Author Statement-Shona Ramaya

My narratives engage with certain personal/cultural experiences that, to me, embody life in a globalized India: a constant paradoxical tension between the absurd and the mystical, life as I have felt it; a problematized experience that is intensified every moment by the easy and free mingling of technology, passion, myth, science, dreaming, history, and the belief that anything is possible if you can imagine it.

In the context of the discipline and the works of other South Asian writers, the issues in the book are not about clashes, but about mergings; they are not about moral choices, but about understandings and transformations. Currently, there are three categories of literature/fiction by South Asian writers:

1. Fiction that promotes the exotic appeal regarding India (Chitra Divakaruni, Gita Mehta, Vikram Seth)
2. Fiction that deals with ethnicity in this country—immigrant experience (Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Anita Desai)
3. Fiction by writers who are recording experience in India, either as memoirs (Abraham Verghese) or as loosely disguised autobiographies (Bapsi Sidhwa, Rohinton Mistry, Manil Suri, Shashi Tharoor).

The exotic appeal comes in various forms: a presentation of a clash of cultures via relationships in stories; woman as victim; wretched lives of poverty and squalor; colonial domination of one set of people by another or destruction of a natural agrarian society by an evil industrial one. Most of the current India writing deals with a clash of cultures, either in America—in the lives of immigrants—or in India, between the old and the new, often with a sense of feeling lost, trapped and confused.

My work goes beyond these images of rejection and separation. I would put my work in a different category and as breaking away from these trends and examining/exploring life in a transnational space. South Asians who are a floating population, traveling constantly, back and forth between the home country and America, or doing business over the internet. Addresses are not relevant anymore. Internet space serves as personal address and “dotcom” as identity. (Rushdie has delved into the subject of refashioning identities and floating “homes” in a British context.) In contrast to the above three categories, my work (past and present) does not simply present exotic terrains, it engages with and analyzes the problematic nature of the exotic. It also, as stated earlier, presents mergings instead of clashes, in a culture that has remained the same while being perpetuated more aggressively by the coming together of the old and the new.

Set on the border between modernity and tradition, where personal freedoms and cultural identity are at stake, this book is about the mergings of cultures. As a result of the new technologies and the global market, a new breed has emerged from a third world that the west doesn’t recognize anymore. The stories depict a world of paradox and parody, complex interactions between characters, situations, beliefs, and experiences past and present, exploring junctures where history or myth crosses paths with contemporary events. Pop culture and history fuse. The characters are in constant play as they negotiate political and personal boundaries. They flow with osmotic ease into a technologically heightened world in an India in flux. Their local troubles unfold on a global plane; their experiences span continents.

—Shona Ramaya