India, U.S. stories are anything but modest feat

By Steph Bedford

Special to The Capital Times

June 22, 2006

Sita Bhaskar’s collection of short stories, “Shielding Her Modesty,” is no modest accomplishment. Far from it. Bhaskar envisions the intersection between contemporary Indian and American culture through a series of fully realized tales set on both sides of the globe. Like many of her protagonists, the author is an international citizen; she was born and educated in India but lives in Madison. Her immensely sympathetic characters are all caught, to a greater or lesser extent, between two worlds.

In the title story, an illiterate sign-painter named Murunga longs to spend time alone with his new wife. However the couple share a cramped room with relatives, so Murunga channels his considerable passions into the paintings of the blond, half-dressed movie star on his most recent billboard.

Bhaskar develops her characters with a delicate touch, through credible dialogue and telling detail. The attention with which she describes Murunga’s daily bus commute conveys the clamor of modern urban life in India while at the same time showing the relish her protagonist takes in small pleasures.

“Your Self Storage” also depicts a marriage filled with longing, but that longing is not between the spouses. Kaveri is an Indian woman living in Ann Arbor, Mich., married to a man whose notion of wifely duty requires her to comfort him as he weeps over another woman. Kaveri’s desire to return to India drives her to rent a storage locker in secret, and as she gradually fills it with her belongings, she begins to imagine a life of her own.

“Your Self Storage” was originally conceived as a short-short story, winning a prize in the 2004 Wisconsin Book Festival’s 24-Hour Story Contest, and it’s gratifying to see Bhaskar’s ingenious premise expanded into a longer piece.

The strength of these stories is in the confidence and versatility with which Bhaskar portrays her protagonists. They are old and young, Indian and American, crushed by poverty and comfortably well off. They range in education from Murunga, who cannot read the writing on the billboards he paints, to Keshav, the Ph.D husband in “Your Self Storage.” The authorial voice is unflaggingly empathetic, even when depicting characters who are hard to like.

Take Hemant of “Diamond Essences,” for example, a young man convinced that he is the hottest property ever to hit the arranged-marriage market. Bhaskar presents this puffed-up fellow as a misguided romantic, fixated on the advertising jingle for a Chicago jewelry store. Hemant is convinced that through the judicious use of Photoshop software he can determine which woman, among the pictures he’s received from India, will look most suitable on his arm.

This is just one of several instances in which Bhaskar mines humor from the many ways Indian and American culture rub up against one another, both literally and figuratively. The entire plot of “Scoring Some Viagra” centers around an Indian father’s attempts to procure the titular drug while visiting his college-aged daughter at the University of Wisconsin.

Bhaskar’s stories are told in a straightforward fashion. Her focus is on the inner lives of the men, women and children who populate her stories. Aficionados of more experimental short fiction might be disappointed by the relative lack of verbal pyrotechnics or metaphor in “Shielding Her Modesty,” as well as the lack of ambiguity in the resolution of many of the stories. One is never at a loss as to what feeling Bhaskar intends to evoke.

However, it is refreshing to read fiction that doesn’t shy away from such unfashionable themes as domestic happiness and marital concord. Bhaskar’s stories create a world filled with vivid characters the reader feels fortunate to know, and that is nothing to be modest about.