The title story in Elvis, Raja, M.G. Vassanji’s collection of tales of Muslim Canadians via Africa, is worth the purchase alone:

On the floor… stand four gaudily painted cutout figures of wood or cardboard… they look like Hindu icons, each with the face of Elvis. Elephant-headed pot-bellied Ganesh, with puffy middle-aged, perhaps drug-drenched, Elvis face and leer, the trunk holding a small guitar; monkey-god Hanuman as the rock ‘n rolling young Elvis in hound-dog pelvis-shaking posture; blue Krishna holding a mike and proferring a benevolent smile; and finally, in the centre, larger than the rest by a head, a black Elvis as Kali the terrible… and at her feet the skulls of vanquished foes… Andy Williams, Bing Crosby, John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

He certainly knows how to set up a premise. Many of the other tales are similarly mind-expanding. Vassanji is of the generation just past Partition, a former MIT nuclear physicist who founded the Toronto South Asia Review, but his voice is contemporary.

This is a solid book; I loved it only in bits and pieces. Vassanji follows up the rambunctious ‘Elvis, Raja’ with ‘The Trouble With Tea,’ a story about a man groggily trying to find spirituality, or just good tea, at the 5 am azan at a Toronto-area mosque. It is a quiet, plain tale. Others may find charm in it, but I enjoy the stillness of meditation in situ, not ex libris.

With my predilection for gonzo writing, I find it hard to get into tales of circumscribed lives, which is why I abandoned both Brick Lane and Maps for Lost Lovers. It’s about conservatism, not Islam; Rushdie wrote circles around Shame. If you want to hear about lives constrained by el quedirán, talk to your aunties of a certain age.

Another quibble: Vassanji repeatedly uses the revelation of homosexuality as a final plot twist, a gay-us ex machina. Surely we’ve advanced to the point where a love affair hinted at rather clearly in the first page of a story can be treated with the same respect as hetero romance, rather than as a curio and a plot twist.

This collection is titled When She Was Queen in North America — a blander title, a blander design. The title alone was enough to get me to buy this book. As with many things, y’all across the pond are missing out on the Warhol-Wonderbread genius of the subcontinental edition.

But your Pakistani army is not full of weaklings either, they are our same Punjabi jawans after all! India may be big, but the Tamils and Malayalis are not going to come over and defend us… and forget about the Bengalis, who would talk away Hindustan!

The Deccan Harold reviewer is sick of diasporic lit:

Rootlessness is also a problem with the second-generation American and British Indians, too. And all these children who may or may not have missed the midnight start becoming ponderous. And when they become ponderous the result is that they pen a book…

… he does not try to bring in all the clichéd problems of the irritating Indians living abroad - like their love for pickles and agarbatti… his craft is thousand times better than the sob stories written by behanjis sitting in high-rise apartments of Brooklyn or Southall… [Link]

Jabberwock, the Hindu and Time Out have more.

Related post: Coconut Express