Dear Paramount Pictures: Stories
by Iqbal Pittalwala
Category: Fiction

Iqbal Pittalwala’s debut collection focuses on the lives of ordinary South Asians in contemporary India and in the United States, giving voice to people who are usually denied a say. The eleven stories are told from the point of view of young and old, male and female--characters confronting a chaotic and corrupt society torn between changing religious and social values, economic decline, and the encroachment of superficial popular culture--cinema in particular. In the epistolary title story, an elderly Indian woman’s letter to Hollywood epitomizes the ironic distance between her Hindu faith and her addiction to popular film and television: she writes a rambling missive about many aspects of her long life, including the fact that she’s just met the reincarnation of the actor James Dean in Bombay. In "Trivedi Park,” a father’s pangs of conscience over his part in his "slow” daughter Radhika’s suicide are manifest in his certainty she’s "haunting” him and in his desperate need to cleanse his guilt one rainy day. In "Lost in the USA,” Pramila, an elderly widow from Bombay visiting her son in America, tries with serio-comic results to assert her independence by making an ill-fated bus trip to a shopping mall.