May 4
By Joanna Antoniak
Using fictional female characters, Nadeem Aslam highlights that the South Asian women living in the exile in the United Kingdom often find themselves exiled to the margin of the society before they even have a chance to assimilate with the host culture which, combined with trauma caused by their exile, forces them into personal exile.
By Rima Bhattacharya
America provides Panna with an opportunity to not only reconstruct her identity but also to perform new socio-cultural roles. It also opens for her new possibilities to develop life-long friendships with other migrants inhabiting New York. The American metropolis decolonizes Panna and inserts her into a space, where interracial erotic encounters are possible, quite unlike in India.
By Saumya B Verma
While I grapple with my own realities and memory-making in the new city, I identify with both Shai and Yasmin but only in parts. I continue my encounters with the city in both the domestic and professional realms – doing rapid rounds of groceries, cooking copious amounts of food, cleaning and washing, watching neighbours shovel their driveways and on other sunny days visiting film festivals, attending courses at the university, volunteering in the community, reading new authors, making new friends!
By Kaustav Bakshi
This article focuses on a Sri Lankan expatriate novel, Mary Anne Mohanraj’s Bodies in Motion (2005), a family saga that moves between Sri Lanka and the United States, spanning a timeline of six decades. Told in twenty interconnected short stories, the intense dramatic saga of the Kandiahs and the Vallipurams is built on a series of family secrets that unravels myths of purity, happiness, romantic coupling, parent-child relationship, and sexual desire.
Café Dissensus 