The lightweight ambitions of a promising writer

Lindsay Pereira's new collection of stories is uneven and undercooked, with a couple of exceptions

- Somak Ghoshal

Lindsay Pereira's new book, Songs Our Bodies Sing, is a collection of nine stories, several of which are set in Mumbai, the city he grew up in, while the rest is a motley bunch that portrays the trials of Indians in North America, England and Europe. The stories are easy to read—at times, a little too neat—and vary in length. Butterfly is only a few pages long, and If You Don't Weaken is as detailed as a novella.

If you pick up this volume expecting the energy of a typical short story, which serves up a slice of life with a twist at the end, you will be disappointed. Admittedly, all the tales here are slices of life, but with little to no surprises. More often than not, you can see the ending from miles ahead. Or else, a promising story like The Antique Shop, with which the collection opens, simply peters out with a whimper.

Himanshu, the protagonist of the first story, is a wily antique-seller, running a decades-old family business near Chor Bazaar in Mumbai. In the course of one morning's transactions, his internalised prejudices against white foreign customers, Muslims and homosexuals flare up. But, in the end, these details amount to little more than anthropological insights, with not much fictional substance. This failing to transform close observation into arresting stories, unfortunately, is endemic to the collection. The characters remain either too flat or too textbookish for the most part.

If, on the other hand, you decide to read