THE PLANET SPINS ON ITS AXIS, REGARDLESS

Jindal’s collection of short fiction explores tensions between tradition and modern life.

This assemblage of more than a dozen stories sensitively examines the ways in which modern characters experience a venerable Indian culture that seems resistant to revision. In “Where He Lives,” 24-year-old Sabina abandons her study of philosophy at a women’s college to marry a man named Riyaz, presumably to “have plump babies and be a more docile woman.” However, her former professor, Mrs. Palli, later encourages her to return to her intellectual pursuits, despite the dour protests of the “joyless creature” who is her mother-in-law. A spirit of philosophical inquiry infuses the collection, which provides impressively subtle psychological character portraits. In “When You Go You Leave a Farce,” for instance, an unnamed protagonist living in London returns to Ujjalpur, India, after an absence of 18 years. She’s there to spread her recently deceased father’s ashes in his native village, but she suspects that he may have had a “hidden agenda” to keep her connected to her family. Jindal sometimes tends toward a facile sentimentality, and she succumbs to this in the title story, which didactically imparts a lesson: “It’s out of your control. Realise this, and everything is easy. Also much more difficult. Because you’ll put your efforts in, dial up to the max, then wait. Nothing may happen, something may happen. ”However, in the main, the stories are more delicately crafted and delightfully quirky. In “The Unusual Properties of Cork,” for example, the protagonist accompanies a friend from her London gym to a dinner in Sweden, a romantic adventure “in the transcendent light of a Nordic evening.” The friend dominates the conversation, discussing his family’s cork-manufacturing business in Portugal, but the main character is still won over by his “generous spirit”—providing the spark of what promises to be a lasting friendship. The evening is a peculiar one, but it’s one that feels entirely plausible. Indeed, this is the principal strength of Jindal’s stories: to show how the deeply eccentric is an everyday feature of human life.

A thoughtful anthology that offers an insightful peek into the oddities of human experience.