asianamlitfans | Lavanya Sankaran's The Red Carpet: Bangalore Stories

In The Red Carpet: Bangalore Stories (Dial Press, 2005), Lavanya Sankaran offers eight short stories featuring young adults making their way in the cosmopolitan, well-to-do milieu of Bangalore, India, which as a city has recently developed rapidly into a leading center of globalized industry.

The perspectives in the story flit back and forth between the young men and women, their parents, and the servants in their homes. I actually found the stories told from men's perspectives most fascinating and insightful. The opening story, "Bombay This," for example, concerns Ramu, a young man so intent on finding a wife that he even authorizes his mother to make suggestions for him as a matchmaker. Ramu's view of Ashwini, a woman from the bigger and more cosmopolitan Bombay, forms the backdrop of the story that also sketches out the personalities of others in his circle of friends. The second story, "Closed Curtains," focuses on Mr. D'Costa, a man of an older generation who is the neighborhood busybody intrigued by the young couple across the street who, despite an education and work prospects abroad, have decided to move back to India.

What I like so much about this collection of stories is how it pokes at and explores the aspirations of Indians educated abroad in the United States, England, Australia, and elsewhere. The stories ask what this cosmopolitan education offers generations of youth and how such worldly lives affect older generations. One story, "Alphabet Soup," very pointedly considers American educated Priyamvada, pursuing her PhD and studying India in the context of postcolonial, feminist U.S.-ethnic studies. The story pits her academic/activist views of culture and labor against her parents' immigrant belief in the American Dream and their back-home Indian contemporaries' own sense of the modern world.

I found the collection of stories very nicely assembled as well, with the stories complementing each other in their range of perspectives. The characters all seemed well-rounded and distinct, unlike in collections where purportedly different characters sometimes come across as the same character under the guise of different names. Tying the stories together is the city of Bangalore with its nouveau riche and its complicated relationship to British colonialism and American neocolonialism. There are also a few characters who pop up in more than one story, helping to create a web of people loosely connected in social networks of the well-to-do in the city.

This story would be wonderful to think about along with other short story collections set in India and Pakistan like Nalini Jones's What You Call Winter and Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, both of which sketch out the milieu of particular locales and explore the connections between South Asia and its diaspora.