Books: Touching Tales Highlight Neglected Northeast
Aruni Kashyap’s new collection of short fiction, set in India’s troubled Northeast and America’s immigrant communities, is filled with “poignant, finely crafted stories,” as Amitav Ghosh notes. Kashyap is an associate professor of English & creative writing and director of the creative writing program at the University of Georgia, Athens.
In The Way You Want To Be Loved (Gaudy Boy), a collection of short stories, Aruni Kashyap, whose books have received acclaim in India, introduces readers in the U.S. to the lores and landscapes of Assam (where Kashyap spent his early years) and northeastern India, a region whose multilayered culture and history has been largely underrepresented in popular culture and fiction.
Kashyap’s prose is simple yet elegant, with jolts of color and starkness that keep the reader thirsting for more characters and places from the region that mainstream India has forgotten for decades. The stories span a variety of characters, places, and circumstances—villagers in rural Assam or graduate students in Minneapolis (where Kashyap studied)—but each holding universal truths about love, loss, grief, and belonging.
In “Bizi Colony,” we turn to the family dynamics of a family of four, whose everyday life is constantly upended by the shenanigans of a truant and malicious younger son. The story is familiar—of parents and siblings putting on a brave face and calm exterior even as a sibling or parent or aunt or uncle ravages family honor and pride through misdeeds and falsehoods.
Some stories are the quintessence of the immigrant-student hyphenated lives that so many of us in this country share. While Lahiri’s Gogol Ganguli epitomized the South Asian immigrant of the 1970s and ’80s, Kashyap’s Himjyoti and Anurabh are the immigrant student representatives of the millennial generation, more comfortable in their foreign surroundings and foods, and yet no less nostalgic for home.
The violence and bloodshed from the insurgency and counter-insurgency years in India’s Northeast feature in several stories, a grim reminder of those decades when that region was “othered” by the Indian central government and national media.
“Before the Bullet,” though one of the shortest stories in the collection, is the starkest in its representation of the tough times that communities in the Northeast faced at the hands of the Indian army stationed there to quell the insurgency. ‘In this business, only the dead spoke to the government agencies,’ the narrator says. ‘If there was no unrest (deaths, chases, corpses), the [army] camp would be called off: the camp that laid golden eggs for the soldiers and officers. What if the story of a young local man who didn’t dismount from his bicycle, who spoke in English at the army camp in a village where people didn’t even know how to speak in Hindi, went around? It could create a hushed confidence in the minds of the villagers.’
Kashyap’s prose toggles between distinctive styles—in “Skylark Girl,” the magical realism of a folktale serves as an allegory for the struggles in the Northeast but ensconced, like a Matryoshka doll, in a more contemporary story about the microaggressions faced by an immigrant academic in America.
There is drama, pathos, and sex—queer, straight, honeymoon, and illicit. In “Like The Thread In A Garland,” the narrator agonizes over his friend’s inability to consummate his marriage and the story picks up a heady steam with a colorful cast of characters including a gun-wielding former militant who turned out to be the bride’s ex-lover.
In “The Way You Want To Be Loved,” Kashyap taps into the unspoken desires and emotions of his characters, portraying love not as a grand, sweeping gesture, but as something more subtle, complex, and deeply personal. He dissects love’s many shades—love that nurtures, love that hurts, love that is unrequited, and love that transforms—and in doing so, presents a tapestry of human emotion that is universally relatable.
Girija Sankar, a freelance writer based in the Atlanta metro area, works in global health.
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