It's something of a change when an Indian author reverses the trend and does unto the firang as he did unto us, even if he repeats the firang's errors: Anurag Mathur did it years ago with The Inscrutable Americans, and now here's Boman Desai with Asylum, USA. The first was straight slapstick; the second is an assortment of leftovers from a member of the generation of Indians who lived through the '60s and '70s only to be co-opted along with the hippies and the babyboomers.
The plot, such as it is, is driven by Noshir Daruwala; his fellow passengers, one of whom intrudes briefly to lend a hand at the wheel, are the women with and through whom he's experienced the US of A. Boman Desai is bright enough to hide behind the novelistic inadequacies of his narrator, an electrical engineer by profession: "This (says Noshir) would be better organised if I were a writer." So far, not so good, and it gets worse. Daruwala ties himself in linguistic tangles, indulges in adolescent wordplay ("he made of her his heroine, his heroin") and attempts to pass off a missing spacebar key on his PC as style (SoninAmerica, onceuponatime).
The first details we're given about the women who drift through his life is a rundown on the lingerie they wear (or don't), the way they look. It is all the more irritating because the women are interesting: Barbara, bisexual, a control freak who marries him to give him citizenship; Blythe, working out her own comfort zones in relationships; Sheila, who hustles drinks off men in a Chicago bar; Lisa, who hates endings.
Given all of this, why bother to read this book? Because somewhere among the teenage humour, the flip verbiage and the sneaky feeling that you need to be listening to bootleg Dylan and Grateful Dead tapes to get into the spirit of Asylum, USA, is a blurred home movie of the generation that had it all and then sold out. Like so many other Indians and immigrants, Noshir does discover the Promised Land, only to find that it appears to be curiously empty, not just to him but to the original inhabitants.
What emerges finally is a sense of terrible loneliness mixed with tentative hope, emanating from almost all the characters who accompany Noshir on his lurching path from Bombay to Good Citizen, Anytown, usa. It provides just the right counterpoint to Desai's authorial exuberance, saves him (though only by the skin of his teeth) from being, as his protagonist fears, just another fastfood writer.
