BKMT READING GUIDES
Temporary Lives: Stories (Awp Award Series in Short Fiction)
by Ramola D
Hardcover : 184 pages
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Introduction
These ten memorable stories explore interior worlds and moments of intensity, either awakening or loss, in the lives of diverse characters mostly young girls and married women, but also boys and long-laboring men. Whether Hindu, Muslim, or Christian, they are all burdened by the complex layerings of class and gender, and are variously able or unable to find escape from the conditions of oppression that surround them. Some manage to rise above their situations by experiencing the denials and hardships of their lives as temporary; others find no such relief.
In the title story, Rose Ammal, who married young and bore numerous children, survives her husband's betrayal and religious conversion by creating her own private redemptions and conversions. The Next Corpse Collector chronicles significant moments in the lives of two young brothers, Anwar and Amir, who seek to escape the destiny of corpse collector, the job their father is determined to bequeath to them. What the Watchman Saw offers a glimpse into the life of Venkatesh, a longtime watchman who is faced with the dilemma of whether to report the theft of stolen antiquities from the house of his new neighbor.
Esther is a tale of the haunting, troubled spirit of Leeza's grandmother, who lingers in Leeza's childhood home and unexpectedly helps her during the summer her grandfather dies as she wakes to an adolescent infatuation with a neighbor boy. In The Couple in the Park, a young middle-class wife, Laura, in a constrictive arranged marriage, finds comfort in watching a couple in the park who remind her of her own grandparents as she tips over the edge into schizophrenia. The Man on the Veranda traces a significant day in the life of retired government-worker Parameswaran the day his wife finally leaves him.
Excerpt
EstherIt happens after midnight, like it has so many times before, on this night when my mother's away in the hospital at her father's dying bedside, and we're alone in the Madras house, my sister and I, with Kanthi, my grandfather's old servant-lady, who sleeps in the hall, two rooms away, on the floor. ...
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Discussion Questions
From the author:1) In the title story, Temporary Lives, how does the narrator transcend the central struggles of her life?
2) In the story Esther, what is the most compelling narrative of retrieval that comes through?
3) In the story What the Watchman Saw, could the night watchman have acted differently?
Notes From the Author to the Bookclub
Note from the Author: I grew up in India in an old family house in Thousand Lights, named for a mosque in the heart of Madras (now called Chennai). My mother believed the house was haunted, and her stories of the ghosts she saw filtered into my story Esther. As a journalist, I once interviewed a whole family afflicted with a form of schizophrenia, while neighborhood children crowded in to watch. I spent a week with an aunt diagnosed with schizophrenia. I watched a watchman strive to stay awake on his folding-chair outside a fancy villa. I read about a man who performed an unusual service for the homeless: preparing their corpses for burial. I discovered my paternal grandfather had changed his religion in order to take a second wife, thus changing forever the life of my grandmother. In the mysterious way that life transmutes into fiction, these moments and characters brought their souls and longings into the stories which became TEMPORARY LIVES.Book Club Recommendations
Recommended to book clubs by 1 of 1 members.
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