Nijhawan’s impressive debut, a collection of loosely interlinked stories, explores the plight of India’s working poor.
The highly segmented structure of work in Indian society, often determined by caste and class, means that specific vocations are often handed down from one generation to the next. Although the working poor’s lives mostly unfold parallel to the upper classes’, these stories show them intersecting in interesting ways. In the story “Shavewala,” Hari the barber attends to Vinay’s grooming needs by visiting the home his client shares with his wife, Kaveri; the barber is called upon to perform a necessary service when his client is near death. In “Safaiwali,” cleaning lady Shanti keeps up an apartment for a young, single woman, Mandira, who’s trying to carve out a new life for herself in the city, far from her small hometown; Shanti serves a critical function when Mandira has a love affair that doesn’t end well. A dash of noir style (“The gathering darkness, the subtle drop in temperature, and the salty-sweet whiffs of ocean breeze created the illusion of cleanliness in a place where there was little to be found”) adds spice to many of these stories, and fellow Indian writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s influence can be seen in the abrupt, twist endings. Nijhawan shows her outsider perspective in how she paints these working “waalas” and “waalis” in a strictly positive light. Each underclass character, some of whom appear in more than one story, is relentlessly virtuous and of strong moral fiber; as a result, the very people that the author sets out to showcase occasionally seem one-dimensional. Nevertheless, these stories, which are supplemented by an extensive glossary, show a remarkable degree of empathy for people who go largely unnoticed.
An often incisive story collection that manages to show just how closely interconnected people truly are.
Pub Date: July 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-9-38-503172-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Om Books International
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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