What does not kill you…
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...
South Asian
Looking away from injustice, until it’s one of your own
Over the last few years, many damning reports and videos of police brutality and bias against African-Americans have emerged and been disseminated via the internet, sparking the Black Lives Matter movement. Some parts of the Indian-American community stayed out of...
Just another clichéd arranged marriage
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...
Lucky Girls, lucky reader
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...
Not so Exceptional
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...
Immigrant & Internal Pressures
The myth of the model minority has bedeviled Asian-Americans for decades: they are supposed to be the high achievers who bootstrapped themselves through American society, and are held up as role models for other immigrant groups. Prachi Gupta’s family seemed...
Santiniketan, pre-Independence
This review was first published in Parabaas, and is reproduced here with permission. A memoir with a conspicuously literary slant is Buddhadeva Bose’s The Land Where I Found it All. Translated from Bengali to English by Nandini Gupta, the translator...
Grief, loss and squash
It is always a pleasure to make the acquaintance of a debut South Asian woman writer, so I was very pleased to give this novel, which had been shortlisted for the 2023 Booker, a try. It begins with 11 year...
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...
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...
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