Book Review : Strangers Faced With Infinite Options in Lands of Opportunity
The Middleman and Other Stories by Bharati Mukherjee (Grove Press: $15.95; 192 pages)
Bharati Mukherjee returns alienation to the aliens, in these 11 stunning stories of strangers in a strange land. Her characters stand on the shaky ground where East meets West and the sound of cultures clashing could shatter glass. Unlike earlier generations of immigrants who arrived here after weeks in steerage, weakened by potato famines or crushed by pogroms, these new settlers jet in from Bombay and Calcutta, Sri Lanka and Manila, with AmEx cards in their wallets and university degrees in hand, imagining themselves ideally prepared for life in Toronto or Long Island, Michigan or Miami.
Mukherjee’s people aren’t refugees but adventurers; eager and energetic, bold, brash, infinitely adaptable and desperately eager to shed their old selves. They’ve seen American TV and movies, read our magazines and listened to our music. By the time they step off the 747 at Kennedy, they’re ready to take us on.
Consider N. K. S. Venkatesan, the 49-year-old English teacher at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Academy in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka. On a salary that would hardly keep a California subcompact in unleaded gas for a month, Venkatesan supports his parents, grandparents, an aunt and three unmarried sisters in comfort. Until he finds himself wielding an ax at a political demonstration and realizes that he has unintentionally wounded a Home Guard officer, Venkatesan has led a tranquil middle-class life.
Suddenly transformed into persona non grata in his homeland, he applies to eight American universities, beginning his letters with “Dear Respected Sir,” stating his scholarship credentials, and including a paragraph crafted to show both his familiarity with his field and his present emotional state. “Hath not a Tamil eyes, heart, ears, nose, throat, to adapt the words of the greatest Briton.” Turned down, he sets forth on a dizzying hegira that ends in Hamburg, considerably short of his desired destination but far preferable to the Gulf Emirates, the only places that had extended a legal welcome.
Where Venkatesan’s story is wryly ironic, others are complex mixtures of farce and tragedy, told by narrators who have shucked their old identities without yet acquiring serviceable new ones. In “Jasmine,” the teen-age daughter of an Indian doctor in Trinidad is smuggled into Detroit via Canada in a mattress box in the back of a van. After a short stint as a maid in a motel run by fellow countrymen, she’s hired as a baby sitter by an academic couple in Ann Arbor.
Seduced by the professor while his wife is away with her performance art troupe, Jasmine welcomes his advances as a kind of unofficial citizenship ceremony.
“The Management of Grief” is the phrase used by the Canadian social worker sent to console the bereaved families of a group of Indians killed when their plane crashed into the Irish Sea. The narrator has lost her husband and two young sons, and she tells her story in the falsely calm voice of someone drugged into a semblance of rationality. The Canadian MSW is fooled into thinking that Mrs. Bhave is coping splendidly, when in fact the only thing keeping her functional is Valium. While some of the survivors retain their belief in fate and others are comforted by gurus and swamis, Mrs. Bhave has become too Westernized.
Reluctantly, she returns to her family in India for a visit. “Courting aphasia, we travel. We travel with our phalanx of servants and poor relatives. To hill stations and to beach resorts. We play contract bridge in dusty gymkhana clubs. . . . We hit the holy spots we hadn’t made time for before,”--where astrologers and palmists sell “cosmic consolations.” After six months, the magic works inversely. At one of the shrines, the widow sees a vision of her husband and realizes she’s ready to return to Canada and resume the life they had chosen together. One way or another, sooner or later, the other survivors reach the same point.
In “Fighting for the Rebound,” the pampered daughter of an exiled Philippine publisher has reinvented herself as the live-in girlfriend of a junk-bond specialist, a wounded veteran of the sexual and financial revolution. A member of Marcos’ inner circle, Blanquita’s father is currently stocking shelves in a California liquor store; her mother doing perms in her kitchen in West Hartford. Young, optimistic and exotically beautiful, Blanquita has every intention of escaping their fate. For the purposes of this tale, Mukherjee has perfected a style of contemporary masculine speech that even Tom Wolfe could envy.
“The Tenant” is Maya Sanyal, once of Calcutta, but more recently of New Jersey and North Carolina; now settling in Cedar Falls, Iowa, with her Ph.D. in Comp Lit, hired to introduce R. K. Narayan and Chinua Achebe to the heartland. Maya is a liberated, modern Indian woman, delighted to be on her own in the land of infinite opportunity. Why then does she haunt the periodicals room of the university library reading the matrimonial columns in Indian newspapers?
The transformations in these stories are still incomplete; the characters struggling to discover what they want to be in a world of bewildering possibility and confusing options. Until you read these witty and subtle contemporary tales, you can’t imagine how much adventure that process entails.