You Bring the Distant Near

In An Alien Land

You Bring the Distant Near by Mitali Perkins is slightly different from the many Bengalis in the US stories (Bharti Mukherjee, Chita Banerji Divakaruni, Jhumpa Lahiri) in that part of the Das family’s immigrant experience involves interactions with black people.

The book has autobiographical elements as it briskly tells the story of Rajeev and Ranee Das who move with their two daughters Tara and Sonia from Kolkata to Ghana to London and finally to New York in the 1970s. There are the usual adjustment problems, Ranee is concerned that their Flushing neighbourhood is black, and her racism to so deeply set that Sonia does not dare to invite her black friends home.

Sonia is the dark-skinned, studious one, who grows up to be a journalist, while her sister Tars is movie-star pretty and does end up as a Bollywood actress, but that part of the story is kept of the pages. The narration is by Tara and Sonia by turns, and one can’t but note that the book could do with a lot more detailing. There are TV serial like jumps in time, and the reader is left to imagine what might have transpired in the intervening years.

 Later, Tara’s daughter Anna and Sonia’s half-black daughter Shanti/Chantal take over the narration; Anna moves from Mumbai to New York and the reader gets yet another dose of cultural adjustment. The stories of the five women are mildly interesting, and the book is quick read, but it’s the sketchiness  that prevents it from rising above the mundane. There cannot be a novel about Bengalis without several mentions of Rabindranath Tagore, but mercifully, there is no Durga Puja sequence. The one Hindu ritual is hilariously conducted by a hippie priest!

You Bring the Distant Near

By Mitali Perkins

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 303