Transplanted couples’ expectations collide, as men revert to the “prehistoric values” a mother warns her US-raised daughter against.Myths of womanhood control, but can sometimes liberate. In “The Maid Servant’s Story”, a woman views an aunt’s tale as a warning: “A preview of my own life which I thought I had fashioned so cleverly, so differently from my mother’s, but which is only a repetition, in a different raga, of her tragic song. Perhaps it is like this for all daughters, doomed to choose for ourselves, over and over, the men who have destroyed our mothers.”Divakaruni is no apologist for the American dream, eyeing the “Paki-bashing” of America’s own “dotbusters” (after the red bindi on a married woman’s forehead) and fatal muggings in the 7-Eleven. Resisting facile binaries of East versus West, she unpicks with irony her characters’ mutual illusions and envies.The modest realism of Arranged Marriage makes the failure of The Mistress of Spices all the more puzzling. In the novel, an old, village-born woman, once kidnapped by pirates and taught the secrets of spice-magic on a tropical island, runs a store in Oakland, California. Chatting to her wares (“Spices, what does this mean?”), Nayantara, or “star seer”, divines migrants’ ills and desires: “Green cards, promotions, girls with lotus eyes.” Since her powers rest on celibacy, when she falls for a young Amerindian, doses herself with a youth elixir and beds him, the spices wreak revenge via the San Andreas fault.

“Spices, I caused it,” she moans, as the earth moves.This drivel is threaded with “real” lives: Haroun, a servant turned taxi driver; Ahuja, a battered wife; Jagjit, a bullied schoolboy. None rises above cliche as the author attempts a lofty compassion to the “lost brown faces”: “Garment factories smelling of starch and sweat and immigration raids, women handcuffed and piled crying into vans …”The compulsion to address a white American reader, latent in the stories, becomes blatant as the novel strives to explain. But pandering with fake folklore to New Age mysticism leaves its characters exoticised and diminished.. “You like Utopia?” The first and most enduring impression of Ethiopia is an endless series of friendly faces cheerfully mispronouncing their country’s name. Some of these faces belong to handsomely attired Orthodox priests, some to white-robed pilgrims, some to shepherd boys, some to tall, beautiful women with beads in their hair.

But in the Omo valley, a remote area in the far south west near the Kenyan and Sudanese borders, the people have only recently become aware that such a thing as Ethiopia exists, and they ask a different question. “You have razor blade?”
I eyed the ridged network of garish scars decorating their bodies and flapped a hand rather urgently to our guide, Alex, who ambled over with a grin. As usual he was prepared for anything, and handed me a bag bulging with strings of brightly coloured beads: much better for the skin, and the Karo people loved them We were instant hits. Faces lit with humour, the Karo draped the beads around their wrists and necks and started to prod and poke us gently.The bright-eyed and endlessly curious Karo are one of the most threatened tribes of the lower Omo. They number fewer than 1,000, and a single epidemic could obliterate them; but more worrying are other tribes in the area, who are not always friends.

The Mursi are permanently at war with the Hamar, the Hamar with their cousins the Karo; and the Bumi fight both the Karo and the Surma whenever they can. The women scarify their chests to beautify themselves, but the men do so to indicate their having killed an enemy or a dangerous animal.Few areas remain in Africa that can be described as true wilderness, but the valley of the wide, smooth-flowing Omo River is a good candidate – a lost world, rendered almost uninhabitable by the tsetse fly. Here spectacular landscapes are unblemished by man, and huge herds of eland and buffalo roam across the unspoiled savanna grassland, along with giraffe, elephant, zebra, lion and leopard. Unused to tourists, the animals are wild and shy, but despite having been warned that game was far less visible than in other East African countries, we were not disappointed.Alex, a professional hunter, has an infectious enthusiasm for the country as well as an impressive knowledge of its wildlife, and cheerfully woke us for each morning’s safari at 5am. Spotting wildlife in the grey light of dawn was extremely difficult. Alex patiently pointed to a clump of dry, spindly bushes in the distance.