"Table Manners" by Susmita Bhattacharya (Dahlia Books, 2019)

Stories from Structo, Litro, Lonely Crowd, etc.

• The right thing to do - A maid consoles a neighbour who come round when her respectable husband beats her. The maid's mistress, Bhabhi, is rather pampered. When Bhabhi supposed cousin Arjun, an entomologist, visits, they spend time together. He's searching for a rare butterfly. The two of them and the maid find it, a brown plain thing. He puts it in a jar. She objects. At the end Bhabhi removes Arjun's toothbrush from the mug where it's been leaning against hers
• Comfort food - A wife enjoys her Friday nights alone with a simple meal. One Friday as she's about to eat she's called out by her husband to accompany him on a business meal. The client flirts. When they return and her husband's in bed, she makes herself vomit so she can eat her simple meal.
• Good Golly Miss Molly - Mouli wakes to hear her husband Satish, dead a month, talk to her. Actually it's Popat, a parrot Satish had bought her 40 years before as a disappointing first anniversary present. The ending is "Tomorrow she would set him free. He could roam the skies and eat the mangoes himself. The tree he has accidentally planted all those years ago. Tomorrow he would taste the fruit. Then he would return to her. She was sure of it"
• Growing tomatoes - Hoda has been shipped in from India to Cardiff because Fatima and Abdu are childless, and Abdu needs an heir for his business. A neighbour, Waheeda, is pregnant with a 5th child and grows potted tomatoes that die of neglect after Waheeda gives birth. Hoda remains childless. Abdu refuses to be tested until Waheeda has the child. Hoda decides to cook him a stew with her tomatoes in it
• In the lap of the gods - At a Christian camp the narrator hopes to find a husband. She spends 3 nights with a rather rebellious room-mate who doesn't want to marry. Other people declare their love of god - they say they have found the meaning of life. The narrator and room-mate drink rum and sleep together. After, they do not meet again, though the narrator's outlook on life has changed. The narrator on social media sees the traditional wedding photos of her friend.
• Letters home - Hassan goes from Dhaka to Cardiff to work in an Indian restaurant. We see his letters back to his expectant wife. His English isn't standard and aspects of UK life confuse him - what is curry? His boss is in London when there's terrorist attack and dies. Coincidence? Hassan shaves his beard and moustache hoping to reduce prejudice.
• Buon Anniversario amore mio - Andy and Maya are in Venice. They've been together 20 years. Maya's bald with terminal cancer. She's an artist, keen to visit the Biennale. He's not into modern art. She used to live with Tom, Andy's brother, indulging in drugs and alcohol. Andy saved her from that, and had discovered her breast cancer. On their wedding day Tom had overdosed. An accident?
• The taste of onion on his tongue - It's 7pm. A woman is watching the couple opposite who married 10 years before. She hasn't left her house since she cremated her husband. They were married for 30 years, childless. She likes watching (and listening to) the couple having sex. They're childless, which she thinks explains why the husband beats his wife. At the end, the husband stares across the road at her, mouthing "crazy bitch" before drawing the curtains.
• Dusk over Atlantic Wharf - The wife arrived in Cardiff 4 months before the wedding. He'd been there 6 years. "She would learn to love him." They go to the cinema. By chance a Bollywood film is on. They watch it. It's set in Mumbai, her home-town, which she's missing. She's not used to how the local girls behave. She cries in the car.
• Table Manners - "The Chinese family across the street is cooking. The whole street knows ... The steam from their bubbling pots condenses on their window, creating a soft blur of their movements". They're watched by a widower. He's invited over by the Chinese grandma to get a cat out of a tree. She speaks no English. They're both lonely. She makes him tea then a meal. The colourful kitchen and its fragrances contrasts with his microwaved food and body odour. When he returns home he gets out a photo of his wife and his much thinner old self. Typo - "but it's certainly smells better"
• That face like a harvest moon - Manju has a week left of her 3 month stay with her daughter and son-in-law in Wimbledon. They have a student daughter Divya, who arrives unexpectedly, in tears. She's pregnant. It's soon decided that she'll have the child. We learn that Manju had a baby before marriage - a shameful event. Her baby was whisked away straight after birth. As they part at the airport the son-in-law tells Manju to try to forgive Divya (dramatic irony - Manju should forgive herself). Typo - "but when her baby was born was born"
• The summer of learning - An Indian man, with his golden haired UK wife and daughter (they live in Cardiff) visit the father's village in India for the first time, where they're treated as if they were rich, though they live above a shop and the father's a taxi-driver. The daughter begins to like it, the father begins to go drinking, ignoring his wife. The maid steals 200 pounds from the father because her son is sick. She's sacked and the son dies.
• The luxury of quiet contemplation - An old woman falls in her kitchen and can't get up. She recalls when her husband died in the night. Her son's gone to the States, married to a women she carefully chose. Her maid's being beaten by her husband.
• Spider - Paula and husband Tony are on a touring holiday. She's bored of temples. The guide takes her around alone, to show her the real India. She's shown backstreets. For a price (paid before she know what for), she's shown male Siamese twins. At first she's not impressed by the guide, then realises that this is the only way the two sons can earn money - they have five sisters.
• A holiday to remember - Anand takes wife Rima (who he met at a Bombay college; she came from a much poorer home than he did) and baby on a cheap caravan holiday. It's all they can afford now that they live in the UK. She's fed up. They argue. Then their baby takes his first steps.
• After she was gone - A girl's looking out of her window for her mother, who's out late again. Her taxi-driver father is waiting too. They pick her up from a shop where she's being held for shop-lifting. She hasn't got over baby Dolly's cot death. Dolly was pretty. The narrator's plain. Years pass. The narrator marries and has a baby. Her parents are happy. Her mother dies. She visits her father on a bad day. He decides to clear his wife's stuff out. He gives his daughter a home-made quilt. When it rips they discover that it's stuffed with stolen baby clothes, some with the price tag still on.
• Marked - a girl at the Taj Mahal scratches the initials of her and her boyfriend on the marble. Years later she revisits with her husband (who isn't that earlier lover) and kids. They return to India yearly, but don't usually have time to see the sights. The initials have gone. We learn that her parents had rejected her lover for religious reasons. She'd been sad that he'd given her up without a fight. They learn about the result of the Brexit vote, which triggers feelings of estrangement. Then we switch to point-of-view of her erstwhile boyfriend. We learn that he's living in the UK, married to an English woman. The Brexit vote has just happened. Vandals have scratched "Go home" on his car.
• Mango season - In India a great-grandmother dies at 102, eating a mango. She and her husband were westernised, well-to-do, until he became a Gandhi follower, after which she burned her western stuff - piano, etc. Her great-grand-daughter moves into her room, finds some old gloves stuffed with love letters from "John". John had asked her to return with him to England. The girl realises that her great-grandmother may have set fire to things more as a reaction to that than because of politics. Mangoes are mentioned in a letter.

I've described the plots here because I'm bad at plot development and wanted to study them - they're central to the success of the book. Though in the main they scaffold the stories effectively, sometimes I feel that they restrict character development. I think non-writers would like the stories - they'd work well on the radio. Maybe fellow writers wouldn't be quite so impressed. Scenarios are set up involving displacement and adaption, or people watching others unaware that they're learning about themselves. Symbolism's often seeded near the start and is used to convey the message at the end (butterflies, tomatoes, mangoes). Some stories (e.g."Dusk over Atlantic Wharf") get little further than setting the scenario up. Others develop along lines which while not being entirely predictable come as no surprise. Characters learn things, often belatedly, and in ways that don't affect their subsequent behaviour. The language varies little in register, the characters are recognisable, and the mode is resolutely realist with a sentimental twist. Some pieces are nearly real-time, others have a story duration of a day or so. A few jump years. "Marked" has split time-lines. No story particularly stands out. They're all readable. Maybe the title story's my favourite.

Other reviews

• Emma Lee (A motif throughout the stories is the concept of home and family. Some characters remain at home, others move countries, others have mixed race heritage; all have to consider what sustains and nurtures them)
• storgy
• Chris Sanders (The characters in Susmita Bhattacharya’s collection, Table Manners, are alienated by language, culture and geography, silenced by loneliness and yearning. Food is a byword for class, loss, happiness, and a minefield of potential gaffes for the culturally uninitiated. ... “Comfort Food” is a gem of a story ... The stories in this collection are deftly constructed and executed with confidence and surgical precision. ... At its best, her writing brilliantly reveals entire worlds in a paragraph ... Regrettably, these insights are all too rare. The hushed-up domestic violence, English lessons, chicken kormas, caustic mother-in-laws, and cooking smells leaking into the street often seem overly familiar – perhaps because so many writers have latterly documented the immigrant/outsider experience, these observations appear commonplace rather than curious?)
• Pia Ghosh-Roy (For me, the most beautiful part of these stories is that they end not with a resolution but with small, sharp shards of hope.)
• Good reads