asianamlitfans | Nalini Jones's What You Call Winter

I never got around to writing up a review of Nalini Jones's What You Call Winter when I read it a few months ago.

I found a copy of the short story collection at a local used book store and thought it would be a fascinating exploration of a minority religious experience in India. The stories concern a group of Indian Catholics in the fictional community of Santa Clara outside Mumbai, centered on the Almeida family in the contemporary moment and in the recent past. Some of the stories also follow a younger generation that has migrated around the Anglophone world such as to the United States. By virtue of its focus on a religious identity outside the Hindu-Muslim dichotomy that often characterizes representations of India, the stories in this collection offer some interesting insights into community life beyond the defining features of religious conflict.

Over the course of the stories, the family's history emerges as do individual personalities. Marian Almeida, a daughter in the family, is perhaps a central figure around whom the stories revolve. In the first story, "In the Garden," she gets her first period and is mortified by the blood, thinking that she has committed some unforgivable transgression to deserve such punishment. The particular valence of Catholic guilt lurks in the story as well, giving her fear a sense of religious weight. Other stories chronicle the gentrification of the neighborhood, with the tearing down of single-family homes for larger apartment and condominium buildings. In spite of these transformations, the families of the area manage to stay close, often living in different units of the same building.

In another story, "The Bold, the Beautiful," an older woman Grace has cataracts and must be convinced by her daughters to have them taken care of. The title of the story references her obsession with the soap opera of that name, and the story explores transnational connections between India and America in that popular culture vehicle as well as in the return visit of Grace's older daughter Colleen from America. In numerous ways, the story draws out contrasts between India and the United States, between local culture and American modernity. There is also an interestingly ambiguous question about Colleen--something that she seems to be hiding from her family in India (her sexuality? something else?).

Amongst the other striking stories is "The Crow and the Monkey," narrated in the limited perspective of a young Jude who wants to help with party celebrations for the new year. He does not understand that his aunt and uncle next door, hosts for the party, are on the brink of an explosive confrontation in which the aunt finally lashes out at her husband for his affairs with other women. The story wonderfully captures the confusion that Jude experiences in the moment as his own desires to participate in the celebrations meet with the tense relations of the adults.

I read this collection a few months after reading the more recent In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin, which is a short story collection set in Pakistan on one landowner's estate. There is a similar kind of exploration of one particular milieu, crossing gender and class lines in perspective and examination of characters. Jones's stories seem to have a more Asian Americanist perspective than Mueenuddin's, though, even in the ones set completely in India. The influence of transnational families seems much more a part of the fabric of the characters' lives rather than just a little note.