Not Native

The stories in this debut collection explore experiences of first generation Indian immigrants in the U.S. Kamma’s characters deal with conflict, growth, dislocation, and renewal in a new world. Their old world is also present, and this "in-betweenness" shapes their lives. Once immigration involved leaving all behind, assuming a new identity with your new culture. Now we move back and forth—between continents, cities, our different mores no longer tidily compartmentalized, sometimes more migrant than immigrant. Generational splits in families mirror and amplify the gulf between new and old. A father steps off a train at a station and disappears for a son’s entire childhood; an emigrant son returning for a visit easily falls in with his father’s delusion that he is a servant. A couple safely ensconced in their new American life face the costs of their choices when those they left behind come to visit. Divisions within a nation, whether of caste or class, can be more striking than differences between countries. Returning to India, characters revisit choices they or their parents made with radically different sensibilities and assumptions now in play. What seemed shocking, inevitable, or impossible then, may feel inconsequential, arbitrary, or heroic now. Like his characters, the author is an acute observer—and diffident interpreter—of a much larger world that will never feel fully familiar again.