Same old in the US of A

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here_and_now [1]

Karishma Attari

[2]

[3]

Rs 199

The theme of young men going off to faraway places to make their fortune is as old to the novel as, well, the novel itself. You see it in Henry Fielding’s 1749 book, Tom Jones, where loosely plotted picaresque adventures and a coming-of-age story added up to the first detectable sign of something new: a novel.

Amreekan desi, on the other hand, is about as new and original as the title sounds. There was Anurag Mathur’s The Inscrutable Americans, published nearly two decades ago, that popularised the theme of an Indian student’s misadventures in America. It’s a winning formula in a country prone to brain drain and blogger Atulya Mahajan takes it up, obviously drawing, in part, on his own experiences: A young man travels to America to pursue engineering studies and ends up learning a lot about Western culture.
There is no variation from that theme once we are introduced to Akhil and Jaspreet aka Jazz who apply for further studies to the Florida State University. This book might well be titled Student Life in America for Dummies for it has everything — the announcement of the journey, the visa interview, the good news on the visa, the packing, the arrival at the airport, the flight, the connecting flight, arrival at destination, the reception, the first morning, the first shopping trip, the first restaurant experience, and so on and so forth. This kind of writing gives most blow-by-blow accounts a lesson in rigour.
A series of comic mistakes punctuate the story as the FOB (Fresh Of the Boat) students interact with the natives. Characters are paper thin and one word descriptions are enough: Akhil the geek inadvertently enters into a nerve-wracking who-will-blink-first contest with a redneck type American truck driver when he refuses to cross the street in front of the vehicle that stops for him. Jazz the jerk is pretty confident that his Pamelaji, the actual Baywatch actress, if not a lookalike counterpart, will soon be at his side. He winds up getting punched out for touching the shoulder of an unknown blonde bombshell in New York.
The humour is sometimes relatable but Mahajan does not maintain the fine line between the absurdly humorous and the plain old absurd: Akhil’s father insists on accompanying him to the US and dropping him to his student digs and dresses in a “20-year-old navy blue Raymond’s suit” with “a leather pouch around his waist…” and “the rest of the cash across the hand baggage, wallets, and the pocket in his underwear”. The caricature turns mean, however, and Akhil’s father becomes the butt of jokes. On his first morning in America he goes on to chase a local jogger in order to answer the question tossed out in a casual greeting: “Hello, how are you doing?” Having chased the American down, Akhil’s father tells him he is feeling a little constipated and that he couldn’t sleep, as the air conditioner was cold.
Even more dismaying is the rampant tastelessness disguised as humour. An overweight Jazz’s attempts to exercise is described so: “When you are approaching 85 kilos, every minute trying to run is torture worse than the one practised in Indian jails on unsuspecting criminals.” There’s another equally stretched comparison with the kind of flurry that accompanies a water tanker arriving in a small Indian village. If Mahajan had to joke about these things in a country with a disturbing record of drought-related farmer suicides and prison human rights violations, he could have at least done it with a little more finesse.
Every fiction has its target audience and it is arguable that even the greatest fictions would appeal universally. Tom Jones may have kick-started the revolutionary novel genre but today it is the bane of literature students. Amreekan desi is a tongue-in-cheek read for a populace that is young, about to go abroad and must be warned of how their “desi” genes will get in the way of fitting in. It has some humour, it has some romance, and it is a guide where most guidebooks would fail. For one thing, yes, the Coca Cola in America does taste better than the Coca Cola in India. Also, did you know that there’s a racial hierarchy wherein even a black Subway server (nicknamed Beyonce by Jazz,) can find an FOB ridiculous? Oh, and there are other inconveniences. Akhil finds himself being addressed in Spanish in a men’s urinal. “He thought I was Latino,” lamented Akhil…. To which his friend responds, “You can’t live in Florida and not face this problem.”
As a story about young people with paper-thin characterisation, racial and gender stereotyping and mostly tactless comic misadventures, Amreekan desi is all set to become an American Pie type rip-off movie (there are a few allusions to it), down to having an ironic epilogue that states in true comic movie style how things ended. As a book it has its moments, not the least being the largely relatable experience of packing one’s emotional and physical baggage and moving to a foreign land. The Indian student packs everything from the cheapest available editions of textbooks to a tawa and somewhere in there is a great big adventure that Mahajan comes close enough to depicting.