This is an enjoyable book that spans a variety of settings, moods and characters in its eight stories. We know these characters because we, of the diaspora, have met them as it were -- parents who visit their daughter in the U.S.; a billboard painter in Chennai amorously fantasizing as he recreates film-stars with his deft paint brush and jealously shielding the modesty of his curvaceous creation; children in a doll factory in India; a family mourning their dead baby. The book is particularly relevant and enjoyable for a diaspora reader because it moves between India and north America with easy familiarity, and delineates each situation with humour and sympathy.

The writer who comes to mind is R.K.Narayan, who knew how to give life to ordinary characters we meet or see every day, and observed little details that we tend to gloss over. Like Narayan's world, this is a world full of decent, rather lovable everyday people, where there are no crooks even if one or two indulge in some crooked ways. There are different kinds of humour; for example the humour of situation where a young woman living with her boy-friend removes every trace of his presence from her home in preparation for her parents' visit; the humour of irony when two young people who want to do their own thing because they think of themselves as unconventional turn out to be exactly who their parents would have chosen for them in an arranged marriage.

As in Narayan, we see gentle satire, where the billboard painter dreams of getting an assignment to paint the Chief Minister because her ample dimensions would keep him employed for days. One wishes, as one does with Narayan, that the author would not race through with the plot and storyline but go deeper into the inner workings of the characters' minds. Everything is rather too much on the surface, and we never delve into characters' psyches, or traverse the inarticulate deserts and floods of emotional turmoil.

If one wanted to indulge in postcolonial jargon, one could talk about child labour and outsourcing work to India, in The Bharati Doll, where children are in the assembly line putting together Jiyajee (G.I.Joe) and Barbie, renamed Bharati. Or one could just enjoy the fun situations in the stories -- the children's obsessive yearning for Barbie's shoe and G.I.Joe's cross-bow; a visiting father in U.S. enticed by what Viagra ads offer - and one could cry over the intense poignancy of bereavement as parents and grandmother grieve in separate circles of grief and can let go only when they grieve together.

This volume is a happy change from the usual stereotypes of women crushed by a cruel man or a cruel world. Even where a couple is caught in a triangle, it is the man who seems the greater victim of the arranged marriage situation.

What I liked about the stories is the way they depict the lifestyles of the younger members of the diaspora. The characters in the four stories with an American setting are first generation diaspora members, born in India and now living in the United States. Young and ready to take all that life offers, they are "with it" in every way, whether it is in the challenges of student academic life or in the more personal choices such as living together with lovers.

Book Description: Modern India and its people spilling over its borders into contemporary life in America form the backdrop of these stories. In one story is Muruga, an illiterate billboard painter, with a lascivious eye on his billboard creation, at odds with the shameless gawkers at his half clad sultry siren. In another is irrepressible Naresh whose love for Pushpa harks back to a not so innocent time of lurid teenage fantasy and all the delicate implications that make it hard for him to confess his love to her. And then in a Barbie Doll assembly factory in India, eight-year-old Parvati yearns for a shoe from a Barbie Doll collection. As the characters are jostled between the pull of both cultures, their experiences uncover the myriad contradictions and commonalities deeply embedded in looking at things with an Indian eye while adapting to western mores and thought. Taken together, these stories form a distinct palette of cultural vignettes that inform the reader of the nature of the Indo-American experience.