Book review: Vauhini Vara's This Is Salvaged | Outstanding collection of short stories about American life

Vauhini Vara's This is Salvaged: Stories was released in September 2023, around 16 months after the launch of The Immortal King Rao in May 2022. (Photo credit: Fourth Estate India)

Vauhini Vara, a Canadian-American journalist of Indian origin, is also the author of the novel The Immortal King Rao, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It won the Atta Galatta – Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize for fiction as well as the JK Paper – Times of India AutHER Award for best debut. The story of The Immortal King Rao, whose eponymous hero is a Dalit, blends multiple genres from the historical to the speculative. It tracks diverse timelines, from the caste-ridden India of the 1950s to a futuristic dystopia. King Rao, born on a coconut plantation in Andhra Pradesh, grows up to study engineering and moves to the US where he starts a tech company, called Coconut, that becomes so powerful that it takes over several governments and changes the way society is run.

Another novelty in Vara’s repertoire is an essay, Ghosts, that appeared in The Believer. For this essay, written after her sister’s death from cancer, Vara used an AI tool, ChatGPT 3, because she could find no other way to voice her grief. The result is a beautiful, moving piece that can be read online.

Theatre of the Family

With This Is Salvaged, a collection of 10 stories – nine have been published before in various American publications – Vara demonstrates that she is a master of the short form too. The Immortal King Rao is set partly in South India. In contrast, the short stories are drawn entirely from American settings such as Seattle and San Francisco. The characters whose names – Swati, Priya, Karthik, Anand, Mayuri – are a passing nod to an Indian immigrant past are clearly all-American. They reflect a new and separate diaspora landscape, that of second-generation immigrants, free from the identity conflicts of their parents as seen in earlier diaspora fiction. The collection thus showcases the multiculturalism of American society and how this adds to the range and vibrancy of the modern short story. What makes Vara’s short stories unique are their insightful renderings of human relationships. They offer a deeper understanding about urban life – of individuals, families, neighbourhood communities – as well as urban loneliness. Invariably, they underline the universal human need: to connect.

Childhood, Girlhood, Sisterhood, Motherhood

In You Are Not Alone, an eight-year-old girl, whose parents are divorced, flies to a new city and a new home with her father and stepmother after her own mother is institutionalized for a mental illness. Despite the stepmother’s friendly overtures, the child treats her like a stranger. The awkwardness that all three characters feel is summed up in the stepmother’s words, ‘Life is so deep it cannot be understood.’

In The Irates, a teenage girl grieving the death of her older brother says, ‘A living person is large, multitudinous. When a person is no longer living, those left behind are not up to the task of re-creating them; it can’t be done.’

While the stories are told in different narrative voices, the connection of the body and its impermanence with loss and grief is a recurrent motif in the collection. Eighteen Girls is a poignant tale about two sisters and how the younger sibling deals with the situation when the older one gets cancer.

I, Buffalo, possibly the finest story in the collection, is told in the first person by Sheila, a 34-year-old out-of-job lawyer battling with alcoholism and loneliness after her partner moves away. "He had taken the dog too, too. They had left behind a great and holy void." The story, spread over a few hours, begins when the protagonist is trying to identify the source of a bad smell in her apartment on a day when her younger sister chooses to visit with her husband and daughter. Sheila finally identifies the stink as her own vomit, though she can’t remember when she threw up. Later in the evening, her sister discovers a rotting apple core behind a cushion and begins to cry. "I swear to you, the sound of my baby sister’s voice. It reached inside of me and ruptured time."

What Next explores the relationship between a single mother and her teenage daughter who is all set to meet her biological father for the first time. In the years past, the father has written to his daughter several times, but the mother has intercepted the letters and hidden them away.

Sibyls is about an eleven-year-old girl who reads out from the Encyclopedia Britannica to an elderly neighbour who has dementia.

Climate change and the growing distance between the natural world and human society are the themes of the title story, which is about Marion, an experimental artist who creates impermanent installations out of feathers, sand leaves, human hair and waste. "He envisioned the art degrading as people interacted with it, until it transmogrified into something else altogether… The point being that in the future none of this would exist in any recognizable form… He was referring to the extinction of all terrestrial life. The universe continuing on even after we had all been atomized and wind-scattered." Marion’s most ambitious project is a life-size ark built according to the specifications in the King James Bible.

Polished, precise yet nuanced and deeply moving this collection will, hopefully, belie the old lament that short stories don’t sell. When they are this good, they deserve better.