Books like Love and Longing in Bombay

4.5/5\ I spoke at length, then, about superstition and the state of our benighted nation, in which educated men and women believed in banshees and ghouls.\ I chalk this work's low rating up to the collectively vain expectation that creations written in English will always be centered around the English and its domination of modern times. Colonization. Postcolonial. Nationalism in one and hoards of what I take to be Hindi with no sign of footnotes in the other. I would've been as lost as the majority of the US-majority GR audience had I not within the past year read The Discovery of India and Women Writing in India and Grains of Gold, so the position from which I speak is not a vaunted one. It's simply an observation that, thanks to my recently acquired background awareness of Mughal and Pakistan and Sikh, I was able to brush up gently against the references and sink my teeth into the marrow of the genre. The adult returning to whence their childhood once ran from. The Great Gatsby. The Noir. The Money Hoards of the New Tech and the Old Sleaze of Art and Power. The Story. I had to be led to why this collection is postmodern, but I didn't have to be convinced of how much this crystallization appeals. It's a world with no guarantee that all explained, not until such explanations catch you by the throat.\ "Fire," he said. "Whoosh. One moment and a whole city gone.""How?" It was Amma. Her hair was white, and she was wearing white, and she had a strong nose and direct eyes. The engineer looked up at her, a glass of milk in his left hand. "If you break a speck," he said. He didn't know how to translate "atom." "You release energy. Fire." Amma said, "How?" Now the children were quiet. Amma took two steps forward. "How?" The engineer gestured into the air. "It's like that thing in the Mahabharata" he said finally. "That weapon that Ashwatthaman hurled at Arjun." "The Brahmasira?" Amma said. "That was stopped." "Not this one," the engineer said, turning his palm down. "They used it." Then the food was ready and he ate.\ It's not the universality of horror, but the history of it. The epistemology of what is accepted as sacred and what is requisitioned as fodder. I've spent enough time practicing the rejection of the masculine status quo, the heteronormative, the rich and the able and the ones who are not despised, to recoil on instinct to the majority of it, if not all. Ten pages without a bump is swell, fifty is a good sign, but an entire work where Others are not an ideal for use but a characteristic of reality is something I will always latch onto tooth and nail. As for the rest of the reasons why I enjoyed Chandra's first short story collection so much that I'll be looking out for his behemoth of a Sacred Games is, honestly, a voyeur thing. The sake of the new. The fact that I really don't indulge in South Asian fiction as much as I should be, and any intro into doing that more is good enough for me.I'm not doing a very good job of selling this at all, am I. All I've said so far is that you'll probably need to read a history book about India and maybe some sociopolitical postcolonial theory while you're at it to understand why this five stories give me both chills and a craving for more. Simply put, I like the real beyond the facts and the statistics and the little Bombay dot on a googled geography map. I've got a hard enough time with engaging with US film that Bollywood probably won't ever snag me long enough for a lifelong indulgence, so this Bombay/Mumbai world of caste and the atomic bomb will have to suffice.\ He knew there was a problem, but of course he had the essential belief that the wars of the past were fought because of benighted ignorance, that good sense would after all prevail. She wanted to tell him that the past was responsible for him, for his beauty, but of course there was nothing to say, no possible way to explain.\ P.S. My Postcolonial Short Story class seems to be working, if this reception is anything to go by. Literary enjoyment's literary enjoyment, but it's always good to get your money's worth.P.S.S. Apparently this is my 400th review. All that writing time I could've spent reading. Ah well. Where would've been the fun in that?