14 Short Stories of the Diaspora
Dr. Swagata Bhattacharya
In this Chapter we shall discuss:
- Biographies of six diasporic writers: Shani Mootoo, Makeda Silvera, Rohinton Mistry, M.G.Vassanji, Hiromi Goto and Suwanda Sugunasiri
- Plot summaries of the six short stories: ‘Out on Main Street’, ‘Canada Sweet Girl’, ‘Swimming Lessons’, ‘Refugee’, ‘Stinky Girl’ and ‘Fellow Travellers’
Shani Mootoo
Shani Mootoo (1957-) was born in Dublin, Ireland and grew up in Trinidad in a family of mixed Indian and Nepalese origins. After coming to Canada in 1977, Mootoo studied at the University of Western Ontario where she received a BFA (1980). She was an accomplished multimedia and experimental video artist before she took up writing. Having been told by her grandmother not to repeat that an uncle had abused her sexually, Mootoo adopted the visual mode of expression early in life as the primary means of articulating her innermost thoughts. Her visual works – videos, photographs and paintings – have been exhibited and screened nationally as well as internationally. Her works include Out on Main Street (1993), Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), The Predicament of Or (2000), He Drowned She in the Sea (2005) and Valmiki’s Daughter (2008). Mootoo is a contributor to CBC’s radio show ‘This Morning’ and has been a writer-in- residence at a number of universities including University of Alberta. She currently resides in Edmonton and calls herself simply a ‘Canadian’ writer.
‘Out on Main Street’
Plot: The narrator of the story (who is affectionately called ‘Pudding’ or ‘Pud’ by her girlfriend) and her girlfriend Janet are descendants of Indians who had once migrated to the Caribbean islands. After the second migration from the Caribbean to Canada, their families had settled down in Canada as double-migrants. Pudding and Janet find themselves misfit and uncomfortable in the main streets of Canada. The story is set in Vancouver where they often go out for trips. On one such occasion, Janet and Pudding go to “Kush Valley Sweets” to taste Indian sweets. Pudding points to one piece of sweet and asks the shop attendant to hand her “one piece a meethai”. The attendant laughs at her for not being able to identify that as ‘koorma’. He asks her about her origin and laughs at her inability to identify herself as an Indian. The experience leads Pudding to confirm that both Janet and herself are “cultural bastards”. After they settle down to eat, two intruders suddenly burst into the restaurant and start misbehaving with the waiters. They make racist comments and the other Indian women enjoying their afternoon snacks at the restaurant at that moment sympathize with the shop attendant and his brothers. Several of them move over to the counter and start talking with the shop attendant as if to express their support. The next moment the restaurant door again opens and a bevy of good- looking Indian women enters the room. At once the waiters shift their attention from the middle- aged sympathizing women to these young ones. One of them, however, goes to the extent putting his hand behind the back of one of the elder women and tries to be overtly friendly with her. This gesture was not at all well accepted by the old women and she addressed Pudding about having to tolerate such behavior in public. Finally, the entire atmosphere of the place changed with the entry of yet another couple, Sandy and Lise. As soon as they spotted Janet and Pudding, they greeted them with such warmth and frankness that those who had not been able to recognize Janet and Pudding as a couple for so long now got to understand everything. As a result, when they were leaving the restaurant, Pudding turned to acknowledge the old women and instead got the feeling that her exit was most welcome.
‘Out on Main Street’ addresses four significant issues:
Racial identity: One of the prime concerns of this short story is racial identity. Janet and Pudding are originally Indians but find themselves alienated from other Indians because of a significant historical incident which had taken place generations ago. Their grandparents had migrated to the Caribbean islands from India almost 160 years ago. They had tried to maintain their culture and heritage in their adopted homelands but had failed to inculcate those practices into the succeeding generations. Most families of Indian origin in the Caribbean islands had been converted to Presbyterians and, consequently, had drifted apart from their original culture and religion. In this story, Janet belonged to one such Presbyterian family. Her Christian name and anglicized behavior did little to let her know about her origin and culture. In Canada, both Pudding and Janet found themselves “watered-down Indians”. When they come face to face with ‘real’ Indians, they are made to feel as the ‘other’. Their only problem is their skin colour by virtue of which they are mistaken as Indians and that was the only reason why the old woman in the shop spoke to Pudding. The incident of the two drunk men entering the shop and abusing the waiters demonstrate that the shop owner, who is from Fiji, has to encounter racism in multicultural Vancouver. When the whites discriminated against the coloured men, the ‘brown’ women were by their side. But in a span of a few lines it is seen that this solidarity is too temporary. Racial discrimination and sexual discrimination actually go hand in hand. Taking advantage of their sympathy, when one of the waiters tries to become too friendly with one of his female customers, the atmosphere changes. The same woman who was full of sympathy for that very man a few minutes ago is now repulsed by his attitude. Now she turns to Pudding as a gesture of seeking sympathy from a person of the same gender. She thinks that since Pudding is a woman she will understand what it is to bear such nuisance in public. It is all the more disgusting since any formal complaint would automatically lead to the remark that the ‘other’ cultures such as theirs is sexist and uncivilized.
Cultural Identity: In this story, Indians from the Caribbean islands are shown as “subaltern diasporic communities” as opposed to the NRIs. Unlike the NRIs who are much fated, these ‘Indians’ are mostly ignored. Authentic Indians are unlikely to see such Indians as “Indians”. They are more likely to see their discontinuity with India and cultural similarity with Creole. In Trinidad, Pudding had identified her family as “kitchen Indians”, i.e., those who cook Indian food at least once a day. She had prided herself on being a “Hindu par excellence” with a more superior knowledge of Indian traditions and rituals than the Presbyterian Janet. However, in the streets of Vancouver, they both find themselves at a loss to express themselves. In the Canadian city, the Indians who are by themselves a minority need to have an ‘other’ in order to bolster their own authenticity. The cultural superiority displayed by the authentic Indians vis-a-vis the Indo-Caribbeans reflects a regrettable Indian attitude where a false sense of superiority is adopted to assuage their own minority status.
Gender Relations: The story engages with questions of gender and sexuality and critiques homophobia which is most dominant within the coloured groups. Janet and Pudding are a lesbian couple who have become used to not being accepted in the mainstream society. Their relationship had been much talked about since their days in the Caribbean islands and even in Canada they have not been able to express themselves freely. Pudding feels, acts and behaves like a ‘man’ with her crew cut hair, gym boots, and blue jeans tucked inside those boots. In her own words, she looks like “a gender dey forget to classify”. She feels jealous if anybody tries to flirt with her girlfriend and becomes extra possessive and protective of her. Janet, on the other hand, is ‘feminine’ with long hair, make-up and high heel shoes. Her sexual preference also changes as Pudding recalls that Janet had had physical relations with a man. Their adventures on the main street, particularly in the Indian shops, are under a garb of simple friendship. They refrain from showing any affection towards each other in public. However, the arrival of Sandy and Lise let the cat out of the bag as it left nothing to the imagination for even elderly Indian women. It was clear that after such exposure, Janet and Pudding had no other option but to leave the restaurant. The homophobic Indians were surely intolerant of such relationships.
Language: In this story, the author problematizes power hierarchy in terms of both culture and language. The diasporic sensibility of displacement lends to her language a strange hybridity that can be defined as a translation of the thought processes of a confused mind. This confusion is further heightened because of altered notions of sexuality. Standard language is unable to express the condition of her characters who deviate from the norm. Feminist critics like Juliet Mitchell have argued that since the language at the disposal of a female writer is essentially patriarchal, and since she has to express female experiences in a patriarchal language, a woman writer’s voice is bound to be fragmented. Mootoo goes one step beyond with her fragmented language since her female voice refuses to comply with norms of female sexuality. The appropriation of lesbian and bisexual voices within the patriarchal discourse of writing essentially involves an automatic translation of the voices and experiences which cannot be expressed in any single standard language. The language of this story is a new literary decolonized space that allows accommodation to the dislocated and the fractured. It is technically known as ‘Patois’, a ‘substandard’ French. Since Janet and Pudding face social ostracization every moment in their lives, their expressions cannot be in socially rooted conventional languages. Hence, in ‘Out on Main Street’, English, French, Patois all present themselves in inappropriate forms.
Makeda Silvera
Makeda Silvera ( 1955- ), born in Kingston, Jamaica in a working class family, she moved to Canada with her parents when she was 13. She began writing in the 1970s as a reporter and freelance journalist. Her journalism and community activism made her aware of the problems facing Caribbean-born domestic workers in Canada. The result was Silenced (1983), Silvera’s first book. She is the co-founder and publisher of Sister Vision Press, a Toronto house that publishes writings by women of colour. Makeda’s collections of short stories include Remembering G (1991) and Her Head a Village (1994). She has written novels such as The Heart Does Not Bend (2003) and edited anthologies like Piece of My Heart: A Lesbian of Color Anthology (1991), The Other Woman: Women of Color in Contemporary Canadian Literature (1994) and Pearls of Passion: A Treasury of Lesbian Erotica (1995).
‘Canada Sweet, Girl’
Plot: Millie Maxwell, a resident of the Caribbean islands, came to Toronto with her friend in search of a job. It was partly financial crisis and partly a spirit of adventure that prompted her to migrate. In her initial days in Toronto, she did odd jobs and spent her free time with friends in restaurants and pubs. At that point of time, she felt that moving to Canada had been the wisest decision of her life. After some time, she found herself a job at a Chinese restaurant and thought of settling down in Canada. After working for a few months, Millie entered into a relationship with the owner of the restaurant, Mr. Young. It was more of a necessity rather than love and Millie soon found herself at ease with her present situation as a mistress to her employer. As a consequence, Millie became pregnant and gave birth to a son who never knew his father. Since Mr. Young paid her expenses, Millie was unable to detach herself from him. As her son grew up, he resembled his biological father so much that Mrs. Young was forced to find out the secret. She threatened Millie to leave her husband and eventually got her fired from the job. Millie found herself a new destination and started to earn her living as a domestic worker. However, she did not have any legal document and always lived in fear of being deported. Her fears however came true a few years later. On a paltry charge of playing loud music, the police one day entered her apartment and sought her papers. Her inability to produce legal documents drew their suspicion and Millie was summoned to appear before the court for a hearing on her status. A shivering Millie appeared before the judge one cold morning and was ordered to leave Canada within two weeks. It did not matter that she had been staying in the country for nine years, that she did not have any criminal record, that she had ten thousand dollars in her bank and that she had a Canadian-born son. Her lawyer, who took money from her regularly, did little to fight her case. Her second appeal got denied and she was handed over an Air Canada ticket to Jamaica.
After struggling for nine years to make a foothold in Canada, Millie Maxwell’s world was turned upside down in a single day when she was thrown out of the country without even being allowed to take her ‘Canadian’ son with her.
‘Canada Sweet, Girl’ addresses the issue of Canada’s biased immigration policy vis-à-vis the coloured immigrants. This story directly refers to the Foreign Domestic Movement Program (FDM) which was initiated by the Canadian government in 1981 to attract women from the third world countries. This program and its successor, the Live-in Care Caregiver Program (LCP) established terms from the recruitment of women in Canada under a system of temporary permits. Under the LCP, women from the developing countries were allowed to enter Canada for domestic work and child care in a Canadian citizen’s home. They were told that after a point of time they shall have the opportunity to apply for landed immigrant status. But this story shows that such a thing was mere fantasy, the caregivers had to spend their term in Canada as illegal immigrants and were deported back to their original countries after a point of time. Prior to deportation, they were arrested and put up at Strathcona Hotel, a notorious building in Toronto mentioned widely in immigrant literature. Several immigrants have actually committed suicide in this hotel without finding any other way of escape. In this story, too, Millie had a nightmare of being dragged into the Strathcona Hotel by the Canadian police force.
The other significant issue in this story is that of the use of language. The language used by Makeda Silvera is Patwah or Patois, a broken and substandard variation of French. It is slightly different from what is known as Pidgin or mixed language. In her own interviews, Silvera had admitted that it is impossible to express the feelings of racially oppressed people in a racist language such as English. She also adds that any standardized language would fail to give expression to the wrath and humiliation that lies hidden inside the racially oppressed people of this world. Those who are not part of the majority cannot speak in the language of the majority, hence the need for deviation. It is also a new literary space where the decolonized mind can speak for itself. It is a way of re-inventing the enemy’s language. If any reader wishes to go through the story, he/she has to decode the language and understand the politics that lies behind it.
Rohinton Mistry
Rohinton Mistry (1952-) was born in Bombay in a Parsi family. He received his B.Sc. in Maths and Economics from the University of Bombay before moving to Toronto in 1975. He worked for ten years in a bank, while studying English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Mistry began writing full time in 1983 after winning the university sponsored Hart House prize for each of his first two short stories. His first published book was a collection of short stories called Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987). Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995), Family Matters (2002) and Scream (2008) are among his novels. Currently he lives in Brampton, Ontario.
‘Swimming Lessons’
Plot: ‘Swimming Lessons’ is the story of Kersi, a Parsi boy who migrates to Canada from Bombay and aspires to be a writer. The story moves to and fro as Kersi’s mind shifts from his childhood days in Firozsha Baag amidst the Parsi community and Toronto, his currently place of residence. In Toronto, Kersi suffers from acute loneliness with only a sick old man and a nosy Portuguese woman for company as neighbours. His repressed sexuality urges him to look at women sunbathing without having the courage to approach them. It was possibly the sight of the bare bodied women that prompted him to get enrolled in swimming classes. His first day at the pool was nothing short of a disaster which reminded him of his struggle with the waters at the Chaupatty beach back in Bombay. Along with his own personal fears, there was also the constant apprehension of being mistreated as a man of colour. His initial enthusiasm soon gave way and Kersi started dreading the swimming classes. As the days passed, the old man’s condition worsened and he was taken to the hospital. With time, Kersi’s attitude, however, did not change. He still held the hope of being able to learn how to swim.
Alongside Kersi’s first person narrative, there runs a description of his parents’ conversation about the letters he sends to them from Canada. These conversations actually tell us that Kersi has become a writer and that he writes only about his childhood days spent in India. His father argues that it will probably take him some more time to settle down and write about his experiences encountered in the new place of his residence.
‘Swimming Lessons’ is the concluding story of the collection Tales from Firozsha Baag and refers to other stories of the same collection. It is a kind of fiction within fiction in which Kersi is acknowledged to be Mistry himself.
The issue of political violence and intolerance in Bombay has been addressed in the same manner as that of racial intolerance in Toronto. Just as the Shiv Sena discriminates against the non-Maharashtrians and treats them inhumanly, in Toronto the value of a non-white immigrant is nothing compared to a white one. As a Parsi, Kersi has encountered discrimination both in India and in Canada. His neighbours, the old man, the Portuguese woman, the Yugoslavian Berthe are all as alienated as him since none of them do actually belong to the mainstream. In fact, Kersi’s sexual desires are also a manifestation of his loneliness, his inability to assert himself anywhere.
Kersi’s constant urge to make himself acceptable finds expression in his inclination to learn swimming. He had failed to learn the art in Bombay and had consoled himself by saying that it was too dirty a place to swim. But in Canada where the water is fresh and pure, Kersi is still unable to make himself comfortable. It is a symbol of his failure, it is a symbol that he is actually a fish out of water everywhere. Neither the Indian shores were his own, nor the Canadian ones could be. His constant sense of insecurity gets manifested as he helplessly tries to keep himself afloat. Actually, Kersi’s insecurity is as much on land as in water, he suffers from a crisis everywhere.
The most significant issue addressed in ‘Swimming Lessons’ is the subject matter of diasporic writers. Mistry had himself observed that when an immigrant begins to write, it is taken for granted that the writing will address racism. The fact that a person of colour may not want to write about racism and multiculturalism is never taken into consideration. Through the character of Kersi’s father, the author points out that there may be several reasons as to why diasporic writers choose not to speak about their current place of residence. The standard opinion was that white Canadians preferred to read not about themselves or their own country but about the ‘other’. It can also be that it takes some time to settle down in a new environment and write about the new experiences encountered. But overall, it is seen that nostalgic writings have a better market and are much more preferred by both people in Canada and back in India. Mistry’s own stand vis-à-vis the reasons that prompt his own writings about the Parsi community in Bombay remains ambiguous.
Moyez Ghulam Hossein Vassanji
M.G. Vassanji (1950-) was born in Nairobia, Kenya and raised in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He is the son of parents who were second and third generation Indians in Africa. In 1970, he moved to the USA to study Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After obtaining his PhD in Nuclear Physics from the University of Pennsylvania, Vassanji moved to Canada to teach at the University of Toronto. After ten years and thirty published papers in his field, Vassanji became a full-time writer since 1988. Primarily a novelist, his works include The Gunny Sack (1989), No New Land (1991), The Book of Secrets (1994), Amriika (1999) and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003). His only collection of short stories, Uhuru Street, was published in 1992. Apart from fiction, Vassanji has edited A Meeting of Streams: South Asian Canadian Literature (1985). He is also the founder and publisher of TSAR (Toronto South Asian Review).
‘Refugee’
‘Refugee’ is the story of Karim, a boy from Uhuru Street who aims to sneak into Canada as a refugee to make a fortune for himself and his family. It was not Karim himself who had the ambition of becoming a rich man or living a hugely successful life. It was his mother’s dream which persuaded him to chuck his apparently comfortable life at Uhuru Street in Dar-es-Salaam and plunge into unfamiliar terrain. There were also other peoples’ success stories which lured his mother to force him into migrating to a first world country. In a desperate urge to see his family happy, Karim eventually decides to take the plunge and finds himself at the Frankfurt airport, ignorant of what to do next. He had been instructed to repeat that he was a refugee, and he did so, chanting it like a prayer. The trick worked up to the point when his passport was stamped and handed out to him with an address to report to. He had only a phone number to which he could not connect and stood around the airport like an absolutely stupid person. Eventually with the help of a helpful Indian and a German, Karim could contact the person he was looking for and landed in Bayreuth. The ordeal was enough for him and he was already desirous of going back into the safety of home. But Karim knew very well that he was standing in a point from which there was no return. As he sat vaguely under an alien sky in an alien place, two policemen picked him up and locked him in a police station. A terrified Karim was interrogated and later released. At last, with trepidation and curiosity, he walked into the address he was asked to contact at in Bayreuth. It was a house where a Nigerian man was playing the piano and a German woman was dancing. Among the rest seated there was a Sri Lankan, his host, and an Indian. All of them appeared to be sophisticated enough and all of them had legal documents with them. The police officers who had accompanied Karim left the place satisfied and as soon as they left, several other people rushed out of their hiding from the adjacent rooms. They were all illegal immigrants waiting to travel to Canada via Hamburg and Karim was going to be a part of them. It was a sort of business for Anand, the Sri Lankan host, who took in refugees from all across the world, gave them shelter in Bayreuth for a short period of time and directed them towards the proper route to enter Canada as a refugee. The fact that the Canadians were unable to distinguish Africans from the Lebanese or for that matter any third world country from each other had encouraged the flux of illegal migrants from these countries as refugees.
Vassanji’s short story deals with the issue of illegal migration as one of the ways of entering into Canada which would otherwise not allow entry to coloured migrants. In his criticism of racism, Vassanji includes not only Canada but also Africa, the continent where he was born and raised. In this story his protagonist Karim is a member of such a family which had its roots in India and had come to the British East Africa in search of fortune. Such families had been at the receiving end of racial discrimination in Kenya at the end of the MauMau period (1952-1960). Those who were of Indian origin were discriminated against by the ‘original’ Africans and in the name of state sanctioned confiscation of property, the Indian families were tortured, killed and their property seized. Under such circumstances it was only natural for such families to look for means of escaping to other countries which promised them social security. Canada was one of such lucrative spots and hence, people like Karim were desperate to reach that spot under any pretext. The name ‘Refugee’ becomes ironical as Karim actually becomes someone who has no place to call as his own.
Hiromi Goto
Hiromo Goto (1966-) is a Japanese-Canadian editor, fiction writer, cultural critic, arts advocate and teacher of creative writing. Born in Japan, Goto migrated to Canada with her family at the age of three. She used to live on the west coast of British Columbia before moving to Nanton, Alberta. She studied at the University of Calgary and is, at present, the writer-in-residence of the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.
Basically a novelist, her famous works include Chorus of Mushrooms (1995) and The Kappa Child (2001). She has also co-edited The Skin on our Tongues (1993).
‘Stinky Girl’
Hiromi Goto’s ‘Stinky Girl’ is a semi-autobiographical narrative in which a daughter is affectionately referred by her mother as “Stinko”. She knows fully well that her mother does not mean anything when she calls her daughter by such a name, it only reminds her that in the outer world also she is referred to as a stinky girl. It makes her feel that when a child is born, it is wet and stinky in a literal sense irrespective of race and colour. But no one is called a stinky child at the moment of its birth. This adjective is a marker of racism and is used only as an abuse. Thus when she was really wet and stinky in her mother’s arms she was adored and loved by all.
However when the same child grew up and went to school, she became a stinky child because of her racial inferiority in the eyes of the white people. Unable to pinpoint exactly when and how she came to be considered as stinky, the girl narrator keeps on wondering what makes her so different from the rest of the people around her.
The sole and central issue which concerns this story is that of racism and racial discrimination as encountered by people of Japanese origin in Canada. The physical features – the yellow skin, the slit eyes as well as the cultural differences of the Japanese have not been much welcomed in Canada as such. The resentment increased and reached a height post the Second World War and the Pearl Harbour bombing in 1942. Several writers of Japanese origin living in Canada have documented their torment during that period and Goto has always been very vocal about the racial discrimination against the Japanese. In this story too, the narrative is based on the singular fact that racial abuse can deter and damage a young child’s psychology and influence her thought processes to a great extent. Her self confidence can be described and hence the personality of a human being can actually be fractured by making her feel unwanted and undeserving. It is one of the potent tools of threatening the existence of the ‘undesirable’ members of the Canadian society.
Suwanda Sugunasiri
Suwanda Sugunasiri (1936- ) was born in Tangalla, Sri Lanka and migrated to Canada in 1967. A scholar from the University of Pennsylvania, Sugunasiri earned his PhD from the University of Toronto. His major works are in Sinhala. He is the co-founding editor of TSAR, a classical dancer and stage actor. The Search For Meaning (1980) was his first major work. Life Struggle (1961) and Idiots (1966) are among his other notable works.
‘Fellow Travellers’
‘Fellow Travellers’ is a first person narrative where the narrator recounts a family incident revolving around Podihamy, a hapless woman who worked as their servant. Podihamy had been picked up from the streets and given shelter by the family in exchange of household work. But the poor woman could never get rid of her habit of wandering about in the streets and picking up food from here and there. One day, this resulted in a severe bout of diarrhea and she had to be hospitalized. The family was not rich enough and the expense over her treatment led to a dispute. Aunty Fair, the narrator’s aunt, and her sister, the narrator’s mother, fought between themselves over Podihamy. While the mother was dead against spending money to treat Podihamy, Aunty Fair did all she could to make Podihamy recover fast. She went to the extent of nursing Podihamy so much that she herself fell ill. Her last pennies had been spent on buying medicines for Podihamy. In such a situation, Podihamy started to show signs of recovery and she gave the impression that she was now well enough to nurse Aunty Fair. In addition to working errands for the mother, Podihamy nursed the aunt till she was hale and hearty. Being sure that both the sisters are quite well, Podihamy died that day after having massaged the two women’s bodies. After this incident, Aunty Fair who had been staying with her sister over a period of time decided to go back to live with her adopted son. Before leaving, she explained that she would not like to spend her last days like Podihamy, unwanted and unattended. She has realized that when a very useful person fails to provide service she is discarded and considered a burden. Taking a lesson from Podihamy’s last days, Aunty Fair left her sister and went away.
‘Fellow Travellers’ is a work by a diasporic writer set in his homeland. The story has no direct connection whatsoever with Canada. It represents another aspect of diasporic writing where the homeland of the writer and its cultures and customs become areas of interest for his adopted home.
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References
- Dasgupta, Sayantan ed. Readings Vol. II. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press, 2002.
- Kamboureli, Smaro ed. Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature in English Second Edition. Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2007.
- McGifford, Diane ed. The Geography of Voice: An Anthology of South Asian-Canadian Writing.
- Toronto: TSAR, 1992.
- Silvera, Makeda ed. The Other Woman: Women of Color in Contemporary Canadian Literature.
- Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1994.
- Vassanji, M.G. ed. A Meeting of Streams: South Asian-Canadian Literature. Toronto: TSAR, 1998.
- Sugunasiri, Suwanda ed. The Whistling Thorn: South Asian-Canadian Fiction. Buffalo: Mosaic Press, 1994.