rishiheadshot.jpg A couple weeks ago I was standing on the train during my morning commute, my arm stretched all the way up so my finger could curl about the ceiling pole, idly twisting about on my toes in a half-turn to survey the crowd and eye-scape their morning reading for titles, authors, snatches of prose. What are they reading? I always wonder, like a ghost watching a feast. These days it makes me ill to read on the train, and I feel like I never have time to read real books—spoiled by my steady diet of magazines and blogs, I can’t quite digest those bricks of literature. That morning there were some romance novels, a Crichton, Guns Germs & Steel. A woman shifted, and behind her a gray-suited man’s folded back New Yorker came into view, the familiar Deco font, and like my mother’s voice the desi words sharpened into focus:

Karma, by Rishi Reddi, Harper Perennial; $12.95: Each of the stories in this startlingly mature collection shows first- and second-generation Indian-Americans attempting to manage the disconnect between cultures. The premise is hardly a new one, but Reddi’s understated prose and her choice of details give her revelations a quiet power.(link.)
Some part of me groaned. Karma? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s really the best title you can come up with? Saying the premise is hardly new seems like the understatement of the generation. My skimming glance over the title story (then findable online, now sadly only partially available online as a pdf excerpt) quickly got me to a line that seemed worrisomely familiar:
. . Shankar and Neha were deposited on the threshold of their new life.
Oh not, not another catalog of the first apartment’s goods! Quick, do they mention those EIGHT DOLLARS?

reddi_karma.jpgAnd then I caught myself. So what if there’s another book with tales of confusion and misunderstanding blossoming into a new life? Yet another list of the precise order in which first a chest-of-drawers was purchased and then a record player? Every husband’s frantic search for his clothes among the silk saris cheongsams? How many books do we have on roadtrips, replete with convertibles, mix-tapes, and crazy encounters? Or thrillers about the moody American expat? Perhaps immigration-fiction, the constant probing of that crease in the heart, is a genre unto itself. (Shanti, Manish, there are no mangos or mehndhi patterns or emroidered mirrors on the cover, just a stencilled pigeon and some flowers, and even the font is free of devnagari-styled serifs.)

I frequently bemoan the fact that minority writers feel the need to their minority’s themes while a white man has the freedom to write a Japanese story and gets the whole canvas to play on. I want the New Yorker to write a two-page review of a great American novel that’s deeply, equally relevant to the whole nation and have the desi name be almost an afterthought, as it is with so many of the other categories of accomplishment we celebrate here. I want my white or Asian or black or Hispanic friends to call me up and say, “You have to read this book,” where the book is by a desi author but that commonality between me and the author has nothing to do with their insistence. Why must we always be meekly constrained to the edges?

But who am I kidding? I want to write that book, and I want all my friends to rave to each other about it. But I can’t even write most of a blogpost in two whole weeks. This woman, on the other hand, is an environmental lawyer, is raising a daughter, and serves on the board of SAALT. Yet somehow she found the time to write story after story, one of which was even chosen by the illustrious Michael Chabon for a Best American Short Stories collection, and then get them published as a book. (link.) If she needs to write out her version of the disconnect story, and she does it well enough to garner good reviews from The New Yorker and the Washington Post, maybe I should give her a chance without rolling my eyes. Literature is not just about the keywords on the dust jacket. It’s also about voice—and this woman has voice.

The cliche is that the test of a pudding is in the taste—but the aftertaste is where a masterwork can be destroyed or raised to heavenliness.(Example: I could give you an intellectual list of reasons why Snow Falling on Cedars is a good novel, but the best proof is that strawberries have always smelled sweeter since.)I read the title story, Karma, online. It’s pleasant enough, and deeply recognizable in its basic structure—new couple from India, how will they make it? Hard work and serendipity, of course! And yet, for all my cynicism, it has since stuck with through the darkening of the moon—not because of the life details which are recognizably uber desi but the details which anyone can appreciate, like the lives of birds . As the Washington Post reviewer Adriana Leshko wrote, “While Many of the stories seem simple, characters and plots linger long after you turn the page.”

So next weekend I’ll try again to work on my Great American novel. This weekend I’ll be in a bookstore, humbly paying for my Karma.