A Passage to America

A warm Indian-American debut suffers the narrative pitfalls of mental illness but finds safe harbour

Amina Eapen—accidental wedding photographer, assimilated Indian immigrant and woman interrupted— is one of the most endearing characters you may meet in recent diaspora fiction. Mindful of the extended family her parents left behind, she has assimilated generational conflicts, dramatically played out in an opening flashback to Salem, Tamil Nadu in 1979, entitled ‘Book 1: What Happens in India Does Not Stay in India’. She does not scorn the little cousin who picks at the trappings of foreign presents, remembers water that tastes like ‘hot nickels’, trips over the ‘argada-argada-argada’ of Malayalam. Elegantly, she calls forth the motherland in unpretentious passages that avoid the mango-cardamom-chicken curry sagas the blurbs might wish upon it; Gary Shteyngart loves it partly because it is ‘stuffed with delicious chapattis’. (Luckily, the Indian publisher plans to take the rotis out of the roll-out.) Yet, despite this placid exterior, the commentary is nicely apt. Even worthy of the critical, homegrown Suriani:

‘thousands of years of obsession with a Christian God in a subcontinent of more dynamic religions had petrified the Syrian Christian community, turning them into what she alternately called ‘the stalest community on earth’ or ‘India’s WASPs’.

Amina is a fluent exile in Seattle—where we meet her in the late nineties—as much as her family’s strife is located in Indianness. Her parents would never have been together of their own volition, she suspects; her lovable brain surgeon father Thomas buries himself in work partly because of his refusal to return home; his domineering mother and dipsomaniac brother Sunil were unable to accept his abandonment of India, and by extension, of them.

There is more that binds the generations than they might admit. Uncle Sunil is a sleepwalker who sets the family home on fire and Akhil, Amina’s late brother, dies as a teenager in an accident caused by the narcolepsy he refused to confront. Akhil’s death is pivotal, sparking a kind of emotional catatonia inside Amina and her parents. When she grows up and photographs Bobby McCloud, a Tacoma Indian who plunges to his death off the George Washington Memorial Bridge in 1992 after accepting a government settlement, it all comes back. Amina hears Akhil, a fiercely liberal young man when he passed, saying “Blood money for blood money, huh?”, in one of her frequent ‘visions’ of him. This ‘falling man’ is fictitious but Associated Press photographer Richard Drew’s captured one of 9/11’s casualties and was pulled; Jacob takes on the issue of responsibility here in a clumsy, ill-fitting side plot.

Meanwhile, Amina is undone by the calamity—and the fact that she helped deliver it to the media—on his behalf. Her career in photojournalism is shelved for wedding photography, New York replaced with Seattle. Finally, when her mother Kamala calls and says Thomas is seeing dead people, Amina rushes home to Albuquerque—where she encounters high school flame Jamie Anderson of the oddly attractive womanly lips—and emerges from a stalled life and career. That Jamie’s sister was Akhil’s girlfriend only connects the two loners further. His Afro long gone, lover boy is all grownup, and Jacob masters passion even in the back of a car, in some cosy love scenes. The sexual tension lifts this moving yet somewhat plodding family story. For, the reader tires of Thomas’ segues into apparent dementia—soon identified as a brain tumour but allowed to persist because Thomas believes its communications take him to Akhil. Sofas stray onto lawns and the house falls into disarray, as the madness spills a 100 pages over the stylish novel it might have been.

Yet, the enjoyable narrative and prose relieve the tedium, as do the characters. There is a happily-ever-after quality to the near relatives of the Eappens’ recreated family, worthy of a Malayali Meera Syal spinoff. The cool aunt who hasn’t had kids and the uncle who cooks are a refreshing departure, though Kamala is too close to the typical nagging Indian mom. And Dimple, Amina’s wicked cousin, is delicious, unsparing of samosas, ‘Cadbury couture’ work wear and boys they grew up with. Her cutting one-liners keep it real: ‘“So what, you’re going to take up the Suriani habit of drinking yourself into a nasty middle age?”’

Mira Jacob charms in this intuitive and often funny debut that reads like a screenplay, despite the yawns. If you read just one Indian American novel this year, let it be this one.

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