Grief and love: three decades of diasporic family tensions

In 1997 Seattle, a young Indian-American woman called Amina Eapen receives a call from her mother Kamala in Albuquerque. Her neurosurgeon father Thomas, it seems, has started talking to himself, and worse, to his long-dead family members. A little guilt-tripping by Kamala:

“[You have] some big work thing? So don’t come. Yes, I understand. It’s just your father.”

and soon Amina is heading back to her childhood home in New Mexico.

Chapter 2 flashes back twenty years to the Eapens’ visit to the family house in Salem, India. Thomas’ mother Ammachy lives there along with

Sunil Uncle, dark and paunchy; his wife, the wheatish and wimply Divya Auntie, their son Itty, head weaving from side to side like a skinny Stevie Wonder; Mary-the-Cook, the cook; and two new servant girls.

This section, I thought, was the best in the book. Ammachy is mean as a snake, never missing an oppportunity to pass biting comments about her children and grand-children.

Ammachy pointed to the roll of flesh that pressed at the hem of Akhil’s polo shirt. “What kind of girlish hips are you growing?”

She turned to Amina with a wince. “I sent some Fair and Lovely, no? Didn’t use it?”

Ammachy is bitter that Thomas, against her wishes, married the dark-skinned Kamala and chose to live far away in America. She takes it out on Kamala, who ironically would prefer to leave America and move back to India. Both women want the same thing, but given the way Ammachy treats Kamala, no collaboration is likely between the two women. Ammachy’s strategy leans more towards guilt-inducement and manipulation.

Meanwhile Thomas’ brother Sunil is envious of his success and feels he has lost out on opportunities. Their son Itty has mental issues, and from Amina’s point of view, is drawn as somewhat creepy. Things come to a head, and the visit ends dramatically.

Back to 1980s Albuquerque, where Amina and Akhil are in high school, negotiating their Indian-ness in that small self-absorbed world of bullying and dating. Akhil’s constitution changes dramatically: he’s falling asleep on the couch right after he comes back from school, always angry when awake, and eating enormous meals (“five helpings of chicken curry, nine chapatis, two spoons of salad, one bowl of rice and dal, one bottle of RC cola”) — a fever of exhaustion, food and rage. Eventually, they decide he is simply having a massive growth spurt. But a few months later, the problems recur, to devastating effect.

At the heart of this book are major traumas: the deaths of the Salem family, and that of Akhil. (This is not a spoiler — the deaths are foreshadowed early in the book). A decade later come Thomas’s odd behaviours, whose cause is also unclear.

The author dedicates the book to her father, and has described him in interviews as crazy-but-charming (see here). She’s captured this personality in this affectionate, warm-hearted and coherent portrayal of the father in the book, Thomas Eapen, who is a brilliant and focused doctor, tormented by the family deaths, but also usually at work, detached from family life, possibly having an affair with a co-worker.

The mother, Kamala, is portrayed with less affection. She is sharp-tongued, calls her daughter ‘dumb’, ‘dumbo’, ‘like a deaf-mute’, ‘idiot-box’ and suchlike, frenetically active in household chores, and is never warm or supportive.

Kamala’s ability to transform raw ingredients into sumptuous meals brought her the kind of love her personality on its own might have repelled.

Ouch!

Her offbeat malapropisms are played for laughs.

[Via a copy of Rolling Stone] Kamala [was] a self-proclaimed export on all things Seattle (“The grunges! The Starbucks! The start-ups!”).

“Is [Dimple] still opening relationships?”

“There are times to have a good time and times to put a good shoe forward.”

Yet her character is occasionally inconsistent. Kamala is deeply conservative born-again Christian who throws her son’s girlfriend out of the house, but then lovingly invites her husband’s lady friend (an affair? Kamala suspects so, but to the reader this is unclear) into the house to sit with him. Approximately equal time is devoted to Kamala and Thomas, but Kamala comes across as a bit of a caricature in contrast to the warmer portrayal of Thomas.

Dimple is Amina’s dearest friend, but Amina’s affection for her remained baffling to me. In high school, pretty Dimple hung out with the cool kids while Amina slunk along the hallways in silence. In Seattle, Dimple is nosy, bossy and manipulative, and while Amina thinks “Dimple needed her more than she needed Dimple”, the book did not demonstrate this.

The minor characters were well sketched: the high school jerks who turn out to be nobodies later in life, the saintly Jamie as a love interest, his beautiful sister Paige, and two families of Indian-Americans who are unrelated to the Eapens, but who have become family as these things happen in diasporic communities. Kamala’s own family is casually mentioned (“many sisters”) but they play no part in the novel.

Much book space is spent on Amina’s work life as a photographer — long chapters about a wedding she photographed, the wedding party, the guests and in-laws — and I thought these sections could have been reduced, as they distract from the main story. There is a side story about her most famous photograph: a suicide jumper who she photographed as he jumped, but the backstory of the Native American jumper also felt extraneous and unnecessary. Amina’s secretly-taken photographs seemed rather exploitative of the people who were being photographed without their consent or knowledge; the ethics of this were not discussed at all. These were all well written side stories, but perhaps some of them would have worked better as independent short stories.

The more familiar aspects of immigrant literature — the foot in both worlds, racism, how Indian or American to be, parental pressure to marry within the community — are dealt with handily, woven into the fabric of the book without becoming a focus.

This is an interesting novel, well-written with emotional depth, bitingly funny in parts, and quite original, but I wish it had been a little tighter with fewer digressions.

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