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"Karma and Other Stories" by Rishi Reddi (Harper Perennial, ISBN 0060898828,
$12.95)

This new collection of short stories from Rishi Reddi offers the best of two
worlds: it's a slim volume, but its pages encompass broad, stunning swaths of
experience. Its characters, too, partake of a doubled world; they move between
India and the U.S., working hard to hold down roots in both. Theirs is a
difficult balancing act, and Ms. Reddi's stories carefully and compassionately
catch each of them in the precise moments when they promise to stumble,
cartwheel, or rise.

Reddi is a masterly tale-teller whose stories have appeared in the Harvard Review and elsewhere in the past few years; “Karma and Other Stories” is her first collection. I first read her work when her story “Justice Shiva Ram Murthy” was selected for the 2005 volume of “The Best American Short Stories,” and it has proven unforgettable: a dignified elderly man, come from India to live with his daughter’s family in Boston, moves like a fish in unfamiliar waters, with his habits and instincts all out of kilter. The near breaking point comes when he’s served a beef burrito in a fast food restaurant. It’s the most forbidden food to him, and it comes on like an attack. But the justice endures, and he carries on in his new, badly tailored but serviceable American life.

Each story in "Karma" is a small, perfect window into a life in transition:
new immigrants try to find their feet, second generation Americans come to grips
with ancestral ways of choosing and marrying, and a young schoolboy battles with an overzealous teacher who condemns the Lord Krishna as Satan.
Reddi carves out each one with details that make them specific and precise but
never insular. These are Indian-American stories, and they're the stories of
everyone. Most play out in Boston, but the collection also samples life in
Hyderabad, India, and in Wichita's own Indian community.

For readers who relish a fine story, for cinema-goers who can't shake the spell
of "The Namesake," and for every curious soul eager to touch a sure hand at
nearly flawless fiction: turn the pages of "Karma and Other Stories"  and enter Rishi Reddi's engaging stretch of there-but-not, for-then-and-always, new and traditional lives.

Review by Mark David Bradshaw, May 10, 2007

 

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