Feet in both worlds

The Red Carpet: Bangalore Stories by Lavanya Sankaran; The Dial Press; May 2005; $23 (hardcover)

"Two Four Six Eight" is about a ten-year-old who attends an all-girls school to get a 'convent education' and learn 'How to Be English and How to Be Good.' The main theme is the girl's relationship with her ayah, Mary, who has two faces: a deceptively sweet one for her employer, and another for the little girl, often getting her in trouble at home and at school. What's striking, even troubling, here is the schoolgirls' strong desire to be English--fueled by a steady diet of Enid Blyton's stories of children solving mysteries and eating scrumptious ham-and-watercress sandwiches and pie--and their confusion over having to recite the 'Lord's Prayer' at school, where they suspend their individual religious beliefs for eight hours. They receive a valuable education, but at the cost of trying to figure out if they are 'English enough.'

In "Bombay This," we meet Ashwini, whose life in the even-more-Westernized city of Bombay has given her a confidence and sexuality that many of her peers lack. Men want a woman like Ashwini to hang on their arms at parties and possibly to sleep with, but at the end of the day, she's the type of girl who's considered inappropriate because she's not a 'traditional Indian girl.'

Which brings us to the issues of premarital sex, smoking and drinking--all frowned upon in conservative societies. In "Birdie Num-Num" (yes, a tribute to Peter Sellers; Sankaran refers to his role in The Party), the author presents the generation gap, with the typical Indian parents whose soon-to-be-PhD daughter, Tara, is spending the summer at home. The mother is a contradictory character: She's serving pesto canapés alongside minced mutton kebabs, imported sherry and wine at a cocktail party, but her aim is to introduce her daughter to eligible bachelors. 'Tara is twenty-seven, and no matter how many PhDs she earns, it is time now for her to learn to be a good wife and mother, just as her mother and grandmother have done in their turn,' sums up her philosophy. Tara, who's been intimate with her American ex-boyfriend, has no desire to follow in her mother's footsteps. It's a problem many young women in the East face--for a better education, they are sent to America or England, where they battle between the values drilled into their heads from childhood and the ones they encounter in the West. Then they are expected to come home, settle down with a 'nice boy' and have babies.

In "The Red Carpet," Sankaran's strongest story (which debuted in The Atlantic magazine), we witness the juxtaposition of the lives of the socialites and their help. Mrs. Choudhary and Raju, her driver, come from vastly different backgrounds but share a strange bond. Although Raju disapproves of 'May-Dum's' (Madam's) revealing Western clothes and her penchant for smoking and drinking alcohol (he considers her behavior 'immoral'), he has a strong commitment to her. There is poignancy in the details, such as the time May-Dum promises to visit Raju's home, and he spends money cleaning and preparing ('His family had used precious water to scrub themselves clean . . . His wife had prepared a sweet and a savory with ghee . . . he had bought specially for the occasion.'). He worries that May-Dum will forget or that she'll show up in yet another indecent getup. But she comes through, dressing and behaving with decorum. Another touching scene is when May-Dum visits her mother-in-law, who lectures her on her attire and hands her a bag with saris for her and dresses for her daughter. May-Dum, in tears on the drive home, gives the clothes to Raju for his family. He protests: 'But May-Dum, they are brand-new,' after all, he's accustomed to hand-me-downs.

Sankaran draws upon her experiences in both the East and the West, painting a picture of a progressive Indian city (more effectively in some stories than in others) in which a section of society is just as cosmopolitan as its counterpart in New York or Los Angeles. And she leaves the reader wondering: How are we surviving with our feet in both worlds?

Farah Ameen is a freelance magazine editor in New York City.