ILLUSTRATION: YVETTA FEDOROVA

Summer 2007 | At Last

Turn About

By Rishi Reddi '92

AS THE ONLY CHILD in an immigrant family, I was constantly on the “outside” of things — a school, a town, a societal custom — striving to learn how an insider should behave, look and think. My way of coping was to read books, juggling three or four at once, picking up the one that best suited my mood at the time. In the pages of a novel or short story, I could jump into someone else’s skin and escape the unusual circumstances of my life. We moved often, resettling in a new location every two to four years, which only sharpened my sense of alienation. In that respect, I was like many other adolescents; my experience just had a cultural context.

My family was part of the wave of Indians who arrived in the United States in the 1960s, the first South Asian group in 40 years to find our way through an American cultural landscape. In those early days, it was unusual to find a book from an Indian writer that was celebrated in Western mainstream literary circles. There was Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul, of course, and Bharathi Mukherjee, who made a splash, but they were exotic and solitary perspectives on the literary world stage.

So it’s with great curiosity that I notice a trend in today’s English-speaking literary world: a keen interest in books that describe all the stuff of my Indian immigrant childhood. Instead of being relegated to the role of the “outsider,” Indian-American authors, writing about Indian things, are suddenly “in.” One has only to look at the awards rosters in the past 10 years to find evidence: Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Akhil Sharma, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and others, all writing from the perspective of Indian-Americans, winning major English-language literary awards for their novels and short stories, selling hundreds of thousands of copies of their books.

Why is mainstream America suddenly interested in her Indian immigrant population and its country of origin? Perhaps because India is a presence on the global stage now, an economic powerhouse that flexes her muscle not only through the high-profile effects of corporate technological outsourcing, but also through the spending power of its growing middle class. India is also a nuclear nation, capable of influencing international policy in ways that it could not in the recent past.

But the most telling reason is that my Indian immigrant generation, which spent its childhood in the America of the ’60s and ’70s, has come of age. We take part in every facet of the economy, as our parents did, but there’s something more. Many of us are connected to non-Indian mainstream America through bonds of affection — as high school best friends, or spouses, or daughters and sons-in-law. These friends and family are interested in our experience. So we tell them our stories and are flattered that, for a few moments, they wish to see the world through our eyes. What we learn through our storytelling is what we’ve known all along: that definitions of “insider” and “outsider” are superficial, at best. And all of us who are bibliophiles, no matter what our ethnicity, love to escape into a good story.

Rishi Reddi is the author of Karma and Other Stories (Harper Perennial, 2007). Her previous work was chosen for the Best American Short Stories 2005, received honorable mention in Pushcart Prize 2004 and has appeared in several literary journals.