"Newberry" - A Short Story by Chaya Bhuvaneswar - from her debut collection, White Dancing Elephants - 2018

Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a practicing physician on the front lines in New York City, a Rhodes Scholar, and a highly acclaimed short story author 

"Newberry" - A Short Story by Chaya Bhuvaneswar - from her debut collection, White Dancing Elephants - 2018

In the nearly eleven years in which i have maintained The Reading Life i have never seen as much attention given to a debut Short story collection as that given to White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar.  So far I  have posted on eight of her marvelous very creative stories, all deal with the interaction of persons of Indian background with western countries.  

I have  recently  reread The Anatomy of Criticism by Northrup Frye.  He talks extensively and very learnedly about the various ways in which myths are used to structure literary works. In today's story and others of her work  I read prior to today we can see Bhuvaneswar very profoundly use ancient Indian myths not only as part of the rhetorical structure of her stories but she shows us how people retreat into deeply rooted ancient archetypal myths to help with the otherwise unfathomable aspects of their lives.  She overlays the ancient myths with modern reality. 

As "Newberry" opens Vinita is taking a smoke break from her job at a Massachusetts beauty salon.  She has worked there for years, hating the customers.  She knows most of the patrons look down on her.  She and her boyfriend are from India.  Her boss Leo launders money for organised crime.  Vinita and her boyfriend are in the final stages of embezzling from Leo, enough to escape.

We see how the rationalizes the theft, her plans for escape.  Her life is a mess.

There is much more to this story.  Lovers of the short story will want to read the entire collection.

https://chayabhuvaneswar.com/

Chaya Bhuvaneswar studied Indian poetic traditions with the support of an NEH Younger Scholars grant and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, concentrating in Sanskrit. She has received a Time-Life Writing Award as well as a Yale Elmore Willetts Prize for Fiction. Her short stories have been anthologized in Her Mother’s Ashes 2,and featured on the Other Storiespodcast. An Affiliated Fellow in Writing at the Boston University Center for the Study of Asia, she lives in Newton, Massachusetts.She is a practicing physician.

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"Jagatishwaran" - A Short Story by Chaya Bhuvaneswar. From her debut collection, White Dancing Elephants, 2018

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"Jagatishwaran" - A Short Story by Chaya Bhuvaneswar. From her debut collection, White Dancing Elephants, 2018

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You can read today's story here.

A Lockdown Read

In the nearly eleven years in which i have maintained The Reading Life i have never seen as much attention given to a debut Short story collection as that given to White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar.  So far I  have posted on five  of her marvelous very creative stories, all deal with the interaction of persons of Indian background with western countries.  

I have  recently  reread The Anatomy of Criticism by Northrup Frye.  He talks extensively and very learnedly about the various ways in which myths are used to structure literary works. In today's story and others of her work  I read prior to today we can see Bhuvaneswar very profoundly use ancient Indian myths not only as part of the rhetorical structure of her stories but she shows us how people retreat into deeply rooted ancient archetypal myths to help with the otherwise unfathomable aspects of their lives.  She overlays the ancient myths with modern reality. 

"Jagatishwaran" is narrated by the only unsuccessful child in a large Bombay family, the youngest, a boy. His siblings all have highly professional jobs.  He is fancies himself a painter, working on a mural based on classical Hindu mythology.  He lives at home and is a great disappointment to his father.  His father is very verbally abusive to him.  He suffers from various delusional mental disorders.

His sister, a physician, is at home on her annual visit from America, along with her adolescent daughter and younger son, bringing lots of gifts. Of course her presence only makes him stand out more as a burden on the family. We learn a good bit about how the family, affluent with servants functions.  Foodies will savour the descriptions of the meals.

Jagatishwaran is a regular patron of prostitutes.  It seems he feels more comfortable at the home of the women he regularly 

sees than his own family.  

The family dynamics are masterfully depicted.  Jagatishwaran establishes a bond with his neice and she confides in him.

I give my total endorsement to all lovers of the short story to White Elephants Dancing.

https://chayabhuvaneswar.com/

Chaya Bhuvaneswar studied Indian poetic traditions with the support of an NEH Younger Scholars grant and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, concentrating in Sanskrit. She has received a Time-Life Writing Award as well as a Yale Elmore Willetts Prize for Fiction. Her short stories have been anthologized in Her Mother’s Ashes 2,and featured on the Other Storiespodcast. An Affiliated Fellow in Writing at the Boston University Center for the Study of Asia, she lives in Newton, Massachusetts.She is a practicing physician.

Heitor - A Short Story by Chaya Bhuvaneswar - From White Dancing. Elephants- 2018

In the nearly ten years in which i have maintained The Reading Life i have never seen as much attention given to a debut Short story collection as that given to White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar.  So far i have posted on four of her marvelous very creative stories, all have death as a core factor and deal with the interaction of persons of Indian background with western countries.  

I have just finished Reading The Anatomy of Criticism by Northrup Frye.  He talks extensively and very learnedly about the various ways in which myths are used to structure literary works. In all three of the stories I read prior today we can see Bhuvaneswar very profoundly use ancient Indian myths not only as part of the rhetoric structure of her stories but she shows us how people retreat into deeply rooted ancient archetypal myths to help with the otherwise unfathomable aspects of their lives.  She overlays the ancient myths with modern reality.  

Early European commercial ventures into South and South East Asia societies by England were fronted by The British East India company.  The Portuguese and the Dutch also gave near sovereign power to trading companies.  Human beings were among the items traded.  John Bull was a slaver and a rapist.  Most colonial explorers and traders were single men.  Of course, as the narrator of this story tells us, they wanted women,either as wives or slaves.  Slaves from India were regarded differently from African:

"Small for his age then, easily bound, Heitor was brought by ship and force, by sons of spice traders, by members of large prosperous companies, brothers of men who had settled in Goa, the place in India where the first human remains of the Old World were found. Those traders had married the most beautiful Indian women they could find, converting them to Christianity with jewels stolen from their own ancestors. Heitor was sold for an elite price to work for the nuns of Evora, and their novitiates. Indian, Chinese, Japanese slaves were bought and sold in Portuguese as males, than African slaves, and thus allowed to work in the convents. As a child, he was striking for his quietude, forming a graceful harmony with the aggressive potential of his prematurely hard and strong limbs. Beginning at the quick, observant, diligent age of eight, Heitor was saved from harder labor, given to the convent’s Indian gardener and its cook. They were nowhere to be found on his last night. The men, lovers, were hiding for fear of being chained. They were both drunk and in despair that they had not foreseen his fate."

Heitor was sentenced to death for sexual contact with Portuguese nuns.  There is an interesting plot in the story.  It also turns on sexual relations between enslaved persons and Europeans.

https://chayabhuvaneswar.com/

Chaya Bhuvaneswar studied Indian poetic traditions with the support of an NEH Younger Scholars grant and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, concentrating in Sanskrit. She has received a Time-Life Writing Award as well as a Yale Elmore Willetts Prize for Fiction. Her short stories have been anthologized in Her Mother’s Ashes 2,and featured on the Other Storiespodcast. An Affiliated Fellow in Writing at the Boston University Center for the Study of Asia, she lives in Newton, Massachusetts.She is a practicing physician.

This story is part of our Stories by South Asian Women Project.

Oleander Bousweau 

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The Goddess of Beauty Goes Bowling,” - A Short Story by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

Website of Chaya Bhuvaneswar

Gateway to Chaya Bhuvaneswar on The Reading Life

Website of the Publisher- Dance Books

“The Goddess of Beauty Goes Bowling” - A Story from White Elephants Dancing by Chaya Bhuvaneswer - 2018

“His wife was still young, stubborn enough to run up the train steps and then come down looking worried, roaming the street. She would be looking for Shree, always for her. Shree, of course, would be safe and comfortable. Oblivious—but not in a serene way, not like the god Vishnu asleep on a serpent in the cold deep. To Gopi, rather, his daughter was the serpent, rapaciously devouring them. At fifty-eight, Gopi shouldn’t have felt like an old man. His wife Lakshmi’s face was as young-looking and round as it had been on their wedding day. Though she looked more like a younger sister, people knew her to be his young wife. His hold was too possessive anything else. From the beginning he had worried not only that she would outlive him, but that she would have to care for him as an invalid. There was nearly a twenty-year age difference between them. To some it seemed like a scandal, a thirty-eight-year-old bachelor finally marrying a nubile, intelligent nineteen-year-old girl from a good family. It was Gopi’s reward for his father’s years of company service and longstanding friendship with Lakshmi’s father. But her father knew, after all, that he would love her to his death, care for her, shelter her with the last scrap of clothing he possessed, like Nala in the Mahabharata, who took off his one remaining garment and used it to cover his beautiful, half-naked wife once they were exiled into poverty.”

Today’s story, “The Goddess of Beauty Goes Bowling” will resonate with any less than saintly parent who cannot always escape wondering if their life has been ruined by the burden of a developmentally developed child.  The story, set in Elmhurst, New Jersey centers on Mr. Neelakanta Vaikuntashyamala Gopisundaram Iyer, Gopi to his friends, his wife Lakshmi, their son and their daughter Shree.  Shree is 12 but mentally is five, the doctors say she will never develop past that age.  She moved to New Jersey first then sent for him, his wife teaches special needs children,from a proud family back in India, of lawyers and engineers,he has not worked in years. Gopi is old before his time. For a while, he had a small inheritance but now his wife supports the family.  Their son is attending a quality private school back home, sponsored by relatives.  His days are taken up with domestic minutia and caring for Shree.

As one would, his wife and he are terribly worried about what will happen when she grows to adult years, never can she marry but will always be someone’s dependent.

Shree has committed to memory a traditional myth, a liturgical prayer which she often recites, loudly, normally she must seek permission to speak in a higher volume, somehow these myth induces Gopi to project ancient depths on his situation. As she did in “White Dancing Elephants”, Bhuvaneswar interlays motifs from South Asian traditions over the lifes of immigrants living in London or New Jersey.

There is a lot to ponder and enjoy in this story.  The ending is chilling.  

This story is one of seventeen in Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s highly regarded debut collection, White Dancing Elephants.  It is the third one upon which i have posted.  I anticipate posting on several more, quite possibly all seventeen.  

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"Neela: bhopal, 1984" - A Short Story by Chaya Bhuvaneswar - From her collection White Dancing Elephants - 2018

Website of Chaya Bhuvaneswar

I first became aware of the amazing stories of Chaya Bhuvaneswar in a news letter from PEN.  It was announced that she, along with four other writers, was shorted  listed for their annual award for Best Debut Short Story Collection. On her website, one of the best and most respectful to readers of author websites I am familiar with, I learned of numerous awards and looked through the glowing reviews.  

Years ago when I first began posting on short story collections I followed standard procedures, post briefly on a few of the stories then conclude with metaphor laden concluding remarks and issue a recommendation.  Sometime ago I moved toward focusing on individual stories.  If I like a writer as much as I do Chaya Bhuvaneswar I post on numerours of the stories.  This seems more respectful of the writer, better for serious readers and for me also.  Writing about a work seems to increase my understanding and helps me recall the story.

Last month i read and posted upon the wonderful title story, “White Dancing Elephants”.  Today I am posting on a very different story, one you may read at the link above.

I am a bit embarrassed to admit it did not know  about Bhopal disaster before today.  On December 2nd, 1984 a gas leak occurred at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India owned by Union Carbide.  It produced the worst in history industrial disaster.  Over 500,000 people were injured by the gas leak.  3500 were acknowledged immediate casualties and up to twenty thousand died with in weeks.  Over 30,000 suffered permanent injuries. (The long legal battle to seek reparations is detailed in my links.) Many were blinded.

“Not for another thirty or maybe a hundred years will the water and land be safe again, as pure and unpolluted as they were hours before. Before the air burned and became a hateful thing. neela: bhopal, 1984  Eight thousand years ago, children huddled with their mothers Eight thousand years ago, children huddled with their mothers in cool caves. Those caves are hidden deep in a forest, miles from here, and would have been so much safer than shantytowns around the factory in Bhopal City, the easily penetrated houses of corrugated metal and scavenged plywood. The walls of those shacks are sheets of plastic with small holes...”

She awakes to find her three brothers dead.  She runs to the forest,trying to escape.

“All three of your brothers, limber and clever boys, were gifted at nosing out delectable refuse, edibles in the garbage. They were like scavenging dogs, little ponies. Long ago they nicknamed you Neelagai—antelope, for your thin quick legs, your skill at finding enough unspoiled food for all of them—and when they pretended to hunt you, none of them could find you here. Other hunters have found you at the edge of your forest: methyl isocyanate, fleet-footed mercury, and Sevin, the most experienced killer, creeping like ground brush."

This is a heartbreaking story, of indifference and greed of the very rich inflicting horrible cruelty on thousands of the poorest people in Bhopal.

The last words are hard to cope with.

I will read all of her stories.

CHAYA BHUVANESWAR is a practicing physician and writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, The Awl, Tin House, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, story South, aaduna, r.k.v.r.y. and elsewhere. She has received a Henfield writing award, a Rhodes scholarship, and is a frequent public speaker on social justice as well as trauma and recovery. Her debut short story collection, White Dancing Elephants, was selected as the winner of Dzanc Books' 2017 Short Story Collection Prize.  From  the publisher's webpage

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The Story may be read by clicking here

Times of India on The Role of Union Carbide in the Bhopal Disaster

Comprehensive Information on The Bhopal Disaster

Gateway To Chaya Bhuvaneswar on The Reading Life