The first remarkable thing about Nilanjana Sengupta’s Chickpeas to Cook and Other Stories is its structure.
The book has eight chapters named solemnly after religions ― Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism. Within each chapter are nestled three things ― an introduction to the religion, an introduction to a community within the religion and then, a story honouring a person from that community.
The scene of this action is Singapore, a country Sengupta moved to from India and lives in.
The stories are mostly women-led. Each is prefaced with an acknowledgement of sorts on how a particular friend of Sengupta’s has introduced her to this story.
‘Chickpeas to Cook and Other Stories,’ Nilanjana Sengupta, Penguin Random House SEA, 2022.
Throughout the book, religion straddles the lives of those who have made Singapore home. Most are from the Indian subcontinent. All are interesting in their own way.
Sengupta’s worthy preoccupation in this book has been to find the smallest ― in fact, the unit ― of all experiences. Thus it is that in Singapore, a tiny country, the lens is trained on the home, a tiny stage where the largest of concepts ― religion ― is performed.
Prose flows like in a conversation, as Sengupta introduces each religion before taking a longer look at each community that follows that religion. Who are the Dawoodi Bohras? What about the Eurasians? How far removed are the Theravada Buddhist-Burmese from the Buddha and Burma? Sengupta answers these with the air of a grandmother recounting a well-told story. Shorn of grimness, each chapter seeks to answer an essential question ― all religions have grand philosophies, but what of the women?
The stories are also not burdened by the intention of offering up vignettes of very unique lives. They are neither very dissimilar, nor the same. But they do have central themes relating to women’s dreams, anger, exhaustion and happiness running through them.
What is truly unique to each story is the amount of religion that a person has let into her life ― an Orthodox Jew can’t get far enough from either the orthodoxy or the Jewishness of her faith, but a Nattukottai Chettiar is occupied more with her son’s school marks.
Before each chapter is a declaration of what interviewers have said. Readers thus know that while what follows is fiction, it is not too removed from life.
Among other things, it is delightful how footnotes nestle within the book. An exchange between siblings in the middle of a family function leads to a weighty footnote on the beginning of the Guru Granth Sahib. ‘I know all of this is very serious,’ Sengupta seems to say, ‘but no form of worship or spirituality can escape the everyday.’ Do the footnotes break the narration? Absolutely. Can the reader dip back into the story after having read the footnote? Yes. And she is all the richer for it.
It’s easy to overlook the exquisite cultural beauty of Singapore, with its gigantic capitalist manifestations, so credit belongs to Sengupta for unfurling what we miss when we don’t look closely at the other sources of its richness.
In the last three decades, many novels have dealt with how those who have left India have grappled with life in the West. It hasn’t been easy, the likes of V.S. Naipaul to Jhumpa Lahiri have said. But Indians also travel to other parts of Asia, and make a life in a very different ― and often brutal ― society. Fiction that looks at such Indians’ lives have not exactly crowded bookshelves. It is to Sengupta’s credit that she offers some glimpses of immigrant life from another side of the globe. The stories say an important thing ― that the histories of even a small square metre in Asia are exquisite, painful, and worthy of attention.
Two Indian origin women in Singapore. Photo: John Gillespie/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Sengupta’s literary output is particularly cognisant of the cultural criss-crossings that make the south and southeast Asia.
She has written on Singapore’s de facto poet laureate Edwin Thumboo, freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose’s legacy in southeast Asia, Myanmar’s women politicians and the biography of Singapore’s first Postmaster General, the Indian-origin M. Bala Subramanian.
Chickpeas reflects the conscience and kindness of an author whose earlier subjects are the above mix. There is thus a measure of jouissance to its characters which is very welcome. While suffering is an essential component of the Asian experience, in this book the characters are allowed some joy, a lot of frivolity and a degree of hard-fought financial freedom. At risk of giving away spoilers, the endings of a few stories come as a real surprise given how a woman protagonist gets some kindness out of her husband, a mother and daughter make up despite the latter’s bid for freedom and a real estate agent makes a robust sale.
Lastly, the book arrives at a great time in Indians’ existence. It is lost on no one that contemporary India is fractured along religious lines ― a fracture deepened for political reasons. Perhaps those who believe that followers of a particular religion should live in their own particular country ― and that melting pots should not exist ― would do well to read of a part of the world where coexisting is an economic model and a measure of life’s richness.
Like a Sikh woman says to her interviewer in the book, ‘I’ve cooked it over a slow fire, stirred and turned it till the chickpeas and spices, herbs and salts, oil and water are blended, and there is no telling one from the other, each fibre indistinct, immersed in a melting curry.’
