Reading The Americans by Chitra Viraraghavan is a bit like being taught a complex weaving pattern. You’re given thread after thin thread till your hands can hold no more and then told to knit them into cognisance, but the pattern just won’t show up. So you pause, examine each of the 11 story lines that run parallel through the 300-odd pages, often twisting and knotting into each other and the beauty of the braid gradually unfolds.
Told in an unending series of snapshots from the lives of both immigrant and resident Indian-Americans, with a few non-Indians included, the book presents you with shards from the broken glass of the great American dream. Pieced together, they mirror a fragmented reality.
The Americans is book-ended by the story of Tara, an English teacher and textbook writer (a career description much like the author’s own), who returns to the U.S. for three weeks to baby-sit her sister’s daughter. Her life briefly intersects with a retired widower from Madras, visiting his daughter. Tara reconnects with Madhulika — a college friend obsessed with Shah Rukh and disappointed that life doesn’t imitate Bollywood — and her husband, Vinod, balancing an extra-marital affair with wedded duties.
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Meanwhile, Tara’s sister battles with the nightmare of raising an autistic son, Rahul, in a land policed more by law than compassion, and a teenage niece Lavi who swings between her Indian roots and Americanised hormones. Into this mesh is intertwined Shantanu, closet poet and maitre de at an Indian restaurant staffed by Ludhianities and bossed by Andhra-ites, who has long overstayed his passport’s welcome.
The richness of the social fabric that Viraraghavan stitches together comes from the sheer spectrum of lives she engages with. From the luxuries of Madhulika’s mall-hopping hobbies to the grime of Shantanu’s dingy, dodgy apartment, The Americans stretches across class boundaries to paint the ugly greys of American living.
Woven into this are the inevitable complexities of race and religion. In the Indians’ interactions with other migrants, Hispanic cleaners and Filipino guards, for example, and in the stories of the Israeli housekeeper, Ariel, and African-American student Danisha, Viraraghavan traces that delicate dance of superiority and inferiority within the unspoken social hierarchy of second-class citizenship as American migrants.
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Through Akhil, a Muslim systems administrator convinced that the Uncle Sam is silently “vapourising” the migrants, Viraraghavan confronts the surveillance-induced paranoia of being Muslim in post 9/11 America.
Despite all the characters that the author juggles, and for a book titled The Americans, the white man, or woman, is conspicuously absent through the narrative.
In an age when writing about the Indian-American immigrant experience is a genre all its own, The Americans doesn’t enthral you with a fresh perspective. There are moments where its dialogue sounds hollow and the action over-dramatised, as in Tara’s bizarre night car rendezvous with a dreadlocked black man. Moreover, with the plethora of characters, segments seem indulgent in detail and peripheral characters.
Even so, Viraraghavan has moments of brilliance, especially in two excellent stylistic choices. The first is in interspersing chapters with fractions from Danisha’s diary that threads beautifully between the books she’s reading and her difficult life.
The second is Viraraghavan’s shifts of tone from Lavi’s nonchalant dismissiveness to Akhil’s blogging voice and the craftsmanship in the passages that rhythmically replicate life inside Rahul’s autistic brain. The Americans is also chock-full of insider insights into migrant life, replete with sharp comparisons to life back home, from “suspiciously brown” American bananas, to the ‘y+1’ debate and that sly nod to Indians’ magnetic tendency to compulsively congregate across oceans.
What The Americans rewards you with is this intuitive slice of life beyond borders. Just don’t let the threads fall through your fingers.
The Americans;Chitra Viraraghavan, HarperCollins, Rs.499