June 21, 1999

As a trend, expatriate literature is far from new. The brilliance of American writers in the Paris of the 1920s is a case in point. The current boom in writing among NRIs in the US is, therefore, scarcely novel; what is the prolificity with which women of Indian origin are producing a wondrous variety of writing. The veterans -- Anita Desai (Journey to Ithaca) or Bharti Mukherjee (Leave It To Me) -- have long been there. Now there are more: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Sister of My Heart), Anjana Appachana (Listening Now), Kiran Desai (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard). From the greater Indian diaspora too have come lyrical voices: Shani Mooto (Cereus Blooms at Night) of Trinidad and Marina Budhos (The Professor of Light) of Guyana. American publishers and book-sellers acknowledge that one reason why Indian women writers are doing better than their male counterparts is because women read more fiction than men. Co-immigrant readers apart, says Banerjee Divakaruni, there are also "a growing number of American women curious about the foreigners living in their midst". Arthur J. Pais in New York met three spunky women who have just published well-received books in the US to try and understand this exciting if definition-defying genre.

Jhumpa Lahiri: Calcutta Pilgrim
Interpreter of Maladies (Houghton Mifflin)
She was born in London, grew up in Rhode Island but set her early stories in Calcutta because of "a necessary combination of distance and intimacy"

The praise has been effusive. "You will not be able to put the book down," writes best-selling writer Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club) of debutante Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. It is not a mystery novel but in its nine stories Lahiri, 32, offers suspenseful tales. She navigates between Indian traditions, which many of her characters have inherited, and the intriguing new world they live in. In "A Temporary Matter", first published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple has to cope with a stillborn child. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and is astonished by a sudden confession.

When Lahiri -- born in London but living in the US for 30 years -- began writing seriously about a decade ago, she set her stories in Calcutta, which she has visited many times. "I went to Calcutta neither as a tourist nor was a former resident -- a valuable position, I think, for a writer," she said in a recent interview. "I learnt to observe things as an outsider and yet I also knew that, as different as Calcutta is from Rhode Island, I belonged there in some fundamental way. In the ways I didn't seem to belong in the US."

Setting the stories in Calcutta gave her a perspective, she says. "There was the necessary combination of distance and intimacy with a place." Slowly, as she gained confidence, she began writing about the situations closer to her own experiences. Published by Houghton Mifflin this month, Lahiri's book has been sold in Germany, the UK and several other countries.

Lahiri's initial attempts to be a fiction writer were rebuffed as several schools rejected her graduate school application. "Now I know that was a blessing in disguise," she says. Lahiri took up a job as a research assistant at a non-profit institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had a computer of her own. There she stayed late and came in early -- to work on her stories.

Eventually she had enough material to apply to the creative writing programme at Boston University. But once it ended, she did not know how and where to sell her stories or book projects. So she went into a PhD programme. "But it was never something I loved," she says candidly. So she continued writing stories for literary magazines.

But things took a dramatic turn when she was accepted to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, two years ago. "It was something like a miracle," she says, "in seven months I got an agent, sold a book and had a story published in The New Yorker. It has been the happiest possible ending." That happy ending has nudged her to work on her first novel -- yet another probe into young immigrant lives.

Sujata Massey: Zen Mysterywomen
The Flower Master (Harper Collins)
The first Indian to win the Agatha Award for crime fiction continues plotting Japanese adventures for her multicultural sleuth

With her very first novel, The Salaryman's Wife, Sujata Massey won popular acclaim. People magazine named it the "Page-Turner of the Week" and it won the 1997 Agatha Award for debut mystery novel. With it Massey became the first Indian to win what is perhaps crime fiction's most coveted award. With The Flower Master -- third in a series set in Japan -- Baltimore-based Massey, 35, has made it to the big league.

"Her best yet," says best-selling novelist Laura Lippman (Butcher's Hill), "intricate plotting and writing as beautiful as the ikebana described herein." Massey, born in England of an Indian father and a German mother, has lived in the US for nearly three decades. With a masters in journalism from Johns Hopkins University, she joined the now defunct Baltimore Evening Sun. "I probably would have written about fashion and food forever had I not been courted by a navy medical officer who made an offer I could not resist: marriage and the chance to live abroad," she chuckles.

While she lived in Japan for two years, Massey not only learnt Japanese but also began plotting her novels. She was not interested in presenting the super-efficient and clean-as-Switzerland Japan. She wanted to write about real people. But how did she get to create Rei Shimura, the amateur but gutsy and imaginative sleuth? "I purposely chose to write about a foreigner who can almost pass for Japanese because that was my experience too," she says.

Shimura is multicultural. Born in the US, she has a Japanese father and an American mother. Massey shares with her a confusion over ethnic identity: "Rei would like to be treated like a Japanese native, but her manners aren't quite right." But Massey is quick to add that despite her own confusion, "within a few days of arriving in India, I feel at home". Maybe Rei Shimura could crack her next case in India.

Bharti Kirchner: Word Technician
Sharmila's Book (Penguin/Dutton)
The lady wrote software for IBM. Then she chucked it up to write cookbooks-and novels on the immigrant experience.

Seattle-based Bharti Kirchner comes from a "family of big-time story tellers". She has not done too badly herself. Her second novel, Sharmila's Book, has just been released. But it was years before she actually got down to writing. As a systems manager at Bank of America, San Francisco -- at the bank, she also met her husband Tom -- Kirchner, in her late 40s, toyed with the idea of writing fiction.

About a decade ago she took leave of absence from her job at IBM and enrolled for a year-long non-fiction writing course at the University of Washington. "At the end of the course I did not want to return to IBM or any other firm," she says. Instead she wrote her first cookbook, Healthy Cuisine of India: "I was going to earn a fraction of what I made at IBM. But I wanted a more romantic and creative life."

Soft-spoken Kirchner says, "When you have written successful cookbooks many people find it difficult to believe you can write novels that explore deep inner conflicts." Her cookbooks, she argues, sprang up between software writing and novel writing: "The mindset is so different for fiction -- it kind of takes over. And that's the state I've been in for the last few years."

Many of the characters in Sharmila's Book are as multicultural as Kirchner: "When you live in as interesting times as we do and try to understand what it means to be an American for a person raised in India, isn't it natural that your novels address that theme?" The story revolves around Sharmila, an artist born and raised in Chicago by her immigrant parents. Though savvy and hip, she is a failure in relationships and turns to her mother for an arranged match in India. But the arrangement brings acute culture clashes.

Is Kirchner tempted to write a cookbook in between her fiction? "That phase of my life is over," she shrugs. "Now when people ask me what's cooking, I say, 'Well, yet another novel'."

© Living Media India Ltd