Perhaps we could warm up to grandfathers telling mischievous tales of debauchery in their youth because boys will be boys , but sweet, coy dadiji s? Not so much. They hijack the class to tell erotic stories and the tales they narrate could plunge the men in their community into cardiac arrest. Jaswal accords the women in her book with agency to mould their own stories — a departure from the rest in the larger genre of erotica, where even female desire is fetishised for the pleasure of the male gaze. Breaking news!
Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal
September 11th and the wars that followed plunged not only Americans, but much of the world into a moribund existential crisis about the meaning, fictive and lived, of war, patriotism, and home. These themes found their way into much of our pop culture and it became commonplace to feel their effects in what we saw on the big and small screens, and on the page. In three new works of fiction, South Asian British and American authors take up the mantle of sexuality in unique nodes of interpretation. In Marriage of a Thousand Lies , S. Sindu offers an original and deeply personal tale of sexuality and struggle amongst the Sri Lankan Tamil community of New England. While sexuality is a constant reference point across all three novels, it is the guilt associated with sex and freedom of movement that forms the connective tissue of these novels and the South Asian communities represented in Cleveland, Boston, and Southhall. From that angle, these characters are not so different than those in much of past South Asian American and British fiction; they are all, essentially, struggling to balance their desires and wants with those of family, particularly parents.