no one can pronounce my name by rakesh satyal

You could be reminded by any number of things that you weren’t making love, that love wasn’t being made.

Making love could not be confined to a bed. She found the expression horrible and cruel anyway. But Ranjana was not lying she did not know the last time that she and Mohan had made love. No, Prashant’s conception had not been the last time.

Her marriage to Mohan was arranged, and she wrestles with her feelings for him and their lack of intimacy: Butt, her son Prashant has just left for college, and she has discovered her husband has been researching how to perform sexual acts on the Internet-a troubling revelation given the fact that the couple has been celibate for years. Harit’s story is intertwined with that of Rajana, another Indian immigrant close to his age, who writes paranormal novels as a needed distraction from a suburban life rife with unpleasantness, melancholy, and outright suspicion: She works for a proctologist named Dr. But Harit struggles with his place both in this country and in their friendship. He meets Teddy, a gregarious man who persuades Harit to go out drinking with him after work. That was it: he did not question his actions because part of him believed that Swati was the one performing them.Īfter working as a janitor, Harit seeks a job in the storage room at a department store, but instead he’s given a job as a salesman. Perhaps it was because, at the beginning, it wasn’t just his mother who needed Swati to be alive but Harit himself. He had never thought of putting on makeup, but in the midst of his suffering, or the catatonic nothing that turned out to be suffering, he had done both of those things so easily that he wondered if perhaps he had once dreamed about doing them, if they had been occupying the same part of his mind that a childhood phobia of snakes or an affinity for lassi had occupied. He had found himself holding one of Swati’s lipsticks to his mouth and knew that it would be a routine. It had just seemed like the logical thing to do. He wasn’t sure how the dress-up game had started. The Indian immigrant family is so overcome with grief that Harit begins dressing up in a sari for his mother each night to pass as Swati.

The sudden death of Harit’s sister, Swati, has come to define Harit and his mother. No One Can Pronounce My Name, his sophomore effort, is a funny, compassionate portrayal of the immigrant and second-generation immigrant experience. Though he’s written only two novels, Satyal’s already garnered critical acclaim: Blue Boy, his debut, won the 2010 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut fiction from the Association of Asian American Studies. Those who scour “the most anticipated books of 2017” lists have likely noticed that Rakesh Satyal’s No One Can Pronounce My Nameis featured on most of them-and with good reason.

No one can pronounce my name by rakesh satyal