Category Archives: Indian American
Tina’s Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary by Keshni Kashyap, illustrated by Mari Araki
“Dear Mr. Jean Paul Sartre, I know that you are dead and old and also a philosopher. So, on an obvious level, you and I do not have a lot in common.” Thus begins 15-year-old Tina’s class project for her English Honors elective on existential philosophy. And what an angst-ridden, beguiling, contemplative, delightful exploration of teenage-hood it proves to be.
Tina has just started the second half of her sophomore year at Yarborough Academy, “just a boring school started by some guy who died eons ago.” She’s “a pretty good student. A decent violin player. And a bit of an intellectual.” She has two older (overachieving) siblings – her architect-trained artist sister, her internet wife-seeking surgeon-to-be brother – who, now well into their 20s, are dealing with their own self-discovery. To the “question I get asked the most … What are you, REALLY?” she answers “I’m an Alien (But my parents are Indian.).”
In just six short months (eight if you count the “Epilogue”), Tina’s high school-centered life goes through some existentially significant changes. She loses her best friend to “a new group of friends with whom she could discuss slutty clothes and cheesy poetry,” has her first date and first kiss (sort of twice), gets cast as the lead in the school play, falls in love, gets lovesick, and fights off what she calls “CEM or Chronic Existential Malaise.”
Lest I’ve somehow caused you to think even for a millisecond that this is your same-old, same-old teenage tale, please let me dispel any such misconceptions: creators Keshni Kashyap (who is also a filmmaker, and making her publishing debut her) and Mari Araki are far too clever and original for that. How else could they combine Krishna, a Samoan Mormon convert, “tacky pieces of art like statues of white people doing ballet and kissing,” Rashomon, Camus and Kierkegaard, skateboards, nirvana, and horse tranquilizers to get such stellar results?
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2012 Continue reading
Stir It Up by Ramin Ganeshram
Food writer Ramin Ganeshram shares her Indo-Caribbean culinary prowess in her debut title for younger readers about eighth-grader Anjali Krishnan who really knows how to stir things up … and make it all taste great. Working part-time in her family’s busy roti shop – which specializes in Trinidadian comfort cooking – in Richmond Hill, Queens with her father and grandmother, Anjali has delicious dreams: “I want to have my own show about Caribbean food. No one has done that yet. I’ll be the first.”
At 13, she’s well on her way to chef-dom, learning all the family recipes from her grandmother, testing and sharing her own unique creations with some of the shop’s appreciative regulars, and taking serious classes at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan. Then Anjali gets a chance to compete in a reality show featuring kiddie chefs: making the finals turns out to be the easy part, but convincing her parents to let her go to the auditions proves to be a much tougher challenge, especially since tryouts are the exact same date and time as the admissions test for a coveted spot to Stuyvesant High School.
Regardless of her parents’ old-world immigrant insistence on education first, Anjali is not about to give up her dream, especially when she’s can practically smell the curry: “‘… we curry just about everything.’” As talented as she is, however, Anjali’s still got a thing or two to learn about cooking up true success.
With all her cooking and writing experience, Ganeshram gets the blend just right in this toothsome tale about food, family, and feeding not just the belly, but nourishing the mind and soul, as well. The recipes read deliciously, too … as I’m an utter disaster in the kitchen, maybe I can rally my teenagers to give me a helping hand!
Readers: Middle Grade
Published: 2011 Continue reading
The World We Found by Thrity Umrigar + Author Interview
Here’s a moment of literary serendipity: on the morning my Bookslut interview with Luis Alberto Urrea went up, I happened to be finishing the galley of Thrity Umrigar‘s latest novel, The World We Found. Amazingly, here’s what appears in the penultimate paragraph on the very last page: “Thanks to Luis Alberto Urrea, whose definition of ‘the trembling ones,’ inspires my work.” What are the chances?
When I contacted Umrigar to set up our interview for this piece, she mentioned that she had just started Urrea’s Into the Beautiful North: “Howz that 4 coincidence?” she immediately replied. After a little nagging, she explained her “trembling” reference: “I heard Luis tell a story about his dad working as a janitor in a nearby bowling alley. And Luis was there with his friend but he didn’t acknowledge his dad. The friend didn’t know their relation and made fun of the ‘janitor’ and the father just stood there, mute, trembling with embarrassment. And Luis said something like, ‘here’s to the trembling ones.’ And I thought to myself that that was the best damn description of who I write for and why I write, that I’d ever heard. He’s so friggin’ brilliant, isn’t he?”
I, too, eventually recognized this story because I realized I was actually there: I moderated a panel almost a year ago at the 2011 AWP Conference, where I introduced Urrea and recognized Umrigar in the audience. Umrigar would, of course, become the best part of the post-presentation discussion that followed. She is, in live time, fiery, inquisitive, challenging … though occasionally she’ll give your brain a rest with her own brand of goofy fun.
On the page, Umrigar is equally fiery and challenging, although she is capable of wielding powerful control even while revealing the most wrenching moments in her resonating novels: dissolution of decades-long relationships in her debut Bombay Time (2001), utter betrayal in The Space Between Us (2006), the death of a beloved spouse and sudden uprooting in If Today Be Sweet (2007), and the unthinkable loss of a child in The Weight of Heaven (2009).
Readers of The World We Found are surely in for some “trembling” of their own. What might initially read like chick lit – four college friends are brought back together after almost 30 years of drifting apart to fulfill the dying wish of one of their own – evolves into an explosive, revelatory examination of class, gender, family … and the very extremes of religion.
Not yet 50, Armaiti is dying of a virulent brain tumor, and having seen her own mother suffer a horrible death, she decides she will hold on as long as she can to her quality of life and not be controlled by debilitating medical interventions. More than anything, Armaiti wants to reunite with the vibrant soulmates of her youth, her three closest friends who remained in Bombay. As university students together back in the 1970s, the fearless four were idealistic, devoted, ready to fight any and all injustice. Decades later, Laleh is a privileged wife and mother, Kavita is an accomplished in-demand international architect, and Nishta has all but disappeared. With the help of Laleh’s Mr. Fix-It-husband and in spite of the obstacles of Nishta’s fundamentalist spouse, Armaiti must get her final wish.
You’ve got some explosive content in this, your latest. No spoilers here, but that final scene in the airport is a shocker. Are you ready for the reactions you’re definitely going to get?
I’m not sure what you mean. Why is the scene a shocker? I mean, I understand that it’s meant to be a surprising twist – that was my intention – but I’m not trying to offend or insult any group. My main contention is that when individuals have power over others, more likely than not they will use, and abuse, that power. What reactions, and from whom, do you think I’ll get?
That was actually one of the details about this book that I admired most, that none of the characters were ever simply “good” or “bad,” and that even the “good” guys were not above falling prey to abusing their power. But back to that final scene, I don’t at all think you were intending to offend or insult any group! I’m convinced, though, that you’ll have readers who will have strong reactions to Adish’s inflammatory one-word solution to the situation at hand. Adish has been a calming, reassuring presence throughout most of the book, so it’s a shocker when he reacts as he does at the airport. Post-9/11, don’t you feel people have become hyperaware, even hypersensitive to certain trigger words and situations?
That’s great; I want them to have a strong reaction to his “one-word solution,” as you so delicately put it. My hope is that they will ask themselves what they would’ve done in this situation and whether the ends can ever justify the means.
Let’s back up a little: So when did you begin writing World? How did the story come to you?
The bare outlines of the story took shape after a chance meeting in India with a college friend I hadn’t seen in over 25 years. We were catching up on our lives and she mentioned that she had moved away from the activism of her college days after the Hindu-Muslim riots that tore apart Bombay in 1992-’93. It marked the end of her innocence, in a way. And although I was living in the U.S. by then, I remembered how the riots had affected me at a very deep level. It was almost as if the secular, easy-going, tolerant city we had grown up in, didn’t exist any more. So I could relate to her feelings, even though I disagreed with her conclusions. And then I asked myself questions about lost idealism and whether something of value still lingered from that era. And slowly, the book took shape. [... click here for more]
Author interview: Feature: “An Interview with Thrity Umrigar,” Bookslut.com, January 2012
Readers: Adult
Published: 2012 Continue reading
The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
When Firdous Bamji – a veteran narrator – reads Amitav Ghosh‘s haunting novel in his ‘normal’ voice, he’s hardly memorable. But as soon as he ‘becomes’ the searching Piya, the sophisticated Kanai (“‘[s]ay it to rhyme with Hawaii’”), the contemplative Nirmal, the grounded Nilima, and the many, many other characters, Ghosh’s already lyrical, dazzling prose becomes truly transporting.
Piya, a young American marine biologist detached from her Indian heritage, and Kanai, a middle-aged Lothario translator from Delhi, meet over spilled tea on a train from Kolkata to Canning. They are both en route to the isolated Sundarbans, also known as the tide country, an archipelago of hundreds of islands in the Bay of Bengal held together by a vast mangrove forest. Piya hopes to secure the permits that will allow her to research rare river dolphins; Kanai has been summoned by his elderly Aunt Nilima to claim a package left for him by her late husband Nirmal.
What might have been a brief encounter lasts throughout the sweeping, wondrous novel. Piya’s first attempt at tracking her rare dolphin ends in near fatal disaster, and she’s rescued by a reticent local fisherman, Fokir, and his young son. They deliver her to Nilima, a ubiquitous presence in the unpredictable tide country. There on Lusibari, Piya finds Kanai poring over an aged notebook in which his late Uncle Nirmal recorded his experiences during the tumultuous, tragic clashes between the government and the refugee inhabitants of the tide country. Piya’s research in the surrounding rivers and other islands overlaps with Kanai’s quest to better understand his uncle’s troubled past, not to mention his own growing interest in Piya. Piya, in turn, finds herself strangely drawn to the nearly silent – and married – Fokir.
Ghosh remarkably manages to weave politics, history, folklore, research on rare animals and their delicate ecosystems, and even the devastating December 2004 tsunami into an exquisite, heart-thumping adventure … perfect company on the run, by the way. I confess that I so missed Kusum, Horen, Moyna, and the many others, that I now have Bamji reading Ali Sethi’s The Wish Maker to me. Stay tuned … literally.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2005 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, Indian, Indian American, South Asian, South Asian American
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
Just after finishing Divisadero, I immediately found myself missing Hope Davis’ voice – she who so lullingly narrated Michael Ondaatje’s dream-like bifurcated drama. So what a comforting surprise to click on Ann Patchett‘s Wonder and find Davis’ voice gently streaming out of my headset! Serendipity indeed!
As the daughter of a foreign graduate student father who deserted his Caucasian American wife and hapa child after finishing his degree, Marina Singh’s family situation merits one of the best quips in the book, comparing her personal background to “the stuff of presidential history.” Her separation from her Indian father looms large, forever haunting her unconscious, exacerbated to the point of blood-curdling nightmares especially when she ingests anti-malarial drugs, which she must during her few visits to Calcutta as a young child.
Now in her early 40s, Dr. Singh – a pharmaceutical researcher of mundane anti-cholesterol drugs – is back on the same mind-altering prescription and nightly screaming herself awake (and anyone else within shrieking distance). Her bland boss, Mr. Fox, who also happens to be her noncommittal lover too many years her senior, surprises her with the news that she’s being sent to Brazil, ostensibly in search of further details about her colleague who has reportedly died of a mysterious fever out in the field.
More importantly, Mr. Fox needs a concrete update on the company’s Amazon-based, high-expense-but-not-yet-delivering project on fertility drugs, headed by the legendary Dr. Annick Swenson. Unfortunately, Singh’s aborted OB/GYN career is directly linked to her past relationship with Swenson, which ended almost two decades earlier. Already frought with difficult memories and nightmares before she even embarks, Singh’s journey proves to be a ‘heart of darkness’-like odyssey, both wondrous and shattering, redemptive and damning.
Patchett’s latest title is an uneven mix of soap opera antics (the younger woman falling for her older mentor figure recurs no less than three times, not to mention Dr. Swenson bearing a spooky resemblance to Meredith Grey’s steely mother on Grey’s Anatomy of all shows!), and high cultural aspirations (Heart of Darkness, Lost Horizon, opera). Most disturbingly, I couldn’t shake the undertones of western colonial superiority – that sense of everything outside is crumbling, backward, lacking, literally requiring mind-altering inoculations in order to survive out there. And to make the protagonist so clearly hapa, so distinctly teetering in the middle of two worlds, left me just as unbalanced as to how to ultimately react …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
I Am Different! Can You Find Me? by Manjula Padmanabhan
Leave it to the Global Fund for Children (and the always innovative small press Charlesbridge) to offer a colorful new book that uses a clever game of hide-and-seek to celebrate our differences, while sharing our universal sameness. And, of course, novelist/playwright/cartoonist Manjula Padmanabhan also deserves equal praise for her entertaining, enlightening creation.
Although 80% of the U.S population speaks only English (I confess I cringed at that statistic, given how so much of the rest of the world is multi-lingual), many many many languages were brought to American shores from all over the world. We are, after all, a continent of immigrants, with roots that extend all over the world over hundreds and hundreds of years, as well as origins that begin right here for indigenous Americans.
Here you’ll learn how to say, “Can you find me?” in 16 different languages – from Hebrew to Cree to Hawaiian to Arabic to Chinese to Spanish to Nahuatl to even American Sign Language (!) – along with 16 puzzles in which you’ll need to identify the one crow, iguana, flower, ladder, key, etc. etc. that is not like the others.
With each puzzle, you also get a little language lesson, including the many words from various other languages that have become a part of everyday English. Take a guess where these words might have originated: hallelujah, ukulele, giraffe, candy, tote, silk, shampoo, and so many more. You’ll just have to get the book if you’re not sure of the answers!
In case you needed any more convincing, click here to hear some of the Global Fund staff read to you from this delightful title. Don’t you want to join in?
Readers: Children
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Truth: if not for Sunil Malhotra, I would never have finished Abraham Verghese‘s bestselling first novel, Cutting for Stone. Immediately opened upon receipt more than two years ago, for some reason, my bookmark never moved beyond the first few chapters …
Timing mattered: I realize now to fully appreciate Stone, I first had to read Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste (for Ethiopian political context), The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee (for medical background), and Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (for an overview of women’s societal maladies). Then Sunil Malhotra’s mellifluous narration embodied the characters (after which, with his many talented voices still in my head, I returned to the page because my eyeballs are quicker than my ears).
The final result is, in a word, wondrous.
On September 20, 1954, conjoined twin sons – ”tethered together” at the head by a “short, fleshy tube” – violently enter the world in Missing Hospital’s Operating Theater 3 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Born to an Indian nun who dies, and a British surgeon who vanishes in shocked stupor, they are named Marion (for the pioneering American gynecologist) and Shiva (who was “all but dead until [his adoptive mother-doctor] invoked Lord Shiva’s name”).
Now at 50, Marion Praise Stone examines his life: the twins’ Ethiopian childhood intertwined with their nanny’s daughter Genet, their cleaving when Marion is forced to flee their homeland, his training in a New York inner-city “Ellis Island hospital” (far removed from a more genteel “Mayflower hospital”), the shattering events that lead to reunion, and his ultimate trip back home. His telling repays a debt: “What I owe Shiva most is this: to tell the story. It is one … which I had to piece together. Only the telling can heal the rift that separates my brother and me. … Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed. To begin at the beginning …”
And thus the prologue ends and the epic begins. Over the next 500-plus pages (or 24 hours if you let Sunil woo you to the end), ShivaMarion will vividly inhabit your imagination; Verghese makes sure their residence is long-lasting, using his formidable literary skills to both unravel and bind the twins’ story amidst the chaos of immigration, colonialism, missionary life, political occupation, and so much more. More remarkable, however, are the small reminder seeds Verghese plants chapter after chapter, scenes so unforgettable that the tiniest triggers will cause you to envision ShivaMarion once more long after the final page: a hurt thumb, Middlemarch, helpless puppies, stalled motorcycles, even The New York Times.
Wait no more. Be ready. Be haunted. Be enthralled.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, African, Indian African, Indian American, South Asian American
Hot, Hot Roti for Dada-ji by F. Zia, illustrated by Ken Min
For young Aneel, having his grandparents come live with him is like having built-in playmates, not to mention “… his grandparents’ stories were the best of all. Aneel loved hearing about the faraway village with the green wheat fields and the swaying coconut palms.”
One day, while his grandmother is too busy chanting her Hari Oms, Dada-ji, his grandfather, is happy to tell Aneel about his youthful days of wrestling water buffalo, tying together hissing cobras, and even juggling three elephants! Dada-ji’s strength, of course, came from stacks and stacks of his own mother’s “fluffy-puffy roti” accompanied by her “tongue-burning mango pickle.”
Longing for roti, but unable to convince anyone in the house to make it, Aneel decides he’ll make them himself! Indeed, as his surprised family looks on with encouragement (and hunger), Aneel figures out by roti number 10 how to make the perfect circle for the perfect fluffy puff. And the hot, hot roti for Dada-ji gives both grandfather and grandson all the strength they need to find grand new adventures together.
First time book illustrator Ken Min‘s stylized, angular faces are bursting with expressive energy – check out grinning Dada-ji in his headstand, the startled elephants in mid-air, Aneel’s worried mother as he takes over the kitchen, and Aneel’s own glee as he soars into the blue sky. Zia’s story warmly celebrates the exuberance of imagination, and rewards the tenacity of can-do attitude.
If I had one little, minor, tiny complaint, it might be that a roti recipe would have been much appreciated, especially since Aneel himself makes the process look so possible … and delightfully delicious. Mmm mmmm good indeed!
Tidbit: Talk about internet magic … you can try out Aneel’s roti recipe by clicking here!
Readers: Children
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Fiction, Indian American
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
I won’t lie: at almost 600 pages (or almost 21 hours if you choose the audible option), Siddhartha Mukherjee‘s 2011 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction is a Commitment (yes, capitalization intended!).
But commitment can come with vast rewards and, in this case, get ready for a massive infusion of exacting history, lingering mysteries, and scientific discovery. More than the undeniable erudition, the book’s most memorable moments are, of course, the true stories that Mukherjee (who is both physician and researcher) seamlessly weaves throughout – inspiring, wrenching, hopeful, driven, miraculous – of both the famous (Sidney Farber, Mary Lasker …) and the everyday important (Clara, Jimmy, Germaine …).
Before you delve into this book, however, might I suggest two others to read before which will infinitely enlighten and enhance your appreciation: Intuition by Allegra Goodman for a fictionalized overview of the machinations of a research lab (for example, Weinberg’s lab in Emperor, also in Boston, also working on turning cancer cells into normal, becomes that much more accessible) and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (neither Lacks nor her HeLa cells are mentioned by name, but her undeniable role in cancer research is referenced often).
As behemoth as the contents are, Mukherjee offers a clever, illuminating shortcut on just three pages, 463 to 465: “Recall Atossa, the Persian queen with breast cancer in 500 BC …” and from there, Mukherjee remarkably, concisely follows the course of 2500 years of cancer history and research, even projecting into 2050 when “… [t]his War on Cancer may best be ‘won’ by redefining victory.” The rest of the book’s pages explicates, elucidates, and enlightens.
Reading Emperor is certainly a personal journey (I found a relative-by-marriage on page 229!), even more resonating if you have lost anyone to the disease. While honoring the remarkable progress in cancer research, Mukherjee is insistently forthright – his table of contents follows with a sparse page of sobering data: “In the United States, one in three women and one in two men, will develop dancer during their lifetime.” And 459 pages later, he admits, “The question then will not be if we will encounter this immortal illness in our lives, but when.”
And yet Mukherjee’s honesty is never maudlin, balanced by moments of sheer wonder as, for example, he is awed by the “miraculous moment of [his] daughter’s birth” (even as he’s harvesting the rich stem cells in her umbilical cord). He follows her birth with something akin to re-birth for a “routine spectrum of survivors,” the ‘routine’-ness of their survival bearing witness to their transformation from victim to victor in the cancer war.
As we reach that final page, we can believe that when we come in contact with the disease, we, too, will hope for, even dare to expect, that our survival will be routine …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Biography, .Nonfiction, Indian American, South Asian American
Author Interview: Anjali Banerjee
With her past seven published novels – written for audiences that range from middle-grade readers on up – Anjali Banerjee didn’t particularly mention male body parts in any great detail. Maybe a twinkling eye here, capable hands there, but she certainly didn’t dwell. But as the saying goes, there’s a first time for everything.
Indeed, welcome to Haunting Jasmine, Banerjee’s eighth novel, her third for adults: Page one opens with an avid discussion on the fidelity factor of male genitalia based on ethnicity, complete with images of… well, shall we say… gold-embroidered formalwear for the faithful Bengali member. Five pages later, our betrayed heroine is not above asking the elephant god Ganesh to put a curse – à la Lorena Bobbit – on her heartbreaking spouse’s non-Bengali, all-American private parts. Oh, ouch.
Painful initial details aside, Banerjee’s latest is actually another easy-breezy, deftly entertaining love story, this time with spine-tingling twists. Searching for respite from her cheating soon-to-be-ex, the eponymous Jasmine heads home to remote Shelter Island in the Pacific Northwest where she’s agreed to watch Auntie Ruma’s bookstore for a month. Auntie Ruma needs the time to have her “heart fixed in India,” and only Jasmine can be entrusted to take care of the historic Victorian and the treasures – literary and otherwise – that reside within.
Books and writing – and certainly some multi-culti magic – have always been a part of Banerjee’s life. Born in India, and raised in small-town Canada and later big-city California, Banerjee found special inspiration in her literary maternal grandmother, herself an English writer who called India home.
From the moment Banerjee “could pick up a crayon and scribble,” she started writing. She wrote her first story at age seven, and in spite of “preposterous premises and impossible plots,” she never stopped. While she’s “not sure of a specific moment when I decided to become a writer” – she did have a few career detours as a veterinary assistant, an office manager, a law student, to name a few – Banerjee readily acknowledges that “writing has always been part of who I am.”
Since publishing her first title in 2005 – her lauded kiddie novel Maya Running, about an awkward young Indian American girl who goes through a 13 Going on 30-sort of transformation (sans the timely fast-forward) and becomes an assertive, multilingual beauty overnight – Banerjee has managed to publish more than a book a year. Even with five books for middle grade readers and three more for us oldsters, all out in just six years, Banerjee insists, “I’m not that prolific!”
In case you’re about to set off for the library or local bookstore, you’ll need the rest of Banerjee’s titles: In addition to Maya, her other younger-reader novels are Rani and the Fashion Divas, The Silver Spell, Looking for Bapu, and most recently Seaglass Summer; her adult titles before Haunting Jasmine are Imaginary Men and Invisible Lives (with nary a mention in either about certain appendages. Ahem).
So Haunting Jasmine starts with quite a saucy departure from your previous novels. What prompted the impulse?
The departure seemed right for my character, a jilted divorcée whose husband cheated on her. He dashed her dreams for a perfect life and a happy marriage – her thoughts seemed appropriate for the situation! [... click here for more]
Author interview: Feature: “An Interview with Anjali Banerjee,” Bookslut.com, February 2011
Readers: Adult Continue reading
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