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How’s this for blurbs: when the female author published this collection of short stories at age 32 in 1999, she won the Pulitzer Prize, the Pen/Hemingway Award and the New Yorker’s Debut Book of the Year.

Like the author’s other collection of shorts that I have reviewed (Unaccustomed Earth, 2008) these stories are about Bengali immigrants in the US from the Bengal area of India, around Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). There are about 250 million Bengalis in the subcontinent, about 2/3 making up the Muslim nation of Bangladesh and about 1/3, mostly Hindus, in West Bengal, a state in India.



But, with the exception of two stories, these folks are not urban slum dogs --they are upper-income folks with PhD’s and MD’s 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. They live in Boston townhouses and upscale suburbs. And there’s a twist to saying these stories are about “immigrants� because most folks in these stories were fully assimilated into the global upper class before they even arrived in the USA.

Here’s a sample of what the nine stories are about:

In the title story, a man who is an interpreter of native Indian languages for a doctor is also a tour guide for visitors to India. He tells this to a Bengali couple, with their kids, visiting from the states. The wife, desperate for someone to confide in, thinks he is like a psychological counselor and pours out her secrets, shocking the tour guide.

In “Mrs. Sen’s,� an eleven-year old boy learns the depth of the loneliness of a Bengali woman in Boston who desperately misses her native country and her large extended family back in India.

“A Real Durwan� is one of two stories set back in India, not in the USA. A poverty-stricken old woman, bent with age, has a job sweeping the stairwell in an apartment building. She sleeps on a pile of rags below the mailboxes. As improvements are made to the building the tenants decide they want a real concierge and toss her onto the street.

In “Sexy,� a young woman listens every day to her co-worker aghast at the infidelity of her cousin’s husband who has left his wife for a younger unmarried woman. Although she and the co-worker are best of friends, the woman can’t tell her that she herself is having an affair with a married Bengali man.

In “This Blessed House,� a young Bengali couple has just moved into a new home and they keep finding posters of Jesus behind closet doors, crosses, statues of Mary in the bushes and nativity scenes in nooks and corner. Over her husband’s objections, the wife collects these and displays them on the mantle. � ‘We’re not Christian,� Sanjeev said. Lately he had begun noticing the need to state the obvious to Twinkle.� Sanjeev is an introverted engineer. And it could just be that life-of-the-party Twinkle, despite her poor housekeeping skills, could just be the complementary partner Sanjeev needs if he has sense to hold on to her.

The stories in the author’s collection, Unaccustomed Earth, were very good but Maladies is excellent. No wonder it won so many awards.

Map from portcities.org.uk