Jae suggested this by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni for the neighborhood bookclub. Pleasant, the usual tropes but not used in as stale as way as a run-of-the-mill chick book might, reminiscent of Clear Light of Day (only because of the setting, because I don't read scads of books set in India) and even of "Bride and Prejudice" because of the dual marriages, one to stay in India and the other bound for America. Pleasant, and not a waste of my time, but I don't feel like I learned anything from it either.
The timing was a little off, too: published in 1999, it's set now-ish, recently enough that a computer programmer exists, recently enough for routine sex-identifying ultrasounds, which would make the the two protagonists' parents (who had their daughters probably in their early 20s) too young to remember, led alone be mature at the time of, the partition of India. I thought, since it's set in Kolkatta (Americanized to Calcutta), that perhaps the partition that beggared some characters was the eventual freedom of East Pakistan, but Wikipedia tells me that no, the Partition refers only to India's independence in 1947, not also to Bangladesh's separation.
But whatever, I love The Corrections despite the impossiblity of its timeline--Depression-era parents of a Gen-Xer?--and I'm a lot more certain of U.S. generations than of Indian history.