50books_poc | The Red Carpet, by Lavanya Sankaran

This is a collection of loosely-linked short stories set in Bangalore. Each works as a stand-alone, but they're connected by associations between the characters (with a background friend or relative in one becoming the protagonist of another), and by shared themes of class, choice, family, Westernization and modernity.

Sankaran has a light touch, and the stories are sometimes very funny, but they're far from lightweight. What appear to be simple, predictable set-ups consistently take sharp turns into far more complex territory.

So what appears at first to be a charming story about schoolgirls obsessed with Enid Blyton (and making up stories in which people are Naked) turns out to have a bitter plot about child sexual abuse, revenge, and servitude.

Excessively-earnest American-raised university student Priya, visiting India in hopes of getting in touch with her roots, looks like she's being set up for an obvious comeuppance; instead, what she discovers is much more nuanced and her realizations are far more gently-handled.

It's a fast read and I wolfed it down, but I'm still thinking about it.

Later, Priya had written a few e-mails.

To her friends at the Tree Hugger's Cafe, she wrote: I met some people our age in a social setting, and it was such a pleasure to see that they spanned the spectrum of India: punjabi, keralite, bengali, christian, muslim, brahmin, sitting together in a spirit of great communal accord and brotherhood.

She did not mention that this meeting had taken place in a coffeehouse that looked like an upmarket Starbucks, and that the women were dressed in tank tops and skirts that ended mid-thigh; that the men had argued over the relative aesthetics of Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears, and everybody seemed to be recovering from a hangover. That would be unnecessary local color and would simply muddy the issue.

She sent the same message to Eric, along with a paragraph on how much she missed him and his muscular body (A Lot).