Of gay Indians in America

Quarantine
Rahul Mehta
Random House
254 pages
Rs399

Rahul Mehta’s nine short stories are about relationships: young homosexual NRIs, their relations with their ‘traditional’ Indian grandparents and parents, ‘straight’ siblings, gay Indian-Americans and their Indian ‘guide boys’.

Almost all the stories are narrated in the first person, from the point of view of a gay Indian in the US. All of them have American boyfriends, and some also travel to India with their partners. Some belong to Gujarati households. These similarities make the resemblance between the writer and the protagonists sharp.

The eponymous story ‘Quarantine’ is about an NRI living in cosmopolitan New York taking Jeremy, his boyfriend, home to meet his family in small town America. Despite the stories he’d heard about how his partner’s grandfather, ‘bapuji’, had tormented his mother, the American takes a liking to the old man.

Similarly, in ‘Ten Thousand Years’, the American forms a bond with his Indian boyfriend’s grandmother. Most of the stories read like diary entries, without a strong storyline, and they seem like a collection of incidents put together in story form, with no common thread other than the fact that this was the protagonist’s experience.