Coming to America – Part 1 About three months ago I started two books with, published some 40 years apart, with essentially, the same story line. Both focus on young Indians coming to the US, leaving family and the comforts...
“The Hanuman Chalisa by Tulsidas is one of the best-known and best-loved poems in the world. Tens of millions of people recite it by heart, and chant it daily, as well as in times singularly joyful or sorrowful—or when they...
In Edison, our hero Prem is challenged to explain “What is good about Hindi movies?” It’s not something he has thought about – to a devotee, they just are. Pondering the question, he comes up with They crammed it all...
~ A History of Burning, by Janika Oza ~ Grand Central Publishing, 2023 He hadn’t seen his family in nearly fifty years. His mother was gone, his middle sister too. These sentences, about 100 pages into Janika Oza’s A History...
The Story of a Widow is a lovely book by Musharraf Ali Farooqi about a middle-aged woman in Karachi adjusting to widowhood. The story begins as Mona Ahmad reflects on her marriage and wonders what, if anything, she should do...
n an interview at the end of The Other Woman, a collection of short stories primarily about extramarital affairs, editor Monica Das says she was interested in studying the literary representation of polygamy and bigamy and their adverse socioeconomic impact...
At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the...
When I picked up this collection of short stories, Next Door by Jahnavi Barua, I was intrigued by the idea — to be invited into the homes and lives of strangers. What I didn’t expect was such darkness. Set mainly...
It’s not that the storyline lacks plausibility. Some of us are all too familiar with the NRI engineer, MD or MBA grad who goes to India for 3 weeks and comes back married to a virtual stranger, the so-called ‘marriage...
Here are five stories, set in Southeast Asia and on the Indian subcontinent-each one bearing the weight and substance of a short novella-narrated by young women who find themselves, often as expatriates, face to face with the compelling circumstances of...
When I was 30, a well-intentioned, non-Indian adult suggested I write a letter to my mother, let her know how she had made me feel for decades – get it all out. I smiled and said, Indian daughters don’t do...
500 or so pages into The Covenant of Water, matriarch Big Ammachi has a conversation with her god, grateful for her blessings, certainly not complaining “But, there’s always something, Lord, isn’t there? Every year there’s a new worry…now and then,...
Note: There are no spoilers in this review because, well, it’s just not a Donne thing, to borrow a cheesy line from Anwar, the ‘hero’ of Syed M. Masood’s The Bad Muslim Discount. Spanning continents and decades, encompassing themes of...
The first article I read about the Netflix show Indian Matchmaking gave away the ending. I wasn’t planning to watch so it didn’t matter if Sima-from-Mumbai found her clients their perfect match. Then it started. Colleagues from work – they...
Call it a sign of the times. After weeks of baking and cooking, I’ve now moved on to…reading cookbooks. Browsing my collection, Indian cookbooks mostly found on bookstore bargain tables over some 20-30 years, of course, I had to start...
Class, Race and Motherhood
Kiasu Rom-Com
Contraception through the ages
Different but not alienated
Quiet Desperation
Fine dining with an unusual chef
A Year in the Lives … at an American mall
Separated sisters “are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of a pond”
Secrets and Lies
Skin colour, politics and poverty
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