When 12-year-old Deepa"s father dies, her mother leaves her with Amma, her blind grandmother and her buffalo, Jhotta in the small village of Mardpur. Amma is a seer with a reputation for seeing "bhooths", "ghosts" and having treasures, gained from her career as a royal midwife, hidden in her house. It is through Amma"s developed olfactory sense that this first-time novelist best captures India "with its tangy-fresh smell of oranges and limes, mustard greens and radishes, the earthy smells of freshly ground spices and the aroma of basmati rice and tea leaves". Meanwhile, Raman, the father of Deepa"s best friend, with only a lowly Third Class BA, desperately needs a dowry for his twin daughters. He takes it into his head to write a bestseller and is convinced that yoghurt made from Jhotta provides literary inspiration. Once you have grasped the rather complicated chronology and cast of characters, this family epic settles into a light-hearted and immensely readable tale of story-telling, subterfuge, rivalry and match-making to equal Pride and Prejudice, with its own culturally specific status codes, such as caste, the quality of the sari and skin colour. Deepa is advised to stay out of the sun because "modern families don"t care about dowry and caste and all, but dark skin they do not like". The novel often slips into convoluted plot twists to explore its themes of ownership: of women, of buffalo, of stories and of truth. But it remains a relatively simple fable laced with the strains of modernity that contemporary India grapples with. -- Cherry Smyth