Cultures in Transit
Writing about fiction is difficult to begin with, and writing about short
stories is even a step above that critical plateau. In high school and
college, I always resisted when my professors tried to find symbolism in
every damn aspect of a book, wondering why on earth they couldn't just
enjoy what they were reading.
A few years down the road, now, and I understand a bit better what they
meant. There is always a subtext, accidental or contrived, subconscious or
conscious, in any writer's work, and making sense of that underpinning
meaning -- again, even if the author didn't explicitly put it there
-- not only helps to understand the author him- or herself, but also to
understand the work.
So, here I am, making my way through Ticket to Minto,
Indian-American writer Sohrab Homi Fracis' first collection of stories, and
I'm finding myself looking for that underlying meaning, the thread that
ties the whole book together. Sure, I can go for the most basic idea and
say that, well, all these stories are about Indian people, but that doesn't
matter all that much, I don't think, at least not to me; for as much as I
know about Indian culture in general, the characters here might as well be
Martians. Or I could point to the continuity between the stories, how Pesi
from "Ancient Fire" is the same Pesi in "Stray", simply all grown-up and
living in America, or how Zubin Commissariat manages to pop up in three
different stories, each in a different position as a character (bystander
in "Holy Cow". the turning point of an elderly piano teacher's career in
"Keeping Time", and finally protagonist in "The Mark Twain Overlook").
Neither of those really gets to what this book is about, however. In fact,
it's in the quasi-autobiographical piece "The Mark Twain Overlook", towards
the end of the volume, that I think the author hits it on the head -- the
stories here are about being "Other", being an alien, an outsider. Fracis
may live in America, but his heart does not -- cannot, not completely --
reside here entirely, and I think that he himself knows intimately what it
feels like to be an alien.
This thread runs throughout, but it is most apparent in the specifically
Parsi stories of the collection. An ethnic and religious minority in
modern-day India, the Parsis are Zoroastrians, worshipers of the ancient
fire gods of the Fertile Crescent, descendants of Persians forced to flee
their homeland when the tide of Islam washed across the Middle East
centuries ago. Not "real" Indians to some, the Parsis of Fracis' stories
are doubly aliens, both within the explicitly Western realm and
within the predominantly Hindu and Muslim landscape of India. They remain
a small, intermarried minority in both the U.S. and India, fighting for
survival, that survival itself the subject of a number of pieces here
(especially "Holy Cow", which delves into a Parsi mother's desire to see
her daughter marry a Parsi husband and continue their family).
In "Ancient Fire", young Pesi is an outcast before he even hits puberty, a
distinction made by his bullying tormentors seemingly in part because of
his family's religion, but he finds pride and self-assurance, ironically,
in the same primordial element of fire venerated for millennia by his
ancestors. Later on, in "Strays", he is forced to choose between his
parents' Parsi traditions and those of his newfound American friends,
between his halfway-stuck-back-home-in-India Parsi girlfriend, Shenaaz, and
the allure of women in America, as "alien" to him as he is to them. Pesi
is trapped in the middle, in a kind of limbo between cultures, and this is
the area that Fracis explores best in his stories. Even the shortest story
in the collection, "Hamid Gets His Hair Cut", which is barely three full
pages long, manages to deftly encapsulate the struggles and choices of a
Muslim Indian youth in the U.S.A., while the title story, "Ticket to
Minto", illustrates how alien-ness can be found within a country, as
well as without.
The idea of limbo appears in a number of pieces, as well -- in almost all
of the stories, in fact, with the possible exception of "Flora Fountain",
which is more about staying put. This other meaning of Ticket to
Minto is almost apparent in the book's travel-sounding title; these
stories are all about a transition, usually the journey from the
protagonists' home in India to the vastly different culture of America,
which we never see in the actual stories, but also the characters' internal
transitions. Despite having reached their destination in the U.S., their
hearts and minds are still very much in motion, possibly never able to
reach an equilibrium with their physical selves. This ties in with the
above notions of alien-ness, obviously -- these transitions affect
the alien-ness, whether causing it or alleviating it, either one.
Overall, that's what really makes this book work. Naturally, it's
always fascinating to read about characters and situations foreign to us,
even in their everyday lives (if that weren't true, the science-fiction
section at the bookstore would be completely empty), but it isn't the
culture itself that Fracis focuses on -- let the scholars and
anthropologists handle that part -- but the transition, going from a
comfortable, knowable home to a place where your skin, accent, and customs
immediately label you as an outsider, as one of "them". Nearly everyone
alive knows the feeling, even if they can't necessarily recognize it right
off, and Ticket to Minto's is a valuable perspective, especially
right now, with the current of xenophobia that can be found in modern
American society. I doubt one book could ever hope to fix all that, but
every step forward is at least a step, and that's better than nothing, to
my mind.
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