I'm always wary of reading short stories about expat South Asian lives.
I'm terrified of finding at best, dreamy, soft-edged images of exotic otherness and at worst, a reduction of all that is South Asian to Apu or Raj or some variation of the Spider-in-the-toilet (that's a reference to this Seinfield bit, 01:6 to 0:24) motif...some mutation of ph.d.-holding, heavy-accented, brown-skinned Indian-ness. (Okay, okay - this is a jump from one medium to another - but aren't television shows, walking-talking shorts, finally?). It really is as if South Asian-ness is essentially about arranged-marriages, spices and aromatic cooking, when, of course, it isn't about the angst of being brown in a white world, or being a third culture child who just doesn't fit in. And If it isn't these, there are the narratives of "ennui-ridden other-ness" to borrow a phrase from Rohin Guha (he mentions Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri), which sometimes are entirely forgettable until someone discovers the profitability of poverty porn*.

So yes, I started on Sharbari Z. Ahmed's. "The Ocean of Mrs. Nagai: Stories" with all this baggage and enough anxiety to fill up a small room. But, it turns out, that anxiety was entirely unnecessary. Ahmed's short stories are about people, not types - about young mothers and old wives, about little children rich, lonely ones and poor, playful ones, about Americans in Dhaka and Bangladeshis in Hell's Kitchen. These stories are expressly not about saris (although these make an appearance) or food (which also somehow creeps into daily life, who knew?) or angst (well, okay, a little, but even then not in the way that you'd expect). These are stories about people crossing paths, connecting with each other and establishing relationships. These are stories about life and death. These are stories that haunt. These are stories that I could not read back-to-back, simply because of how intense they are.

While reading, I found Ahmed's writing slightly jagged in parts. And of the wide range of characters - from a demure, gracious Japanese woman Mrs. Nagai, to an inquisitive, sprightly five-year-old Bangladeshi boy living in New York, to a fairly conservative Bangladeshi Muslim man who has lost a sister, to a young American girl of Bangladeshi origin on the brink of her teens, to an indulgent Ethiopian Jewish gardener - that Ahmed narrates, some work better than the others.

But, Ahmed's strength lies her ability to create stories that refuse to leave you, despite this jaggedness, this unevenness of narration (for instance, right now, I can't remember what parts I stumbled through. I can, however, remember every single scene that made me squirm while reading). She uses little details spectacularly to highlight nuances of human emotion (for instance, in the eponymous The Ocean of Mrs. Nagai, a slip of paper with a fortune on it throws into relief the struggle of new motherhood, the relationship between new, young, working parents, inter-generational attitudes, cultural adjustments...all this, in a slip of paper). And this - this packing of an ordinate amount of humanity into little gestures, unassuming words, into deceptively nondescript details - makes these stories entirely worth it.

Of the eight stories in the book I have my favorites - Pepsi and Raisins not Virgins top that list.Pepsi traces the story of a young girl, the child of a diplomat in Ethiopia as she interacts with other adults and children around her. Raisins not Virgins on the other hand, deals with the entirely adult world of romantic love, religion and human choice. I had to set the book down after both stories - just to watch them sink into my soul. As did, for that matter, Foreign Exchange - which involves a painful unearthing of death in a foreign land. I love that Ahmed's stories do not essentialize based on nationality, sexuality or gender. And that she leaves enough room for her stories and readers to breathe.

These are stories which, even if you don't realize it while reading, will creep up on you and smack you on the head with their awesomeness at the oddest moments (for instance, while you're staring at a near-empty pantry wondering what to make for dinner). And at 2.99, this is a deal. Read it.

*The year that film released, nearly every stranger I met on a bus wanted to talk to me about the slums of Bombay.