India, home away from home

The writer, who visited her mother’s family in Bandra regularly as a child, sets her stories in India, her home away from home Nalini draws on Bandra as the setting for her book

NEW YORK: It took five years for Nalini Jones to complete 'What You Call Winter' set in a Catholic suburb in Mumbai and she used her own experiences to help write the short-story collection. The notion of leaving home, dislocation and the scattering of family is a constant theme in What You Call Winter; the son is shipped off to a boarding school in India; a wife and mother walks out on her family and children emigrate.

Jones told DNA that her writing is shaped by her childhood where she was in an “annual state” of goodbyes and reunions. “I grew up with at least one side of my family scattered over the globe. My mom’s family lives in Bandra. She bravely started up a life in the States with my dad so I have always been fascinated by that idea that she had to begin a home in a new place — it must have been difficult,” Jones said, at a book reading in the Rubin Museum of Art.

“As children my brother, sister and I visited Mumbai often and we were encouraged to think of it as our home. I have loved going there,” added Jones, who has based her fictional Indian Catholic town of Santa Clara on Bandra where her mother Marguerite grew up.

Jones confessed she chatted up Indians behind the steering wheels of New York’s iconoclastic yellow cabs. “I have always been intrigued by their courage. I think that sense of not being quite certain of where your home is or feeling possibly that you have two homes that are so distinct has always moved me. That is how I ended up writing about people who have experiences so different from mine,” said Jones who explores American childhoods, Indian childhoods and the different ways distance operates in families in her book.

In one of her stories, a daughter waffles over how much she should reveal of her new life in the US when she returns home to help her mother get a cataract surgery. The book title itself comes from dialogue in one of her stories.

A father who lives in India is speaking to his son in the US and mentions a “cool winter” and the son who is battling a New York snowstorm laughs it off, saying; What You Call Winter is nothing to us. It’s like our summer.” Jones cleverly uses everyday conversation like this to convey a broader message. The father suddenly realises how far he and his son have drifted.  

What You Call Winter is flying off bookshelves and will be released by Harper Collins in India. Jones is inviting comparisons with Indian-American writers like Jhumpa Lahiri. Her debut has been hailed as 'auspicious' by US critics.