In 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, and are strict with their teenage daughter Heera. They want their daughter to wear only Indian clothes to her North Carolina public school.
[…] the smirks at your embroidered kurti tops, eye rolls at the homemade chapati egg wraps that your mother insists you eat for lunch..
In fact, they want their daughter to grow up thoroughly Indian while being brought up in 70s-80s America, and are casually blase about her tense, nervous attempts to make them aware of her life.
“I just want them to stop teasing me”
“Stop being so sensitive”, Baba says. “When they tease you, it means they like you.”
Of course, dating, prom and suchlike are completely out of the question.
Luckily, Heera has two solid friends: Marie Grimaldi and her older brother Marco, who live nearby. Marie has the ability to charm Heera’s parents into allowing a few mild escapades, and Marco, it is clear from his first mention, is the love interest.
Marco calls but Ma says into the receiver you are busy for the next couple of years until you go to college, that perhaps he should finish his senior year by studying.
The conflict of parental expectations and how to straddle the two cultures is standard fodder for immigrant and diasporic writing, but Laskar manages to write about it with some originality. From Heera’s perspective:
Your name represents a series of long unpronounceable expectations from a place across the globe that you never belonged to directly, but somehow the hooks are still there. Your name also represents what the good people of North Carolina want to see when they look at someone who looks like you, someone who looks so unlike them: A girl who is respectful and obedient, a girl who knows her place in the world, a girl who is invisible. In this way, the two worlds exist like an eternal syzygy.
The parents are stereotypical, summed up pithily:
They are afraid you’ll become too American, that you’ll forget everything they ever tried to teach you, that you’ll abandon your shared language and culture, that you’ll forget the things they hold in the highest esteem.
Many Indian-American novels such as those by Jhumpa Lahiri and Sanjana Sathian write about the well-to-do middle class families, who can afford to fly back to India for holidays and live in good school districts. In contrast, the parents in Circa are struggling.
[Ma] works overtime these days, she comes home in the evenings too tired to cook, and the three of you eat discount sugar-cereal in grimacing silence.
They do not see the need for sneakers for their daughter’s gym class; she sees this as the typical parental desire for control, but in fact it comes from the need to pinch pennies.
They leave the discount Shoe Barn without paying for the athletic shoes you need for PE.
“These are not necessities”, Ma says.
The stage is set for what looks like the standard immigrant child coming-of-age story, but the huge tragic event that occurs (no spoilers) is unexpected, and changes everything. The social, popular Marco renames himself ‘Crash’, and withdraws from everyone, and Heera (now ‘Dia’) is isolated, shaken, lonely and traumatized. In addition, Heera’s mother is diagnosed with a serious illness, money becomes tighter, and Heera cannot even accept the partial scholarship to Columbia. Instead, she is married off to a wealthy New Yorker whose family suggests they are willing to ‘let’ Heera continue her studies. In contrast, Marco/Crash, despite his own trauma and dissolving family structure, has many options.
The novel is entirely from Heera’s perspective, but Devi Laskar has chosen to write it in the second person. This, I think, is intended to plunge the reader deeply into Heera’s life and thoughts, while also providing some distance and perspective. But if you ask me, it’s simply an annoying literary device that makes the book that much harder to read. We have sentences like
Your story does not begin with you; it inevitably begins with your parents.
You try to speak but you hear yourself moan.
It’s distracting, and did not seem to add anything to the novel. Despite the whole novel in Heera’s voice, it is oddly incomplete: we get little insight, for example, into what the suddenly compliant Heera feels about her impending marriage.
“What others will think” is another standard Indian concern, and without giving away any spoilers, in this novel, it is taken to an extreme by Heera’s new parents-in-law.
A side story concerns a local Indian-American family with a daughter a little older than Heera, subject to the same kind of social restrictions. This girl suddenly vanishes, but a twist later in the novel suggests that she might have chosen to depart, for rather obvious reasons.
Sad to say, the Heera/Marco affair is the least interesting part of the novel: dragged out over years and cities, it is predictable and their attraction remains relatively opaque to the reader. The changing relationship between Heera and her parents is more complex and interesting, and could have been explored further, especially towards the hurried end of the novel.
The novel has its moments and its edgy, original turns of phrase, and I really liked the cover, but there are too many issues for me to recommend it.
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