These short stories are about Bengali immigrants from the Bengal area of India, around Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). But these folks ar[Revised 4/8/23]
These short stories are about Bengali immigrants from the Bengal area of India, around Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). But these folks are not urban slumdogs or even rural slumdogs, arriving with manure on their shoes. These are high-end folks with PhDs and MDs who grew up speaking English in India and who came to the USA to be doctors, professors and engineers in the high-tech beltway bandit firms around Boston. (The author grew up in the US where her father worked at the University of Rhode Island.)
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There is a lot of local color of the modern Boston suburbs. The Bengalis live in upscale suburbs like Lexington in modern glass houses with acreage overlooking the Massachusetts woods and coastline. Their children will go to prep academies and then on to Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr as a prelude to rounding out their pedigree with a graduate degree from an Ivy.
And these high-achievers do indeed expect their children to follow in their path. In fact, one story is about a family's shame when a son becomes an alcoholic and a dropout. There's a twist to saying these stories are about "immigrants" because these folks were fully assimilated into the global upper class before they even arrived in the USA.
Still, there are ethnic ties that persist. They return to India each summer with the kids and some return to India to live or to retire. They bear the stigma of being identifiably Indian in the context of American culture. The book is made up of interconnected stories that we assume are quasi-autobiographical for the female author. They vary from the classic immigrant saga to those in which the ethnic factor is attenuated and incidental to the story.
One of these stories is about little girls whose mothers drag them to American birthday parties in their saris and yet they grow up to have affairs with married men. In another story a woman married to an American man wrestles with the dilemma of the Indian expectation of having her father come to live with her after the death of her mother.
Another story gives us a daughter's reflections on her mother's romance with a male immigrant. A sister makes the mistake of letting her alcoholic brother babysit for her in London. A young man is so devastated by his mother's early death and his father's remarriage that he becomes a global nomad, wandering and essentially homeless.
In another story a young woman learns her boyfriend is a philanderer and in another a woman turns away from her married lover after ten years of promises that he will leave his wife. Ten years. Is that a record?
With the head start they had, these Bengali immigrants became Americanized very quickly and how that happens is a fascinating saga.
The title is from a quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne that is worth repeating: "Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth."
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The author is best known for her novel The Namesake, and for another collection of short stories: The Interpreter of Maladies.
Top photo of the Immigrant Grandmothers Mural in East Boston from boston.gov The author (b. 1967) from theguardian.com...more
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