Deepa Rajagopalan won the 2021 PEN/RBC Canada New Voices Award, given annually to promising unpublished writers, with her short story “Peacocks of Instagram,” which is now the cover story of her fascinating, highly anticipated first short story collection.
The collection includes some of the author’s short stories that have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, as well as some new material. Born in Saudi Arabia to Indian parents, Rajagopalan writes about women of the Indian diaspora around the world. She was recently named by CBC as one of the 30 writers to watch in 2024.
In the title story, a woman works in a cafe but earns a side income selling peacock-themed accessories. The story quickly takes us into the personal life of the smiling person behind the counter: something readers may not often think about. The author plays with the character’s self-image, how others see her (“an overzealous Indian woman with a thick Malayali accent”), the role she plays in public to get customers to buy her accessories, and the details of her story she doesn’t show others – her life with her husband researching peacocks, and the personal tragedy she experienced in India. The author cleverly weaves this tragedy into the protagonist’s work life by bringing in a kind but clueless activist.
Ema Suvajac Photo Deepa Rajagopalan’s short story collection will appeal to readers who enjoy novels about identity and the search for home and meaning.
Many of the stories carry the same tensions between the Eastern and Western worlds. For example, in CakeIn “The 40 Fingers,” a hotel employee clashes with her boss and, as in the title story, takes advantage of his underestimation of her abilities to outsmart him and get what she has always wanted.
Sometimes the tensions in the stories remain within communities and families, as in Living inwhich, as the title suggests, deals with the different values of young people of Indian descent compared to those of their parents regarding cohabitation before marriage. Several stories deal with other “forbidden” relationships: interracial, same-sex, extramarital.
A thing with many legs explores larger societal tensions – namely the capitalist pursuit of profit at any cost versus the value of human life in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This story contains some heartbreaking passages: “Raji in her parrot green kurta, gasping for air, waits in the hospital with no one to care for her. Oxygen cylinders are the currency, and Raji is not rich enough.”
Some stories are set in India, including one of the most outstanding, Math Clubin which a young girl at boarding school learns valuable lessons about appropriate and inappropriate friendships. There are also some loosely connected stories that deal with a Canadian family returning to India for medical treatment. Here the author plays on the reader’s assumption that Canada is the more progressive country.
Rajagopalan’s writing style is simple and direct. Sometimes he pauses to linger on an exquisite little detail: white hair curling on a priest’s chest, “the needle of the CN Tower supporting the clouds,” a painting of a goddess with a gold necklace over her breasts and her eyes “lost in thought or pleasure,” “the afternoon sun, splintered by the balcony railing, falling in golden bands on my father.”
However, many of the stories cover large periods of time rather than the small snippets of memory that are often the subject of short stories. This larger scope means that some of the stories end with a summary or contain large sections of explanation that sometimes drift into information dumping. This is particularly evident in Rachelwhere we get years of emotions and events summed up in lines like “At some point, Freddie’s wife actually found out about one of his lovers” and “When he got back to Johannesburg, he wrote to Sophie” or “So the years went by and Freddie lost most of his other lovers”. Some very important moments are skipped over rather than shown in the scene. This gives the impression of an outside observer narrating rather than immersing oneself in the story.
Peacocks from Instagram
This collection will be of interest to readers who enjoy short stories about identity and the search for home and meaning, and who enjoy writing about people from underrepresented communities.
Zilla Jones is a Winnipeg-based author of short and feature stories.
