Marriage of a Thousand Lies by S.J. Sindu

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. And back in America, Rakesh Satyal has written one of the funniest, yet deeply emotional tales, about Indian Americans that I have ever read in No One Can Pronounce My Name. Across the pond, Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Erotic Fiction for Punjabi Widows uses the guise of humor to offer a moving account of loss and love among British Sikhs.

Sindu offers an original and deeply personal tale of sexuality and struggle amongst the Sri Lankan Tamil community of New England. In three new works of fiction, South Asian British and American authors take up the mantle of sexuality in unique nodes of interpretation. While the post-9/11 period and its racialization and subsequent criminalization of brown bodies and identities marked one epoch of the South Asian experience, particularly in Diaspora, recent South Asian immigrant literature suggests the beginning of another frame: sexuality. 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.

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.

Marriage of a Thousand Lies by S.J. Sindu