In Aruni Kashyap’s novel set in contemporary India, a group of young academics, professionals, and poets navigate queer love and identity— and look for purpose during a politically turbulent period.
How to Date a Fanatic (HarperVia) opens in spring 2016 at a roadside Dhaba in Delhi. Rohit, Minti, and their taxi driver Satpal are hiding in a water tank on the Dhaba’s rooftop, hiding from angry mobs in a violencetorn state. “Is this how a life ends,” Rohit asks, growing numb in the water. After setting up this visceral opening, Aruni Kashyap rewinds the story to summer 2014, building up layer by layer, the stories of the characters who come and go out of Rohit’s life.
Rohit is a recently minted academic, fresh from doctoral studies in New York, now teaching at a Delhi University-affiliated college. Minti and Sarfaraz are Rohit’s “emotional cushions.” Minti, a therapist at the University of Naalanda, is, like Rohit, from Assam and queer. Sarfaraz, who is Rohit’s childhood friend from Assam, has quit his career in entertainment to return to university. Then there is Dhruv, Rohit’s unrequited love. Into this universe come and go Karan, Neeraj, and other friends.
What Kashyap, a professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia, does well and consistently is refuse to let the political flatten the personal. Life, love, friendships, winesoaked parties, and late-night runs to Dhabas happen in a changing and charged socio-cultural milieu. The newly elected rightwing government had now come to legitimize fundamentalist hooliganism in Delhi. The changing climate begins to affect Rohit and his friends, at first as inconveniences to everyday life, but soon, as cataclysmic events that upend relationships. Rohit and his friends go in and out of romantic relationships against this backdrop of communal tensions. Rohit cycles through a string of lovers—Tarun, a brief interlude with a woman whose family turns out to be Hindutva, and then Sayan—while Dhruv, the unrequited love who started it all, continues to orbit and disrupt. When Sayan finally professes his love, Rohit retreats into self-preservation, telling him he wants the comfort his privileges can buy, not another complication.
How to Date a Fanatic is a tapestry of contemporary India—an India where communal violence and religious fundamentalism coexist with gay love and ambition. The young academics’ love lives play against the background of Hindutvadis vandalizing college campuses and terrorizing everyday life. For Rohit and his friends from Assam, the precariousness of everyday life of their childhood was a precursor to modern day life in Delhi: “We left our homes in Assam looking for stability, careers, and peace, since for most of our lives, we had only seen violence, known insecurity. Now, the rest of the country had turned into our home state.”
That the violence of the margins does not stay marginal gives the novel its most resonant political argument. Rohit senses his interests diverging from those of his friends over time. While Sarfaraz and Dhruv join student protests against rightwing and Hindu fundamentalism, Rohit finds himself yearning for simpler pleasures such as drinks at a rooftop bar. In a spirited study of modern India, the writer deftly toggles between the love lives of the young and restless and the mounting political tensions around them. Dhruv and Sarfaraz’s forays into the student movements, political organizing, and consequent disappearances are a jarring reminder to Rohit that he can never be too far from violence and strife. Rohit’s eventual romantic interlude with Dhruv is just that—an interregnum between the violence of Sarfaraz and Dhruv’s disappearances.
The narrative speeds up in its final chapters, taking unexpected turns and twists, and the writing, fast-paced, evocative, and page-turning. Kashyap returns the reader to the rooftop water tank. The story of the violence instigated by identity politics of India serves as a figurative bookend for the other story of the rapidly modernizing and progressive sexual politics of urban India. In taking on the charged themes of rightwing extremism and sexual identity politics, and universal themes of love and belonging, How to Date a Fanatic lifts a heavy load in narrative and storytelling.
For readers like me who have lost a sense of the Indian zeitgeist, How to Date a Fanatic is a poignant corrective.
A scientist by training, food writer Mashushree Ghosh is a daughter of refugees (her parents preferred “displaced,” she notes) from Bangladesh who made their post-Partition home in Delhi. Growing up in the Indian capital, Ghosh had a certain notion of Punjabis as those of the “agriculture culture,” an unfortunate prejudice instilled in her at an early age by her environment. As an immigrant in America, however, Ghosh discovers much in common with the multi-generational Punjabis she meets over the years.
Safar: Finding Home, History, and Culture through Punjabi Food in the American West (Bloomsbury Academic) is a journey into immigrant subgroup cultures and food ways. Stories of four Punjabi women, each representing subsequent waves of immigration to the American Southwest, serve as organizing frames through which Ghosh dives into Partition history, the politics of separatist movements, gender relations, interracial marriage, and assimilation. Themes that would normally make for dense prose are rendered immediate and personal through Ghosh’s beautiful narrative style.
America does not take kindly to the influx of Punjabi immigrants. After 1907, 50 percent or more of immigrant applications are rejected. Punjabi men are trapped in a bind. If they return home to marry Indian women, they cannot reenter the U.S. If they stay, they cannot buy property. So, they stay and marry Mexican women. Sheila Singh (anonymized) represents what Ghosh calls the First Wave of Punjabis in the American West. Sheila’s father is Teja, a Sikh, and mother is Marisol, a Mexican. Sheila’s family and friends meet once every few months at the Stockton gurdwara in Stockton, CA. The Punjabi men—Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh—move to the American Southwest in this early wave as farmers and marry Mexican women, who have been in those parts for generations.
With the Second Wave of Punjabis comes a nuance to the Punjabi experience in the American Southwest. While the First Wave Punjabi men married into the Mexican community, the Second Wave men brought their Punjabi wives with them. First Wave immigrants intentionally assimilated into mainstream America, seeking to subsume their immigrant identities in Americanness. In contrast, the Second Wave immigrants reinforced their traditional practices in their borrowed homelands. Langars prepared by the Punjabi wives of the Second Wave replaced Mexican-Punjabi women in inclusive gurdwaras of the First Wave. The Third Wave, Ghosh explains, arrived soon after Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards, seeking refuge from police-sponsored violence in the Indian state of Punjab.
That Ghosh is a trained scientist is evident in her meticulous fact-finding, archival research, and his- torical exposition. In the lead up to Jes’s story, we learn about the silence around inter-generational trauma from Partition, called “the cycle of selective silence”—what survivors do (or do not do, rather) to suppress the traumatic memories of Partition. Jes (Nijjer), granddaughter of Second Wave immigrants, and nurse turned food photographer, refuses, Ghosh writes, to carry the burden of intergenerational trauma.
The people and stories profiled are as diverse in their chosen paths as they are similar in their values. Trucker, dhaba owner, home maker, food photographer, or superior court judge—all united by a deep sense of self, relentless hope, courage, and optimism. Throughout, Ghosh weaves in memories from her childhood and graduate student life into the histories of the Punjabi immigrants in the American South-west, her Bengali lens giving the Punjabi experience an added intimacy. The book comes with quintessential Punjabi recipes such as Aloo Saag, Rajma, Makke ki Roti, and Ghosh’s delightful twists on classics such as Desi Cantaloupe salad, and Punjabi-Mexican curry powder.
Ghosh offers us part-memoir, part-biography, part-commentary. The ambitions of such a book are bold if not risky—to present a social history of a people through the lived experiences of a handful of individuals, intertwined with the author’s search for home and a sense of belonging. In the end, Ghosh asks, “What makes us belong? Sometimes it’s just a cup of chai. Sometimes, it’s a meal shared with people. Sometimes, it’s sitting with them as they pray, even when you don’t… I am home. I am home. I am home.”
Safar pulls off the ambitions, evident in the final pages, where history, memory, and longing resolve, quietly, into belonging.
Girija Sankar, a freelance writer based in the Atlanta metro area, works in global health.