North American immigrant writing tends to be dominated by the US, so it is a pleasant variation to come across a book by an Indo-Canadian author.
Scaachi Koul is in her early 30s, and a writer at Buzzfeed. This, her first book, is a collection of essays about topics ranging from her Kashmiri-Canadian parents, alcoholism, growing up brown-skinned in Calgary, to her trips to India.
This could easily have become another tedious exercise in navel-gazing, but Koul is too bright and original for that. She writes about her own experiences, but also comments on the wider culture in both Canada and India. She could also have hidden behind a lightly fictionalized version of her own story (see, autofiction), but is too honest for that approach, thank goodness.
The first essay, Inheritance Tax, starts with Koul and her boyfriend (who is referred to, throughout the book, as ‘Hamhock’, a rather offputting nickname that is ascribed to him without explanation) are flying to Southeast Asia. I feared a ponderous travelogue, but in fact, we get very little about the trip itself. Starting the essay with her travel, however, allows her writing to wander through her fear of flying, her parents’ emigration to Calgary, her grandmother’s life in Calgary and return to India, and her exploration of how her upbringing led to her own fears.
Mom raised me with an undercurrent of fear beneath her hysterics
(you’d think all these original and independent young people would be more creative than to blame their mothers for their current problems. But perhaps I’m biased toward mothers :-))
The essay goes on to describe her parents’ own trip to Cuba, and ends rather sweetly with a role reversal: it is Koul who gets frantic when her parents don’t call or send email for a whole week.
Aus-piss-ee-ous follows Koul to India, where she is attending a cousin’s wedding. She is snarky about the title word:
The accents here also pronounce the word as ‘aus-piss-ee-ous‘, fragmented and somehow even more dramatic. The wedding date? Must be aus-piss-ee-ous. The pairing itself? Must consult the stars and ensure it is an aus-piss-ee-ous union. […] Let us all be sure this is the most aus-piss-ee-ous of aus-piss-ee-ous days. No one, English-speaking or not, knows what this fucking word means, but it is important that we observe it.
It seemed a bit unnecessarily biting, but Koul was somewhat on edge during this trip to India. She is at an age when her parents would ‘love to arrange me’ despite her white Canadian boyfriend, she is sensitive about her body and the criticism of her clothes, she is bitter about the differing standards for men and women, more obviously on display during a wedding (‘angry…that the men were allowed to drink and eat meat on a day reserved for religious activity when both were strictly verboten’), and of course, there is the cultural dissonance between Indo-Canadian Koul and her Indian cousins. It is energetically written, but for me, did not break new ground.
A sharper and more unusual story is A Good Egg, entirely set during Koul’s college years in Toronto, and about alcohol.
It’s not that I drink a lot. I rarely drink during the week, and my weekend drinking generally consists of juuust enough wine to make me forget about the three times I’ve accidentally sent my boss a furious and deeply intimate Facebook message intended for Hamhock. But I like alcohol because it induces a kind of stupor I can control, one that comes in gentle waves, that I can keep at bay with water and disco fries or make harsher with amber-coloured liquor.
In college, Koul had two close male friends, Jeff and Matt, with whom she went to parties, got pulled into a ‘cool crowd’, and who would keep a protective eye on her. It was all fun, until Jeff’s drinking spiralled out of control. It’s a sad, realistic story, but along the way, Koul also talks about the two scary times when she was slipped a roofie (the date-rape drug), and her own issues with drinking. All very sobering, no pun intended.
I thought the least appealing essay was Mute, about Koul’s experiences in the Twitter world. As with so many women on the internet, the vitriol directed towards her posts is intense and exhausting. She analyzes this experience thoughtfully, but (and this is likely related to my own age and interests), one does tend to wonder why she doesn’t just get off Twitter, which seems to bring little joy and much trauma.
Koul is, often, funny. About her parents’ betrothal:
My dad asked her father for her hand (and the rest of her, presumably)
and self-deprecating. About the visible veins on her arm:
At a dinner party I was seated next to an emergency room doctor. I stuck my arm under her nose and asked “What does this look like to you?” She said it was nothing, but speaking as someone who once went to a university with a pre-med program, I’m pretty sure I know a little more than she does.
She is willing to be vulnerable, as in Size Me Up, about her relationship with clothes:
Clothes are ephemeral: they fall apart in the wash, you lose them at a friend’s house, they rip and crumble and go out of style. [..] But your insecurities, the ones that make you go hunting for something to make you feel better, to love yourself more, to give you a renewed sense of self or greater esprit — don’t you even worry. Those will last you a lifetime.
The essays read as a realistic and honest portrait of growing up and living as an Indian-Canadian. Koul is not quite as sharp as Lindy West or Roxane Gay; the essays are more likely to make you smile or relate than to surprise you with a new perspective or a novel social analysis.
Among the more amusing parts of the book are the end-notes of each essay, random snippets of email between Koul and her father.
Papa <papa@gmailcom>, March 14, 2015: Treat me like a demigod Not a full-god, an in-between god. Pay homage to me every time you see me. Do exactly what is in my mind.
Scaachi <sk@gmail.com> []: What is in your mind?
Papa <papa@gmail.com> []: I’ll think of something
or this one:
Scaachi <sk@gmail.com> []: my boss called me competent today
Papa <papa@gmail.com> []: that warms the coccles [sic] of my heart. Were his lips a bit curled when he said this. I do not trust anybody.
You can see where Koul might have got her irreverence from.
1 Response
[…] contrast to the immigrant parents in my last review, the Indian-American parents in Circa are very, very old-school, resist any hint of assimilation, […]