HE SAID, HEAD TILTED BACK AND arms raised in a V of supplication to the changing weather, “You don’t get it. The game has rules. You’re not supposed to be yourself. These girls want intensity, they want someone to talk big ideas. Books! Read all those weird writers with weirder names. That’s the only way you’ll get into these chicks’ pants.” In my time at Columbia I’d had no more than a handful of dates, with two ending drunkenly in unpleasant and fumbled lovemaking, where I felt like a deep-sea diver who had descended too far, too quickly, racing urgently to the surface. “Start with Kafka,” Anton recommended, exhibiting a personal trainer’s authority. “He’s hardcore.” I was never much of a reader. In freshman comp I paid friends to write my papers or ordered them from an ad in the back pages of The Village Voice. Like most in my family, I was uninterested in the turmoil and dislocations I guessed literature examined. My father was a GP, born in Ludhiana, India, who came to New Jersey in the sixties and founded a small but thriving practice.
What do You think about Good Indian Girls: Stories?
