Bombay Wali and other stories
by Veena Gokhale,
Guernica Editions,
218 pp. $20
The dozen stories in Bombay Wali and other stories by Veena Gokhale are all marked by a gentle tone, no matter the content. Gokhale, a journalist in Bombay (Mumbai) in the 80s and current Montreal resident covers a wide swath of geography in this debut collection.
Unsurprisingly, the most arresting stories are those set in Bombay in the 1980s, and of these, the most powerful feature female characters. The title story deals with three young women, friends from college, who are trying to find their life paths. Gulnar, Tanya, and Renuka are wonderful friends who support each other while trying to figure their goals and how to reach them. Gulnar and Renuka are away from their homes and chronically broke although Renuka has a boyfriend who foots her entertainment costs. Both Gulnar and Renuka are writers, and Tanya lives at home and is obsessed by the Tarot. Their powers of imagination lead them to contemplate robbing a bank to solve some financial problems.
Gokhale’s world is a realistic one, and lack of money affects more than the characters of the title story. In “Friere Stopped in Bombay” Dilip is a young student in Bombay, also away from his home and suffering from extreme poverty. He has a scholarship, but the money doesn’t come on time, and in this story, Gokhale touches on the plight of the Dalit caste. Unfairness abounds, and the outcome is sad.
Other stories have characters of material wealth, but emotional poverty as in “Smoke and Mirrors,” in which Kavita, a self-absorbed businesswoman imagines killing her best (and perhaps only) friend, a woman she has betrayed. These stories show the importance of having enough money to live on, while placing love and friendship at the top of what matters in life. In that regard, it doesn’t matter where people live: their needs are similar.
In “Snapshot,” for example, an elderly Japanese woman suffers from physical ailments, but the more significant issue is her loneliness. Sukiyo lives with her daughter on the outskirts of Tokyo, but her daughter’s commute is two hours, and Sukiyo’s great-grandchildren live in Thailand. How she tried to ease her pain is curious and understandable and suggests major shifts in contemporary lifestyles. In “Kathmandu,” a young Canadian woman is left in a small hotel by her boyfriend because he wants to go white water rafting, and she is sick. Money is not a problem; her father is funding her trip. But being abandoned hurts her, and she is encouraged by an older woman at the hotel to go and do what she wants to do.
Given Gokhale’s background as a journalist, the prose is direct, and writing is seen as valuable and powerful. Guernica Editions publishes “fine Canadian literature with a special understanding of different cultures,” and Veena Gokhale’s collection joins the ranks of other books put out by this publisher that demonstrate the human similarities in the cultural differences.
I so enjoyed reading the stories in Bombay Wali. Every story was uniquely presented to evoke a sense of nostalgia and empathy for the characters.
Look forward to more publications from Guernica.