Snapshots of Sri Lankan lives

“Bodies in Motion,” Mary Anne Mohanraj’s debut book, is less a collection of stories than a series of snapshots, a highly colored album of two Sri Lankan families in America. Read separately, the stories are a scattering of random images, raising more questions than they answer. Taken together, glossing and expanding on each other, they create a vivid portrait of families in flux, wandering back and forth over borders both geographic and cultural.

There’s a little of everything here: arranged marriage and infidelity, political violence and parenting, homosexuality and miscegenation, depression and redemption. There are constants too: the struggle for personal identity, the search for love and security, and a heightened awareness of sensuality in the everyday. (Mohanraj has edited and published stories in several collections of erotica.) There is also a bracing honesty on the subject of race, a baring of the soul-deep prejudices that lurk beneath the broadest of minds.

“Oceans Bright and Wide,” the opening story, is set in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, in 1939. A wealthy father strolls the grounds of his children’s convent school with Sister Catherine, a vivacious Irish nun whose company he has enjoyed for 25 years. His daughter Shanthi, last and brightest of his 13 children, is graduating, and the nun urges him to consider sending her to Oxford instead of arranging her marriage. He glows, basking in his daughter’s accomplishments, until the teacher’s last words. “She will be a beacon at Oxford,” Sister Catherine says eagerly, “proof of what astonishing heights your people are capable of.” Later, he listens to his son’s British-accented voice express amazement at the complexity of their country’s ancient civilization: “Fascinating stuff, quite impressive, considering how backward those people were.” Squeezed between past and future, he gives his daughter permission to attend the university. Dazed with excitement, Shanthi’s first reaction is to ask how the cook prepares their daily curries. “If I do go all the way to England,” she says, “I need to have something decent to eat.” This mix of pride and shame, boldness and conservatism -- along with a deep nostalgia for the strong flavors of home -- threads through the 19 stories and two generations that follow. In “Acts of Faith,” Nalan, an English professor at the University of Chicago, is devastated by the news that his sister-in-law -- who is married to a white man -- has miscarried. “And if a small, ancient part of him hoped that it was the mixing of the races that had gone awry ... then his conscious mind was properly appalled, and stifled the thought before it could surface.”

In these linked stories, Mohanraj moves characters in and out of focus, filtering them through multiple perspectives. She especially contrasts public and private personae, a contrast thrown into higher relief by the expectations of a younger generation of American-born children. In “Pieces of the Heart,” Shanthi’s daughter Leilani finds the beginning of liberation in the unexpected embrace of her college roommate, Sue. In other stories, Leilani becomes the all-purpose aunt, a free-floating source of sympathy and encouragement, everyone’s confidant. The title character of “Minal in Winter,” raised in Colombo by a mother who had grown up in Massachusetts, is shocked by the cold -- “the chilly air that hit her face like a slap” -- when she arrives in Chicago for college. Then the pleasure of her first sexual relationship warms her to a feverish ecstasy: “She will blaze up like a goddess ... she will roast all of these pale-skinned people with her heat until their clothes turn to ashes and their skin turns to burnished gold and then they will jump up with her on the desktops and dance!”

Yet the vividness of Mohanraj’s characters and their cameo reappearances in different decades and contexts make “Bodies in Motion” paradoxically unsatisfying. The stories become isolated, tantalizing scenes from a saga of immigration rather than independent narratives. The need to fit each one into the larger picture (which entails a fair amount of flipping back and forth to the genealogies in the book’s preface) gets in the way of appreciating them individually -- and raises the question of what Mohanraj could achieve at novel length. Let’s hope she gives us the chance to find out.

Janice P. Nimura is a contributor to numerous publications, including the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune.