I felt that each of the women protagonists in Baldwin’s stories, though sometimes simple, showed that every person has unique, even extraordinary qualities. Human nature and dignity are qualities we must value and respect; they inspire a “bottomless well of empathy and compassion” for all of mankind.
Shauna Singh Baldwin has a good measure of compassion for the characters, especially the women she depicts in her complex and multi-layered stories; a lesson in good literature. A story that best demonstrates this is “A Pair of Ears,” where Baldwin shows insight into human nature. She shows us the compassion, empathy, and love a housekeeper (Amma) has for her dead mistress who was treated badly by her greedy son and daughter-in-law. Amma says, “I squat again. I paint slowly — for this is important — slowly I paint a rangoli design in my Mem-saab’s blood on the white chip marble floor.” Baldwin can empathize with the maid-servant’s desire to leave a vengeful symbol for them — a symbol in the blood of a woman whose son put her through agony.
In a recent essay on Dostoevsky published in Brick magazine, Orhan Pamuk writes, “he refused to offer up his wisdom in the abstract, instead he locates these truths inside characters that give every impression of being real.” Similarly, in this collection of short stories, time and again, Baldwin gives us characters we believe in, who live on in our minds.
She reveals the complicated textures of the lives of South Asian women in all of their absurdities and painful truths through these tales. Her particular style of writing, humorous at times, is also full of fresh similes and metaphors that can only come from a writer knowledgeable in a number of languages — their peculiar idioms and puns. Again and again I enjoyed her use of literature’s many conventions, such as figurative language. In “Gayatri,” she opens the story with the protagonist “cocooned in a sulk.” Then she tells us that the “heat of a new delhi morning panted like a waiting dog.” Suddenly, we feel the bodily discomfort caused by an oppressively hot day in India.
Baldwin is adept at entering the minds of her characters to show us the different ways her protagonists think about traditional and ethical values, and the way they act on their own choices. I found that she uses the conventions of writing to advantage. In “The Insult,” she uses a family gathering to demonstrate how two sisters interact. Aunty Nimmi’s denial of help to find a mate in India for her niece, and the subsequent alienation of the two sisters is shown through dialogue. As readers, we can see characters develop through a particular scene in which the narrator says, “My mother sighed. She had asked a favour, and she had been refused.” They engage in some other dialogue for a few minutes, and when the sister persists and hints for help again: “Aunty Nimmi laughed. ‘There are many nice Sikh boys in Chicago.’ Again she had missed her cue.”
These kinds of scenes in Baldwin’s work resonate deeply with my experiences in South Asian culture, and I’m delighted with her portrayals. I have used only a few of the fifteen stories that illustrate this throughout the collection. The author is an adept, artistic stylist who divulges the quotidian and the everyday home scene, first-person narrative, reflective personal interior monologues of her characters, third-person narrative, and other strategies which surface with careful reading, showing a sweet compassion and empathy for the lives of the human beings who populate her stories; I will remember them.
References
Orhan Pamuk, “On Dostoevsky.” Brick, A Literary Journal. Issue 80,
Winter 2007.
Reader’s Guide
About the Author
To celebrate the lasting potency and relevance of English Lessons and Other Stories, Goose lane Editions presents the Reader’s Guide Edition of Shauna Singh Baldwin’s first short story collection. Since this remarkable literary debut, her work has been translated into thirteen languages.
From her beginnings as a radio producer and ecommerce consultant, Baldwin’s writing career took off with English Lessons and Other Stories in 1996, winning the Friends of American Writers Award. Since then, she has published two novels with Knopf Canada: the best-selling What the Body Remembers, which won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize (Canada and Caribbean), and The Tiger Claw, finalist for the Giller Prize. Her impact on the international literary scene is undeniable.
Shauna returned to Goose Lane Editions in 2007 with another short story collection, We Are Not in Pakistan. Her work continues to garner praise from a worldwide readership. Her fiction, poems, and essays have been published in a broad spectrum of literary and popular magazines, anthologies, and newspapers.
Born in Montreal, Shauna Singh Baldwin grew up in India. She lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her Irish-American husband, David.
An Interview with the Author
GLE: The stories in English Lessons and Other Stories often revolve around clashes of culture and values within families, as family members struggle to adapt to life in North America. What were your greatest challenges in bringing this dynamic to light through these characters?
SSB: I’d say my greatest challenge was portraying multilingual characters in one language. Like any language, English has limitations. It’s heavily weighted with Biblical references and colonial connotations, so it’s less user-friendly for descriptions of non-European settings and people. On the plus side, compared to gendered languages that reinforce assumptions about gender in every interaction — hindi, Punjabi, urdu, and many European languages like Spanish and French — it may be somewhat less loaded for writing about women.
Because English is the most powerful global language, learning it brings a cultural shift, often of power. As the mother in “Rawalpindi 1919” realizes, learning English or going abroad changes relationships for the person who leaves and for family members who stay.
GLE: You tell tales in the first and third person. How do you decide which to use when you’re telling a story?
SSB: I let a story and its characters tell me if it should be told in first or third person, experimenting till the narrative distance feels natural. “Rawalpindi 1919,” “English Lessons,” and “Toronto 1984” use interior monologue as if someone were writing in a diary — naturally, in first person. “Family Ties” is in first person, but it feels to me as if Fatty is reliving her story under hypnosis. The third person, in stories like “Gayatri,” “A Pair of Ears,” “Nothing Must Spoil This Visit,” and “Devika,” introduces a narrator. Sometimes that’s necessary for distance, commentary, or explanation. I feel my way by character and length, considering the reader in due course.
GLE: Two of your characters provide us with the point of view of white women married to or in relationships with Sikh men: Janet in “Nothing Must Spoil This Visit” and Lisa in “Lisa.” What did these points of view bring to this collection of stories?
SSB: Unlike Jassie who speaks of “white women” as she tells her story, I prefer the term women of European origin. Janet is married to Arvind in “Nothing Must Spoil This Visit,” and Arvind is a Sikh. But the unnamed man who is going with Lisa might be Sikh, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, or Muslim — the religion is left to the reader. Without these tales in the collection you’d only read stories about people of Indian origin adapting to the West. But I feel people of European origin need to adapt, too.
Intercultural relationships frequently involve the discovery of differing values: individual rights versus family honour in “Nothing Must Spoil This Visit” or romantic love versus son-preference in “Lisa.” Janet is a well-meaning romantic whose blithe assumptions are challenged by the idea that her happiness is founded on Chaya’s unhappiness — and she doesn’t know the whole story. Lisa isn’t interested in understanding cultural differences, so she’ll make the same mistake again.
GLE: In “A Pair of Ears,” Balvir’s blind greed and heartless treatment of his mother, though treated within the context of Indian society, transcends cultural barriers. How is the absence of the theme of clashing cultures in this story important to this collection?
SSB: Elder abuse happens in every c
ulture, but stands out in one that prides itself on highly valuing and respecting its elders. Also, as I learned in writing this story, Amma, a Hindu serving woman who owns almost nothing, paradoxically has richer relationships of sharing with her children and more freedom than her mem-saab, the upper-class/upper-caste Sikh woman. I included it because it shows the impact of Western values and standards about youth and the imperative of progress. Here I’m thinking of Balvir’s projected condominium complex! These are English lessons too, learned from three hundred years of contact with and colonization by the British.
GLE: Both Indian and Western culture have naming traditions that illustrate male ownership of women. In Western culture, a woman takes her husband’s last name. In Indian culture, the husband chooses a new first name for his wife. Do you see a similarity between these naming conventions?
SSB: As alluded to in “Jassie,” Indian husbands often chose new first names for their wives up to the 1940s. It’s rare in urban postindependence India. Today, like women in the West, urban Indian women have begun to keep their birth family names for career reasons.
And yes, such naming conventions betray similar cultural assumptions. They assume women and women’s wombs are family property, and that the male line carries the family name and assets. As in Europe, the custom of primogeniture was reenforced by the British in India for efficiency of taxation.
GLE: This story collection begins in 1919 and continues chronologically until the present day. Was the arrangement meaningful? I wanted more stories past 1991!
SSB: I wanted to explore the changes for Indian women in my three countries (India, Canada, and the US) over the years. I began after the First World War and the influenza epidemic in India, when learning English and becoming like the British was an end in itself. I found stark contrasts between the values of urban Indians within India and the Diaspora versus the West and the situation of Indian women versus the West. In 1991, problems and opportunities for Indian women shifted, when the Indian economy opened to the import of Western goods. Technology shifted, Indian men and women vaulted into the era of TVs with remotes, then fax machines, then computers and cellphones. English remains the ticket to the global economy, but different problems emerge after 1991.
GLE: Maybe that’s a future book. Can you talk about the difference between this collection of stories and your latest, We Are Not in Pakistan, published eleven years later?
SSB: The stories in English Lessons and Other Stories deal with Indian men and women. The stories in We Are Not in Pakistan take place in the late ’90s and post 9/11 world and only some have Indian characters. They are set in the Ukraine, the US, Canada, and Costa Rica. Some are from the point of view of women, some from the point of view of men — one is from the point of view of a Lhasa Apso! The characters are negotiating the issues of our times — nuclear power, our ambivalent relationship with Art, issues of race, class, gender, human, and civil rights.
GLE: There was a long hiatus between your two short story collections, during which you wrote two novels. What impelled you to the stories in the second collection?
SSB: After writing about the 1947 Partition of India in What the Body Remembers and Europe during the Second World War in The Tiger Claw, I wanted a break from war and history and the sad treatment of women in both. But these subjects refuse to go away — the “war on terror” is underpinned by cultural assumptions about whether the economic well-being of the developed nations must rest on the economic exploitation of people and resources in the developing world. And cultural assumptions about whether women are people, what women want or need, and whether a woman owns her own body. I began by writing one story but soon heard more voices, each demanding I tell his or her story. I needed to explore contemporary issues again, with echoes of the history I’d learned from writing the novels. Before I knew it, I had committed another book: We Are Not in Pakistan.
Books of Interest
Selected by the Author
When I began writing English Lessons and Other Stories in 1991, I was producer and host of a radio show called Sunno!, the East Indian American radio show where you don’t have to be East Indian to listen. I wanted to air stories in English about Indian women (and men) but soon realized I would have to write the kind of stories I wanted. Other writers who have felt a similar need:
Incantations and Other Stories by Anjana Appachana
Junglee Girl by Ginu Kamani
Arranged Marriage: Stories by Chitra Divakaruni
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Few books trace the women’s movement in India both legally and in cultural practice. Here’s one I would love to see updated for this decade:
The History of Doing: An Illustrated History of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India by Radha Kumar.
The stories in English Lessons feature Hindu and Sikh women. Hinduism is commonly understood, so here are a few books on Sikhism:
Sikhism: A Very Short Introduction by Eleanor Nesbitt
The Sikhs: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices by William Owen Cole and Piara Singh Sambhi
Ethics of the Sikhs by Avtar Singh — I would have titled this book “The Religious Philosophy of Sikhism.” It’s an excellent introduction to the teachings of the ten Gurus.
I discover more facets each time I read these works of fiction:
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Horses are a motif in the interior décor of our home, including the wallpaper. One of my favourite scenes in Hard Times is when a gentleman discusses wallpapering a room.
“I’ll explain to you then,” said the gentleman after a dismal pause, “why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality — in fact? Do you?” … “Why then you are not to see any where, what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact. What is called taste is only another name for fact.”
If you are writing fiction, this gentleman lies in wait for you, if not in real life then in your mind.
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll
Alice remains calm, sensible, reasonable, caring and helpful when the world around her turns topsy-turvy, and as she and people around her make silly statements, change in unpredictable ways, vanish, and create problems. I know quite a few women like her.
Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya
Few writers can write “down class” without romanticising or condescending. Kamala Markandaya is pitch-perfect. Reading her work widens your compassion and intelligence.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
When I read the story of surrogate mother Offred I knew so little about writing I wondered if Atwood’s experiences were anything like the women she described. How else did she know about the misogyny so many women consider normal? It was one of the few novels that discussed the power relationships between women, circumstances of surrogate motherhood, and polygamy, a topic I explored more than a decade later when writing What the Body Remembers.
Days of the Turban by Pratap Sharma
My favourite of all Pratap Sharma’s plays, novels, and films. Days of the Turban tells the story of Balbir from Amritsar who becomes involved with protesters who become revolutionaries, then extremists, and finally terrorists. It’s written with great love, understanding, and sorrow for families in Punjab who lost so many sons in the eighties.
Come Rain by Jai Nimbkar
A wonderfully nuanced look at cultural conflicts. Ann Palmer meets a middle-class foreign student, Ravi Gogte, in San Francisco and moves to India to live with him and his family. Ann doesn’t have blonde hair, is not promiscuous, nor bothered by India’s dirt and squalor. She isn’t even a missionary. Ann has a stormy relationship with her husband and a number of power struggles with a very strong mother-in-law. Her efforts to understand India are skilfully rendered by Nimbkar’s smooth and thoughtful dialogue.
A book that flows as well as this
one could not have been easy to write.
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
My husband David was away on a business trip, and I planned to finish Fugitive Pieces, the story of Jakob Beer, a Polish Jewish boy who witnesses the slaughter of his family in the Holocaust. When I couldn’t find the novel anywhere, I called David to ask if he had seen it. “I hid it,” he said without a trace of shame, “because it made you cry so much.” “I cried because it was so touching and beautiful,” I said. On his return, I demanded my book, but David (genuinely!) couldn’t remember where he’d put it. “It will show up eventually,” he said. I couldn’t wait for eventually. I was scheduled to speak at BookExpo Canada on a panel with Anne Michaels. I bought a US edition of the book so I could ask Anne to sign it. Now we own two copies, and both are precious.
The Telling by Ursula Le Guin
Reading A Wizard of Earthsea as a child, I wondered what ursula Le Guin would be like in person. I’m still wondering, because she chooses the style and voice that suits each story. I now know how difficult that is. She’s an anthropologist, feminist, and an explorer of the impact of technology. The Telling is one of my favourites: the story of emissary Sutty, who moves to the north of the planet Aka to find people unaffected by the rule of the Dovzan Corporation, “inefficient people” whose way of learning is through ideograms and story. Her journey is monitored by the Corporation but equally interesting is how she monitors herself as an observer who must make a report without HP (hocus-pocus). If you’re a writer, read A Wave in the Mind as well.
English Lessons and Other Stories Page 17