A HOUSE IS A BODY

Fear of loneliness, abandonment, and death propel these 12 stories set in the U.S. and India.

In this debut collection, time is temperamental. Reality bleeds into dreams, and these dreams later shape reality. In the first entry, the sublime “Blindness,” Sudha, an architect and newlywed, struggles with a husband who can’t (and won’t) understand her depression. A dream of an alternate life may be the only cure for her persistent “black feeling.” Disaster looms large, and quirky characters find themselves trapped in hamster wheels, spinning futures they have little control over. In the stirring “Mourners,” Mark’s wife, Chariya, has died. His cousin Reggie as well as Chariya’s sister Maya help him parent his infant daughter while he stumbles through the cruelty of grief. “He holds his breath. He is so close to it, to feeling joy, the joy of the body. But it is moving away from him. He cannot reach it.” Swamy’s pulsating prose produces riveting narratives. Her stories twist in subtle yet unexpected ways, and crucial revelations appear buried in the middles of paragraphs. This is certainly the case in the haunting “The Neighbors,” in which a play date takes a dark turn when a mother of two small children reveals a disturbing truth to another mother she’s only just met. In other stories, art serves as a space for solace and refuge amid chaos. “Earthly Pleasures” finds Radika visiting a museum’s Rothko painting whenever she feels alone.  “It had a way of getting into me, the painting. The room filled and emptied several times. There were moments I felt as though I was falling in.” The fallible characters in Swamy’s ravishing book are always falling into something and bravely grasping what they can on their way down in a frenetic attempt to pull themselves back up.

A dazzling and exquisitely crafted collection.