Jaffna Eyes
Let me tell you about dark men with white smiles, these Tamil men I loved and who belonged with me. In my house there were four of them. Each of my brothers resembled my father in a different way. All...
South Asian
Swimming in fraught waters
Set as it is in an upscale American suburb and focusing on the few nonwhite residents, this first novel may remind readers of Celeste Ng’s Little Flowers Everywhere, but to my mind, Vibhuti Jain’s Our Best Intentions tackles a complex...
One Twist Too Many
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,...
Politics and social oppression
This novel has left me thinking that in India, principles/morals are a luxury seemingly few can afford. The story illustrates how the political system in India works, mostly at ground level, how favours are exchanged, how preferential treatment is given...
“The Filipina maid is a favourite among Singaporeans”
Singapore, the tiny island-nation with famously impeccable streets, not a leaf out of place and constantly updated infrastructure, all maintained by a population of foreign workers who form about a quarter of the population. Beyond the people who clean the...
Love in dystopia
In a dystopian future, most women are unable to bear children. The few women who are fertile are managed by the government, whose goal is to ensure the continuation of the species by making sure these women bear children to...
The first South Asian American
In the early 1600s, America was vast and Europeans had a tenuous foothold in Jamestown, Virginia. To encourage immigration, every Englishman who brought a servant or bonded labourer to America was ‘given’ 50 acres of land. One of the Englishmen...
A Library of One’s Own
Imagine a weatherproofed box of books outside a house where anyone is free to stop by and pick up a book, drop off a book, or just browse. It is such a charming idea, and seems so community-minded and friendly....
Growing up and growing old in 1990s Bangalore
A debut author with a collection of short stories set in Bangalore; definitely worth investigating. Most of the stories in Shubha Sunder’s collection, Boomtown Girl , focuses, as befits the title, on girls growing up in Bangalore in the 1990s....
Secrets and Lies
The early wave of South Asian immigrant writing focused on the immigrants themselves: their unfamiliarity with the new country, discrimination, yearning for a home that changed after their departure, and excitement about the opportunities now available to them. The next...
Gossip Girls in Gujarat
If Indian villages were populated by American teenagers, The Bandit Queens would be a black-humor romp. The novel is inspired by the true story of Phoolan Devi, a poor woman at the bottom of the caste structure in Uttar Pradesh....
What will people think?
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...
Outsidership, through the prism of friendship
Having read and loved all Kamila Shamsie’s novels, I was thrilled to get my hands on her latest, Best of Friends. Even better, the blurb suggested it was going to be a read similar to Kartography, one of Shamsie’s earlier...
Irreverent and honest
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...
Potter’s clay
Debuting with An Atlas of Impossible Longings (2008), Roy has steadily published 5 novels over about 14 years; The Earth Spinner in 2022 is her most recent. Each of her novels have been of good quality, well written, non-stereotypical, full...
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