Bombay Blues by Tanuja Desai Hidier (review)

Two years in book time have passed since American-born South Asian seventeen-year-old Dimple fell heart-over-head in love with Karsh, the suitable boy her parents had pinned their hopes on (in Born Confused, BCCB 2/03). Since then, she and Karsh have been pursuing her photography and his DJing in the hottest Desi hip-hop clubs in New York and sharing beds in their NYU dorm rooms. Now Dimple’s cousin, Sangita, has invited them to her wedding in Bombay, and both have trepidation about the trip; Dimple is grieving the death of her Dadaji and Karsh the suicide of his father, and they are wondering what India will mean to them without these native anchors. The journey moves them closer to themselves but farther from each other, as Karsh seeks solace through spirituality and Dimple goes fully carnal through multi-page, perspective-shattering sex with a stranger. This is a very different book than its predecessor, with Dimple at a very different stage of life and the language less accessible and more artful. Dimple ultimately comes to terms with being neither fully inside nor fully outside either of her cultural identities, but her stream-of-consciousness scene-kid narration is so hipster and private that only readers plugged into all of her various currents will be able to take that journey with her. Her exploration of the teeming wonders of Bombay and her reflections on desires and behavior are conveyed through a dizzying blend of inventive intercultural hip-hop terminology that is intricately crafted, but it often proves more baffling than engrossing, more art than story. Nonetheless, readers willing to suspend the need to make complete sense of her lush language and submit instead to its mellifluous sounds will share Dimple’s experience of sensory overload and identity fusion and confusion, and that may be enough for those desperate to know what happened to Dimple after Born Confused.