“Leave and Come Back” by Lavanya Lakshmi

Shah Rukh Khan is such a well-known Indian actor that his name is likely to be recognized even by people who are not devotees of Bollywood films. Lavanya Lakshmi pays homage to a 1995 Shah Rukh Khan film, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (or DDLJ as she has it), in her debut novel, Leave and Come Back, an entertaining yet serious story of an Indian Canadian woman named Simran—as in the lead female character of DDLJ—who tries to win over her big extended family to her white boyfriend, Leo.

The novel begins when Simran receives a wedding invitation from her cousin Geeta in New Jersey. Simran throws it away. She lives in Toronto and hasn’t been back to her relatives’ home in New Jersey in seven years.

Her parents were killed in a car accident in Chennai when Simran was fifteen. Her closest relatives were her aunt, uncle and cousins in New Jersey, so she moved halfway across the world to live with them. It was difficult enough for her to mourn the sudden deaths of her parents, but Simran felt even more alone when her aunt and uncle refused to talk about her loss.

Months after her parents passed, she tried to talk about them. Veena perima was her mother’s older sister—she’d even lived with them when Simran was a baby, before she’d married Ashok peripa and moved to the U.S. She was the only one who knew them as well as Simran had. But whenever Simran tried, her aunt would tell her that now was not the time or that she was very busy…Death is deeper than kin, longer than memory, stronger than forgiveness.

After college, Simran moved to Toronto, the home of her college roommate and best friend, Liv. It’s Liv who encourages Simran to attend her cousin Geeta’s wedding. One of the reasons Simran agrees to attend Geeta’s wedding is that she will finally have the chance to obtain the key to her parents’ home in Chennai so she can return to India to properly mourn her parents.

She wants to run her hands along the walls of her bedroom, remembering when she got in trouble for drawing on them with crayons. She wants to stand in the living room and let the hymnic tones of Suprabatham, the morning prayers her mother used to listen to, echo in her memory. She wants to sit in her father’s old study and taste the sweet sting and snap of the ginger cookies he used to keep in a jar on his desk, the ones she’d sneak in to eat covertly that he’d refill without a word.

Just before the wedding festivities begin, Liv’s brother Leo (whom Simran has begun dating and who is not not exactly the Tamil husband her family have had in mind for Simran since they took her in at fifteen), is in New York for work and ends up showing up at Simran’s aunt and uncle’s home in suburban New Jersey. One thing leads to another and soon Simran along with her cousins Geeta and Kavitha conjure up a plan to get Veena aunty and Ashok uncle to accept Leo as Simran’s boyfriend.

The plan is based on the Shah Ruhk Khan film, DDLJ. Leo is introduced as a friend of Geeta’s fiancé Rishi and at first he commits typical faux pas like wearing his shoes in the house and not being able to handle spicy food. Leo is a linguist and makes an effort to learn both basic conversational words in Tamil and Hindi. As the wedding approaches, vivacious Veena practices her French with Leo and the typically quiet Ashok enjoys taking walks with Leo to get exercise and to get out of the house.

Simran’s cousin Kavitha writes movie reviews under a pen name and has a term for Shah Ruhk Khan movies—rom-com fam drams. It’s this combination of a rom-com and family drama that gives Lakshmi’s novel more depth than it might otherwise have.