Literary Safari

Original post at Sepia Mutiny.

A couple of weeks ago, I tuned in to the Food Network’s The Next Iron Chef to find a sophisticated, soft spoken, skinny desi chef cooking up a storm. His name is Jehangir Mehta and his delicate dishes in every episode and challenge have been distinguished by their creative use of fresh herbs, fruit, and spices and their aesthetic presentation.

Mehta is the owner and executive chef of Graffiti, a Lower East Side NYC restaurant that serves “international small plates that feature his trademark affinity for bold flavors and spices such as chillies, sambhar, turmeric, and star anise.” In cook off after cook off, Mehta—who trained as a pastry chef at the Culinary Institute of America, but who hails from a Parsi family in Bombay — has been impressing the judges with unusual and original dishes such as pickled ginger scallops, bitter melon fritters, and apple and soy caramel skewers. His preparations are like miniature paintings; each one a carefully choreographed mouthful of flavor.

Tonight at 9 PM EST is the season finale where Mehta will battle against the Philadelphia-based Chef Jose Garces. Two very qualified chefs from two ethnic backgrounds with rich culinary traditions; it’s bound to be a close match.

Below the fold is a brief Q&A with Chef Mehta, including his thoughts about reality TV, his take on a South Asian Thanksgiving, and his recipe for his favorite comfort food.

Will Mehta be the next Iron Chef? We’ll soon find out. (more…)

This interview was originally published at Sepia Mutiny.

As someone whose own family is dispersed over several continents (my husband often jokes that we can’t visit any new country without discovering that some distant relative lives there), I’ve often asked myself many of the questions that Minal Hajratwala did: How were choices made? What were the journeys like? How do they reflect the diasporic experience? That’s what I loved about “Leaving India”. I thought it would be interesting to speak with the author about how she tackled the mammoth task of “deftly exploring … the unprecedented late 20th-century dispersal of Indians to every corner of the globe and their rapid rise in the places they landed” (see Washington Post review).

Q. You write in your introduction that you wrote this book to “find whatever fragments remain here, to trace the shape of our past and learn how it shadows or illuminates our present.” Was there an experience, an event, or some defining moment when you knew that an interest of yours had to become 7 years of your working life?

A. Not at all, it was a slowly growing awareness that somewhere in the midst of my dozens of cousins spread over nine countries was an untold story. The vague ideas swirling in my brain about migration, family, and the new visibility of Indianness in popular culture crystallized when I took a book proposal class with Sam Freedman at Columbia University, who gave me amazing guidance and editing, and asked a lot of smart questions. As I shaped it into a narrative spanning a hundred years, I became more and more curious about how all this happened, and then the questions themselves shaped my journey.

I was also naive; I thought I could research the book in a year and write it in another year. If I had thought it would be a seven-year process, I might have gotten cold feet at the beginning.

The rest of the Q&A follows below the fold. (more…)

When you’re visibly pregnant and riding the NYC subway with a book titled “Family Planning” in hand, you’re bound to draw stares and curious gazes. Such was my experience earlier this month as I traveled on the downtown 1 with 25 year old Karan Mahajan’s laughter-inducing yet tender first novel in hand. In this Brooklyn-based, New Delhi-born author’s debut work (HarperPerennial, 2008) set in contemporary New Delhi, family life, politics, adolescent love, and prime time soap operas intertwine in entertaining and unexpectedly moving ways.

At the heart of this story is the chaotic household of Rakesh Ahuja, a hard of hearing, America returned engineer who holds a prestigious position as New Delhi’s Minister of Urban Development. Apart from the bureaucratic and political challenges that face him at work (he’s in charge of a laborious flyover construction project and part of a political party that sponsors “intolerable bills such as the Diversity of the Motherland Act which calls for the compulsory resignation of all Muslims “for reasons of diversity and national security”), Rakesh is beset by his own personal dramas at home.

The father of 13 children (and one more en route), he must deal with the trauma of having had his teenage son Arjun walk in on him having sex with his wife in the baby nursery. Understandably, Arjun asks, “Papa, I don’t understand—why do you and Mama keep having babies?”

While he has to figure out a way to explain himself to his son (“Obviously, Mr. Ahuja couldn’t tell his son that he was only attracted to Mrs. Ahuja when she was pregnant” reads the first line of the novel), this is not the only secret Mr. Ahuja has been keeping from his son, master babysitter and eldest of 12 younger siblings and darling of his mother, Mrs. Ahuja, an unattractive woman whose days are spent changing diapers, managing her vast household, knitting, and recovering from the loss of her favorite TV character Mohan Bedi from Zee-TV soap opera, “The Vengeful Daughter-in-Law.” There’s also the bit of information about Rakesh’s first wife, Arjun’s mother, who suffered a tragic death and who continues to haunt his unhappy existence. Meanwhile there’s Arjun, an awkward teen so madly in love with Aarti, a Catholic school beauty who rides the morning bus with him that he’ll do anything to get her attention—even start a rock band with a bunch of classmates.

Yes, there’s a great deal happening in Mahajan’s novel; many competing heartbreaks and dramas. And yet, as a reader, I was pulled in just as much by Mahajan’s observant and sensitive eye as I was by his ability to create satirical scenarios that reflect some of the complexities and paradoxes of social and political life in today’s India.

Read the rest of this review and a Q&A with Mahajan, whose sense of humor is as refreshing in the interview format as it is in his prose, below the fold. (more…)

I wrote last week about a young adult novel that grapples with the impact of 9/11 on the Sikh community. Today, I bring you a review of a new novel published as part of the Modern History Press’s”Reflections of America” series.  Drop a note in the comments section for a chance to win a free copy of this book.

We have read numerous stories in the mainstream media about the widows of 9/11. Not so many about the Muslim victims. In her novel Saffron Dreams, Austin-based Pakistani-American author Shaila Abdullah fills a void in that literature by providing the perspective of a pregnant Pakistani woman, Arissa, who loses her husband–a writer with a masters in literature who worked as a waiter in the Windows on the World restaurant–on September 11.

Inspired by the true story of Baraheen Ashrafi, a Bangladeshi woman who was widowed two days before the birth of her second child, Abdullah’s novel follows her main character on her five-year journey through the five stages of grief as she reconstructs her life in a world that views her as a perpetrator of the violence, not as a victim. Upon discovering her husband’s unfinished novel manuscript, she takes it into her hands and decides to try to complete it — an act of courage that allows her to connect with her deceased partner and acts as the impetus for her healing process.

I read this novel just after I’d wrapped my writing of a curriculum guide for an oral history of Muslim youth in New York City, This Is Where I Need To Be, which was published by Teachers College’s Student Press Initiative. It would make a wonderful read for both a young adult and adult audience interested in further exploring the ways in which America’s Muslim population experienced 9/11. Intertwined with flashbacks to Arissa’s childhood in Pakistan, this novel provides a valuable insight into secular, upper middle class Pakistani society. A much-needed perspective in the void of the American Muslim experience, it is an unflinching and moving look at the societal pressures of widowhood, the role that art can play in the healing process, and the impact of media bias and stereotyping on the Muslim American community in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Read a brief excerpt from the novel here. Below the fold is a brief Q&A with the author.

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Soon after 9/11, a friend of mine told me that her college roommate’s home had been visited by the local police in their town in upstate New York. The police wanted to search the home of this family because they’d heard they had a picture of Osama Bin Laden hanging in their living room. The cops were mistaken. This was the home of a pious Sikh family and the picture was of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion.

I’ve often thought about this story. There are so many more like it — incidents of mistaken identities, faulty detentions, stereotyping, and violent acts in the wake of September 11th. We’ve read about them in the press and slowly, literature is beginning to tackle this dark period of recent American history as well; a time that unfolded in what Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist, Art Spiegelman, described so aptly as “in the shadow of no towers.”

A few years ago, Ask Me No Questions by Marina Budhos was one of the first young adult offerings to address the challenge of growing up South Asian and Muslim in an America altered by 9/11. First time novelist Nisha Meminger takes on a similar theme in her new YA novel Shine, Coconut Moon, just published by Simon & Schuster.

When her turbaned uncle appears at the doorstep of her suburban NJ home just four days after the 9/11 attacks, 16 year old Samar is caught off guard. Raised in a single-parent household by an Indian-American mother who cut off ties with her Sikh family many years before, Samar has no connection to her cultural roots and traditions. She is skeptical of this man, Uncle Sandeep, who claims to want to reconnect with his estranged sister because “we’re living in different times now … and I want to be close to the ones I love. The world is in turmoil—we’re at war. Anything could happen at any moment.”

As Samar gets to know her uncle, she begins to learn about Sikhism and gets to know her grandparents. She even visits a gurdwara, Sikh temple, for the first time in her life. This prompts her to start questioning her mother’s decision to raise her to think of herself “like everyone else.” She begins to question her identity; wondering whether she is a coconut — someone who is brown on the outside and white on the inside—someone who may physically appear to be Indian but doesn’t know who she really is. At the same time, she is shocked and saddened by a series of troubling events in her community that affect her personally: her uncle is attacked by a bunch of teenage boys who goad him to “Go back home, Osama!” and the local gurdwara is set on fire.

In his compelling Guardian article “The End of Innocence” Pankaj Mishra writes, “‘Post-9/11’ fiction often seems to use the attacks and their aftermath too cheaply, as background for books that would have been written anyway.” Shine, Coconut Moon does not fall into this category. Most definitively shaped by the effect of 9/11 on minority immigrant communities, this is an ambitious coming of age novel for young adults that seeks to demonstrate the effects of fear mongering on the lives of ordinary minority teens who saw themselves as American before 9/11.

Below the fold is an excerpt from the novel, as well as a Q&A with, Neesha Meminger where she talks about her novel writing process and the real-life incidents that inspired it. And, for those in the NYC area, there is a book launch party and reading this Saturday, March 14th at 7 pm at Bluestockings Bookstore. (more…)

Nadia Aguiar is the Bermuda-based author of The Lost Island of Tamarind. Read a review of this book here and enter to win a free copy of the book.

Q. I read that you began The Lost Island of Tamarind during your MFA program at Columbia. Did it start out as a short story?
I first had the idea—a family who lives on a boat, the storm, the island—the year after I finished the program at Columbia. It was always going to be a novel. I wrote a few passages of the first chapter but then the idea was shelved for two or three years because work and life were so busy. A few years later the idea was still vivid, and when the opportunity to devote some real time to it arose, it was full steam ahead.

Q. Setting is such an important element of Lost Island of Tamarind. You’ve created a lush imaginary world, an island that exists in a lost part of the world. How did you go about creating this world? Did it develop as you continued with your writing or did you map it out prior?
I don’t map much out in advance. I have to actually be writing before I can really see anything in the world of the book for the first time. Once I start writing, I feel like I’m actually physically in the world in a sensory way—seeing and hearing and experiencing everything there.

Q. You’re from Bermuda. What aspects of your childhood seeped into the writing of this book?
The sounds, smells, heat, the ocean—all these made their way into Tamarind in a way that I don’t think they would have if I’d been from elsewhere. The natural world is very powerful and beautiful here, and magical things are part of ordinary days. We really do have glowing sea creatures, and all you have to do is spend an afternoon on the ocean to discover something miraculous. Also, I don’t think that I could have written about siblings as easily if I didn’t have so many of my own—that dynamic of bickering but really loving each other, and sharing childhoods with one other, is very familiar to me. Finally, Tamarind is a variation of my greatest childhood fantasy—to be shipwrecked on a deserted island … hardly imaginative for a kid who grew up on an isolated island!

Q. Fantasy, adventure, and historical fiction seem to blend in this novel. Who are the writers you read while growing up?
I read voraciously but indiscriminately—everything from Madeleine L’Engle to Archie comics. I read a lot of Enid Blyton, a popular and prolific English writer of children’s books who was read widely in Britain and in many parts of the Commonwealth. Looking back on those books now, there are many unsavory features (jingoism, sexism, etc.), but what still stands out as being great and memorable about them was that there was always an exciting adventure and a group of friends who were all thrillingly autonomous for children. These are things that I think young readers really respond to. Some of the most (more…)

This post was originally published at Sepia Mutiny.

A few weeks ago, I posted “Data Crunching for Obama,” a look at the Democratic campaign’s microtargeting strategies led by Vijay Ravindran, chief technology officer at Catalist, Harold Icke’s start-up political technology company that built a national voter database of information on more than 260 million people for progressive groups, including the Obama campaign.

At Catalist, Ravindran led all the technology aspects of developing the company’s software products and services. The data banks and web-based tools he helped develop could answer questions such as: “How many Indian-Americans gave money to me, said they were an Obama supporter, voted in the last general election, own their home and live in Baltimore?”

Below the fold is a Q&A with Vijay Ravindran, where he talks about his engagement with politics, the 2008 election efforts, Catalist’s role in it, and what South Asian voter data tells us about the “brown” community.

Incidentally, the 34 year old is on a roll. Just yesterday, it was announced that as of February ‘09, Ravindran will be the senior vice president and chief digital officer of The Washington Post Company. Per the press release that went out:

“We are fortunate to have Vijay join the Company as we focus increasingly on electronic media,” said Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive officer of The Washington Post Company. “Vijay is widely recognized as one of the top innovators in the field. I am delighted that he will bring his extraordinary skills, talent and experience to our efforts to expand our digital business.” (more…)

I’m happy to be a part of a global virtual book tour for the recently published picture book Amadi’s Snowman (read my review). Paris-born Katia Saint Novet-Lot was born to a Spanish mother and French dad. She currently living in Hyderabad, India, but is quite the globe-trotter and possesses a valuable international perspective, which shines through our interview.

Welcome to Literary Safari, Katia. I enjoyed reading your book and was struck by your international background and living experiences which I thought bring a unique perspective to your work. First off, I’d love to know: What was your inspiration for the character of Amadi?
My husband’s work at UNICEF and the problems they had to keep boys in school, in the south eastern part of Nigeria where we lived, are the inspiration behind the character of Amadi. It is a real problem, especially in Igbo land, where trading is part of the traditional culture. Boys tend to drop out of school in big numbers to earn quick money doing street business.

Did you write and revise the book while you were living in Nigeria? How did it change after your left Nigeria?
I wrote the story while living in Nigeria, and it went through several revisions, there. But I continued working on it after we moved to India. It was my very first story, and I had a lot to learn in terms of story arc, especially the emotional arc. Why and, most importantly, HOW did Amadi reach the decision to learn how to read, when he was so adamant about not wanting to at the beginning of the story? There had to be a progression or the decision at the end would not be satisfying, nor feel real and believable.

The description of how Amadi eats his mango is so right on. So is the choice of having him be from the Igbo business community. Tell us about the role of research and observation in writing a children’s book.
Thank you, Sandhya. As I mentioned above, Amadi could only be an Igbo boy. We lived in Enugu, which is in the heart of Igbo land; this was the former capital of the short-lived Biafra Republic. As for the mango, I happen to have a daughter who LOVES mangoes (who doesn’t love mangoes, anyway?) and I have many pictures of her savoring the fruit, sticky juice running down her chin. Of course, observation and research are extremely important. Even after I had left Nigeria, I continued to send many questions to a friend in Nigeria. I wanted the story to be perfectly authentic in every way. As for observation, I think that anyone living with a writer will tell you that we’re terrible, because we look at everything and everyone with a writer’s eyes, meaning we’re always thinking : mm, I could use this in a story, and/or filing images, words, sentences, and situations in a corner of our mind (when we are not scribbling furiously on any scrap of paper, to not forget).
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Election fever is on the rise. (I don’t know about you, but none of my favorite TV shows quite have the same appeal these days and anytime I pick up a newspaper or hop on a website or facebook, I’m more likely to read or click on a election story than anything else.) It’s even hitting Anu Garg, the software engineer turned wordsmith and the brain behind the immensely popular (600,000 people in some 200 countries) A.Word.A.Day newsletter.

Garg is asking a simple question this week: What’s in a name (of those whom we call our presidential hopefuls)?

“The effect of the actions of a president last for years and eponyms (words coined after someone’s name) enter the language that reflect their legacy, such as Reaganomics and teddy bear (after Theodore Roosevelt),” Garg wrote earlier this week in his daily newsletter. And, although the five words for this week’s A.Word.A.Day all appear to have been coined after this year’s presidential candidates (Obama, Biden, McCain, and Palin). they have been in the language even before these candidates were born.

The first word for this week: obambulate

PRONUNCIATION:
(o-BAM-byuh-layt) MEANING:
verb tr.: To walk about.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin ob- (towards, against) + ambulare (to walk). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ambhi- (around) that is also the source of ambulance, alley, preamble, and bivouac. The first print citation of the word is from 1614.
USAGE:
“We have often seen noble statesmen obambulating (as Dr. Johnson would say) the silent engraving-room, obviously rehearsing their orations.”
The Year’s Art; J.S. Virtue & Co.; 1917.

[In case you’re wondering, the image to your right was generated using the above definition, courtesy of Wordle, a wonderfully obsessive site that generates word clouds for a chunk of text, url, or RSS feed.]

The remaining presidential words will be posted here everyday for the rest of this week. And, my Q&A with the Seattle-based software engineer turned wordsmith Anu Garg follows below the fold.

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This interview was originally published at Sepia Mutiny. Read my review of Arkansas-based, Canada-born Padma Viswanathan’s debut novel “The Toss of a Lemon” here.

Q. When and how did you first start collecting these stories?
A. I interviewed my grandmother over the course of a year or so, in the mid-nineties. She would talk for a few hours, either in English or in Tamil (with my mother translating, to ensure I got the nuances), and then I would transcribe the tape. She told me a story that fascinated and bewildered me: of her grandmother, who was married as a child and widowed at eighteen with two small children. It then took me over ten years of writing to imagine myself into this world and to transform the story I had been given into a novel of my own making. The book that resulted has many emotional and narrative ties to the story my grandma told, but also departs from it in numerous significant ways.

Q. How did you research the historical and social context of this book?
A. I went to India after interviewing my grandmother. I had been many times before, but now saw the old places in a new way, populated by the ghosts of these stories she had told me. I interviewed other relatives and did a lot of reading on the particular social and political upheavals that were happening in this corner of India at that time, in contrast to the larger narrative of Independence. Six years later, with much of a draft written, I made a return trip, visiting some incredible resource centers in south India, where I did more detailed research on themes and characters that had emerged in the writing. This involved a lot of reading, as well as interviews with scholars and historians. I also revisited the places where the novel takes place, to refresh my sense memories and ask more specific questions of my relatives. Although the world I have described exists now only in a fragmentary and vestigial way, I actually saw it crumble in my lifetime. So some of the research was reconstruction of my own memories. (more…)

This post was originally published at Sepia Mutiny. I’m passing on my copy of “Schooled” to any interested reader. Just let me know you want if you want it in the comments section and, if there is more than one person, I’ll pick a name at random next Friday, the 26th. 

I used to work at a tutoring center on a small private college campus in Westchester, NY several years ago. Our offices were a safe space that students visited for help with writing papers, coursework, math, ESL. We hired several peer and professional tutors every semester to provide such services to our student body, and very often, I also took on a small student load. It was tremendously fulfilling work, helping students navigate challenging course material or a tricky writing assignment, watching them come into their own, grasp the content, and produce assignments that met curriculum standards.

That’s my experience with tutoring. Then, there’s the experience of Anisha Lakhani, a former teacher whose novel “Schooled” was just published by Hyperion this summer. She taught (and was even the Middle School English Chair) at the high-profile NYC private school Dalton for a decade, but quit last year following her disillusionment with the culture of cheating in which she found herself.

Lakhani was raking in the dough (over 200 bucks an hour) for private tutoring sessions with the children of wealth clients on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Her closet was filled with the latest designer fashions and she was hanging with all the right folks. As the Jersey-born Columbia graduate sank deeper and deeper into this world, she discovered a vicious inner circle in which educators, parents, and students were enmeshed: Parents, eager to see their kids excel, hired tutors like Lakhani to help student swith school assignments. Students, accustomed to being treated with kid gloves and occupied with AIM, Juicy Couture, and their active social lives, expected Lakhani to essentially do their homework for them. And, teachers, intimidated by parents, knew not to give in-class writing assignments or to even raise the question of whether a paper was written by the student or a tutor, kept silent.

Based on her experiences as a tutor as well as those of her colleagues and parents, Anisha Lakhani’s “Schooled” takes us into the crazy world of Anna Taggert, a recent Columbia graduate who goes against the wishes of her parents (they could have been desi!) and takes up a job at a private school. Despite her initial idealism and desire to imbue her students with the spirit of literary greats, she is very quickly beset with a host of problems: pushy moms, low pay, a rundown apartment, and a school administration which warns her not to make her lesson plans too complicated (she’ll make the other teachers look bad). As the months pass, Anna decides to take up a tutoring gig on the side to supplement her measly income. That’s when things spiral out of control. Her values go whoosh and she falls head over heels with the all things Juicy and Chanel; with shopping sprees; with blonde highlights; and with the experience of being the “cool teacher” who gets invited to Kanye West bar mitzvahs. (Sidenote: The novel also features a desi character – a fellow math teacher – who also gets equally corrupted by the lure of tutoring.)

Eventually, things settle down and Anna looks in the mirror and realizes who and what she has become — and unlike Lakhani, who has quit teaching and turned into a full-time novelist and socialite — returns to the classroom ready to reform her students and herself. But until that happens, readers will get an unnerving look at the Upper East Side annals of overambitious, competitive, and heartbreaking private education. The novel follows in the footsteps of books like “The Nanny Diaries” which provide the insider/outsider point of view. In fact, by the end of this week, movie rights will be sold. And though it’s not literary fiction by any means, it is an intriguing sociological study into a culture of cheating with a dash of pedagogy and activism thrown in.

“I thought it was time someone spoke out. Yes, certainly there were many hardworking students and decent families, but so, so much cheating is occurring and it needed to be exposed.” Lakhani told me in our e-mail Q&A which follows below the fold. Maybe parents and teachers alike will cull some advice from this morality tale from someone who knows what it’s like to walk in their shoes. I certainly hope some conversations about reform emerge from this book, or else it will be just a fictionalized navel-gazing venture. (more…)

Read our review of Cynthia Kadohata’s most recent young adult novel, Outside Beauty.

Literary Safari: “Kira-Kira” is a book about two sisters. This one is about 4. What is it about you and sisters?!
Cynthia Kadohata: I’m very close to my sister. My relationship with my sister — and my brother! — are a couple of the defining relationships of my life. My siblings have had a huge influence on me, and we were a threesome the whole time we were growing up.

LS: In this day and age where being a multicultural author comes with its own baggage, “Outside Beauty” struck me not so much as a story about ethnicity and more of a story about coming of age. How do you strike a balance between writing about the teenage experience versus meeting the demands and pressures to write about “the Japanese American experience”? Did this influence your choice to make many of your characters mixed race?
CK: Hmmm, that’s a good question. The only strategy that I’ve found useful for myself is to write whatever I feel passionate about at the moment.

LS: “Outside Beauty” will remind some readers of “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” Both are stories of summer separations endured by young women. However, “Outside Beauty” is also different because your characters are all different ages and connected through blood ties. As you were writing, were you thinking about this similarity and about the difference between family and friends?
CK: Actually, I wrote the first draft of this in the late nineties. I’m not sure “Sister of the Traveling Pants” had been published yet. In any case, I didn’t think of the similarity at all as I wrote. I’m very close to my family but also feel very close to my best friends. I probably have fewer friends than most people but am quite close to them and trust them completely. (more…)