Short stories of diaspora dilemma: Nishanth Injam’s The Best Possible Experience is a collection of extracts on the emotional price of relocation

Representative image. (Photo: Alejandro Cartagena via Unsplash)

For several decades now we’ve had a steady output of long and short fiction from writers like Arun Joshi, Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Divakaruni, Jhumpa Lahiri and Akhil Sharma that describe the experience of being Indian and moving to the United States. Given that Indians, besides being English literate, make up the tenth largest diaspora in the US, this is hardly surprising.  In 2022, Indian citizens accounted for 73 per cent of the total H -1B visa holders. While getting the visa is a challenge in itself, it’s nothing compared to what may and, oftentimes, does follow. The stories in The Best Possible Experience, a debut collection by techie-turned-fiction writer, Nishanth Injam, are vivid examples of the emotional price relocation extracts from individuals leaving their homes for better prospects.

Motif of marginalisation

Though a yearning for the world that has been lost is the common thread binding them, not all 11 stories are about the immigrant experience. With marginalisation as an intersecting theme, several stories are set in India. The world they reflect is the narrowness of small town India and the standard  journeys of people leaving these places.  While these journeys are aimed towards improving the circumstances of the individual characters, they are haunted by a sense of exile, loneliness and a longing akin to grief. Indeed, The Bus, a story with a strong feel of the supernatural, is about a young man’s journey in an interstate bus with a lavatory into which passengers enter and disappear. Come with Me, about a 13-year-old boy who develops an infatuation for an older teenager, talks about the continuing difficulty of parsing a traumatic experience that one is too young to understand.

Sexuality, gender, a coming-of-age are the themes of Sunday Evening with Ice Cream. This tale, with subtle overtones of feminism, has as its narrator a Class VIII schoolgirl who, typically, preoccupied by her appearance and its effect on boys, has an epiphany about the thwarted desires of the spinster aunt who takes care of her. Marginalisation is  also the theme of the title story, The Best Possible Experience, about a Dalit Christian boy whose father, a bus driver, strives to make him a commercial pilot. In the realisation of his father’s dream is woven a deep sense of loss.

Immigrants’ dilemmas

The father-son relationship reappears in Lunch at Paddy’s, which is about an Indian family newly arrived in the US: a serio-comic situation develops when one of the children issues an invitation to a class mate at school, a white boy. Overcome with status anxiety, the family is in a panic about what food to serve the guest. ‘None of them knew how to survive more than five minutes of conversation in English, let alone an entire meal.’ Likewise, irony permeates The Protocol, about a man from Rohtak, Haryana — a city, ‘with far fewer women than men, one of those places where masculinity ran like drain water on the streets’ — who arrives in the US for a PhD in biotechnology. Fantasising about having sex with a blonde woman, Gautham realises, when the semester begins, ‘that no white woman would even sit next to him in class.’ When his visa is about to expire, he marries a Black woman, a single mother in need of cash, as a ploy towards getting a green card. ‘He didn’t know what the appropriate etiquette for a wedding like this was. Wouldn’t he have to kiss the bride? What was the proper kissing etiquette in these sham marriages?’ As per the protocol agreed in advance, phones and the internet are the couple’s only means of contact. Furthermore, until the green card arrives, he has to deposit $2,500 into a joint account every month, for her to use. Meanwhile he prepares for the questions likely to come up in the forthcoming interview for the green card. Questions like What is your spouse’s favourite food? What bothers you most about your spouse? Questions meant to fabricate a sufficiently convincing version of a new self, one that the US government is willing to allow in.

The very real hurdles of reinvention are depicted in excruciating detail in The Immigrant which begins thus: ‘The long wait in the cold white hall alarmed Aditya. He held the document folder to his chest like he desired nothing more than its safety, like he wanted the authorities to know that he’d worked towards these documents; they were evidence that he could do the right thing, proof that he was normal, an ordinary immigrant, could be given a chance.’ What drives a young man to go through such an anxiety-riven experience are the usual imperatives: a broke family, a mother in need of a lung transplant. It’s his idea to come to the States ‘after learning how much he could earn,’ once he had acquired a Masters degree in AI. What follows is also the typical routine of finding affordable housing, trawling the streets for abandoned furniture, learning a new etiquette that involves things like not sitting next to a white person ‘without wearing copious amounts of deodorant,’ applying for a part-time job and coping with class lectures. ‘Half the things he heard eluded him as though he were a kindergartener sitting on an advanced math class.’ Facing racism on the street, contempt from his classmates, pity from his professors, he confronts two options. ‘He could return to India a failure and watch his mother die. Or he could stay and watch himself die, slowly, dispassionately.’

According to government data, an average of 618 Indians renounces their citizenship every day. Injam’s stories are a moving reminder that their choice, although superficially an easy one, has difficult personal consequences. Given the statistics, immigrant literature will, no doubt, continue to grow. What marks this well-crafted collection of stories as special is its candidness, as well as, the maturity of the author’s voice.