The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Where the Ocean Meets by Bhargavi C. Mandava
Sally E. Perry

Bhargavi C. Mandava. Where the Oceans Meet. Seal Press, 1996. 283 pp. $22.95.

Bhargavi C. Mandava’s Where the Oceans Meet is a collection of stories about traditional India and Indians in conflict with the past and the present. The isolated souls in these tales are related by their seeking moments of transcendence, love, or just understanding, but in most instances a harsh reality intervenes which prevents more than momentary happiness. The conflicting feelings of the characters are between a yearning for traditions, which are safe and predictable but which often deny individuality, and a more modern culture where ritual has lost meaning and gender and religious differences are unimportant. There is an insatiable hunger in these people for something they cannot articulate, and this desire forces many of the characters into violence.

The book functions as a story cycle: the characters of one story appear in others. In one story a poor tailor develops a fixation on beautiful Navina who is to be married shortly. Later Navina narrates her own tale about anticipating her wedding, which is interrupted by the tailor delivering the saris and asking her to marry him. She takes his offer as a joke, and although he leaves, he returns to destroy the woman he loves by throwing acid on her face, killing her. In one of the last stories in the collection, the same tailor confesses to a swami that he cannot find peace after the terrible wrong he has committed.

Peace is not something that many of these characters achieve, often because of the divisions between rich and poor, Hindu and Muslim, Westernized and traditional India. In one story childhood sweethearts are kept apart because he is Muslim and she is Hindu. When they reach adulthood they run away together, rejecting the old values and escaping the imprisonment by their culture which sketches out roles and identities for men and women. However, even the modern women in these narratives who try to bridge East and West feel a sense of unease since they are unable to fit in any culture. Where the Oceans Meet raises some profound questions about identity, gender, and race which the author invites her readers to think about, all the while knowing that there are no straightforward answers. [Sally E. Parry]