snobbish attitude. And Sandy is not exactly your typical romantic hero, despite his “rakish good looks” and high-flying lifestyle. But then, there’s little that is “typical” in this long-winding love story set on a once-royal property uphill from a tiny Himalayan village that the author keeps returning to. More than a decade after Shaya Tales and seven years after The Tailor of Giripul, Bulbul Sharma returns to the hills to draw out Love and Learning under the Magnolia.
The hunting lodge of the erstwhile Maharaja of Menon occupies a large tract on the hill above Shaya and Giripul, two villages that “spring like mushrooms” from its base. Ranjit, the dashing and flamboyant Maharaja, known for his parties and his fashionable friends, is no more, and the lodge is now the home of his widow, the beautiful and bookish Rose, whose circumstances now force her to sell it to the millionaire tycoon Sandy Mehta while she herself moves next door, into her friend Leela’s more modest home.
The pace of life at the estate begins to shift—Sandy builds a helipad and the lodge resonates with the loud conversation and laughter of people unlike any Rose has encountered. Resolutely staying away from these new neighbours, Rose decides to dedicate herself to teaching the village women. But even as Rose busies herself in these lessons under the large magnolia tree in Leela’s garden, she cannot ignore the presence next door.
What follows is vintage romance; the usual misunderstandings, high drama in the form of a landslide that traps Rose and Sandy on the hills overnight, near-tragedy averted only by Sandy’s timely intervention... and it’s not difficult to guess the rest. Sharma’s love of the hills, the trees and the bird life of the Himalayan woods is evident in the lyrical descriptions of the landscape that provides the backdrop to the human story.
Rose’s unusual childhood—sheltered and reclusive—is reminiscent of Raj-era lore, except that in this case the princess is Indian and her guardians British. Sandy on the other hand is a rags-to-riches story from modern India, a self-made tycoon whose success even fetches him (puzzlingly) a knighthood. While the characterisation is charming, it doesn’t quite ring true; the situations often seem contrived and the transformations too convenient.
The story teems with cross-cultural interactions whose complex dynamics could have been more fully explored; the tragic love story of a village girl and a British anthropologist, their golden-haired daughter who roams the forest like a wood nymph before she is ‘tamed’ by Rose’s lessons; Bharati, a child widow who wants to be a schoolteacher; Timsy the lisping Bollywood starlet whose role in the narrative is unclear. Sharma offers us brief glimpses of these individuals but we do not really get to know them.
The one exception is Janak, the ladies’ tailor from Giripul (from the eponymous earlier novel), whose dreams are often the only way we might find a resolution to these loose ends. Love and Learning Under the Magnolia is the kind of book you could lie down with on a Sunday afternoon, with few expectations and a somewhat uncritical lens.