asianamlitfans | Sep. 24th, 2007

I finished Shona Ramaya's collection of short stories Operation Monsoon this evening. Ramaya gets bonus points in my book because her author photo on the back of the book includes her dog. :) Graywolf Press in Saint Paul, Minnesota, is the publisher of this 2003 collection. (Go Saint Paul!)

I liked these stories overall though many of them seemed a bit on the long side. There are only five stories in 250 pages. All of the stories deal somehow with a globalizing India -- with India connected to its diaspora (and NRIs -- non-resident Indians, the category created by the Indian government to facilitate economic flows). Sometimes it is the Internet that forms the foundation of this connection. Sometimes it is the lure of skilled labor work in the US under H1 visas. Sometimes it is the return of a US-trained academic to study the exotic "Third World."

My favorite is the first -- "Gopal's Kitchen" -- that weaves together supernatural/religious understandings of reincarnation (or how life passes on to other bodies) with live organ trafficking. It's the most subtle of the five stories in terms of how it imagines this hybrid world of mythology and science. The others tend to veer towards demonizing Western ways of knowing as inadequate to the complex worlds of India, sometimes in the figure of a white academic whose desire to capture the voice of the subaltern is completely overblown (to the point of parody, though I'm not sure that is the intended reading).

It's also clear that Ramaya grapples often with how academia studies culture. I'd go so far as to say that she is rather antagonistic to postermodernism, for example, as in the opening to the title story "Operation Monsoon":

"Terrorists are displaced in every sense," Jean V reads from his "seminal" paper on environment and terrorism. He frowns slightly at the faint clanging of slot machines and whirring of roulette wheels. With a well-practiced shrug at the background casino noise that refuses to be fully suppressed despite the soundproofing of the auditorium, he continues, "A terrorist's sense of place is a Dali landscape with no real sense of self. They exist in hyperreality. As in cyberspace, a lethal fractalization of the self occurs and any sense of shared destiny is replaced by a vague notion of mission. . . ."

This is the story with the crazy academic who has written a book on a terrorist from his point of view, even though he never actually told her anything about himself.

The third story, "The Matchmakers," is kind of a mystery story about a woman with a limp (polio as a child) who runs an online service to help overseas Indians find spouses -- a twenty-first century version of arrangd marriages. The fourth story, "Re: Mohit," takes the form of e-mail exchanges between an Indian man working in Cambridge, Massachuetts, as an consultant and his family and friends. The final story, "Destiny," is about a woman doing an "interdisciplinary dissertation" who visits a small village by a river to challenge the villagers' superstitious believes in the terrible goddess who guides their destiny.