Indian American

Bijou Roy

admin — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Bijou Roy reminded me a bit of Sameer Parekh's Stealing the Ambassador. Both novels feature a young Indian American who visits India after his or her father's death in an attempt to understand the father better, especially his motivation for leaving his home country. Both are quintessential second-generation novels, I feel, because they attempt to recover the lost homeland through a kind of false nostalgia—a desire for a place that was never theirs, but rather of their parents and of the past.

Dhar's novel seemed to try to touch on a number of cultural issues, too, in the contrast between the United States and India in the Indian American's perspective. One example is that Bijou, the title character, is somewhat obsessed with Ketaki, her aunt's maidservant. Bijou sympathizes with this fifteen-year-old and wants to befriend her because the stark class difference of her aunt and uncle from this maid rubs against the ideal of class mobility that she is familiar with having grown up in the United States.

Bijou's name is French for jewel, a word her father picked up when he visited France. He also met Bijou's mother, Sheela, while in France, and this diversion from a more direct India-to-United States path for the parents is interesting for creating a more complex sense of diasporic movement. The France moment in the parents' lives also brings in Billie Holiday as a favorite singer of the father and Bijou (the father first heard Billie Holiday in France as well).

Bijou Roy also has a number of sections from the perspective of the father, Nitish Roy. (The narration is in the third person throughout, though the character's voices emerge in free indirect discourse.) As in Parekh's novel, there is a past (of the father, of the grandfather) haunted by revolutionary and Communist zeal. Nitish was involved with the Naxalites, a revolutionary group that refused Gandhi's nonviolent tactics for social change. I think it's fascinating how newer fiction by Indian Americans (and Indians in the diaspora) seem to be marking a post-independence moment of political contestation rather than the moment of independence from British colonial rule and the trauma of the India-Pakistan split. It definitely seems generational—that the memories of the authors' parents are what make the substance of the fiction.

There was a kind of interesting relationship between Bijou and her younger sister Pari, too. Dhar sketched out subtle differences in how they perceived this trip to India (due perhaps to age difference but also to the different relationships that they had to their parents).

Ultimately, I think Dhar's novel also aims to explore differences in gender norms in the United States versus in India. That exploration isn't fully fleshed out, though, and gets subsumed by the love triangle subplot, which somewhat predictably forces Bijou to puzzle through her relationship with a White American man and her attraction to an Indian man who is the son of a close friend of the father.

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans

Written by: Stephen Hong Sohn, August 21st 2010

Karma Calling

admin — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:49:00 +0000

Directed by Sarba Das

Shakti Productions

Director Sarba Das has taken the stomach-churning subject of credit card debt and used it as a hilarious plot device in this endearing romp of a screwball romantic comedy. Watching Karma Calling is definitely non-stop farcical fun as the maxed out Raj’s, a Hindu family living above their means in Hoboken, are pestered by credit card call center collectors based in India.

Ingenious scenes highlight the absurdity of our hyper-globalized world as the Indian collectors learn how to sound American and choose fake names based on popular American sitcoms. The plot thickens when a relative of the Raj’s arrives from India, intending to influence her family to stop eating meat and start meditating. Traditional India meets Americanized Indians and it all adds up to the exploration of basic human values: family unity, love and money.

The set up is this: one day, the smoothest operator from the India call center, the absolutely adorable and charismatic Rob Roy, calls the Raj house and daughter Sonal picks up the phone. Soon the two are chatting away and the chemistry is immediate. What Somal doesn’t know (because of his finely perfected American accent and slang) is that Rob is an ocean away instead of being a boy next door. Adding to this comedy of cultural errors is Sonal’s brother Shyam, who dreams of making it as a hip-hop artist with a song that features a Japanese title. While “hanging out in the ‘hood,” Shyam suddenly finds himself smitten with an Indian girl who recently arrived in the nabe and is about to marry a Dollar Store mogul in an arranged marriage. What to do? Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Raj try to figure out how to pay the bills, duck the creditors and figure out life in America.

The film has broad laugh appeal, and better yet, many wonderfully hip, small moments that offer snappy insights. One of these moments occurs when a pompous trainer at the call center, seeking to win a trip to America, coyly passes out bags of Doritos, hoping to inspire demoralized Indians to act more like Americans. By flipping the equation of cultural identities and spotlighting deficits, Karma Calling nails it: no matter where you live, the color of your skin or how much money you have (or don’t have), what the world really needs now is love, sweet love. An additional caveat? To thine own self, be true!

Written by: Cheryl Reeves, July 15th 2009

Stealing Nasreen

admin — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 16:53:00 +0000

By Farzana Doctor

Inanna Publications

Stealing Nasreen is the excellent first novel written by Farzana Doctor. Not fitting into any typical genre, the work showcases a slice of desi life, and incorporates elements of mild satire and romance in telling the story of three demoralized souls, Nasreen, Shaffiq, and Salma.

Nasreen is a grieving psychologist in need of personal counseling support, having recently lost both her mother to cancer and her lover to infidelity. Shaffiq is an accountant and a recent immigrant to Canada. Having left India to escape employment discrimination, he is still underemployed and now working as a janitor in the same office building as Nasreen. Shaffiq attempts to cope with the tensions of adjustment to life in a new country by bravely keeping up a front of false optimism, having passed the honeymoon period of his early immigration to Canada with his children and his wife, Salma. In his coping, Shaffiq has also developed a new and slightly odd habit of scavenging the office garbage for clues about the bad habits and secrets of the office-dwellers, the details of which he shares with his wife.

Salma is a teacher, who is dissatisfied working in a dry-cleaning business and as a tutor providing Gujarati lessons in her home to supplement both the family income and her children’s university fund. Practical on the surface, she hides significant passion behind her motherly, scholarly demeanor. All three characters are low on spirits, but high on self expectations as they come to meet in this original story which combines familiar themes of lost loves, obligations, expectations, and opportunities in an original tale which hinges on a chance meeting, one which stirs up long-buried feelings in Salma.

Triangles form much of the structure of Stealing Nasreen. Three stories of love and loss provide much of the back story to the principal relationship in the novel, which focuses on both Salma and Shaffiq’s individual obsessions with Nasreen upon meeting her. Both Shaffiq and Salma find themselves drawn to Nasreen for very different reasons. To Shaffiq, Salma represents both attractive and unappealing elements of the North American dream. She is a member of his ethnic and religious community who has achieved career success in North America, but embodies characteristics he does not desire for his two young daughters. For Salma, Nasreen is a reminder of a former lover, with whom she had a brief closeted relationship. Both Salma and Shaffiq keep aspects of their encounters with Nasreen secret from one another, culminating in a confrontation which alters the trajectory of events for each character from the course laid out at the novel’s beginning.

Rather than opt for the clichés of a neatly happy ending, Doctor has written a sophisticated story where multiple possibilities abound for each of the characters. Though the novel as a whole is rich in details, wry observations, and sophisticated parallel themes, the style of third person omniscient story telling does not relay the depths of emotion felt by any characters in their experiences of everyday tragedies and triumphs. The author’s style of storytelling emphasizes telling over showing, placing some distance between the reader and the characters. A lot happens in the story and none of the characters or the details, either minor or major are neglected in the story. Depicting the character’s experiences of first love, heartbreak, loss and passion from afar takes away from the emotional depth of an extremely accomplished first novel, one which is quite impressive in its scope.

Written by: Ruth Cameron, July 4th 2009