“Boomtown Girl” by Shubha Sunder

Shubha Sunder

In an early story in Shubha Sunder’s debut collection, Boomtown Girl, the narrator states that her parents felt her younger brother “was old enough to deserve some independence”, yet the teenage brother finds trouble and lands in jail. This theme of independence forms the backbone of the nine stories in her book that mainly take place in 1990s Bangalore. Sunder is a captivating storyteller and with each story she shows that independence sometimes comes with a price.

Boomtown Girl, Shubha Sunder (Black Lawrence Press, April 2023)
Boomtown Girl, Shubha Sunder (Black Lawrence Press, April 2023)

The opening story, “Dragon Girl”, is a harrowing tale of a twelve year-old girl named Mansi who feels emotionally neglected by her wealthy parents. When she’s to star in her school play as a dragon, she is disappointed when they are unable to attend due to work obligations. Her mom is a beauty consultant and her father owns coffee and tea estates. Mansi knows these professions come with flexibility and that other parents make special efforts to take off work to watch their children in the play. Her parents could very well do so, too. After the play, Mansi doesn’t have a parent to drive her home and is left to get home on her own.

 

For an hour she roamed the unfamiliar streets. Her sandals grew slippery with grime; her eyes burned from the heat and smog. She maintained a brisk pace, looking only ahead, as if she had walked these paths a thousand, ten thousand times, as if she had a destination and no time to waste. She passed compound walls veined with mold and crowned with bougainvillea; three-storied apartment buildings in whose driveways kids her age were playing cricket. The shade was patchy, the four o’clock sun strong.

 

Although Mansi’s parents think she’s independent enough to fend for herself in these situations and Mansi thinks she can navigate her way home, they all learn the hard way Mansi may not be as independent as they assumed.

A few of the early stories also feature school age girls who feel ignored by their parents and find that they, too, may not be able to handle the independence they are given, even if it’s through neglect. In the middle part of the book, white American women spend time in India and find themselves in over their heads. “Jungleman” features an American student named Lorrie who is in India to study biology and to follow in her father’s footsteps, a travel photographer who had been in the area in the 1970s.

 

Her father once suffered an attack of typhoid after drinking from a tap at a Hyderabad hotel. In Tunisia he was stung by scorpions; in Laos mugged. But his photographs of these places won international awards, and she knows that his blood runs in her veins.

 

But as much as Lorrie thinks she’s able to travel independently, she cannot escape some harrowing situations.

In “The Western Tailor”, the tables are turned and an Indian tailor clandestinely designs and sews a dress for an American Fulbright scholar who is about to return to the US. This job is not as easy as it seems, but not because Ramesh is not a skilled tailor.

He trained under a British tailor in Bangalore before the latter passed away. Ramesh’s new boss, a woman named Parul, is not much of a mentor and does not permit him to work outside her shop. But when Linda, the American, spots Ramesh out on the street, she asks him to custom-make Western clothes for her. Parul’s tailoring business only deals with Indian clothes. So working for Linda would require Ramesh to moonlight. Linda hashes up a plan.

 

She lived just a few blocks away. They could make an appointment for him to come to her house. He could work there too if he liked: the old lady who owned the place—and who was currently abroad visiting her children—had left it furnished, and there was a sewing machine and a nice worktable.

 

Ramesh would also need to hide this work from his wife because it’s not socially acceptable for him to visit another woman in her home, even if it’s for business reasons. But Ramesh wants to take on this work and feels that this commission from Linda is much more like his work for the British tailor—during the peak of his career—than the dull jobs he takes on for Parul. His independence comes with a price, as is the case with the other stories in this collection.

That Sunder studied under notable writers like Ha Jin and Sigrid Nunez is discernible in the way she writes about place and develops lifelike characters that elicit empathy, no matter how much trouble they get themselves into. With a compelling debut collection, Sunder is a writer to pay attention to, now and in the future.


Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.