ANAGRAM DESTINY

In Shah’s sweeping romance, a woman with a tragic past must decide if she’s willing to fall in love again.

In 2008, Aanya Parekh lands at the Delhi airport, ready to start work in the neighboring city of Gurgaon after relocating from New York to India for her job. As she’s welcomed by a new colleague in India, a random person recognizes her, bringing up a name from her past: “Ayaan.” The narrative alternates between the 1980s and the 2000s to fill in the story of Aanya and Ayaan, two Indian American children who grew up together in the same community in Georgia. As they mature, friendly affection blossoms into something more—the primary school kids share letters back and forth and secretly hold hands during recesses. When Aanya is able to comfort and support Ayaan after his father is shot, the two only grow closer. As the novel progresses, however, it becomes clear that the childhood romance will somehow end in tragedy, as Aanya in 2008—now a woman in her 30s—starts to develop feelings for Abhimanyu, a handsome man who works at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai. The question of what happened to Ayaan becomes central to Aanya’s ability to open herself up to the potential of finding love with Abhi. Shah brings together two love stories that serve as brilliant mirrors for one another; the tragedy that strikes Ayaan and Aanya foreshadows another crisis that she and Abhi must face. While the ending has emotional heft, it takes a while to get there; jumping back and forth from Aanya and Ayaan’s childhood to Aanya’s adulthood slows down the pace and cuts the dramatic tension— readers already know that Ayaan and Aanya are, for some reason, not going to last. It also becomes obvious pretty quickly what happened with Ayaan and Aanya, and Shah’s prose, characterized by belabored phrases such as “frenzied game of nothingness,” slows the book down even more.

An emotional story that suffers from pacing issues and cliched dramatic moments.