Between home and elsewhere

Some books explain immigrant life through nostalgia. Others through big dramatic events. Sharbari Ahmed does neither in The Strangest of Fruit. Her stories focus on the quieter things like small humiliations, awkward encounters, the private wounds people carry, and the memories they don't talk about because talking would make them too real.

But even in that quietness, there is so much force. Reading the book feels like sitting with someone who has lived a full, complicated life and is finally ready to say the things they've been swallowing for years.  Her stories circle around immigrants and their descendants, but what she really writes about is grief, loss, survival, and the quiet ways people keep going when no one is listening. The Strangest of Fruit gathers 10 short stories—some new, some previously published—into one sharp, emotionally layered collection.

The collection opens with "Noor, Embers and Ash", where the boundaries between myth and memory blur in a way that only the South Asian imagination can hold. A girl visiting her grandmother's village encounters a djinn-girl named Noor, who feels part warning, part companion, and part ghost of a history everyone tiptoes around. The story sits between myth and memory, showing how children use imagination to name what adults avoid. It becomes a fitting first note, eerie and tender, and it sets the tone for the rest of the collection. 

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Fragments of memory and regret

One of the most aching stories in the collection, "Black Ice in Jackson Heights", follows Rahima, an 18-year-old new mother who has recently migrated from Dhaka to Queens. The story opens with her sitting on a fifth-floor fire escape in the rain, barefoot, holding her eight-week-old baby. She is exhausted, underfed, disoriented by the new life she is living and cultural shock, and sliding into postpartum depression that no one around her has the language or patience for. Ahmed lets the scene unfold slowly: the baby's phantom sucking, the numbness in Rahima's body, the way she drifts in and out of sleep dangerously close to the edge.

Where "Black Ice in Jackson Heights" deals with the invisible hazards of mental health in diaspora, "Perfect Flowers" approaches memory from another angle. Anadil, a 47-year-old Bangladeshi-American MFA student, tries to fulfill an assignment about memory by writing about mouse droppings on a teak coffee table stored in her basement. The table was bought on a honeymoon trip in Bali, now covered in rodent scat. The connection between past romance and present decay is obvious, yet Ahmed refuses to make it neat. The story is less about a failed marriage than about the difficulty of narrating a life at all—especially for a middle-aged South Asian woman in a workshop full of younger classmates who are eager to dissect her but not really see her.

Shorter pieces like "Alexander", "Eyesore", and "Dervish" extend these same concerns in different registers. They return to the questions of how bodies are looked at, who is allowed to belong in a space, and what happens when desire, faith, and shame collide. Names, neighbourhoods, and even buildings become charged—either as sites of aspiration or as constant reminders that someone is "out of place." Together with the more overtly political stories, these pieces show how the inner life of a character can be just as shaped by gaze, class, and history as by any headline event.

One of the most aching stories in the collection, "Black Ice in Jackson Heights", follows Rahima, an 18-year-old new mother who has recently migrated from Dhaka to Queens. The story opens with her sitting on a fifth-floor fire escape in the rain, barefoot, holding her eight-week-old baby. She is exhausted, underfed, disoriented by the new life she is living and cultural shock, and sliding into postpartum depression that no one around her has the language or patience for.

One of the most interesting things about Ahmed's writing is how she uses humour to expose discomfort. "The Eyesore" is a perfect example. The story follows an interfaith South Asian couple who buy a small, unattractive house in a wealthy white neighbourhood in Connecticut. Their neighbour Archita arrives immediately, loud and overbearing, offering frozen mithai she saved for months and plenty of unsolicited advice. The story is funny, but the humour has a sharp bite. Under Archita's arrogance sits insecurity, class anxiety, caste pride, and a desperate need for validation from the white people around her. Under Farzana's politeness there is quiet fear. She fears standing out, being judged and being seen as the wrong kind of immigrant.

Ahmed captures this dynamic with painful accuracy. Anyone who has grown up in a South Asian community abroad will recognise someone like Archita, someone who polices others because they see belonging as a competition. The story critiques this behaviour gently, without turning cruel.

Themes of aging, desire, and invisibility surface again in stories like "The Length in Six Strokes" and "Dervish," where characters navigate communities, preserved suburbs, class anxieties, and the layered prejudices that shape everyday life.

The collection is not without its flaws. At times, the political commentary can feel a little too on-the-nose, with characters articulating points that readers have already grasped from the scene. Some stories—especially the longer ones—are crowded with subplots and name-dropping, and the men can occasionally feel sketched in comparison to the women, who are almost always vivid, contradictory and real. A reader looking for quiet, minimalist slices of life will not find them here; Ahmed is maximalist by instinct. While the collection is emotionally rich, there are moments where the stories lean a little too closely toward familiar immigrant tropes. Some characters feel shaped by recognisable stereotypes—the judgemental in-laws, strict immigrant parents, the anxious "model minority", the overbearing aunty figure—and at times, the writing risks reinforcing the very patterns it aims to critique. Ahmed usually complicates these figures with tenderness and context, but some readers may wish for more unexpected turns or deeper subversions of those archetypes.

The book shows that immigrant survival is not triumphant but continuous. Grief does not end. It only changes shape. Memory is imperfect, uncomfortable and incomplete, yet it remains the closest thing many people have to home.

At its heart, the collection is about how people carry the worlds that shaped them, even when they move continents away. Ahmed shows again and again that survival is not always loud. Sometimes it is quiet. Sometimes it is embarrassing. Sometimes it is funny. Often it is lonely. And almost always, it is ongoing.

Mahmuda Emdad is a women and gender studies major with an endless interest in feminist writings, historical fiction, and pretty much everything else, all while questioning the world in the process. Reach out at [email protected].