The imperfect art of leaving

In a recent conversation I had with a well-regarded photographer about his longitudinal study on a subject, he talked about Sufism and the structure of the raagas in classical music where a single refrain being repeated was actually an inward search for deeper meaning. It took me a while to sit with those ideas, but reading Katy Family made a few things click into place.

Gemini Wahhaj, is an award winning author and academic based in Houston, Texas. Katy Family is a compilation of 21 short stories published in various publications, mostly set in Katy, an oil-rich suburb of Houston, featuring immigrant Bangladeshis. This is a milieu she's familiar with, having grown up in Bangladesh, moving first to Iraq with her family before putting down roots in America.

In 'Gracious', Nadiya, an engineer who escaped the classism of Dhaka perpetuates the same when she hires a Latina nanny for her child. 'Patent' explores the trajectory of Mirza, who achieves the American Dream, having aced his studies at BUET, obtaining a degree from an American university, getting a lucrative job in oil and gas, which comes with the glossy wife and kids and the fancy house in Katy, before reality catches up. In the same vein, the stories juxtapose the Bangladeshi yearning for escape against the immigrant isolation, with Katy providing the capitalist setting for the little dramas to play out on. It is a refreshing departure from the poverty-porn stereotype dogging the scene since Monica Ali's Brick Lane (Doubleday, 2003) ushered in a fresh wave of Bangladeshi Anglophone writers speaking to a global audience. The middle class characters speak to a much wider readership in Bangladesh; every voice could belong to someone you know.

Upon my first reading of the stories, I found some of the attitudes present in the characters pretty dated, considering that in real life, in the present context—be it because of globalisation, capitalism, or the spread of social media—Bangladeshis as a whole don't have that wide-eyed wonder about all things "Umrican" anymore and conversely, the diaspora is aware—if grudgingly—of this. A closer reading reveals the author's tongue-in-cheek use of the obliviousness of her characters to poke fun not only at the fanciful ideas that the deshi natives harbour about their "bideshi" relatives, but the snobbery with which the diaspora regards its abandoned homeland, and the insecurities bubbling just under the surface. Gemini Wahhaj borrows a leaf from Kazuo Ishiguro, but adds enough cultural flavour to make her own version of this device.

Deftly woven into these intimate cultural snapshots are larger themes like racism and climate anxiety. The stories are ordered so that the reader begins with the lighter, wittier ones. In 'The Lady Doctor', Dr Hasina Rasheed is learning to navigate the unaccustomed social niceties of a dawat in the States, and realises that she is completely out of her depth. In the titular 'Katy Family', a similar theme is explored, but from the perspective of a divorced man. The later stories like 'Marker' or 'Two Mothers' become more sinister, with death and madness stepping out of the wallpaper and taking pride of place in the narrative. 'Camping' directly addresses the environmental impacts of Big Oil, the greenwashing they participate in, and the hypocrisy required of the employees in order to carry on living with themselves. In the age where we all have tickets to a genocide livestream, but all have at least one probashi relative who is curiously mum on the subject, this one hit really close to home.

The prose feels like a little bit of a throwback, with the kind of vague descriptions favoured by English professors in the 80's, but once one gets used to it, the book feels like a little time capsule from an era before smartphones and global franchises. And despite the sadness, the desperation, the feeling of being stuck that seeps through every story, the book feels comforting, like a long-forgotten memory of home.

Sabrina Fatma Ahmad is a writer, journalist, and the founder of Sehri Tales.