For a young community—less than 50 years old for all intents and purposes—Indian-Americans have an outsize voice in Indian letters. Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction and Suketu Mehta’s non-fiction are as well-known in their ancestral homeland as in their adopted one. If quality prose is the measure, then Quarantine, Rahul Mehta’s debut collection of stories, belongs with the best that this unlikely collision of cultures has produced.
Mehta is a cartographer of the interstices between two worlds. His characters emerge from families where a grandson is expected to touch his grandfather’s feet, and a mother warns a son against being too dark lest he ruin his marriage prospects. At the same time, vacation in India includes a schedule for popping the anti-malarial drug Larium. Siblings battle with conflicting ideas of the purpose of marriage: romantic fulfilment or procreation. The newly rich seek their American neighbours’ approval even as they fret about losing their children to an alien way of life.
That Mehta’s protagonists tend to be sexually active gay men adds a brutal sort of honesty to this book. You encounter young hustlers in Rajasthan who sell themselves to tourists, and doctoral students in New York paid $400 to shit on a plate. You discover there are more ways to describe a penis than you thought possible. If you believe that every Indian-American wins the national spelling bee before enrolling at Harvard, think again. Mehta’s slice of Indian-Americana includes gay bars and strip clubs, one-night stands and infidelities, casual pick-ups and furtive couplings.
In a lesser writer’s hands, the harshness of this world may have made it hard to stomach. But Mehta marries an unflinching eye with the gift of empathy. His pared prose brings to mind Raymond Carver. Rarely does one stumble upon a sentence without balance or proportion. On occasion, Mehta unfurls an image of arresting beauty, as when he describes urchins’ fists opening “like dirty lilies.”
But Quarantine is not flawless. For an Indian, parenthetical explanations aimed at those who don’t know their Marathi from their Maratha can grate. At times, as with a story about a man who burns money out of resentment of his rich father, the symbolism can be heavy-handed. But these are mere quibbles. If you’re looking for stories with the honesty and urgency of a contact sport, this fine collection will not disappoint.
