The best possible experience

Review by Booklist Review

Eleven gems make up Injam's stellar debut short-story collection showcasing exquisite quotidian beauty haunted by seemingly inevitable loss--of home, family, lovers, identity--among contemporary citizens of a global diaspora. Indian-born, Chicago-based Injam underscores that limbo in "The Immigrant," in which an Indian graduate student arrives in the U.S. with grandiose plans for a high-paying job with which he will save his mother's life. In "The Protocol," marriage to a stranger might be the only path to securing a green card. In "Lunch at Paddy's," a recently immigrated Indian family struggles to prepare lunch for their young son's friend who will be their first-ever white guest; alas, googling "what to cook for white people" and "things white people say" yields no obvious answers. Annual sojourns home are always bittersweet for a young woman visiting her beloved octogenarian grandfather who raised her in "Summers of Waiting." In "The Bus," a young man journeying homeward recalls the brother he lost in childhood as his fellow passengers keep disappearing into the bathroom. A false accusation between haves and have-nots destroys two generations of a family in "The Zaminder's Watch." A husband mourns his beloved wife in "The Sea." A son honors his overbearing, over-caring father in "The Best Possible Experience," which proves to be exactly what Injam provides lucky readers.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The protagonists in Injam's dynamic and insightful debut collection explore cultural identity and family relationships in India and the U.S. In "The Bus," the narrator, a customer support worker for Bank of America, takes an hours-long bus ride from Bengaluru to his hometown to visit his parents. The trip turns eerie as one passenger after another gets up to use the restroom and then disappears, and the remaining passengers feel the need to escape as the air in the bus grows increasingly cold. It seems their journey ends in their deaths, though a playful tone offsets the morbid theme ("I knew about planes, but I didn't know these things happen on buses too," the narrator's seatmate tells him). In "The Immigrant," Aditya plans to relocate to Philadelphia from India to help earn money for his mother's lung transplant. On arrival in the U.S., he's met at the airport by Indian students who advise him on how to act around white people. The inventive form of "The Math of Living" conveys how a coder at the Chicago Tribune reflects in mathematical terms on his impending visit back to India, where he expects everything to be "formulaic" after reuniting with his family ("My father will do or . My mother will do or "). Injam succeeds in equal measure with the variety of styles, and he offers enriching details about the various experiences his characters face as immigrants and offshore workers. This is a triumph. (July)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Young Indians and Indian Americans try to find their footings in the world in this contemplative debut story collection. In "The Bus," the opening story, a man embarks on what proves to be a strange and unexpectedly perilous visit to his hometown. In "Summers of Waiting," a woman living in the U.S. returns to India to visit the dying grandfather who raised her. For Aditya, in "The Immigrant," his first semester as a graduate student in the U.S. is a struggle to survive. In "The Protocol," another Indian immigrant seeking to stay in the U.S. takes a chance by marrying an American woman for a visa. Most of Injam's characters experience deep emotion but don't know how to communicate their love and longing, perhaps constrained by societal expectations of their gender, sexuality, or religion in expressing how they feel. Many of the stories serve as eloquent meditations on grief, but "Lunch at Paddy's," which tries to be more lighthearted, falls flat. In it, a man named Padmanabham is bewildered by what to serve when his son invites a White school friend to lunch. While some of the humor lands (what kind of grocery store doesn't stock Maggi?), the story's attempt to showcase the multifaceted anxieties of recent immigrants doesn't quite work; why doesn't anyone, including the two kids plenty exposed to American culture, suggest ordering a pizza? But almost every other story offers readers at least one moment of pure literary satisfaction. Linked by theme and tone, the entries are different enough to merit the reader's investment in the rich worlds the author creates for each of them. While the collection takes little risk, it offers an array of characters and circumstances that capture contemporary concerns with grace; the language, well-rendered details, and strong story structures combine to deliver revelations. Injam's title story, in particular, is a testament to his command of the short form. Injam comes close to fulfilling the promise of his title with these meticulously crafted narratives. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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The Bus The bus has a bathroom. Other buses that leave Bengaluru for my hometown don't have bathrooms. They pull over on the highway when you have to pee, or they stop at a dhaba and the driver asks passengers to go so he won't have to make extra stops along the way. The bus is a luxury coach, dark brown from the outside. It has a thirty-two-inch TV and reclining seats and air-conditioning, all of which makes me think: What a good deal. It's the Diwali weekend and every long-distance coach is full of techies going home. Securing a ticket was impossible, but then I came across a new office at the back of the bus station, a travel company by the name of Alphonso Tours, and they made it happen. The driver is busy tinkering with a hearing aid as I get on the bus. "Don't use the bathroom for number two. Only number one," he says, not bothering to look up. I feel the air-conditioning already--sweet. The bus is nearly full. I look at my ticket: 20B. An aisle seat next to a bearded man on his phone, music blasting out of his earbuds. I sit down and relax my feet and begin watching the Bollywood film playing on the TV, a film in which the hero shoves the heroine from the roof of a tall building. Nothing like a movie to alleviate the boredom of an overnight bus ride. We're past the outskirts of the city now, and farmland has started to appear on either side of the road. I haven't gone home in months, and I'm torn--can you tell, K? An hour passes. The bearded man takes a selfie and posts it on Instagram. I turn my neck to stretch, and the seat behind me is empty. I remember seeing an old woman with a large nose there, and I can't tell if she's moved to a different seat or if I'm confusing her with someone I know from somewhere else. My eyes fall on the bathroom; that's it. She's gone to the restroom. But then a passenger in the front, a burly man in 5D, stands up and closes the bathroom door behind him. I turn to my back and count six empty seats in the dark. I don't remember seeing so many empty seats when I got on. Weird. Must be exhaustion. I continue watching the movie. Five minutes later my eyes drift toward the bathroom. The burly man still hasn't come out. 5D is empty and I'm disgusted. This man hasn't listened to what the driver said. Instead, he's taking an extraordinary dump. People are like that, I guess. A lot of passengers are sleeping, some snoring. The bearded man next to me is watching a YouTube video on his phone: a man keeps springing a toy snake in people's faces and capturing their reactions. My neighbor laughs whenever the prank results in an especially outsized response. I try sleeping, but the movie is loud. I take deep breaths, but sleep doesn't come. I can sleep on the bus only if I'm in a window seat. You know that, K. You must remember the time we went on a school picnic and you took the window seat, not on the way to the orchard but on the way back home. Our bellies were stuffed with mangoes, and I told you the bus would make me puke if I didn't have the window and you called my bluff and we fought over it. God, the kids we were, it wasn't a pretty sight. You were stronger than me and you felt that you'd won, but I clutched at my throat and retched hard enough for some phlegm to fall on my shorts. You were sorry; you gave me the window seat and offered the kerchief Mom tucked in your shirt pocket. When I began to feel the mangoes in my throat, you told me to take deep breaths and sleep until the feeling subsided. I remember your face, blank, staring ahead, thinking who knows what, as I sloped against the window, falling asleep. Now you're dead and I'm stuck on this bus. It's nothing new. You've been dead for a while, long enough for me to nod when people ask if I'm an only child. Long enough for me to forget that I had a brother. When you're twenty-three, everything that happened in childhood feels like a lifetime ago. That's just the way it is. Sorry, K. I don't think of you often. Except when I'm on a bus and I'm going home, and what home is has changed irrevocably, not because I live and work in Ben­galuru now, away from our parents, although I shouldn't say our parents because they're not the parents you'd remember, they're my parents now, and I promise there's no satisfaction in claim­ing them for myself. It's just that people change and they're not who they were, nobody is, and that's what I'm trying to say, that life has changed for all of us, and home has too. We no longer live in the one-bedroom apartment on the hill; we fell to the ghetto soon after you died. What home is has changed so much that I don't even know how to define it, but here I am, just thinking about all the ways it's changed, and you, K, are on the top of that precipice. The first thing anyone sees at home is a garlanded photo taken on your tenth birthday. You're grinning stupidly and mak­ing a victory sign. It might be the only photo of you that doesn't include me. Did you know that Mom doesn't make beef curry anymore because she can't stop herself from bringing up the fact that you used to gnaw at the shin like a dog? Or that Dad carries a passport photograph of you in his wallet to remind himself that if he'd had enough money, he'd have been able to afford the surgery for your head injury? After you died, I became the center of attention. Not right away, of course, but with time, which is what I'd always wanted, but not like that. You were always their favorite, you could make them laugh, make them feel like parents. I just make them feel like needy children now. I send them money, but I never answer their calls or tell them about my life in the city. What's there to tell? I don't go home except when Mom pleads and pleads. When I'm home, how can I ignore your stupid grin? How can I take their attention all for myself? I never have this problem in the city. There, people just see me as me; they don't think of me as a stand-in for the other. I open my eyes. 5D is still empty. Has the burly man passed out on the toilet and hurt himself? Then the bathroom door slides open, as though the person who last used it failed to latch it properly. The room is empty. Where has he gone? Excerpted from The Best Possible Experience: Stories by Nishanth Injam All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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