DEAR PARAMOUNT PICTURES

Forget your Brahmins and Buddhists. Here’s an India where the Qu’ran rules the day.

The California-based author’s debut collection of 11 stories is never stronger than in the title piece, where the strategy for depicting life in India at least has an excuse. That tough, foreign life is made clear by the very strategy of the narrative: a letter from an Indian woman, a budding writer, who believes James Dean either never died or has been reincarnated, and is living in India: it’s a crisp device for comparing Indian and American cultures. Apart from this, the strategies are thin and repetitive, and alienation and simulated tourism are the only themes at work, with little truly new resulting from them. In “House of Cards,” a Pakistani woman marries an American only to learn that her husband prefers men half his age, but will she have the courage to return home? A father’s extramarital affair in “Ramadan” approaches the ritual of the celebration with which it coincides, but why exactly have they been fasting all these years? The rhetoric of homelessness in India (in “A Change of Lights”) is similar to that in the US: “How would she survive another night without her booze? How would Bharati survive without food? What if even today the city trash bins had been scavenged before she could sift through them?” A man takes his beautiful daughter to the wicked city for one last trip to the movies (“Bombay Talkies”) before she heads off to an arranged marriage. And another wife in America (“Lost in the U.S.A.”) spends all day on a bus trying to get back to where she lives, but will she decide to keep her inadvertent adventure a message once she makes it “home?” Unfortunately, the narrative techniques here are mostly trite, and ethnic tags are thought to suffice in spots where, in literature, beauty and artfulness might otherwise reside.

Run-of-the-mill stories in an out-of-the-way location are still run-of-the-mill.