IndiaPost.com - Great stories of Indians in America

India Post News Service

LOS ANGELES: In this vivid, compelling collection, award-winning writer Rishi Reddi deftly constructs seven stories, of interconnected Indian American lives, mostly from the Telugu immigrant community in the Boston area.

She makes one journey to an isolated immigrant community in Wichita, Kansas, and another to the characters' hometown of Hyderabad, India. The first story Justice Shiva Ram Murthy which appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2005 tells of a pesky retired judge who reconnects with a childhood friend while trying to take action against a waitress who gave him a beef burrito instead of a bean burrito.

"It is not about money. It is the principle of it all," he mutters as he flails helplessly against the carelessness of the waitress and the strict legal system. In Lord Krishna, a teenager is first perplexed and then angry, when his zealous school teacher likens Krishna to Satan and then, when the indignant parents get into the fray, he decides to forgive the teacher.

In Karma a middle aged couple are asked to leave by a wealthy relative whose whom they share, and in Bangles, a widow makes a harrowing choice, after a distressing sojourn in her son and daughter in law's home in America."

Marvelously perceptive, Rishi Reddi casts her eye on the diverse individuals who come to America and find themselves being propelled in new directions. The new rhythm of life drives them into strange corners.

Voices are bottled up or become shrill with frustration and despair. Some articulate their deepest emotions, others babble incoherently, or try to make sense of the new cacophony in their lives.

The stories are sampled sounds of the lives of immigrants who have come to a new country half expecting a drum roll, instead it is a strange world with fraught with new, sometimes painful , lonely experiences, at other times urging the need to sustain and celebrate the newness.

America is both foreign and familiar to the newcomers and some are passive -aggressive. Rishi Reddi while delineating the characters with sympathy leaves room for the reader's personal interpretation. There is also the technique of a slow, subtle accelerated loop of characters who appear and reappear in other parts of the narrative in varied stories.

In The Validity of Love characters dangle over an emotional edge. Always there is a whiff of desperation, and in an isolated incident or two it becomes tiresome. But the author's connection with her subjects stems from a startling clarity which tells us that happiness is a choice.

At the end of the book, Rishi Reddi writes about learning Bharata Natyam and explains how it was a "link with my Indian heritage, yet devoid of the tension between Eastern and Western behavior, and therefore a place of freedom."

This is evident in the story Devadasi. "Many of the themes Karma addresses grew out of my family's own experience as immigrants in America. The intergenerational conflicts, the tension surrounding traditional gender roles, the differing views on sexuality, all of these occur among Indian immigrant communities regardless of geographic locale."

Born in Hyderabad, India, Rishi Reddi spent her childhood in America, - in West Virginia, St. Louis, and Wichita, Kansas. She attended Swarthmore College and Northeastern University School of Law, and lives in Boston.

She is currently active with SAALT South Asian-Americans Leading Together, a national non profit group whose mission is to ensure the full and equal participation in civic life in the United States, and to create a South Asian American political identity. She worked in the environmental legal field for ten years before she quit in order to finish Karma and Other Stories.