Orbiting by Bharati Mukherjee - 208 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Orbiting by Bharati Mukherjee

Orbiting was included in the book Braided Lives: An Anthology of Multicultural American Writing, which was a collection of stories by different authors. According to Library blog - 'This anthology brings together the vivid stories and poems of Native American, Hispanic American, African American, and Asian American writers. It was created by Minnesota teachers, for teachers and students in Minnesota high schools. They were assisted in their work by scholars, writers, the staff of the Minnesota Humanities Commission and the officers of the Minnesota Council of Teachers of English.'


A story of complicated relationships in a family where permissions are taken for granted and nobody's happy with the life choices and career choices of the other member. The term orbiting here refers to how within a family, the power dynamic in a relationship can shift and be the center.

Everything and everyone then rotates around that one person. Sometimes that kind of one-sided family correlations can be unhealthy or downright inappropriate.


Like Mukherjee’s most stories, Orbiting also shows the unfairness towards other ethnicities and races in a predominantly white population in 70s America.

A story and a novella - Bharati Mukherjee - 207 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Isolated Incidents


One of her short stories entitled “Isolated Incidents” explores the biased Canadian view towards immigrants that she encountered, as well as how governmental agencies handled assaults on particular races.


Leave It to Me - a novella


In Leave It to Me, Mukherjee tells the story of a young woman who is a sociopath named Debby DiMartino, who seeks revenge on parents who abandoned her. 

Set in a mythical tone, the story reveals her ungrateful interaction with kind adoptive parents and a vengeful search for her real parents (described as a murderer and a flower child). 

The novel also looks at the conflict between Eastern and Western worlds and at mother-daughter relationships.

Nostalgia - Bharati Mukherjee -206 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Nostalgia is a story from Bharati Mukherjee's short story collection Darkness.


'Nostalgia' deals with an Indian who has made his fortune in America. Dr Patel is married, has a son who studies at a prestigious college and he works in a hospital for mentally ill people.

One day he falls in love with an Indian girl and has an affair with her which results in disappointment after he learns that she takes advantage of him.


The protagonist, Dr.Patel has achieved what he feels is the fulfilled American dream - an American house, wife, car and education for his child. But when he meets a beautiful young Indian woman,he begins a disastrous affair. The reasons for his affair is later portrayed through his thoughts and recollections during the affair. He is nostalgic about his country and the image of a simple, Indian wife never had really gone from his mind. It was what was lacking, according to him despite all the comforts he currently has. As the story progresses, the girl takes advantage of him through a scheme with her pimp uncle. When everything is over Dr. Patel is washed out - from a bit of money, respect and something more - nostalgia of an Indian wife. His chameleon mind suddenly realises the futility of his hopeless life and returns reluctantly to his American dollhouse.

The Management of Grief - Bharati Mukherjee - 205 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

“The Management of Grief” is a short story by Bharati Mukherjee.


It was published in 1988 as a part of her collection The Middleman and Other Stories. It also appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1989 and in The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties.


Shaila Bhave, a recent widow, has also lost her sons in a plane crash. The story highlights, along with a family's way of dealing with grief, the horrors of apparent Sikh terrorism.

The story opens in her house in Toronto, with mourners and neighbours around her. Some of them also had their family members die in the same crash. Though she appears calm, she has actually been given Valium to manage herself physically and emotionally. This is mistaken by Judith Templeton, a young Canadian government official, to act as a liaison and translator for her group of mourners. She tells Bhave that she has heard that she is a pillar of the community. Bhave reluctantly agrees to help Templeton, while reflecting that among her own community, her calm affect is not a mark of maturity, but of strangeness. The title of the story comes from Templeton’s conception of “grief management”—her belief that grief proceeds in orderly stages, and that it is an emotion to be controlled rather than given in to.


The group of mourners soon fly to Ireland to identify the dead because that is where the plane crashed. From Ireland they go to India to perform the death rituals. Throughout these travels, the way the family members adapt to their new life without their loved ones is shown in conversations and memories.

The other mourners in Bhave’s group have meanwhile all coped with their grief in different ways. Kusum decides to remain in India and to become an ashram devotee. Dr. Ranganathan finds a job in Texas, where he plans to tell no one about the crash, although he still cannot bring himself to sell his old family home.

Back in Canada, Bhave is shocked to see racial prejudices towards Sikhs and Indians, by representatives like Templeton. She rejects not only friendly advice and grief management by the government official, but also turns to her native Indian rituals and reaches out to family for comfort.



Image - A Widow performs ritual immolation (Sati) - an ancient tradition of India where widows would jump into the funeral pyre of their husbands as they would not deem it fit to live after they are dead.

Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee - 204 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Jasmine” by Bharati Mukherjee


“ She was a girl rushing wildly into the future.”


The story Jasmine focuses on a young, ambitious girl who wants big things in life. 

Jasmine is a Trinidadian girl who, through a middleman, illegally enters Detroit. Finding odd jobs like job cleaning and keeping the books at the Plantations Motel, she finds there are other Trinidadian Indians who are trying their luck. Soon she finds employment with an American family.

The Middleman -Bharati Mukherjee - 203 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

About the author - Bharati Mukherjee

Born in Calcutta, India, just seven years to Indian independence, Bharati Mukherjee would soon set foot on American shores which would become a catalyst for her literary mind. 

She was known to write about the experiences of immigrant Indians mainly in America. Mukherjee explained this shift as "a movement away from the aloofness of expatriation, to the exuberance of immigration." Her early novels, The Tiger's Daughter and Wife, both published in the early 1970s, are stories about the isolation of Indian expatriates. 

In Darkness, the stories are centred on a different geographic area which is Canada. There is a pleasantness in the tone and attitude of the tales, but the loneliness away from motherland remains. Other stories explore North America through the alien voices of its various immigrant cultures—Italian, Latin American, Sri Lankan, as well as Indian. With The Middleman and Other Stories Mukherjee gave voices to these nationalities also. In these stories, sometimes with anger, often with violence, sometimes with comedy, often with tenderness, Mukherjee gives voice to the "other" within North America. "The Management of Grief," which deals with the sorrow of the bereaved relatives of the victims of the 1985 Air India disaster, is perhaps the most moving story in the collection. The horror of that tragedy is dealt with in harrowing detail in Mukherjee's second nonfiction collaboration, The Sorrow and the Terror.


After a gap of fourteen years, Mukherjee wrote Jasmine, which explores female identity through the story of an Indian peasant woman whose path takes her from the Punjab, to Florida, to New York, to Iowa, and as the novel draws to a close she is about to set off for California.


In The Holder of the World, Mukherjee turns her attention to one of the founding novels of postcolonial America —Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Reversing the usual binary opposition between occidental and oriental texts, Mukherjee presents Hawthorne's novel as one which has been written out of a knowledge of India.


Bharati Mukherjee is a writer who is at her best when she draws on her experiences of the Old World while writing with insight about the New World to which she now belongs.


Adapted from jrank



The Middleman

“there are aspects of American life I came too late for and will never understand.”

This line may be the very gist of the story about a man who is always on the harrowing line of doing things for others which he doesnt want to but he does so only to eventually be a citizen of America.


"The Middleman" is a story about a man from Iraqi Jew named Alfie Judah. He is working for a land-owner in South America. Alfie becomes a middleman between the land-owner's attractive wife and her lover from her youth in plotting to kill and rob the land-owner.


Narrated by Alfie who is a naturalized American citizen, it is set in an unnamed area which is in the throes of a guerrilla insurgency. The idea for the story came to Mukherjee when she was writing an incomplete novel about a Vietnam veteran who becomes a mercenary soldier in Afghanistan and Central America. The novel featured a minor character named Alfie Judah, a Jew who had relocated from Baghdad to New York, via Bombay, India. Alfie became such a strong presence in the writer's mind that, as she reported in an interview with Alison B. Carb in Massachusetts Review, he "took control and wrote his own story.


"The Middleman," then, is the story of a cynical man who "travels around the world, providing people with what they need—guns, narcotics, automobiles." It is a story of lust, betrayal, and murder, featuring American expatriates, a beautiful woman, and ruthless guerrillas.


Adapted from American expat blog.