These issues are of particular interest to both of us because we are both writers. As new parents of a half-Indian daughter, we’re thinking not only about our individual experiences of the collision between American and Indian (or more accurately, Tamil) culture, but our daughter’s future experiences. We perceive issues of representation so differently at times that we seem to be talking about entirely different objects or events.

My husband is a fair-skinned Chicagoan writer of mixed Italian descent who feels comfortable voicing whatever is on his mind and does not worry about the reaction. Without speaking for him (his viewpoint is more sophisticated than I’m able to capture here), I gather he doesn’t find it offensive when Americans emphasize exotic aspects of Indian culture.

I am an Indian-American immigrant writer who often feels torn about whether my experience is too small, too unique, to have any bearing on what other people think or should think, but nonetheless feels a deep need to voice opinions no matter how unpopular they are. In my view, writing and other art forms that don’t conform to exotic stereotypes Americans have about India and its diaspora remain mostly invisible, creating a narrow public impression of Indian culture and people of Indian descent.

Our latest discussion, over candlelight and fondue, was about the American and British news coverage of the gang rape in India. Specifically, I was interested in an article called My life behind India’s Purdah that ran in Salon on January 4, 2012, in which Mira Kamdar wrote, “India’s purdah mentality permeates every level of Indian society,” as remarks made after the gang rape by members of Delhi’s police force and political leaders make abundantly clear.

Salon picked up the piece from Asia Society, retitling it to suggest (erroneously I believe), that Kamdar, who grew up in America like me, was writing as a voice for all Indian women in India. The piece is packaged as an inside scoop on Indian society, rhetorically connecting the fear of violence that Kamdar learned from her grandfather with the argument that India is in its entirety a rape culture, the worst culture in the world for women.

Later, Kamdar tweeted that she had asked Salon to retitle the article. They retitled it “Behind India’s cultural purdah”.

***

Following on the heels of the news about the horrific gang rape in India was a false news story accidentally spread by Alternet and picked up by Salon, “Saudi religious leader calls for gang rape of Syrian women.” I noticed this article on a friend’s post on Facebook. It received twenty-eight comments expressing horror.

The sole commenter who pointed out that the story was link bait put out there for the purpose of fomenting outrage, that this ‘news’ might be the result of Islamophobia rather than reality, was denounced and shouted down. To critically question the legitimacy of shaky news pieces about the Middle East or India is apparently to be a vile and reprehensible person in American culture right now.

By the time Alternet responsibly retracted the story about the Saudi cleric, the damage had already been done. As far as I could see, Americans read the original article and reinforced their stereotypes about brown people “over there” in those terrible foreign countries. There was no consideration about what it means when Americans react with social media outrage to a story about a Saudi cleric or an Indian physical therapy student, but virtually ignore similar violence at home.

I am referencing here an event from last August: the sexual assault of a sixteen-year-old by two Steubenville, Ohio high school football players that was followed with people urinating on her and dragging her around by the ankles and wrists, which was followed by onlookers sharing photographs of her and tweeting about the “drunk girl” and the “dead girl.”

The town, which reminds me of the one in Friday Night Lights, was reluctant to help in prosecuting this crime because of its potential to damage a chance to win the championships. It took the work of an industrious blogger, the hacker group Anonymous, and four months for The New York Times to break the news of this rape. There are many people who are as disgusted by the Steubenville rape as the Delhi rape, but the Delhi rape made global headlines almost immediately generating outrage, whereas the Steubenville rape, which occurred in August 2012, registered widely in American consciousness at the start of the new year.

***

With twenty-two mother tongues, twenty-eight states, and seven union territories, India is too heterogeneous a nation, and frankly too diverse in the experiences it offers, to argue with legitimacy from the personal, as Kamdar and other commenters discussing “the conspiracy of silence” in India do. Of course, all I can offer to explain the reason these articles hit me the wrong way is my own personal experience with India, which has been different, and less sensationalistic.

If I were to argue from my personal experience, I would reach an entirely different result from Kamdar. But you won’t see my viewpoint on this topic in a mainstream or even a progressive news magazine because my viewpoint doesn’t fit the sacred or profane dichotomy by which the West categorizes Indian experiences.

The Indian women I know are not silent, nor any more vulnerable than any non-Indian woman in the West. Whether they are children of the diaspora in California or Sydney or Johannesburg, or living where they were born in Chennai, they happen to be among the most outspoken of my friends. They happen to be the quickest to offer an opinion or give help or ask a question or participate in an event.

Kamdar talks about the fear her grandfather instilled in her in order to argue that the same fear permeates all of Indian culture. The first Indian man I ever knew (my father) encouraged me to feel comfortable dissenting from popular opinion and taking a stand against injustices. I do not believe he is unusual for an Indian man. Jyoti Pandey’s father, for example, described his daughter as courageous, not transgressive.

***

During my visits over a thirty-year period to Chennai, the most salient aspect of the culture I’ve encountered has been liveliness in both genders, not a pervasive silencing of women. Women talk over men to get heard. Women visit nightclubs. Women work out at gyms. Women work in positions of power. Women protest injustice in the face of rising violence. Following the rape victim’s death thousands of outraged women took to the streets of India to protest the government’s inaction toward the perpetrators of the gang rape.

It is fair to say that India is deplorably behind the curve when it comes to Indian women’s rights. Yes, misogyny and brutality exist in India. In the American rush to condemn a foreign culture, however, let’s not forget that women brave, bold, and strong enough to protest the rape exist in the culture, and are emblematic of India’s culture, as well.

There is a total silence in the West on India’s culture of dissenting women in the face of severe patriarchy and authoritarianism. It doesn’t quite fit, does it, into the dichotomy carved out for Indian women by Americans and the British, being neither sacred nor profane, but a bit heroic.

Discussion of the protests, if any, is embedded in articles about how India’s entire culture, one composed of multiple nations bound together by British colonialism, is a conspiracy of silence, all of which fits rather nicely into the stereotype of the “quiet, good Indian girl” that I experienced while growing up and while dating in my early twenties. I don’t know where this stereotype originated because Indian women were rarely seen in mainstream television or movies before the nineties, but it was an expectation of silent obedience I encountered regularly while growing up into my mid-twenties. A prime example can be found in Madhuri, an Indian woman shown in the first ten minutes of the pilot for the cancelled series Outsourced.

One literary representation of the quiet Indian woman is V.S. Naipaul’s portrait of Shama in The House of Mr. Biswas. Another literary line referencing the perception that Indian women are inconsequential is referenced at the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway when Clarissa calls Indian women “silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops”. After Mindy Kaling grew in popularity on The Office, Kelly Kapur transformed from quiet background character strategically placed to show what a bumbling politically incorrect guy Michael Scott was, to loudmouthed airhead in her own right.

***

Last year, a Bollywood actress, Sherlyn Chopra, decided to become the first Indian woman to pose for Playboy. She told BBC Hindi,

“I have become the first Indian to pose naked for Playboy, and nobody can take away that achievement from me.”

I don’t know why, but I feel a lot of sympathy for Sherlyn Chopra who thinks that being the first Indian to do something this banal and absurd and simultaneously this transgressive, is somehow an achievement. She has escaped the sacred and profane by being in Playboy.

Or is that still profane? Given the ubiquity of Internet porn and the rise of Hustler’s image via The People v. Larry Flynt, I don’t think that America still sees Playboy as profane, but the magazine is banned in India, which suggests that Chopra was seeking a way to make a name for herself by working within the sacred/profane dichotomy.

***

In a back issue of an Indian-American magazine I read regularly, I notice that one of the reviewers of books and films is white. I am irritated when she says, in her review, that she wishes she were Indian, too, that she would change her name to sound like an Indian writer, because it would be easier to get published by one of the big six—Indian fiction is hot right now!

Um, no, not unless you want to write sari and mango novels. Not unless you want to play into the stereotypes of what American people seem to want to read about India and Indians: that it’s all rape, poverty, plucky slumdogs, arranged marriages, mystical, yoga retreats, spiritual revelations, corruption, and elaborate descriptions of North Indian food. A hodge-podge of the sacred and profane packaged for easy consumption, rather than serious consideration.

Later, I’m surfing the Internet again, and stumble upon an essay in The Millions about Indian fiction gaining popularity and mainstream acceptance. I read an Indian writer’s comment to the article: “not writing about my grandmothers reminiscing about baking chappatis in some dusty back court in India, has made some of my work a very difficult sell.” I’m divided. Me, too, I think. I relate, and yet I don’t want to relate because it seems ungenerous and presumptuous to think that readers are motivated to read a book or watch a movie solely by how well it conforms to stereotypical images of my culture that seem “authentic” to them.

Surely those of us Indian-Americans who feel this way have sour grapes? Maybe our work just isn’t good enough to pique interest, having nothing to do with what kind of imagery is expected of us. If Mindy Kaling can write and star in the ultra-popular The Mindy Show without a whiff of exoticism, doesn’t that disprove that you need to write about India or the Indian-American experience in a particular way in order to be successful as an Indian-American writer?

I read interviews with Mindy Kaling in New York Magazine and The Boston Globe. In the latter she says,

When you’re a minority and you’re writing a show for yourself you don’t know that people are pinning hopes and dreams on you in a way and, like, if this fails, does this mean they won’t take chances on Indian-American actresses?

And then she says,

That would be a bummer. I’m not one of these people that’s like, ‘I didn’t get into this to be a role model.’ . . . We’re all role models to a certain extent. You have that responsibility to not do things or say things that you wouldn’t want to perpetuate. But at the same time it’s like I didn’t go into politics, I came out to Hollywood to write and act in earnest. I feel it’s a balance.

She didn’t ask for the responsibility—as she says, television is not politics, though it also functions on popularity—but she has it. When you’re a minority who is not as successful as she is in her field, you see that opportunities are few and far between for minorities in the arts.

It also turns out Kaling’s writer’s room is mostly men. And then I see the show a bit differently, thinking that what Kaling seems to have intended as part-homage, part meta-romantic comedy is being scripted by a bunch of men who are probably mocking, who don’t love romantic comedies at all, who are doing what Jane Austen and Henry Fielding did with sentimental fiction, punishing their heroines for being girls.

Before I learned those factoids, I thought The Mindy Project might counterbalance the whiteness of Girls. Unlike some other writers of color, I didn’t have a problem with Lena Dunham not casting nonwhite women in significant roles in Girls. It’s her fictional world and she should write it how she believes it should be written, I said to myself.

The responsibility lies with networks like HBO or Showtime to green-light projects that are closer to the experience most of us have—a real world in which (gasp) even women of color have bodies that are imperfect and egos that are even more imperfect, who say stupid, earnest, funny things. Mindy Kaling says she isn’t interested in having ethnic humor, or her skin color, or her gender define her: “I never want to be called the funniest Indian female comedian that exists…I feel like I can go head-to-head with the best white, male comedy writers that are out there. Why would I want to self-categorize myself into a smaller group than I’m able to compete in?”

At the start of the day all writers face the same problem: how best to express what you want to express, which might prove to be inexpressible, in the face of a glaringly blank page and an audience that doesn’t care (hopefully, yet). The tick-tick of the clock, the patch of the great green outdoors you can see from your window, the siren song of the Internet or the television. The experiences that have shaped your ontology.

So although I am an Indian-American woman who loves stupid romantic comedies and finds Kaling very funny, I find it troubling that she separates herself from other Indian American women writers because she can compete in a bigger pool. Not because she’s wrong. She can compete outside her racial group, so why shouldn’t she? But so can many other Indian women writers whose voices must fit into the sacred-profane paradigm in order to be published in mainstream outlets at all. Would Kamdar’s essay have been picked up by Salon if she articulated that no, the stereotypes about India are not true? I don’t believe so.

Maybe Kaling wants to separate herself because she doesn’t want to fall into a race trap, the trap that you are a writer who, in writing for Indian-Americans, writes only for Indian-Americans or for people who see India as a bit of a promised land (a land of yoga or spiritual retreat), whose concerns are only racial or ethnic, as opposed to  the broader human experience.

How a writer asks and how she answers questions of race and identity and gender and culture are crucial in a time when the vast majority of women of color working in entertainment, literature, or the arts still have to package and commodify their “exoticness” or experiences of “otherness” as an “Indian-American writer”, a “black writer”, “a Chinese-American writer” etc. in order to have anyone even be interested in what they have to say.

As Kaling seems to realize, there’s a trap here, which she dodges. If you choose to market yourself this way in America, you are only that. You are the writer or artist or entertainer that many people still elect not to read because your experiences are too exotic, too alien, too other.

“I’m not really in the mood for an Indian novel,” I’ve heard readers say. And I am ashamed that I have been guilty, too, of choosing not to read particular books that I have ethnically pigeonholed without reading word one of them.

What would be the cost to me of pretending I am not an Indian-American writer, but just an American writer? Having taken my husband’s name, I might get away with that.

But a heightened experience of otherness is what I’ve experienced. It’s part of my artistic makeup, not only because I grew up learning Tamil, going to Bharatanatyam classes every Sunday, eating thair sadam and lime pickle at dinner each night, reading Hindu mythology comic books, visiting India as child, but because of how other people have responded to me.

No matter how many Babysitters Club books I read to fit in as a child or the law degree I acquired or other markers of social acceptance I’ve sought out in the hopes of belonging. I was always other in American society. I could not help it. My otherness has become part of my ontology.

On the other hand, if I chose to pull a Lena Dunham in reverse, writing only about Indians, is my work automatically to be sneered at (as the writer of The Millions article on the New Wave of Indian fiction put it) as “ethnic fiction”? As fiction that is assumed to have no value to broader America except to the extent it addresses the sacred or the profane?

***

My daughter is half-Indian, but like her father has fair skin and the question for me everywhere I go now, from pizza parlors to doctors’ offices is, “Are you her nanny?” or “Is she yours?” When I told my husband about the latest episode at a pizza parlor, he was quite surprised. From his perspective, most people don’t talk like that anymore.

My mother told me to ignore it. For some reason, perhaps because it is my daily experience, perhaps because I’m sensitive, I can’t. Every incident reverberates, vibrating with every other experience of otherness I’ve had.

When I was a teenager, a boy I liked who knew that I liked him compared my skin to the color of shit as the reason he didn’t find me attractive. Five years later, I learned that my brother had the same experience with some elementary school bullies. Ten years later, a half-Iranian male reading some of my fiction mentioned the experience of being called “sand nigger,” while growing up in Arizona.

What does it mean that this is not the unique experience of a few kids in the suburbs, but also the experience of our president? President Obama had the skin color publicly compared to shit by Lesley Arfin, a writer for the popular television show, Girls. For me, this is something we shouldn’t ignore about American culture: that people of color are compared to waste products and very few people are outraged. Bullies who talk trash like this are not boycotted and shunned and fired; instead, people of color are expected to stay quiet and ignore it.

When I talk about a racist episode, people assume it is limited to one instance with an ignorant person—one instance in a pizza parlor or one instance at the doctor’s office where somebody assumed I was the nanny. However, in my experience, it is a lot of instances, with a lot of ignorant people.

I can’t help but think that these instances are connected to the issue of representation in art, film and literature. The more we see life from the perspective of someone outside the majority culture, the more empathy we are likely to have for the targets of this kind of abuse and the more likely we are to talk differently ourselves.

Girls is a show I enjoyed last year and now feel maybe I shouldn’t. A show that feminist writers gush over as “honest” and “realistic”, comparing it to Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines.

Women writing about their experiences in their own form, women writing about their experiences in the face of a world that wants them to be quiet, women writing in a world that trivializes the seriousness of writing about one’s personal experience when the writer is a woman like Sheila Heti or Kate Zambreno, but elevates that same ambition when the writer is a male like Philip Roth. However, nobody to my knowledge suggests that Girls, How Should a Person Be, or Heroines is actually interchangeable with the other and that you only need consume one to consume them all. Perhaps you’ve noticed, too, that this cultural conversation about silencing, which takes place in both alt lit and mainstream publications, is almost entirely silent on women writers of color.

Zambreno’s book, which I liked a lot, contains a line that scorns a woman who suggests Zambreno write a “multicultural novel.” I’ve heard that scorn from many fiction writers not of color over the years: that to write a book that is actively multicultural (which registers to me as a simple fact about American society today) is not to write seriously, but to write to a trend that will pass. I think this opinion is motivated by the same thought process that motivates the woman who wished she had an Indian name because Indian fiction is hot, just like vampires, BDSM, and post-apocalyptic dystopias.

For some of us, however, multiculturalism is not merely a trend; it is not written because it is hot; it is a serious engagement with our reality.

***

In a smart essay for The Millions, Thea Lim wrote that,

Since 1917, a total of four men of color have won the Pulitzer: N. Scott Momaday, Oscar Hijuelos, Edward P. Jones, and Junot Díaz. Thirty women have won the Pulitzer, almost half of them condensed in the last 30 years, and three of those women were women of color. Since 1950 two men of color have won a National Book Award in Fiction (Ralph Ellison and Ha Jin), and 16 women have won an NBA, one of them a woman of color.

She goes on to mention two white writers, Mary Gaitskill and Alice Munro, as female writers that write as gracefully as Diaz about their own lives. Then notes that Zadie Smith and ZZ Packer are also possible counterparts.

Within this mainstream literary fiction, there is also Jhumpa Lahiri, a writer who somehow manages to break free from the sacred/profane dichotomy, but winds up writing books in which the saris could be exchanged for jeans, where the Indian-ness is frequently bound up in name brands rather than Bengali culture per se. And yet after three such books, a common criticism of Lahiri (that I find annoying) is that she only writes about Bengali-Americans: why doesn’t she write about something else?

Other Indian-American writers who are far more prolific than Lahiri are sidelined for their social engagement in the same way that Barbara Kingsolver is, as described in a 2011 essay on Slate by Michelle Dean: not taken as seriously in the literary world. Chitra Divakaruni. Bharati Mukherjee. There are more.

Part of their relegation to a literary status below that of Lahiri’s might be bound with literary merit and use of language, but another part, from my perspective, is that these “multicultural” or “ethnic” writers write to Indian-Americans familiar with Indian culture about the Indian-American experience. I don’t think they write only to that audience, but that audience is included. Whereas Lahiri’s work, brilliant and graceful as it is about the Bengali-American experience, does not really require the reader to adopt the same familiarity with Indian culture(s). By not making that assumption, by not being “ethnic,” Lahiri more properly takes her place in the pantheon of literary greats.

***

Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton is told in the third person, which does not satisfy my hopes of getting closer to a real person in his situation, but which produces an interesting literary effect. The third-person device forces me to think about how a fatwa forced Rushdie to assume another identity that made him foreign to himself.

I relate enormously to Rushdie’s account of his life in the 1960s at boarding school in England, which weirdly enough, sounds in some respects not all that different from life for an Indian girl in secondary school in Palo Alto in the 1980s and 90s.

At the end of Rushdie’s time at Cambridge, someone throws gravy and onions all over the walls and furniture of his room. He is held responsible and told that unless he pays for the damages, he won’t be allowed to graduate. He pays. Then, when he wears brown shoes to his graduation, he is ordered to change to black shoes and also required to supplicate himself to the vice chancellor, begging in Latin for a degree that he earned.

He obeys.

He writes in third person,

Looking back at those incidents, he was always appalled by the memory of his passivity, hard though it was to see what else he could have done. He could have refused to pay for the gravy damage to his room, could have refused to change his shoes, could have refused to kneel to supplicate for his B.A. He had preferred to surrender and get the degree. The memory of that surrender made him more stubborn, less willing to compromise, to make an accommodation with injustice, no matter how persuasive the reasons.

The insight that I like there is that these personal experiences of abjection and passivity turn him into someone who eventually does fights—with his whole being—for his right to speak the truth as he see it.

Some people might laugh at my juxtaposition. Rushdie? That’s who makes things bearable for you? Mindy Kaling, not the feminist icon Jezebel makes her out to be? What?

But Rushdie’s personal passages contain a level of fight born of supplication, that I think has something important to say to me as a female, as a woman of color, as a writer. And maybe he can get away with talking about this because he is not a woman and because something so profoundly political and disturbing happened to him that nobody (except perhaps Zoe Heller) can trivialize the fact that he is writing about the personal aspects of the crisis now.

Maybe, also, he can write these personal passages because he didn’t grow up in America, believing that he’s supposed to be able to succeed at whatever he wants, but unable to, and because, in fact, he has succeeded by all measures. As someone who does not find herself in a post-racial America, I take solace in a passage about Rushdie’s tendency to supplicate himself as a youth finally turning into a refusal that launched one of the most powerful battles of free speech of our times.

***

Back in the nineties, my first boyfriend, an Israeli-American, mansplaining that being a Jewish male in America is much harder than being a woman of color, finally threw up his hands in exasperation saying, “But you were just born in India. You’re American. You’re not really Indian. You don’t know what racism is.”

It is twenty years since that invalidating conversation. We have a black president, and Indian women are marching against misogyny without applause, but the most popular progressive magazines are not fact-checking stories that perpetuate lies about foreign brown people and publishers are reluctant to put teens of color on the front of YA books because those books won’t sell as well. Shortly after the Delhi gang rape in 2012, a thirty-one year old woman pushed a Hindu man onto the tracks of a subway stations in Queens, New York later saying, “I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.”

Ignore it. That’s what you’re supposed to do.

If I must ignore these disturbing facts; or produce writing about Indian culture that fits into the sacred and profane dichotomy such that my words are familiar to everyone but me; or worse, never engage in conversations about these facts for fear of being disliked, the answer that comes to mind nowadays is different from the silent acquiescence or self-directed anger I experienced twenty years ago. I would prefer not to. 

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• PSY the Clown vs. PSY the “Anti-American”: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity
• On Loitering
• Yellow Peril and the American Dream
• Holy Orange
• Kissa Yoni Ka: What The Vagina Monologues Mean In Hindi

Click image to enlarge:

Related Posts:

• The Sacred and the Profane
• FOLK TALK: Cigarillo
• Help Vela Celebrate Unsung Women Writers!
• Holy Orange
• Kissa Yoni Ka: What The Vagina Monologues Mean In Hindi

Every olive-skinned forehead has a chalky red circle placed by the leathery fingers of holy men. They look like a collection of bulls-eyes. Black red garnets drip from earlobes to rouged cheeks. A woman walks with three small children. She is so stunning she could win beauty pageants, but she was born poor so she never will. Indira Gandhi has been assassinated. I am fifteen.

A sharp jaw is draped by a red sari. When the sun shines through it, the woman’s chin lights up like a neon strawberry. She bends over a camp stove on the sidewalk outside the Bombay airport. She twirls roasted chapattis— Indian tortillas— with her delicate fingers over the weak red flame. Her hands are speckled with the dried blood color of mehndi: henna temporary tattoos like blinking eyes on her palms when they open. The mehndi has faded over time, which means the woman participated in a wedding a week or more ago. The toasty nut chapatti smell competes with the stench of sweat and shit. My green ankle length skirt is too thick in the humidity and perspiration drips down my doughy armpits onto the ground.

I’m looking for my name on a sign. Petite men jump and shove each other to get at the white tourists who have money for motels and taxis. They call out “Rickshaw, Madame? Madame.” Their voices are low and sexual and pleading but harmonize like a choir. The men who call out “Madame” have red teeth. A boy with no legs whizzes past on a skateboard. His arms are extra long and knobby from polio. He has a collection of VHS tapes attached to the skateboard with a bungee cord. One of them is Michael Jackson. He doesn’t beg. Children approach with fingers cut off at the knuckle from leprosy. There is no blood—only bandages. They move their fingers to their mouths and say “kanna” and look into my foreign eyes. I don’t have to know Hindi to know what starving means, but “kanna” means food. The kids spit red. The women spit red. The small puddles remind me I’m bleeding. Where am I going to find a tampon?

Bombay is not just red. It’s also holy orange. A band of Hari Krishnas dance barefoot on dirt in big loose orange shirts and lungis that are like baggy pajamas. Their clothes are the orange that only the earliest morning sky knows. Their bald heads glow in the heat and they smile that crazy smile of bliss that makes me want to float on their orange cloud and never go home. The moon is amber and appears much closer and bigger here. From across the street, they come for me. I want to be orange like their lungis, not big and white because the men jump and yell while lepers scurry to surround me. Some of these men are my age or younger, boys really. My temporary sister with shiny black hair grabs my hand. She tells me her name “Jothi,” (prounced Joe-thee) means light. She says, “This way,” and interlaces her fingers with mine. Her father walks like his hips are sore or broken because they tilt as he walks in short brisk steps. He’s a doctor. He says, “Come,” and I do. His voice is nasal and hard to hear over all of the vendors calling “Pakora, pakora, pakora!” Pakora are salty orange fried vegetables in white bags sprinkled with saffron, cumin and cayenne.

Women carry giant baskets on their heads poised and dangerous but their faces are serene. The baskets are orange and brown and carry the smell of fish. Some baskets overflow with samosas and when one drops from the basket, beggar children scurry for it. Dried orange paste cakes the corners of their lips. Cars and bicycles heavy with chickens swerve around cows that rule the road. Fat, slow cows flaunt orange blossoms between their horns, swinging between them like a hammock. Their horns are painted with red and gold stars and flowers. My temporary sister wears an orange thread around her wrist that signifies that she has a brother and he tied it to her wrist in a ceremony that honors their bond. She interlocks her fingers with mine as we walk towards what looks like a toy car. The children knock on the window as our car drives away. They chase the car for several blocks yelling, “Ferungi!” which is Hindi for foreigner.

Bombay is also white. The bread rolls the vendors sell in baskets as they yell, “Pan pan pan pan” are wrapped in stiff white napkins. Milk is delivered in small bottles in grey metal baskets like in old episodes of Leave it to Beaver. I listen to my Prince “Under a Cherry Moon” cassette tape on my Walkman and walk along the gutter next to palatial marble houses. A man squats and shits in the street. I panic because I want to stare but I look away instead. I think about what it means to be white here, to have the luxury of white cotton underwear and a private poop behind closed doors. Visions of divine white toilet paper taunt me as I pass men in sandals and white turbans. They open their funny pajamas and take their dicks out and point them at me as they walk towards me. This happens so many times I lose count. It happens when I walk with my Indian host family and when it does, my sister locks hands and squeezes me tight. “This way,” she snaps. “Ouch,” I say. She pulls me into a store that sells saris and nose jewelry until the men walk past the store to the nearby marketplace. I want to ask why the men do that but I don’t. Jothi avoids my eyes and holds a green and gold sari. “How much?” she asks the saleswoman. My long skirt is white with gawdy pink and black flowers. We leave with my first-ever sari.

I’ve never been on a double-decker bus so I ride one all day and the men stare. I switch seats to wriggle out of their sight but they come closer, stand over me and clutch the handrail near my head. I wander into an indoor market and two men in turbans pinch my butt. I run to the nearest rickshaw and tell him, “Bandra Road.” When I walk in the front door, the family is sitting at a table for dinner. They are angry and silent. Later, my host brother tells me, “Women who come home after dusk are whores,” right away. He’s trying to explain why his father yelled behind their closed door earlier. The father yelled so fast, I couldn’t catch one familiar word. I can tell by my host brother’s slouch and the way he wobbles his head that he thinks it’s silly that his father yells but I’m afraid he will kick me out, send me back home. He wears American clothes a few years outmoded, but the best money can buy in Bombay. White Izod and blue jeans.

I’m supposed be in college here even though I’m a junior in high school. The first day, I am swarmed by kids. The only white girl there in my loose yellow shirt, I sit in the back of the class on a bench. Students stare and giggle so I walk to the train station where I follow children to their homes in the slums. I trust the kid who grabs my arm and pulls me into a snaky alley past metal scraps and piles of garbage. I’m pummeled by the smell of shit and piss near homes made of cardboard and dirt. Inside, I crouch in the dark around a small fire and drink spiced chai from tiny chipped glasses. The grandparents sleep on the ground on a single blanket and glance over at me. It’s so dark, I can’t tell how many people live inside. The kid giggles and his mother stares into my grey eyes for a long time and laughs. She covers her mouth when she does this. The kid writes an address on a white piece of paper. I promise to write. I never write. Two men follow me onto a train. Their bodies against mine harder and harder until a seat next to a woman was vacant and I squirmed into it. A couple stops away is a four star hotel so I jump off at the next stop and run inside where I won’t be followed, touched or flashed. I fill my backpack with rolls of plush white toilet paper. I get home after dark: white American whore.

Bombay is turquoise and gray. Monsoon rains with blue skies. Ganesh, the elephant God is on posters in homes and stores and in rickshaws promising triumph over obstacles, but in some sects of Hinduism, I am told, a woman is supposed to throw her body on top of her dead husband’s and allow the vultures to pick it clean. When I walk the streets in the morning with my Walkman, I look up at the roofs of gray buildings for the bodies of mourning women and the hungry vultures, but I never see them. I see gray hate and gray shame and red angry spit on the dirt every couple feet. I walk past cold gray shadows where the little girls are still sold out of cages. The gray spaces in the alleys filled with girls carrying gray tins begging for coins. Gray, dirty bandages on their hands. I see turquoise Ganesh on posters. Indian women feed their daughters sweets from a vendor on a train. Indian women twirl chapattis wrapped in gold and turquoise saris. They ask to buy my American jeans for their daughters. Fisherwomen keep their baskets perfectly balanced. Outside the train, families line up outside of the Indian Embassy, hoping to leave. I never write to the children from the slums.

Years later, Bombay is still fresh in my mind and in my bones. As a visitor, I was naïve and lost. When I hear bells, I still see statues of Ganesh in a cool, stone temple and smell sandalwood incense. If I sent a letter to one of the kids from the slums, it would say: Remember when I pointed to your bandaged knee and asked you what happened? I could tell by your khaki shorts and pressed white shirt that you were cutting class too. We exchanged grins. You saw the man press his hips against me and said, “We get off here,” as you reached above me to pull the silver cord. I followed you home and met your sister and mother. Lock hands with them and keep them safe before and after dusk.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• The Sacred and the Profane
• Kissa Yoni Ka: What The Vagina Monologues Mean In Hindi
• Tramp
• So Raped
• Admit You’ve Paid For It: The Savage Honesty of David Henry Sterry

In a guest post for Racialicious, Hannah Green uses an Indian performance of The Vagina Monologues as a jumping-off point for ruminations on sexual assault and women’s rights, in both India and the US. A preview:

Dolly Thakore, one of the stars of the show, told me that she was happy to have an opportunity to perform in cities where The Vagina Monologues had previously been banned at a time when rape and child molestation were at the forefront of discussion in India. Dialogue about violence against women is opening up across India, and this play is a part of that.

Related Posts:

• So Raped
• The Sacred and the Profane
• Holy Orange
• Tramp
• What I Learned In Homemaking

The black and white film opens with a courthouse scene where the accused, Raj (Raj Kapoor) is a young man who tried to kill a highly respected judge, Raghunath. When the judge presiding over the case asks who is defending the accused, a female attorney, Rita (Nargis) makes a dramatic entrance just in the nick of time and declares that she is here to mount a defense, while looking over at Raj with loving eyes. She begins to cross-examine Raghunath by asking him if he had any children to which he replies he doesn’t. She presses him and asks if he denies abandoning his wife and child many years ago. And then we are treated to a flashback in which all is revealed and explained.

The theme of the movie, which is taken up by the villains and heroes alike, is this: If you’re the child of a bandit, are you destined to a life of criminality? Or put more broadly, does where you are born determine your destiny? But I was less interested in this question of nature versus nurture. Instead, I found myself more preoccupied by another theme contained in the film’s plot, which in my mind was reminiscent of both the Ramayana, one of the most revered ancient Hindu texts, as well as the recent gang rape in Delhi.

The flashback showed how Raghunath, a young judge, bucked tradition by marrying a widow, Leela. This was almost unheard of given that even in the early part of this century, there were still those who called for Hindu widows to be burned alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands because what life is there for them once their husbands are dead?

But then one night, Leela is kidnapped by Jagga, an infamous bandit. It turns out that Jagga specifically planned to kidnap Leela as a vendetta because he claimed Raghunath had wrongly thrown him in jail for an alleged rape based on a determination that as the son and grandson of career criminals, he must be guilty. Jagga plans to rape Leela, as retribution but doesn’t when he learns that she is in the early stages of pregnancy. He returns Leela to Raghunath knowing that by kidnapping her he has “tainted” her and that will bring ruin to not only her but also to Raghunath and his unborn child.

Raghunath, at first is thrilled to see Leela however, their happy reunion is soon marred because his elder sister tells him that “everyone” is talking about how Leela has brought shame to their house by being with another man. She insists that Leela and her unborn child should be thrown out before they bring further shame to the family name. Raghunath, an educated and powerful man, succumbs to this barbaric thinking and just as Rama casts away Sita for the sake of propriety, in the epic Ramayana, Raghunath abandons Leela and his unborn child. The movie follows Raj, their child as he grows up in a Bombay slum, depicting how he gets pulled into a life of crime by Jagga, the bandit, himself. Kapoor lifted the persona and antics of his tramp from the master tramp, Charlie Chaplin, and set it to Hindi music.

I eventually gave up on the movie because I was feeling increasingly lousy – it turned out I had a 24-hour stomach bug. Anyways, I was pretty sure by this point that through a dramatic twist worthy of a telenovela, the accused, Raj, would be revealed to be none other than the judge’s own abandoned son. But I remained hung up on the plight of the judge’s wife, Leela – how she was devalued and “thrown away” by her husband and society despite the fact that she was the victim. And I thought to myself, are things that different more than 60 years later? In the U.S., we have male politicians putting forth arguments about “legitimate rape.” And in India we have male politicians denigrating female protesters of a brutal gang rape as “painted” and “dented” women.

India is the world’s most populous democracy but it’s also by some measures the worst country for women, despite the fact that it was led by a female Prime Minister for many years. Bollywood, India’s Hindi film industry is known the world over because it makes more movies than Hollywood, but very few of these movies actually move the genre forward. Through its mastery of science and technology, India is on a path to economic and political power but that path will prove illusory if it doesn’t take concrete steps to address the very real systemic issues it faces in terms of women’s rights, poverty, and corruption. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., as we recover from our own wounds from gun violence, hopefully the painful echoes of the protests in India over this horrific crime will rouse us and keep us ever-vigilant of those who seek to condone sexual violence against women or curtail women’s rights.

I am encouraged because over the last few weeks in India, women and men have turned out by the thousands for vigils to honor the victim and for protests to demand better law enforcement and justice for rape cases. Here in the U.S., voters “kicked out” congressional members who had backwards views on women’s reproductive rights. This makes me hopeful that despite the fact that democracies are messy and don’t in and of themselves guarantee equal rights to all their citizens, it gives its citizens the chance, even if it is a narrow one, at times, to call for justice and be heard.

Awaara, which was nominated for the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, avoided the conventional formula for Bollywood films that persists to this day, which requires a shining hero to rescue a beautiful damsel in distress from an ominous villain. Instead, in Awaara, some heroes emerge as villains, such as Raghunath, the illustrious judge, who let social pressure and backwards thinking cloud over his rationality. Meanwhile, some villains are revealed to have heroic traits, such as the judge’s son, Raj, who came up as a tramp but is redeemed by the power of love. Similarly, women are portrayed as both the oppressor and the savior, with the judge’s sister seeking to leave her pregnant sister-in-law destitute while Rita, the female attorney comes to the rescue of Raj, the lovable tramp. In my mind, the more than sixty-year-old film serves as a cross-cultural time capsule showing how women’s lives played out on the black and white screens of yesteryears. Now we need to figure out how they will play out on the high-definition, three-dimensional, screens of tomorrow.

Related Posts:

• The Sacred and the Profane
• Holy Orange
• Kissa Yoni Ka: What The Vagina Monologues Mean In Hindi
• In the Wound Lies the Gift
• Eleven

We humans are an optimistic lot. We want to believe that things will get better. Heaven, nirvana, enlightenment, revolution, progress, reform, elections, diet, clothes, cars, education, jobs, marriage, houses, investment, retirement, or if all else fails then maybe the lottery will transform our lives. What would we do if just one old man kept us from fulfilling these dreams?

This is the question that dogs the residents of rundown Vishram Society Tower A in Last Man in Tower, Aravind Adiga’s follow up to his Booker Prize winning debut novel The White Tiger. When one of Mumbai’s “new builders,” Dharmen Shah, offers to buy out the residents of Vishram Society each one embarks on a secret fantasy of a future that would compensate for suffering and hardships already endured. Yogesh Murthy, a recently widowed retired schoolteacher, known everywhere as Masterji, is the only one who won’t go along. Another way to ask the question above is: What can you do with a man who wants nothing?

Masterji draws upon an apparently endless reserve of what Dharmen terms “negative willpower.” He denies himself sweets and afternoon naps, corrects his dead daughter’s French in an old workbook, and finds little comfort in religion. His lamp becomes the sun and his fist the moon during the informal science lessons he gives local children. By repeating, “I want nothing,” he hems himself in. “He looked at the round water stains on the ceiling of his living room and saw asteroids and white dwarves. In the cursive mildew he read E = mc2.”

In his earlier work Adiga’s tender attention to the frustrations, yearning and anger of a cycle-cart puller, train station porter, and chauffeur lifted away the dehumanizing mask of vocation and poverty to reveal familiar vulnerabilities and aspirations. Now Adiga’s shrewd empathy extends to middle-class characters like the building’s secretary, an African born “nothing-man,” who plans to use his windfall to move somewhere with a view of migrating flamingos.

Ashvin Kothari spoke now of things even his wife had never heard. Of an African servant lady wiping a large porcelain dish and laying it on a table with a blue tablecloth; a market in Nairobi where his father was a big man; and then one more thing, a memory which blazed in his mind’s eye like a pink flame.

Flamingoes. A whole flock of them.

When he was not yet five, he had been taken to a lake in the countryside full of the wild pink birds. His father had put his thumbs under his armpits and lifted him up so he could see to the horizon; the flamingoes rose all at once and he had screamed over his father’s head.

Another neighbor, the indecisive Ibrahim Kudwa, recognizes the unspoken wish of his neighbors: “All of them could have been different men.”

Aravind Adiga

Meanwhile Mumbai is in the throes of becoming a different city. Everyone and everything is jostling for space and even bits of flotsam are ambitious. Dharmen gazes through a fence that “was supposed to mark the land’s end, but a promontory of debris, broken chunks of old buildings, granite, plastic, and Pepsi-Cola had sneaked past it—the enterprising garbage pushed several feet into the water.” Dharmen tellingly imagines Mumbai springing into existence, “through the desire of junk and landfill, on which the reclaimed city sits, to become something better. In this way they all emerged: fish, birds, the leopards of Borivali, even the starlets and super-models of Bandra.” As a self-made man he views others as his “clay to squeeze,” but his power doesn’t make him immune to the fantasy of remaking himself yet again, going away with his mistress to “find a city with clean air,” and “have another son, a better one…”

Adiga illustrates the circularity of such aspirations by describing reactions to a tourist in jogging shorts:

“Having dreamed all their lives of better food and better clothes, the young men were looking at this rich foreigner’s appalling sweat, his appalling nudity. Is this the end point, they were wondering: a lifetime of hard work, undertaken involuntarily, to end in this—another lifetime of hard work, undertaken voluntarily?”

Possibilities pile up, goading the frenzy of aspiration and consumption onward. Stray dogs, lizards and foraging birds become as disposable as the surfaces they scamper across. Adiga resorts to lists to capture this excess of things. At crucial moments people abandon pronouns: by thinking “thing” and “it” instead of “he” and “him” they become capable of violence.

Much has been written about Adiga’s presentation of a corrupt and squalid India for the delectation of English speaking audiences. Even those who praise him use a vocabulary that seems limited to the “seedy,” or “seamy” or “dark underbelly.” The Telegraph mentions a “grim glimpse of human nature,” while the Guardian peers through his prose into “Mumbai’s grim heart.” It is true that vitriolic greed eats away and eventually dissolves the tangled relationships that bind the residents of Tower A together and the result is tragic. Adiga is familiar with the machinations of materialism. His former career as a financial journalist informs his understanding of “buildings rising above the earth and concourses of money running below it.” But those who prod the old cliché of India’s underbelly are like the residents who rifle through their neighbors’ garbage in search of damning scraps and bits of gossip. When Adiga’s prose climbs over “cellophane, eggshell, politician’s face, stock quote, banana leaf, sliced off chicken’s feet, and green crowns cut from pineapples,” he is a scavenger retrieving that which is useful or valuable. Adiga examines cruelty and ugliness to find the trampled shreds of virtue and humanity beneath. His brilliance comes from showing good and bad hopelessly mixed together like, “water, the colour of Assam tea, on which floated rubbish and blazing light.” After all—and in spite of our collective penchant for optimism—the same rubbish is piling up everywhere and there may not be much more we can do than appreciate the blazing light.

**

Author Photograph by Mark Pringle

Related Posts:

• The Sacred and the Profane
• FOLK TALK: Small Walks
• Holy Orange
• Kissa Yoni Ka: What The Vagina Monologues Mean In Hindi
• Tramp

Training for the job includes “‘culture training,’ in which trainees memorize colloquialisms and state capitals, study clips of Seinfeld and photos of Walmarts, and eat in cafeterias serving paneer burgers and pizza topped with lamb pepperoni.” Read about one American journalist’s experience being outsourced.

Related Posts:

• The Sacred and the Profane
• FOLK TALK: Small Walks
• Holy Orange
• Kissa Yoni Ka: What The Vagina Monologues Mean In Hindi
• Tramp

If Manu Joseph’s portrayal of the winner-takes-all nature of the Indian caste system in Serious Men is any indication, coming in second in a two-horse race is no fun. This is unfortunately true for Joseph, whose novel has been frequently, and justifiably, compared with Aravind Adiga’s hugely successful novel, The White Tiger; while brilliant in places, Serious Men is sloppier, less funny, and less human than Adiga’s novel.

Like Adiga’s India, the India of Serious Men is divided into the haves and the have-nots in ways so deeply ingrained that it could almost pass for post-apocalyptic science fiction. Joseph’s caste system is even more starkly bifurcated than Adiga’s; with few exceptions, the upper-caste Brahmins are egotistical and condescending toward the lower-caste Dalits, also known as “untouchables.” The Dalits are portrayed as desperate dullards, either shrilly resentful or so anesthetized by television soaps that they’re unaware of the most basic cultural identifiers. (“Who is Adidas?” one Dalit asks.)

Ayyan Mani is a lowly assistant to Arvind Acharya, the Brahmin director of a scientific research institute. Ayyan has the privilege of being the only Dalit in the book who is articulate enough to express anger against the prevailing social structure. Openly disdainful of the Brahmin scientists, Ayyan writes false “Thoughts for the Day” on the office blackboard: “A greater crime than the Holocaust was untouchability. Nazis have paid the price, but the Brahmins are still reaping the rewards for torturing others.” – Albert Einstein.

At home, weary of living in a tenement with his wife Oja and his deaf, eleven-year-old son Adi, Ayyan has given up on his life to such an extent that he tells his wife, “For the sake of our son, we must stop seeking our own pleasures.” Ayyan repeats this idea throughout the book: The life of a Dalit is so bleak and hopeless that only the next generation will have even the smallest hope of bettering their lives. When Ayyan fabricates a story about his son’s mathematical genius, the roller-coaster plot begins to roll.

Manu Joseph

Arvind, his boss, is ever the absent-minded professor, devoted to an experiment to prove the existence of alien life, despite the skepticism of his colleagues. When a beautiful scientist named Oparna joins the Institute, Arvind’s devotion to his project is displaced by a more terrestrial, and carnal, objective. His workplace infidelity leads to his slow and steady professional downfall, while Ayyan’s increasingly public lies about his son’s intelligence give him more and more power, as the Dalit community starts to regard the boy genius as the Golden Child.

Some of the novel’s strongest passages are Ayyan’s internal rants against the privileged, like this one in which Ayyan observes Oparna at the Institute:

Ayyan was watching her surreptitiously as she stared thoughtfully at the floor. Another high-caste woman beyond his reach. She went to the Cathedral School in the back seat of her father’s car. Then on to Stanford. Now she was here: the Head of Astrobiology, the solitary queen of the basement lab. So easy it was for these women. Soon, some stupid reporter would write that she had “stormed the male bastion.” All these women were doing that these days. Storming the male bastion. “Rising against the odds”—they all were. But what great subjugations did these women suffer, what were they denied by their fathers, what opportunities didn’t they get, what weren’t they fed, why were they so obsessed with their own womanhood? Oja Mani did not even know that there was something called womanhood. “Downmarket” was what women like Oparna would call her, even discreetly laugh at her perhaps if they met her: at the powder in the nape of her neck, the oil in her hair and the yellow glow of turmeric on her face. Ayyan felt an immense hatred for Oparna and all her friends.

Joseph pounds away at the unfairness of the Indian caste system like a pitcher repeatedly throwing his best fastball, but fails to show enough glimpses of humanity on either side of the caste divide. Ayyan’s motivations are murky at best: What does he hope to accomplish by making his boy a Dalit genius? How does creating this media illusion resolve his own deep-seated resentments toward everything Brahmin? It’s unclear what Joseph wants to say about the relationship between the caste system and media culture, or how any of it relates to the character of Ayyan. Arvind fares better as the scientist whose career and marriage is destroyed by his infidelity, but who, as a result of this journey, reconnects with his love for research and the search for truth.

The novel’s title is deliberately ironic: Ayyan and Arvind are both serious men moving through an increasingly absurd and comic scenario. But there’s nothing particularly funny about Ayyan’s rage, unbalanced as it is by characters or situations that might tell a different story about India’s haves. All the other characters are equally stuck in their heads: Arvind is obsessed with aliens and Oparna; Oparna is obsessed with Arvind; Ayyan’s wife is obsessed with soap operas and Hinduism. For a book billed as a satire, it’s unclear exactly what Serious Men is satirizing. The absurdity of the Dalits and Brahmins? The media culture? India’s politicized scientific community?

The overstuffed plot snakes and buckles, resolving in the only way overstuffed plots can resolve: the Hollywood Way. There are quizzes that recall Slumdog Millionaire, press conferences and television appearances, and even, finally, a riot. While Serious Men has its share of poignant, even transcendent, moments, it’s also littered with enough slipshod point-of-view shifts and imprecise scene writing to shake a reader’s confidence in Joseph’s editorial eye. In the end, one can’t help but feel that Serious Men, like Ayyan’s eleven-year-old son, could have been a genius but just wasn’t.

Related Posts:

• The Sacred and the Profane
• FOLK TALK: Small Walks
• Holy Orange
• Kissa Yoni Ka: What The Vagina Monologues Mean In Hindi
• Tramp

Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows traces one woman’s path through a violent century.

Permit me to note before I begin that I am generally no gusher. It’s more fun to write criticism than praise, and the hyperbolic rhapsodizing common to contemporary book reviews can make me a little grumpy. Now, I hope those caveats let me say the necessary:

Burnt Shadows is the most admirable new novel I have read in a long time, a work of astonishing naturalism, wisdom, and grace. Kamila Shamsie’s ambitions and skills vault her easily into the ranks of Michael Ondaatje and Amitav Ghosh, writers who have shown us the hidden landscapes along history’s major highways, and done so by way of intricately constructed narratives.

The novel opens with Hiroko Tanaka, who is twenty-one when an atomic bomb is dropped on her hometown, Nagasaki. The bombing leaves her an orphan, with of swooping cranes burnt into patches on her back, shadows of the kimono she had slipped on moments before the world went white.

That is, however, an introduction Hiroko would disdain for reducing her to a mere “hibakusha”—bomb survivor—“the most hated word in her vocabulary. And the most powerful.” She had some dreams the bomb didn’t kill: to go to Tokyo, cut off her hair, smoke cigarettes, be “a modern girl.” Beyond that? She hadn’t gotten around to imagining it yet, but she spoke three languages with ease and was in love with Konrad Weiss, a German with a poetic outlook, so her fate was bound to involve the sort of cosmopolitanism Nagasaki was famous for before war imposed patriotism’s provinciality on its citizens.

Determined to bury the bomb’s mark, Hiroko leaves Japan. 1947 finds her disembarking a boat in India just as pre-Independence tremors are peaking and the subcontinent’s topsides are about to split off to form Pakistan. There she finds kindred spirits in Konrad’s sister, Ilse Burton, and in a fellow polyglot, Sajjad, employed by Ilse’s husband. Via Sajjad, Hiroko ends up living much of her adult life in Pakistan; owing to Ilse, she ends up in New York at the time of 9/11.

It might seem far-fetched that the life of one high-spirited woman might be caught up in and fashioned by three of the major cataclysms of the past hundred years—but in Shamsie’s hands, it’s not. Her gift is to show how those events, which we think of as shaping the modern political map, shaped these individuals. In each of the book’s four sections (Nagasaki, 1945; Delhi, 1947; Pakistan, 1982-3; New York and Afghanistan, 2001-2), geopolitics recombine with her characters’ essential peculiarities; the resulting decisions come to seem inevitable, since Shamsie has so successfully immersed the reader in their natures.

The governing image of Burnt Shadows is the spider, “beloved of Muslims,” as Sajjad explains to his non-Muslim friends: “it wove its web—quick as lightening—over the mouth of the cave where Mohammed and his friend were hiding when they fled from Mecca, and so convinced their pursuers that no one had entered the cave in a long time.”

“We are each other’s spiders,” Ilse Burton’s son Harry says, late in the book, to Sajjad’s son, Raza, by which time the metaphor has come to represent the ways in which Ilse, Hiroko, Sajjad, and their descendents have saved one another. “[S]helter provided (three times Ilse gave Hiroko a home: in Delhi, Karachi, New York), strength transferred (Ilse would never have left the life she hated if not for Hiroko), disaster elided (James and Ilse ensured Sajjad and Hiroko were well away from Partition’s bloodletting),” these are some of the ways Shamsie’s characters protect one another from terrible vagaries that have come looking for them.

They don’t accomplish this with huge gestures, though; when they effect a rescue, they do it modestly, even unintentionally. Condemnation happens in a similar fashion. Despite the myriad opportunities for narrative heroism, Burnt Shadows is, to its credit, a determinedly anti-heroic book. Shamsie’s characters act as much on their fears as their ambitions, and more on either of those than on their convictions, though they are mostly loyal and capable of love. Even the most courageous, Hiroko, seeks only to rescue herself when she flees her homeland. The youngest, in a pessimistic turn, lack all conviction, as though their morals have been put to sea by modern life. But their self-interest makes them believable and accessible, and their actions reveal what so rarely seems clear when we read about tragedies happening far away: This is how history is made—of speculations, misapprehensions, and intentions good and bad.

Kamila Shamsie

And, apparently, of metaphors. Cranes, spiders, clouds: Konrad, on his way to propose to Hiroko, “looks up towards Urakami Cathedral with its stone figures that stand against the sky—on overcast days their greyness suggests each cloud is an incipient statue waiting for a sculptor to pull it down and hew it into solidity.” It’s a break in those clouds that makes it possible for the Americans to drop the bomb that day, with the Cathedral as epicenter. The novel thrills with such literary artistry. Many of the key turns, to the reader’s surprise and delicious frustration, happen in throwaway gestures—an American bends to return a pair of shoes he borrowed to wade through a fish market; a young man signals to some cricket players that he’ll retrieve their ball; a pile of stuffed rabbits and bears spills onto an interstate—that return, bloated with horrendous, inadvertent, significance.

The Afghan telling of the stuffed animals, for example, describes how car after car slowed to drive around the moonlit pile. The American listening assumes he and his carful of Middle Eastern mates drove over them, “found the image grotesque, and knew she couldn’t indicate as much without appearing to suffer from misguided American empathy—cluster bomb the Afghans but for God’s sake don’t drive over the pink bunny rabbits!” He will not tell her, for fear of being thought a thief, that they stopped, picked up the toys, and sent them home. The son he never met may be sleeping with his own “soft blue bunny,” while the American, crushed by all the many things she cannot know and he will not tell, becomes increasingly afraid that this man is a terrorist.

You’ve got it wrong! you want to scream at them as they blunder on the pages. Go back! Ask a better question! Explain yourself!

Is this really how life works? I want to believe it’s not true. If one person can convince me, though, it is Shamsie.

Related Posts:

• Captain Save-A-Ho
• The Sacred and the Profane
• Weekend Rumpus Roundup
• FOLK TALK: Small Walks
• Holy Orange