Book 926: Khabaar – Madhushree Ghosh

When the publicist reached out to me about this one, I wasn’t sure I had the capacity, but it was five months before it was published so I figured I’d make time!*

That sort of happened. Khabaar was on my TBR pile nonstop from February onward but between all the knitting I was doing and getting distracted by EVERY MM romance novel possible, I kept putting it off to my detriment.

Once I, finally, got into the book it was an intriguing read that kept me engaged. I somehow missed that it was more a mostly chronological series of essays than a single narrative taking the reader from Ghosh’s childhood home in India and crisscrossing the United States multiple times.

The colonization of the mind and of our immigrant stories is a problematic minefield indeed. It takes decades for multilingual authors like myself to take a stance on how to present words that aren’t English but that I grew up with. Should we italicize words our mothers raised us with or not? Are these words foreign and if so, to whom? If a reader doesn’t understand the word, what will they do? Stop reading? Start exploring? After all, isn’t that what we do ourselves as writers, readers, and learners? Why then, this italics-policing by many publishers to highlight an ‘exotic,’ ‘foreign,’ ‘unfamiliar’ word? Read the sentence. Read the story. You’ll get it. Or you’ll ask. (Author’s Note)

There were so many wonderful essays in this novel that it’s hard to choose a favorite. Each one moved seamlessly between present and past tying what at times felt like disparate stories together from the street vendors in Singapore to meeting her future ex’s parents, to the domestic violence of a female restaurateur juxtaposed with the Saat Pheras of her wedding. Ghosh wove so many different emotions together with various recipes and food stories the reader is constantly kept in the stories even with the big jumps.

I also learned so much about Indian politics some of which I was aware of, but a lot that was news to me even though it was decades old. Some of that can be explained by me being in my teens/early-20s, but wow. I missed so much on a global scale. It was interesting to read about Ghosh’s experience as an immigrant to America writing about having lived in America longer than she had in her home country, especially around the pandemic.

In America, do we learn from previous global experience? No. We create our own pandemic story. The world for us is a fight for toilet paper, for yeast, for the last egg on the shelf, the last Target, Trader Joe’s, Costco, and Walmart runs. Our fight is like post-Thanksgiving Black Friday sales mayhem. Why? Because this is a Western World, and when the capitalistic world is out of our control, we return to the rituals of fighting in a land of paucity that created this country in the first place. (Chapter 10)

The other thing that I found really powerful was Ghosh’s journey to be okay being by herself. There were definitely traumatic moments, especially coming to terms with her marriage and what she wanted it to be compared to what it was and a harrowing claustrophobic experience you’ll have to read to find out about. But, she wrapped a lot of it into the COVID-19 pandemic, which she termed “the Great Pause.” And I found this to be interesting to read as we’re slowly coming out of it/living with it/moving to an endemic state. How she connected her incredibly busy life and being run ragged to the world telling her (and everyone else) to slow down and connecting it all to food was fascinating.

Every year during Diwali, I am reminded of how one can create one’s family, when the family one was born into is gone. Society doesn’t give enough credit to friendships that are sometimes closer than family, nor does it give friends the respect we give to spouses. Every Diwali is my unproblematic Thanksgiving.

The memories are happy because I choose them to be. (Chapter 9)

Recommendation: Well worth the read. Ghosh wrote a fascinating series of essays tying various points of her life from childhood to the global COVID-10 pandemic to food and cooking. Sometimes it was hard to read because of the emotions Ghosh was clearly experiencing during the essay, but those moments were balanced with comfort food or entertaining stories connected to food history. I was impressed with the breadth and depth of the collection!

*I received a copy of Khabaar via NetGalley in return for my honest opinion. No goods or money were exchanged.

Opening Line: “Baba’s tales of Dhaka were love stories.”

Closing Line: “I will wait for the next Festival of Lights—it will be a celebration of good over evil. It will be joy, food, and love. But till then, I wait.” (Not whited out as this is a work of nonfiction.)