Inside Out

The dust jacket of Lindsay Pereira’s collection of short stories, Songs Our Bodies Sing, references the title story of the book. A Sikh man, rendered in shades of orange and yellow, looks over his shoulder, as if from between bars: the ‘bars’ are formed by blue-toned figures striding past. Figures in trousers and jackets, their long strides and swinging arms exuding a self-confidence, a swagger that doesn’t need one to look at the faces that have been excluded from the picture. The faces, anyway, would be superfluous: this is an iconic photograph, which became the cover of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album.

But among the thousands of eager fans who mobbed the Beatles, could there have been some who came not for themselves, but for someone else?  The story ‘Songs Our Bodies Sing’ is about Jaswinder, a Sikh immigrant in England in the early 1960s. Jaswinder’s daughter, teenaged Jasleen, is a die-hard Beatles fan who has been looking forward to the release of Hey Jude, her favourite group’s upcoming release—but Jaswinder is the one who ends up going to the event instead of Jasleen. There’s more to the story, and it’s interesting to see how many subtle truths Pereira fits into it. The generation gap, but also the love between parents and offspring. Racism and hostility, an immigrant’s feeling of being on the outside; but also, occasionally, of mixing in, in unexpected ways. Deep, soul-searing sorrow; but a resolve, too, to keep living.

Two aspects, black and white, yin and yang, east and west, crop up in each of the stories in this collection. The most obvious theme is that of India on the one hand, and the West—Canada/Europe—on the other. In some stories (besides the title story), the characters are immigrants. The longest story (and for me, one of the most impactful ones), ‘If You Don’t Weaken’, is about two Sikh men living in a basement in Toronto, struggling to live the dream that brought them here, so far from home. ‘Oxford Comma,’ a short, sharp tale of a murder being plotted, touches on the frustrations of an immigrant who faces constant discrimination at work.

But the struggles of the diaspora are only one type of intersection between India and the West. In these stories, too, are Indians travelling abroad (fashionable, snobbish Arun in ‘Rivers to Cross’, sauntering through a Paris he’s oh-so-familiar with). And foreign tourists coming to India: in ‘The Antique Shop’, looking for something one might display at a museum, even if it’s procured illegally. Most commonly, though, Pereira uses the idea of a Western import into India to show the bridge between east and west. An old Parsi’s love for classical Western music; a police artist’s fascination with Pamela Anderson; an accountant’s reverence for Elvis.

Kipling’s ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’ is regarded by most today as a pithy bit of pleasing rhyme, outdated in a globalised world. Pereira, in Songs Our Bodies Sing, shows that Kipling may have been right—but then, when you read between the lines, that no, Kipling was wrong after all. If there are barriers, of racism or cultural disconnect, there are nodes, too, along those barriers, points where East may indeed meet West.

It is this humanity, this sense of empathy across the world, that marks most of these stories. Even when it’s a clear case of one party swindling the other (as in ‘Have a Nice Day’), there is a subtle hint, a moment, perhaps, where there is an acceptance (as a character says in ‘If You Don’t Weaken’), “We’re here at this moment, sharing the same space, looking up at the same sky, singing the same song, just a little differently.”

Pereira’s writing is lucid, his characters real, and the world he conjures up a reminder that there is, despite the gloom, the occasional ray of light too. That the song we sing, even if with different words and different tunes, is in essence the same.

across bordersbookscommonalitiesfictionIndian DiasporaLindsay PereiraSongs Our Bodies SingstoriesWeb Exclusive