![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Even after living in Toronto for ten years, this character is “depressed and miserable, perched on top of the toilet, crouching on his haunches, feet planted firmly for balance upon the white plastic oval of the toilet seat.” But our hero doesn’t give up trying. In a story called “Squatter” in Swimming Lessons, a young Indian who has immigrated to Canada finds that he is able to adapt to the Western way of life in everything, except one: in the bathroom he finds himself unable to sit on the commode and has to squat, desi-style. And now here was Rohinton Mistry, and I knew that I had encountered someone who could teach me a thing or two about, as Raja Rao (the 1988 Neustadt winner) put it decades ago, “how to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own.” There were also others I was reading: Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Amitav Ghosh. I’d already felt the heady jolt of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, as many writers of my generation had. Those years I didn’t have authors in English from my own country I could turn to, so it was mostly Indian writers whose work I was devouring. I was in graduate school at Ohio University in the late 1980s, an aspiring writer from Nepal, when I read Rohinton Mistry’s Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag. ![]()
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