A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness

September 1, 2022

Chakrabarti follows up his piercingly inventive National Jewish Book Award winner, A Play for the End of the World, with a collection of short stories featuring characters who bravely follow their heart's desire toward big life changes. A closeted gay man in 1980s Kolkata wants to have a child with his lover's wife, while an Indian widow struggles to sort out her cultural identity within the context of her Jewish fianc�'s family.

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January 2, 2023
Finely wrought characters grapple with culture clash, marital strife, and the troubles of parenthood in Chakrabarti’s impressive collection (after the novel A Play for the End of the World). In the title story, wealthy Kolkata man Nikhil proposes to father a son with his secretly gay lover’s wife, but things don’t go quite as planned. The tile of “The Import” refers to the demeaning nickname Raj and his American wife Bethany use for the nanny sent by Raj’s mother from India, who stirs conflicted feelings in Raj. In “The Prodigal Son,” a New Yorker named Jonah, soon to be a father of two, impulsively sleeps with his guru’s son on a trip to India and makes a wild promise he can’t keep. In “A Mother’s Work,” Rani is hired by Indian families in New York City to impersonate their son’s mother and scare off white girlfriends. Chinmoy in “In the Bug Room” has dropped out of his graduate program in the States and returns home, where he’s soon embroiled in a battle of wills with his mother’s devoted, manipulative servant. Throughout, Chakrabarti builds complicated and intriguing emotional situations, and his disquieting, unresolved endings leave the atmosphere unspoiled. This is a satisfying, vibrant exploration of family and identity.

January 1, 2023
Lush, immersive stories set in India and America about people trying to make families. Children--the fierce desire for them, the heartbreak of miscarriage, and the matter of caring for them--knit this collection together. In the title story, Nikhil fantasizes about raising a child with his lover, Sharma, but such a thing is still impossible in 1980s India: "The country is changing," Nikhil says. "A child diapered by two men," Sharma replies. "Your country is changing faster than my country is changing." In "The Import," Raj and his wife, Bethany, bring a young woman from India to New York to care for their 3-year-old and help them restore their "domestic bliss" only to learn that the woman has left behind her own 5-year-old daughter. In "Lilavati's Fire," Aparna tries to fill the void created by her son's departure into adulthood and her somewhat strained relationship with her husband by building a plane in her garage. This is one of the collection's standouts, offering an emotionally stirring exploration of the counterforces of intimacy and routine, being grounded and taking flight. Elsewhere, adoption is the means through which people try to make families, and here Chakrabarti mounts a searing critique of its sometimes-exploitative nature. That's the scenario in "Daisy Lane" when an American couple comes to northern India to pick up their baby. When they learn that the baby might have an older sister, they think they're being tricked into taking two children. While such people probably exist, as fictional characters they're a bit too shallow and unlikable, and the story falls short. But Chakrabarti teases out the devastating consequences of how economic inequity drives adoption in "The Fortunes of Others," a story about lost and found families told from the perspective of an Afghan refugee living in India. This one will make you cry. Beautiful, thought-provoking work about the costs of wanting children.

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February 1, 2023
Following up his debut novel, A Play For the End of the World (2021), Chakrabarti's moving book of short stories puts familial love to the test. Characters struggle with spouses, racial conflict, and, mostly, choices about their children. In ""A Mother's Work,"" an Indian family hires Rani to scare away their son's white girlfriend by pretending to be his mother. The title story introduces Nikhil, who longs to have a child with his lover, Sharma, but things go sour when Sharma's wife won't agree for the sake of appearances. In other pieces, a white couple travels to India to adopt a baby, only to find that he has a protective older sister, and a man visits his guru and family and makes an egregious error in judgment as his wife is about to give birth. Not one for neat endings, Chakrabarti puts the impetus on readers to decide the consequences of characters' actions and where their fates lie. It's an affecting technique for a captivating collection infused with a meaningful, lingering sense of unease and melancholy.

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