When She Married Dr. Patekar and other Stories (Nidhi Thakur) - Read it for the Nostalgia!

The genre of Indian Americans writing stories about their lives in countries they have made their home, is not new - Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie - the list is long and illustrious. To this August list, I will cautiously venture to add the name of Nidhi Thakur, who debuts with her collection of short stories titled "When She Married Dr. Patekar and other stories". Her writing style is brilliant with the expressions painting pictures, allegorical references and descriptions with three adjectives used, often poetical and lyrical.

Right off the bat, one can sense that the stories Thakur writes, come from her life and her experiences, both the land she was born in (India) and the one she calls her home now (USA). There is the fuzzy warmth of the place she calls home today and a wistful longing for the home she left behind when she moved to a foreign land. Whether it is Mehak (in When She Married Dr. Patekar), Ragini (in The Packing) or Deepa (in Curry and Kosher), there is a bit of Thakur in every story. This is what gives authenticity to each character and makes each story arc genuine. Even where the protagonist is not a woman (The Doorman, Being Krishna) or is a woman from another country (A House for My Memories), the personal touch and hence the genuine characterization, is evident. Thakur does an excellent job of building each character (and not just the main ones) in her story and turning them into flesh and blood people - people we have met in our lives and who we can identify with.

The story that the book is named after, is of course "When She Married Dr. Patekar" - the story of Mehak, a fairly successful film star from India who one day ups and decides to leave a life of glamour and being chased by the paparazzi, gets married to an Indian origin Doctor in US and moves to her new home. What follows is endless wistful days each like the other, until Mehak finds another purpose, a challenge that consumes her till she succeeds. Life is all about making meaning and Mehak finds another passion to do this! People familiar with Bollywood will find the similarities with an actual film star who, at the peak of her career, did what the fictitious Mehak does, but after the first few paras, the story takes a different arc.

While all eleven stories keep you hooked and invested in the characters, my favorites are Family Business, Old and Wise and Those Wars. This is mainly due to the multiple hues the characters have in these stories. Family Business has a darkness the other stories do not prepare you for. Old and Wise has an unexpected twist that makes you grudgingly admire Rekha. Those Wars speaks to the trauma of generations that we inherit and which we continue to experience even if it is in opposite parts of the globe in totally different time frames. This one especially tugged at my heart - the youthful innocence of love, extreme fear in a foreign land, the desire to be accepted as part of a new land and yet be painfully aware of being an outsider, however hard you may try to fit in. Generational trauma is being studied by psychologists and there is research in how stories repeat across lifetimes - this story is a gem highlighting this.

As is the case with any work, this too will have its critique. Thakur's characters are sometimes uni-dimensional - there is only goodness in them and no shades of grey. The women specially, seem devoid of ambition and settled into blissful matrimony. Those who have careers are the ones where the marriage has failed. Some characters seem to have left the story unfinished - I really would have liked to see Sarla (in Family Business) face her childhood trauma and take steps to resolve it, maybe even take revenge. Similarly, Bobby Girl needs some further exploration and unpacking of the character of Shanta. Some stories left me with questions - does Ragini (in the Unpacking) find her new life satisfying? Do Shanu and Ajit in Firefly continue to brush their issues under the carpet to keep peace or do they face the challenge and work on their relationship? Does the Colonel in A House for My Memories say to Henrietta what he really wants to say? I guess I will never know. However, the fact that I am so invested in these characters is surely a sweet victory for Thakur!

Thakur cleverly brings in an unrelated, in the passing mention of characters from one story in another in an almost blink-it-and-you-will-miss-it manner. Does this mean that there is more where this came from and that she has a mega story in her head that she is putting words to? One where the lives of these characters across stories get intertwined and some of my questions get answered, only to give rise to more? :):) Maybe it can then be made into a full length movie, an Hindi and English cross over, with a large part showing different lives and storylines in India and US and a beautiful, intertwined trajectory in the end. It is a delicious possibility, one that I will root for and hold my breath for!