Eloquent tales

Chroniclers of the diasporic Indian experience are many — Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Meena Alexander and Chitra Banerji Divakaruni. Despite this crowded field, that Indian Australian writer Roanna Gonsalves’ debut collection of short stories Sunita De Souza Goes to Sydney and Other Stories, manages to stand out is a testament to the author’s mastery of her craft and felicity of language. This collection of 16 meticulously crafted stories explores the displacement, complexity and alienation experienced by Goans who migrated to Australia. With unsettling honesty Gonsalves narrates the sometimes subtle and frequently disturbing racism directed towards ‘outsiders’ in their adopted homeland. Perhaps her most powerful stories are those that reveal interaction among immigrants, between recent migrants and the established, between parents and children and between lovers at a church gathering. The Catholic church and culture play a major role in the social and emotional lives of these Indian migrants. One of my favourite stories is ‘The Teller in the Tale’, in which a mother and daughter negotiate the debris of past animosities. The now adult daughter, a creative writing major in Australia, gradually uncovers uncanny parallels in their lives, both undaunted despite the many obstacles they encounter. Their mutual animosity is gradually resolved as the daughter writes a story — the last chapter of her Ph D thesis. Like women in classic Indian folktales, the final vignette shows the wall of mistrust between the two women come crashing down as they stand beside the Cooks River, “a handcrafted silver necklace in the sun”. ‘The Skit’ is set in the living room of an established immigrant couple who invite their Bombay gang to meet a white Australian guest, recently divorced from his feminist wife. The room is a shrine to the couple’s pretensions of being a cut above, filled with white furnishings and Ikea lights. Lynette, an MBA student and central character, asks to read her skit — a montage of newspaper reports of sexual assaults on Indian girls by Australians. Her protagonist’s persecution at the hands of an Australian student welfare officer and her further humiliation by the Australian police are an indictment of the Australian criminal justice system. The assembled guests offer well-intentioned advice, warning her not to jeopardise her chances of gaining coveted permanent residency. In this story, Gonsalves succeeds in capturing, pitch perfect, the dialects of Indian immigrants in all their nuances and variations. ‘Curry Muncher 2.0’ is an unsparing look at the recent spate of racist attacks on Indian students in Australia. The victim is Vincent, an Indian graduate student returning by train after working a late shift at an Indian restaurant, a job taken to augment his stipend and send money to his mother in India. When some drunken louts brutally attack him and steal his wallet and phone, he refuses to report the assault to the police for fear it would adversely affect his chances of securing permanent resident status. As the reader flinches at this account, Vincent’s female co-worker, the narrator, wonders how he…