LUCKY BOY by Shanthi Sekaran. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House, New York. 472 pages. Hardcover. $27.00
With Lucky Boy, Shanthi Sekaran performs a literary cantata that is as dazzling as it is soul-searing. Two disparate threads converge unluckily in Lucky Boy. One spools together the story of Kavya and Rishi in a reasonably stable marriage. Kavya is a graduate of UC Berkeley and works as a sorority chef, while Rishi works for a tech company. They lead a somewhat stereotypical Indian American life, balancing their bike-to-work Berkeley lifestyle with an India imported sensitivity to cultural expectations. The other has eighteen-year old Solimar Castro Valdez, an undocumented immigrant from fictional Santa Clara Popocalco, looking for the kind of stability that Kavya takes for granted. Lucky Boy traces Soli’s journey from naïve optimist to gritty survivor and elevates the book by shining a light on the deeply contested issue of undocumented immigration.
“It all started in 2010,” said author Sekaran, “I heard about this case on NPR about a Guatemalan woman who was fighting for custody for her child. She had been picked up in a factory raid, she was in detention, and her son was being adopted away from her,” Sekaran summarized. The case was that of Encarnacion Bail Romero who lost her child to the Mosers, a couple she had never met, all while she was in detention.
This story is from the September 2017 edition of India Currents.
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This story is from the September 2017 edition of India Currents.
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