#Elsewhere book how to#
After Taruni unwittingly shares that Padma’s father is having an affair, Padma upbraids Taruni for this innocent gift by saying, “Well, Amma says all of you have forgotten how to live in India,” adding, “Who brings a white dress here? How will we keep it clean, with all that dust?” Taruni’s privileged upbringing is reflected back at her during this brief exchange. As a host gift, Taruni has picked out an intricate Mary Poppins–style dress. The distance between Taruni and Padma’s upbringings is addressed through stunning dialogue. There, she becomes inseparable from her cousin Padma, whose dad Chithappa has a gambling problem which Padma knows how to hide-also, his dental practice isn’t doing well, he is drinking too much, and his wife is threatening to leave him. When we first encounter her, it is 1990 and a nine-year-old Taruni is traveling with her mom, dad, and little sister from Pittsburgh to India for the first time. The creative choice of narrating the story from the perspective of the daughter, Taruni, works especially well-her curiosity about her family provides a slow reveal of key details.
Heartbreaking and graceful, “Three Trips” reveals the intergenerational effects of one brother’s decision to leave India for America. “Three Trips,” one of the finest stories in the collection, is about paths untrodden. Even the more “fortunate” characters are not immune to the pull of the past and the competing desires to claim and surrender power. Longing impels them to challenge gender norms and move past grief. Longing motivates the characters: for dead or distant loved ones, for adventure, for stability. Whether in Pittsburgh, Eastern Washington, or Tamil Nadu, Bhanoo’s characters reckon with the pain of growing apart and tally the costs of leaving. Memory is often a place in these stories about South Indian immigrants and the families they’ve left behind. It’s a question posed by Michael Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan–born Canadian writer who also writes on diaspora. “Do you understand the sadness of geography?” reads the epigraph to Sindya Bhanoo’s stunning debut short story collection, Seeking Fortune Elsewhere.
Seeking Fortune Elsewhere by Sindya Bhanoo
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