Not really at home abroad

Author Rishi Reddi's Karma and Other Stories is a perceptive new voice on that oh-so-familiar subject: diaspora angst, writes Sanjay Sipahimalani.

Creative writing workshops across America urge you to come up with a memorable character and then ask yourself what he or she wants. Plot emerges as a result of the character trying to achieve these goals in different circumstances. And at the end of the story, a realisation or two dawns, changing the character in some manner. This is what one finds in short story after short story, and it is this template that Rishi Reddi primarily adheres to in her debut collection, Karma and Other Stories.

Thetales sense of familiarity is rendered more acute because these are of Indians in America facing the friction of fitting in. Mainly drawn from the Telugu Indian-American community of Massachusetts, most of Reddi's characters face the double bind of detaching themselves from the way things used to be in their homeland, and coming to terms with the fact that their compatriots have made better adjustments to the American way of life.

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There's the irascible, retired judge in 'Justice Shiva Ram Murthy' attempting to sue a fast-food outlet for mistakenly serving him beef; the lonely, compassionate housewife in 'Lakshmi and the Librarian' who embarks on a formal yet poignant relationship with a local librarian; the recently-widowed consort of the former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh in 'Bangles' who simply cannot cope with her son's family's life in the States; and the dreamy, unsuccessful professor in 'Karma', who finds a new vocation in an animal hospital. Apart from an interesting use of the unreliable narrator technique in the first tale - which is the best one here - the author also proves adept in creating connections between the outside world and the inner lives of her characters.

The weathered bonsai trees, melting snows and disoriented migratory birds are evocative symbols. There's no denying that Reddi's is a perceptive new voice. Her prose is clear and crisp, and much attention has been paid to the delineation and development of characters.

But the themes of her stories - arranged marriages, strained diasporic family ties, the strangeness of India after living abroad - suffer from overexposure. To an audience weaned on the fiction of Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri and Tanuja Hidier, among others, these tales of immigrant angst will be welcome They are, however, likely to bring about an intense sense of déjà vu because of the surfeit of other such sagas, both in print and film.