(You can purchase this book ethically here.)
2 minutes read time
In the 1970s, a handful of Indian scientists signed contracts for good jobs at West Virginian chemical plants. As people do, they settled down and had children, including Neema Avashia.
Like many children of immigrants, Neema’s identity ia a bit fractal. For every all-American pursuit like high school basketball, pickup truck driving or dodging racism, there’s a thick tendril of connection back to Indian culture and Hindu praxis. To further complicate things, she’s also queer and married to a white lady from New York. All of this intertwines to form a meaningful, singular life that unearths surprising experiences from the mountains Avashia was made in.
This is billed as a memoir, but feels like (and works best as) a collection of essays about the author’s unique identity and how it intersects with all of the worlds that created it. Some really stand out. “Nine Forms of the Goddess”, about the Indian women who raised Avashia, is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read about motherly love and women in community. “The Blue-Red Divide” is one of the few really honest, non-performative works I’ve seen about what it feels like when people who were once very close to you become MAGA adherents and how avoidance and simmering personal hurt can seem like the best response even if you regularly fight ideological dragons in the rest of your life. Thanks to “A Hindu Hillbilly Elegy”, the sight of a coconut in a grocery store the other day made me want to cry.
These are good essays about what it’s like to bridge not only culture but subculture. Avashia uses all of her hesitant connections to mismatched places and cultures to really explore all the way to their jagged edges, using her own identity as a base to match the pieces together on.
For all its uniqueness, this is also a surprisingly calm read. There’s a wholesome, laconic quality to the writing that makes even the grittier bits of Appalachian queer Hindu immigrant life more calming than incendiary.
I’m glad I read this. Vegetarian food seasoned Indolachian-style to Another Appalachia.
(Fellow readers! The original purpose of this site was to highlight DIVERSE books for DIVERSE readers and I think it’s time to be a little more intentional about that. I’m slowly putting together a list of desi authors of emotional note, which you can find on the Equal Opportunity Bookshop, along with lots of other booklists compiling works from #ownnormals from all over the world. If you buy something from the shop, this site earns a little commission too. Thank you for visiting, and go read something good! Peace!)
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