Delhi daze Abha Dawesar’s Babyji is a keeper BY CLEA SIMON
	Babyji By Abha Dawesar. Anchor, 368 pages, $13.

Sexual attraction is usually described in terms of chemistry, but for one young appetitive woman, nothing but physics will do. Anamika — the "Babyji" of Abha Dawesar’s second novel — is a blooming physics wiz, a brainy New Delhi 16-year-old who rationalizes her multiple seductions in the language of her science and math classes. It’s particles acting upon particles, all bodies in motion. "Anyone who was expected to understand differential and integral calculus and the derivation of formulae on centrifugal force should be allowed to have affairs," she muses while contemplating bedding an older woman she calls India. When two more lovers join the first (including the warm and beautiful servant who gives Anamika the affectionate nickname of the title), quantum mechanics provides the rationale: "If particles could be waves and waves photons then India and Rani could be each other." As a young woman coming into her sexuality with smarts, the attractions of youth, and confidence, everything is possible and everyone available.

Unlike Andre, the white male protagonist of Dawesar’s first novel, Miniplanner, Anamika seems more likely to be a stand-in for the Indian-born, Harvard-educated, New York–based author herself. Whether or not this is a roman à clef, the young protagonist is an arresting character, drawn quickly but believably in rapid-fire first person. The head prefect of her school and a member of the Brahmin caste, she’s supremely self-assured. She knows her world, knows how to manage it: "We are a nation of taxonomists. . . . There are categories for everything — educated or not, foreign car or not, brahmin or banya or what, . . . " Subscribing in her own way to this system, Anamika unselfconsciously applies it to the women who intrigue her. "If I could get her type down I’d know which parts of her body she depilated. Or if I knew which parts she depilated I could get her type down." She is — at least at first — in total control of her sexual life as well, seeing herself as Humbert Humbert, as opposed to Lolita, and utterly at ease with the nature of her desires: "I rolled off of her with the sweet exhaustion of a man who just hunted his dinner animal."

But sex isn’t the only new element breaking into Anamika’s orderly middle-class life. Her country is going through changes: the Mandal Commission, which governs education, has recommended that university admissions be weighted to give lower castes more opportunity. Brahmins like herself will have fewer options unless they go abroad. Before long, protests break out, and several Brahmin students self-immolate in protest.

School life begins to break down, and soon Anamika’s enviable confidence starts to show some cracks as well. First there’s an assault on a classmate, which she initially tries to rationalize: "I wasn’t culpable for rape. I had just pushed her into doing something faster than she had wanted to." This is followed by her first real attack of jealousy and then disillusionment when India drinks and smokes pot. It all makes for an ambivalence that doesn’t fit with our student heroine’s math-perfect world. "For me, love had to be total or it could not be."

She’s talking herself into a corner, of course, as the assurance and the absolutes of childhood run smack into the turmoil of adolescence — not to mention that with three partners, all-consuming love for any one isn’t likely. But as her adventure continues, Anamika begins to make peace with her vulnerability. Or at least with the young woman she assaulted and with another — unlikely — classmate, a precocious bad boy. Chakra Dev may be Anamika’s male counterpart: she’s bedding the woman he lusts for; because of his lower caste, he’ll probably get the university admission she craves. Through these conflicts, she recognizes something of their shared nature, and as she sets out to save him from the worst parts of himself, she begins to reconcile with herself as well.

Not that Anamika would put it that way. In Dawesar’s hands, this young woman thinks and talks too fast for much deep contemplation. If it’s not in her physics book, she doesn’t quite accept it. But the charm of this fun, fresh novel is in the unsaid, the creeping uncertainties that have less to do with Heisenberg than with the heart.

Dawesar will undoubtedly be compared to the other young female writers of the South Asian diaspora, such as fellow émigrée Meera Nair and London-born Jhumpa Lahiri (both also now New Yorkers), and yet the writer her delicacy most recalls is Ireland’s Emma Donoghue, particularly Donoghue’s similarly frank lesbian coming-of-age novel Stir-Fry. Although Dawesar’s language is fully her own — a mad rush of physics term, student slang ("princi" for principal), and Hindi words that make sense in context (such as "cheapad," or scumbag) — the unveiling of a vibrant young woman is wonderfully familiar. Like Donoghue’s Maria, Dawesar’s Anamika completely inhabits the contradictions of adolescence, when the brain is advanced and the appetite is insatiable but the calculus of emotions has yet to be resolved.

Abha Dawesar reads this Wednesday, March 16, at 7:30 p.m. at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut Street in Newton; call (617) 244-6619.