The publicity pitch for “The Red Carpet,” a debut collection of eight stories, which reportedly earned Lavanya Sankaran the impressively ambiguous “six figures,” (“wow” factor for a short-story collection, including, of course, a synopsis for a novel), will be its portrayal of cultural conflicts brought on by globalization in the city of Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of southern India.
But observations and anecdotes about how the old
ways are challenged by iPods, cellphones, Google and American pop culture, although initially intriguing, do not necessarily create compelling short stories.
Indeed, the weakest stories in the collection are programmatic concept pieces of the now-familiar culture clash when Third World meets New World.
“Alphabet Soup” is the template of such a story. A young Indian woman, made culturally sensitive in an expensive East Coast school paid for by her successful father, laments her supposed marginalization as a person of color in America.
She wants to visit the “real India,” get in touch with her “cultural roots,” only to discover that there she is characterized as an ABCD (American Born Confused Desi, i.e. countryman). Caught in predictable cultural conflicts, both trivial and profound, she tries to Act Local and not Think Global.
In “Mysore Coffee,” the gender issue adds a clichéd turn of the screw. A “pavam,” or poor thing, an old world wallflower, is, in familiar TV series fashion, passed over when a young male yuppie colleague steals her ideas and capitalizes on her hard work. Although she contemplates suicide, she finally just decides to get modern American angry and fight back.
The remains of the old days of colonial empire are evoked in “Two Four Six Eight,” about a slyly sadistic ayah, or English-style Indian nanny, who terrorizes her young charge by sexual manipulation. Told by the victimized young girl, who, along with her classmates, aspires to all things British and dreams of having a romantic, outlandish name like Jane, the story moves to a satisfying conclusion of rebellion and freedom.
The most engaging story here is the title piece, which introduced Sankaran to American readers in The Atlantic Monthly a little over a year ago.
What makes the story hard to resist is the earnest efforts of Rangappa, a poor young man, to make a decent living for his wife and baby. Hired as a driver by a wealthy young wife who promptly renames him Raju, he works hard and is treated kindly, but because he considers himself a “decent, respectable man,” he is shocked that the slip of a girl for whom he works, smokes and giggles with her friends and goes about wearing clothes that expose most of her legs and a good bit of her chest.
When the young memsahib says she wishes to visit his family and help him pay for the education of his daughter, the occasion is of such moment that elaborate preparations must be made, including repainting the house, buying new clothes and borrowing furnishings. Although Rangappa fears his boss will disgrace him with her immoral dress and behavior, she is demure, respectful, every inch the memsahib, impressing the entire neighborhood, thus echoing the days when the British held the natives in awe.
In summary, the story may sound like merely another Sankaran illustration of cultural difference, but it is more multilayered than that. For even as you are tempted to label the woman’s visit condescending and the family’s elaborate preparations demeaning, you are pleased – in spite of the pressures of political correctness – with an ending in which all know their place and mean well.
Sankaran’s stories occupy that gray, but obviously profitable, area between “slick” and “literary” fiction. They are not going to cause a critical stir and win a Pulitzer Prize the way Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies” did a few years ago, but they are intelligent, smoothly written examinations of a now familiar cultural terrain.
Charles E. May is professor emeritus of English at California State University at Long Beach.
…
The Red Carpet
Bangalore Stories
By Lavanya Sankaran
Dial, 224
pages, $23
