But the magic has begun, my story, “Death’s Flag Is Never At Half-Mast” has gone live in Redstone Science Fiction’s August issue. And it’s the cover story, which is not at all unsweet. In case you missed my previous post, this is the story I wrote as a result of this blog post, entitled Lord Nelson Could Beat Up Your Dad.

And, really, more than anything, it’s my tribute to (and parody of) military science fiction, a genre that I love reading, and would never write.

But that time is now. The internet is filling up with words that I wrote. And every one of those words contains the germ of an image. And that image is growing in peoples’ minds whether I want it to or not. And the time has come to decide what that image will be.

I’m not going to go off all crazy and say that all great authors have authorial persona. But it really does help. I don’t think Hemingway would be very famous if he hadn’t spent so much time being Hemingwayish and hitting up bullfights and fishing for big fish and shooting guns at big animals and volunteering to fight in wars that were none of his business. I’m sure you can think of a ton more examples.

Reading is a pretty intimate experience. When you read, it’s like someone is whispering into your ear. And, like it or not, words have a bigger impact when the person saying them is somehow enticing to the imagination. It’s like how you pay way more attention whenever an attractive person is speaking.

While authors are not movie stars, being attractive is a not-at-all unhelpful part of authorial persona. It works for Neil Gaiman. And you can’t read about Truman Capote, even sixty years later, without hearing about his author photograph on the back cover of Other Voices, Other Rooms. Unfortunately, that avenue is not really going to do it for me.

Oh, but you might say “just be yourself.” That is not good advice. First of all, there is no such thing as just being yourself. All communication is performance. The problem with the internet is that it’s hard to accurately gauge who the audience is, and what they want. That means that all communication tends to sort of drift towards one of two poles.

The first is anger. Writing to the internet is a lot like shouting in an empty room. You know that probably no one’s listening, but there’s a feeling that if you yell hard enough, someone will hear. And when you’re by yourself its really easy to get all worked up about things. The end result is that you end up being a huge dick, and expending all kinds of words on things that either A) don’t actually bother you that much; or B) do bother you, but which you know shouldn’t bother you.

I think that I tend to avoid the “anger” pole, mostly out of an exaggerated awareness of how one or two really offensive comments could reverberate around the internet and be enshrined forever in my permanent record.

But I definitely fall into the other pole, “cuteness”. For some reason , well over half the things people write out on the internet come out sounding like they’re being lisped by little girls (or boys) who’re missing their two front teeth. Especially amongst SF writers. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism. Although cuteness is grating, it’s fairly unoffensive, and is especially good for covering up self-promotion, an unpopular opinion, or just the fact that you consider yourself smart enough that when you say something you think people ought to not only listen, but pay to hear what you have to say.

And that’s pretty much what I do. I really dislike it. I read the comments I make in blogs, or the posts I make on message boards, and I am horrified. It’s hard for me to see the person who writes those things as an actual person. Seriously, I don’t even know why he bothers. He’s engaged in negative communication, the actual leaching of meaning from the world and from the words themselves. I find his motivations utterly opaque, unexplainable even by the simplistic economic theories that I learned in college (the ones that explain everything).

I need an authorial persona, if only to make the horror stop.

I didn’t write the novel described in that post. Instead I wrote a 2500 word short story, and I recently sold that story to the newly-established online magazine Redstone Science Fiction. This is not really the story I would have expected to be my second sale at pro-type rates. But I’ll take it. Finally, my endless consumption of military science-fiction has paid some dividends.

Also, also, I got a Kindle DX and have loaded it with roughly a bajillion books. Where my last trip to India involved lugging twenty pounds of books, on this trip my case will be svelte as hell.

Also, I feel like /slash I know that the recent spate of blog activity has gotten me a few more readers (whoever you are). Don’t go away, we’re just getting rolling.

But this kind of gives me an interesting opportunity. I mean, sure, I turned in a personal statement. But a personal statement has all these, like, rules, you know? Like, totes bogus word counts. And stuff you’re supposed to say because they ask you to say it. So I was like, here’s an opportunity to reveal all these other facts about me that they totally did not know. But I don’t know, that sounds sort of needy. And honestly, kind of dull (not for you, I’m sure it’d be fascinating for you, I meant dull for me — although I guess reading seven hundred personal statements probably familiarizes you with just about every sad, thoughtful, amusing, or pathetic fact a person can possibly whip out about themselves). About the only thing I’d like to point out to you is that I am almost exactly two meters, or six feet and seven inches, tall. It’s kind of weird to think that anyone who knows me primarily from some textual medium would not know that, since it’s obviously the first thing anyone who sees me realizes about me and it colors every facet of my life in a way that I am utterly unable to appreciate.

Instead I just decided to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a year. Last year, around this time, I read a bunch of peoples’ lists of all the books they’d read in the previous year. And I was like, “Wow, that is so cool, I am going to start logging the books I have read and then I will post them on the internet”. And that is exactly what I’ve done. My only criteria for the list were that the books had to be ones I’ve read for the first time this year, so I did not include anything I re-read (like the ten or so works of glorious military science fiction that I inevitably read year after year after year). Well then, the list is as follows:

That is 92 books. Which is not particularly astounding, but it’s certainly not bad either. And I think this list is a perfect example of the kind of sullied mind you’d be admitting into your graduate program. Let’s see what leaps out at us

• Paranormal romance novels – 13 – Not only did I read the entire Twilight series (which one could conceivably pass off as cultural studies), I also read the first six books in Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries (the inspiration for the HBO series True Blood. I read all six books in one booze-fuelled weekend), as well as three books in Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series. My main issue with paranormal fantasy is that you always get drawn in by this potent relationship between the main dude and the (usually witty, usually bad-ass) heroine. But then, you get a few books and suddenly the woman is knee deep in some totally magical dudes, and you’re no longer able to convince yourself that any of them is really worth anything. That’s why I gave up on Kelley Armstrong and Charlaine Harris. Twilight actually kind of avoids this paradigm (and a lot of standard paranormal fantasy tropes), which is kind of interesting.
• Nonfiction – 19 (albeit under an absurdly idiosyncratic categorization that counts Rousseau’s Confessions – the work of a man who was certifiably insane – but not Satrapi’s Persepolis, which is autobiographical) – I was kind of surprised there were so many. But a bunch of them were that crunchy fluff that is actually kind of pernicious; the kind that dumbs down and simplifies the world in order to brainwash smart people. Stuff like Sway and Outliers and everything Christopher Hitchens has ever had the gall to commit to paper.
• Science Fiction – 11 – But that’s under a disappointing metric that counts Don Delillo’s White Noise and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest…however, if those are not SF, then what is?
• Graphic novels – 6 – I guess the exact number depends on how you slice them, since I counted the two parts of Maus as two, but the two parts of the Complete Persepolis as one. I’d actually never really read a graphic novel before this year and – to be honest – I wasn’t extraordinarily taken with the form. The Watchmen was great, the first part of Persepolis was pretty fun, and the rest were merely kind of pleasant.
• Fantasy – 6 (19 including paranormal romance) – I also included Pale Fire and Invitation to a Beheading in this category, because, you know…there’s magic in them. But I did not include the Ramayana or the Iliad, because I do what I want.
• Books by David Foster Wallace – 5 – Infinite Jest was totally sweet, don’t get me wrong. But the DFW works that really blew me away were his essay collections. The main problem, for me, with essays has always been that they seemed to require actual research. Now I just know you need an engaging tone. For awhile, imitating him kind of blew my writing to hell, but I think I am mostly over it now.

I was going to include a best and worst list, but it would have just amounted to me saying, “Wow, Paradise Lost is totally sweet…” and I think the annals of criticism have enough of that to last it a few centuries. So yes, grad admissions folks, look around, make yourself at home. Read my post on Jhumpa Lahiri for something slightly less playful (the numerous missing words in that post do not come from me sucking at writing things down, but from me going back and inserting words and moving them around and changing wordings…you’ll notice this post does not suffer from that problem, because I have not edited it at all). This blog is both public and under my own name, and I’m pretty sure that I’m not embarrassed by anything on it.

I was predisposed to dislike the book. A few years earlier, while living in India, I’d read a number of books by Indian-American authors and found myself uniformly disgusted. They were just depressing. Endless stories of women engaged to brash, blonde Pauls and Erics who dismissed their precious heritage as just another cultural trapping; of feeling out of place in liberal, Manhattan drawing rooms; of hiding their Indianness behind jeans and make-up and liquor, rejecting it as the source of their alienation, only to find that it was intrinsic to them and that they could only be made truly happy by a chaste romance with a Nikhil or Arjun, followed by a quick marriage, and a hasty succession of children: a middle-class arrangement in which love would eventually blossom as the children grew.

I absolutely hated these stories. It was like they came from an entirely different universe from my own experience of what it is to grow up as a second-generation Indian in the States. While I certainly possess my fair share of Indian cultural trappings, I’ve never found that they hampered, even mildly, my ability to feel comfortable in America. Furthermore, I, like the heros and heroines of these novels, quickly realized that joining the Indian community is utterly impossible for someone with my heritage, because it is simply not possible to become Indian in the way that one can become American. Even my parents will never be accepted, after their thirty years in America, as fully Indian by those who have never left that country. As for myself, even if I spoke pitch-perfect Gujarati, it would be utterly impossible.

But the solution chosen by the protagonists of those novels, to instead become fully Indian-American, is horrifying. To become one of those clique of second-generation Indians who marry other Indians, who live with other Indians, celebrate Indian holidays, go to temple, have few white friends, and otherwise successfully ghettoize themselves, has always seemed to be the kind of decision that one would only make if one were totally sure that the alternative is isolation and alienation at the outskirts of the white community.

So, I was predisposed to dislike the Namesake, which is about a Bengali-American, Gogol, who grows up at war with his heritage, and almost marries Maxine, a white New Yorker, before finally marrying another Bengali (although that relationship eventually breaks up as well). To be honest, I don’t remember much of the book. It was very well-written, but didn’t make much of an impression on me, other than a vague sense of that same old disgust.

But, for instance, while Gogol struggles with his odd name (there is a whole running leitmotif regarding his name), I have never had a moment of angst about mine. While he spent a year in Calcutta moping around and feeling alienated, I spent a year in New Delhi feeling pretty okay. All these identity issues just don’t strike me as being worth spilling many tears over. Everyone eats different food at home, what does it affect my day-to-day middle school life if my friends eat steak and I eat dal? And it probably helps that the more deeper social and ideological differences between my family and those of my classmates were not very large. My parents speak English in the home, they drink, they had no objection to dating (they did not have an arranged marriage). I won’t deny that the question of how to navigate one’s Indian and American identities is of paramount importance to some people. Clearly it is, or why would these books be written? But it’s just not the case for me.

After the Namesake, I only became more vehement in my private assertion that I wasn’t going to write about Indian issues. I clearly had nothing to say about those identity concerns peculiar to Indian-Americans, and the issues that are of importance to Indians themselves can clearly be better handled by that nation’s vast, educated, middle-class.

My second Lahiri experience was transformative. I checked out her Pullitzer-winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies sometime during my sophomore year of college. Up to this time, I had remained true to my decision to avoid, not just books by Indian-Americans (about being Indian-American), but all of what I’d come to call immigrant narratives (which is not the same as saying all books by immigrants or their children). However, Interpreter of Maladies was an amazing book.

I can’t say exactly why I enjoyed it where the Namesake had left me cold. Perhaps I was just older, more well-read, more educated. But I think it was because the protagonists of the stories in Interpreter of Maladies are primarily first-generation immigrants, and they’re mostly older ones. It’s been many years since I’ve read this book, but I remember that when I closed it, I had a sense of the kinds of things that people left behind to come to America. There’s one story in particular, “The Third and Final Continent”, the last one in the collection. The main character is living in a very old white woman’s house while he waits for his arranged bride to join him in America. It’s something of a lonely, sterile existence. And when I finished it, I realized the kind of richness that people left behind in India. Hundreds of relatives living in communities your family has been familiar with for generations. A sense of being firmly rooted in one place that not only has to be rebuilt in America, but might actually be impossible to achieve in America. And the burden of making up for that lack seems to fall hardest on the women. The men came to America for opportunities. They fall into their work and really come up. But the women in these stories struggle on without the servants and support groups they once had. In many ways, their lives are harder in the U.S. than they ever would have been back home.

The short story collection highlights all of the difficulties someone raised in India would have about the way people live in America. Most notably, this living in two-person nuclear family units. Time and again, husbands and wives struggle with households where they’re the only living things, other than the kids, and where they have to rely on each other not just for practical necessities, but for socialization as well.

These themes are developed in Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri’s second collection, which came out, what, two years ago? I was going to buy it then, but my dad told me we already had a copy. A copy I spent months looking for, until I finally found it in his mother’s flat in Bombay, where I snatched it up and took it back to the land of its birth.

This short story collection basically reads like the people from Interpreter of Maladies got twenty years older. And this collection, aside from its first story, is told entirely from the point of view of second-generation immigrants. First of all, since this is the Lahiri book that is clearest in my memory (given that I just finished it a few hours ago), I’d like to say that the writing is amazing. If I described the plots, or even the characters, to you right now, it’d sound like the most banal shit ever. “Oh, my dad died and is getting remarried” or “Oh, my brother is an alcoholic”. But when you read them, these stories are intense and gripping in a way that I did not stop to even try to fathom. When you’re reading it, nothing even seems particularly great about the words, but somehow they’re so alive with the personality of the narrators that you get a glimpse of how fascinating people’s lives must be when experienced from the inside. You understand how everyone is the star of their own story, and how even the most banal shit is wondrous and tormented when it’s happening to you. Part of me wants to go back with a pen and start vivisecting paragraphs and sentences right now to figure out what she did.

That having been said. These stories seem to explore more vividly the dichotomy set up in the first collection, between the richness of Indian domestic life and the sterility of that in America. For instance, the first story, “Unaccustomed Earth”, which is told by a daughter, Ruma, and her recently widowed father (whose name, if it is in fact mentioned, is not done so frequently). The daughter has quit her job in a Manhattan law firm to follow her (white) husband to his new job in Seattle and spend her time with her son full-time. The arrival of her father for a visit breathes new life into her domestic tedium, and the story closes with her almost begging him to stay. Her young son, Akash, loves his grandfather, and begins to form a strong cultural connection to India, including learning a few words of  Bengali.

The second story, “Hell-Heaven”, is told by a daughter whose mother silently fell in love with a young grad student who was an acquaintaince of her and her professor husband, years ago, when the daughter was a child. The grad student marries a white woman and severs all ties with the Bengali community, before finally leaving her after having an affair with a Bengali woman.

In the last cycle, three stories connecting the same characters, Hema’s family takes in another Bengali family who stays with them for six weeks while looking for a house in Massachusetts. After they move out, the two families drift away from each other and rarely meet again. Kaushik, the son from the latter family, grows up to become a jet-setting photojournalist who rarely visits his father, even when he’s in America, while Hema becomes a college professor, who, after a long affair with an older, married man, is about to submit to an arranged marriage. The two eventually meet again, in Rome, and conduct a brief relationship. Kaushik asks her to stay, to follow him to his next job in Hong Kong, but he cannot offer her the kind of domesticity that her Indian fiancé, Navin, can.

This, is, of course, nothing like an adequate exploration of the way Lahiri treats these themes, which is with a very nuanced eye. For instance, Ruma’s father refuses to live with her. He’s found a kind of love with a new woman, and he doesn’t want to be tied to this extended family, to live and breathe with the doings of his daughter and son-in-law and grandson anymore. But reading these stories made me realize that this is how a significant number of, not only recent Indian immigrants, but even second-generation Indian-Americans and white Americans themselves view domestic life in America.

And it sometimes seems to me as if an assumption running through many peoples’ minds is that the opposite of being Indian is a void. That you come to America and you lose something, but you only lose, and lose, and if you let the process go on long enough then you’re nothing. Not that you don’t have lovers and wives and children, but something essential is gone from you. That you no longer have passion. All the heat in these stories seems wrapped up in Indian thing. On the one hand you have chapattis and bindis and saris and dal and masala and shy grad students who you learn to love, without words, over the course of years and who wreck you, when they die, in ways that you can never express to your children. You have fraught silences and golden, untarnished memories, and parental expections that make you burst with the unbearable internal tension. And then, on the other side there’s just nondescript brownstones and interchangeable New England towns and men who look at you as just another relationship, just another affair, who think your parents are just people they need to bear at Christmas, who can be comfortable with, but never excited or anxious about.

I don’t even think that’s a view that’s limited to people of Indian descent. I’ve heard white Americans express to me a desire for some culture, some ethnicity. As if they had just been swallowed up and sucked dry by the America. That’s just unfathomable to me. Nothing about India has ever felt more real, or more important, to me than American things. There’s a grandness to American culture that is every bit as exciting as India’s crowded millennia-old syncretic mix of cultures.

I won’t argue that it’s not a little bit scary to get swallowed by America. This is a culture that has, to some extent, swallowed the entire world. And thinking of yourself as just another American can feel dehumanizing. But to me, that’s vital to being part of life here. You accept that you’re just another American, because that’s what gives you the power to be a full part of culture here, to converse on an equal level, to make fun of it, or to propose changes in it, and be listened to. If I held back, and insisted that I had some unsullied Indian portion, then it would affect my own ability, psychologically, to interact with America. Perhaps its different for me, since I feel, to some extent, as if I am part of the ongoing cultural conversation in America. As long as I maintain the delusion of achieving success as a writer, I have to think of myself as someone who’s harnessed this monster and is in the process of driving it to somewhere new.

And my embrace of American culture is also affected by my perception that I will never be allowed that opportunity in any other country. As I said earlier, I can never become Indian. America has immense conformity pressures, but here, I both literally and figuratively speak the language. India, which has much greater conformity pressures, would never even give me a chance.

Because of this view, that there is nothing particularly privileged about my Indian heritage, at times some have seen fit to apply to me the term Gogol encounters in the namesake, “ABCD” (American-Born Confused Desi). But I reject it. I can’t see where exactly I am confused. I like Indian food, I have a vast storehouse of knowledge regarding Indian history and culture, but I am never going to live there, and I am not going to make much effort to be a part of the Indian-American community in America. Being Indian is for me slightly more immediate than being Italian or Irish or Polish is for millions of other Americans who’ve progressed a few generations beyond angst. Because the truth is, no matter how many tears you may choose to waste over our “lost” culture, there is absolutely no way to regain it. Indian-Americans can never become Indian. All they can do is cobble together a monstrous hybrid culture here in America, and then erect it as a wall around them, both to keep each other in and to keep the rest out.


So here goes: I moved to D.C. Got a job. Read lots of books. Did a fair amount of writing.

*You’re welcome

**And I have a great new backup drive that backs up everything, always. Hear that, ye gremlins?

***Man, I love expressing opinions. Just love it.

I will be an extremely useful addition to your business. I will do a $1.05 worth of output for every $1 you pay me. I will sometimes come to work several minutes early and leave several minutes late. Also, just as an aside, all the time-stamps on this blog got screwed up…I would never post to my blog on company time.

More important, I would also be an extremely relaxing presence in the office. You won’t notice me at all, except for the amusing anecdote or a mildly witty comment once every two weeks. That’s it. The rest of the time all you get is the kind of genial competence and non-abrasive work habits that second-generation immigrants are renowned for. We’re won’t spend fifteen hours a day running a laundromat. But, due to a lifetime of parental pressure, we’re still pretty hard-working and conscientious.

Also, if you hire me, nothing but good things will appear about you in my blog. And if I’m going to use it to libel someone, I’ll make sure that I do it at home, so it’s not linked to your IP address.

I’m also a Democrat. But if you want me to, I can also be a Reagan Democrat. Or a Rockefeller Republican. But I draw the line at becoming a Libertarian. But I’ll vote for whomever you want. Hell, I’ll vote for you, if you want. Seriously.