What You Call Winter
What You Call Winter
story collection published by Knopf and Harper Collins India
In these interconnected stories, set in a Catholic suburb of the Indian city of Mumbai, Jones depicts the triumphs and pitfalls of the Almeida family with astounding grace and beauty.
— Chantal Walvoord
excerpt
It sometimes seems to Toby that his life turned out the way it had from a failure of imagination. He had lacked sufficient vision, he had not dreamed clearly enough for even those things he desired most to materialize. He sensed that other people, his friends, had envisioned their futures with a definition that bordered on will. They had seen themselves with husbands or wives; had seen houses, plum jobs, children. Nothing had turned out exactly as they imagined, of course. And many had gone. To England or Canada or the States, to the Gulf or Australia. Whole families slipped away to other parts of the globe, wives following husbands, brothers following sisters, elderly parents persuaded to live in suburbs with grandchildren, shopping malls, washing machines.
But whatever eventually happened to them, Toby knew his friends had begun with the idea that a particular life was waiting for each of them. They sat in somebody’s garden, young and fearless and certain, talking politics and a bright new India, falling in love with one another and dreaming futures they could name. They seized them the way they grasped the necks of bottles, and they tipped their heads and drank. For a time, Toby waited to catch up and then slowly came the idea that he never would. Something sharp in them was, in his own nature, blunt. He could feel it even as a young man, even when Jean was by his side, sitting among them in a garden lit with lanterns and listening as one quick voice replaced another.
“What do you think, Toby?” (It might have been anything – women’s rights, the cut of a new suit.)
“I think I’d better have another.” Appreciative laughter. He hadn’t had a strong singing voice of charm or looks, but he was easygoing and loyal – a sweet fellow, Colleen called him – a general favorite. He held his own.
Eventually there would come a call for music.. Glasses refilled, a raucous chorus, chairs pulled in an untidy circle. Jean, who always sang flat, clapped her hands until she could resist no longer and then joined in, defiant and joyous, grinning when the guitarist told her to move; she was putting his instrument out of tune. Toby pulled his chair closer to hers. After they had gone through several rounds, a few people began to yawn. Some set off home, dropping their hands on the shoulders of those still sitting, kissing cheeks. The songs grew quieter. Colleen sat on the ground, her back to Toby’s chair, her legs stretched before her. At dawn a small group would still be talking, fingertips smelling of cigarettes, empty glasses clustered near the legs of chairs. Jean had gone but Toby could not tear himself away. Someone’s sister, looking pale and tired, would lean forward to convince the boy she thought she would marry (in fact it would be another, asleep on the sofa inside) about the work she intended to do in a literacy program. How urgent she was, how hoarse-voiced, how lovely, pushing an unruly bit of hair behind her ear. It was all too important to sleep.
reviews
In her auspicious debut, Jones reveals the hopes and disappointments of young children, mothers and old men living in Santa Clara, a mostly Catholic suburb of Mumbai, India. It covers all the ground between six-year old Jude Almeida, who in the story ‘The Crow and the Monkey’ witnesses his godmother’s wild antics at the New Year party, and 77-year old Roddy D’Souza, who in the title story is haunted by visions of his dead father. The opening story, ‘In the Garden,’ is a gem: at home alone on the verge of her 10th birthday, Marian Almeida discovers and tries on the dress that is intended to be her gift. Simply plotted, the story evokes the weight of expectations of a girl about to enter adolescence. Similar themes are fleshed out in ‘This Is Your Home Also’ and the devastating ‘We Think of You Every Day,’ both of which also explore childhood vulnerabilities. Adulthood, however, offers a wider perspective; in ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ and ‘Home for a Short Time,’ characters reconcile themselves with their decisions – one leaves her mother behind for a new life in the United States, while another stays in India. Jones displays impressive scope and depth of sympathy in her first collection.
— Publishers Weekly, May 7, 2007
A debut collection of intertwined short stories set in India and America. The Almeida family, their cousins and friends live in Santa Clara, a Roman Catholic residential enclave in India. Those who remain witness over time the demolition of its graceful gardens and airy homes to make way for apartment complexes and commerce. Those who leave for America either live a life apart, at home in neither place, or, worse, live with guilt for finding happiness so far from their family. As the collection opens, Marian Almeida is a ten-year-old on the cusp of puberty in the haunting “In the Garden.” Later, in “Half the Story,” she reappears, married, living with her Irish husband and children in Cincinnati, uncertain of how to protect her older daughter from the sexuality that arrives in the form of a neighbor, a brash American divorcee. Jude Almeida, Marian’s younger brother, unwittingly instigates a wicked display of psychological violence that occurs at a New Year’s party in “The Crow and the Monkey.” In the final story, “This Is Your Home Also,” Jude is an adult, living with his elderly, increasingly ineffectual parents. In other stories, members of the extended family take center stage: Colleen, a closeted lesbian, returns from America for her mother Grace’s cataract operation in “The Bold, the Beautiful”; Grace’s son Michael and his wife visit from America with their adopted child in “Carrying”; Roddy D’Souza, a long-time friend and gymkhana card partner of Francis Almeida, begins seeing his father, who died 65 years before, riding a bike around town in the title story. Jones brings the narrative skill of a seasoned writer to this work. She is best at evoking the fearful lonesomeness of alienation, whether it is in the mind of a child observing what he cannot understand, or in the heart of a mother who cannot stop change. An impressive debut.
— Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2007 *Starred review*
In these interconnected stories, set in a Catholic suburb of the Indian city of Mumbai, Jones depicts the triumphs and pitfalls of the Almeida family with astounding grace and beauty. Some of these pieces are filled with irrepressible sadness, as in the title story, “What You Call Winter,” in which a son sees the ghost of his father bicycling around town. Roddy, an older man, feels his world closing around him as new construction goes up—even the “Talkies” close—as he prepares to visit his grandchildren in the States. Younger characters often find themselves navigating between two worlds—America and India—as in “Half the Story” or “Home for a Short Time.” The most poignant stories, however, are the ones in which the younger generation discover they have no language to reach an older generation. For instance, in “The Crow and the Monkey,” six-year-old Jude cannot make his mother understand how important a bonfire is to him. In short, this powerful debut collection is not to be missed by most public and academic libraries.
— Chantal Walvoord
June 28, 2007, The Phoenix: What You Call Winter is listed with other “notable debuts” in John Freeman’s “Heat Waves” column: “summer reads to cool off with.”
July issue of Vogue, What You Call Winter is among the “great escapes” in The Vogue 20 “People Are Talking About” column: one of “two debut story collections [to] examine modern life with Chekhovian grace.”
August 2007 issue of Elle magazine, p. 130:
Another Face of India
United by their minority status, the families of the Catholic town of Santa Clara, India, just outside of Mumbai, all belong to one another in What You Call Winter (Knopf), Nalini Jones’ debut story collection. And when Santa Clarans leave, they feel themselves strangers in the world, as does a young woman named Marian who comes to the U.S. in “Half the Story”: “Everything was wide in the Midwest, even in the suburbs. The yards, winter-yellow, and the smooth-paved roads. The sedans and station wagons. The flattened vowels and broad-backed casseroles. Only the wind had a narrow edge.”
Jones turns phrases with a lyrical lilt that taps into our deepest feelings about family. But her greatest gift is in how she evokes the heightened psychic states of children: Though limited in comprehension, they can sense the slightest tremor, and such awareness is often the pinprick start of growing up. In “The Bold, the Beautiful,” a woman recalls feigning poor eyesight to get some smart-looking glasses. Only then does she realize what her vanity has cost the family finances. Even years later, “she could hardly bear to think of her father’s face that night: the eyes sad and knowing, his disappointment bound so closely with love that perhaps they were inextricable.” What You Call Winter is a momentous debut, a bewitching exploration of what it means to belong, anywhere.
– Rachel Rosenblit
a conversation with the author
Q: What You Call Winter is a collection of stories, but not in the traditional sense…the characters in the different vignettes are all neighbors, relatives, and friends, and many of them reappear in several stories, giving the reader a vision of their community as a whole. Did you always intend for the book to come together this way?
A: I always envisioned a community that functioned that way – people who recognized each other, families who brought their children up together. But in my first version of the book, only a small cluster of stories were connected; others floated off on their own. When I reread that draft with my editor, we found that many of my own preoccupations in writing about the neighborhood cropped up again and again. It seemed as if I could explore them better – in more intricate and substantive ways, but also more succintly – if I worked with a smaller, tighter cast of characters. I began to draw everything closer together. At first I didn’t realize that would mean leaving some stories behind and rewriting several others entirely. But as I was revising, I saw certain possibilities for stories that had been isolated. It wasn’t so much that bringing them together connected the collection as a whole, but that story by story, those connections began to yield opportunities to think about the characters and their predicaments in unexpected ways. Everything began to feel richer.
Q: Your characters all live in (or once lived) the same, vividly imagined Catholic neighborhood near Mumbai. Why did you choose to write about such a place? Have you always been drawn to India as a setting for your work?
A: My mother is from a Catholic neighborhood just outside of Mumbai, and as children, my brother, sister and I visited family there regularly. When I grew older, I began to go on my own. But I never lived there, so aspects of life that my mother and her family took as commonplace seemed endlessly intriguing to me. That became an enormous challenge when I was writing. I had experienced my mother’s community only as on outsider, but to write fiction, I had to conceive of it from the points of view of people who lived there, who could speak languages I can’t speak. I ended up creating a new place, with a name and street map all its own. I gave this neighborhood, which I called Santa Clara, schools, hospitals, churches, parks, a post office. I no longer had to try to accurately represent the real community where I had been a foreigner. Suddenly, with Santa Clara, I could concentrate on bringing something to life instead.
Q: What is the significance of the title?
A: The title actually comes from a bit of dialogue in one of the stories. A father who lives in Santa Clara is speaking on the phone to his grown son, who has emigrated, and mentions a “cool winter.” The son laughs and tells his father that “what you call winter is nothing to us. It’s like our summer.” I don’t believe the son means to be callous. He’s battling a New York winter, and he knows that in this part of India, his father would need little more than a jacket on January evenings. But it’s a moment when the father realizes how far apart he and his son have drifted. The son has adopted the seasons of his new home, and Santa Clara, the place which entirely defines the father, is no longer his point of reference. The collection as a whole deals with distance in families, generational, geographical, certainly emotional, and this exchange seemed to resonate with those concerns.
Q: The notion of leaving, or leaving home, is a recurring theme in What You Call Winter: the son is shipped off to a boarding school; a wife and mother walks out on her family; beloved brothers, sisters, fiancés, and children emigrate. Why this focus on the scattering of families?
A: The most direct answer is that I grew up with at least one side of my family scattered over the globe. On the other side, relatives were spread across the country, but more importantly, my father’s work with touring musicians meant we were in an annual state of good-byes and reunions. As a child I found it natural to conduct friendships with people I saw for a few weekends each summer or to feel close to uncles I might not see for several years. In college, and through my work as a research assistant to Caryl Phillips, I began to read more extensively about migration, dislocation, exile, and at the broadest level, notions of home and belonging. I’m fascinated by those ideas, and I suppose these stories are my way of wondering about different ways distance operates in families.
Q: Do you have any heroes in the writing world? Which writers do you consider your greatest influences?
A: I admire so many writers that it’s difficult to mention only a few, but I love to read Dickens, to savor all his dramatic twists and turns, even the occasional spontaneous combustion. I love the humor and liveliness that animate the work of some of my favorite contemporary authors – Peter Carey, for instance, or Salman Rushdie. And I love the boldness of Caryl Phillips’ fiction, whose “broken” narrative structures are so beautifully wrought, and whose command of voices is so perfect, that readers find themselves moving effortlessly from Othello’s world to Anne Frank’s in a single novel. That kind of range is incredible to me, and such reading helps to remind me what is possible when I’m facing a blank page. But my own fiction, so far, has tended to be more restrained, and so I suppose I’ve been most influenced by writers who work with a smaller canvas. Grace Paley, for example, illuminates whole worlds in only a few pages in her stories about mothers and children. Eudora Welty, Graham Swift, Penelope Fitzgerald are others. I’m always moved by the quiet certitude of Anita Desai’s fiction – she writes with such potency but her prose is so elegant that she manages a kind of lightness at the same time. Maxine Hong Kingston was in many ways my introduction to literature of migration, and I go back again and again to The Woman Warrior for its lyrical exploration of the places where memoir and story-telling meet. But in writing this collection, I thought often of two writers who don’t, perhaps, appear to be likely influences. Anton Chekhov is one. At the very end of stories, just when we imagine all is settled and concluded, he suddenly makes a narrative or descriptive gesture outward. He tips us beyond what we have understood to be the terrain of the story toward the unknown, the undiscovered. I like the idea of stories whose ends bring up new questions – stories that, in essence, beget more stories. The second writer is George Orwell, whose letters and nonfiction shine with such candor and integrity that I’m reminded of the crucial sort of honesty good fiction requires.
Q: I understand you spent some time at the MacDowell Colony. What was that experience like?
A: Working at MacDowell was extraordinary. It was the first time I chiseled out a block of time specifically for writing, and the first time I was surrounded by other artists. I couldn’t believe how much it was possible to accomplish in such circumstances. I spent my whole residency writing nonfiction, which hasn’t yet taken on a definite shape of its own yet, but which led me to some of the questions that are the heart of these stories.
Q: I hope this debut is only the very beginning – what’s next for you?
A: I’ve been writing small pieces of nonfiction and reading fiction in great gulps as I gear up to begin work on a novel. I’ve never written a novel before, so the prospect is at once exhilarating and frightening. When I was a little girl, my mother wanted me to take piano lessons. I did plunk away for a year or two, but when I was about eight I had a moment of clarity as I stood in the wings of one of the festivals where my father worked. I was listening to Count Basie and realized at once that no matter what my mother said about practice, I could never play as well as he did. That was the end of my piano career. (All parables aside, I’m convinced that this decision was for the greater good.) Luckily, reading good fiction has the opposite effect; I’m astounded by what is possible. And years of writing have taught me that “practice” is a lot more powerful than I believed when I was eight. So I’m excited to begin.
author statement
What You Call Winter is a collection of short stories about families who live on Saint Hilary Road in Santa Clara, a fictional Catholic neighborhood in one of Mumbai’s northern suburbs.
My mother grew up in a similar community and we used to visit regularly when I was a child. When I was older I began to go on my own, in part to see family but also because the place itself intrigued me. A quiet grid of streets named for saints and martyrs, several thriving parishes with masses offered in English and Hindi, a fishing village on one side and the lavish homes of film stars on the other.
I’ve always been curious about migration. This began with questions about my mother’s experience, but soon became an encompassing interest. In college I began to read more extensively about colonialism and migration, and eventually I had the chance to work for Caryl Phillips. His own work deals brilliantly with such questions, and as his assistant, I helped research an anthology about “Extravagant Strangers,” which brought me into further contact with writing about migration.
It has always seemed to me quite natural that so much of my family lived at the other end of the world, and that my father, who toured with jazz musicians, was away from us for long stretches of time. But I grew up constantly aware of distance and I’m interested in the way it functions in families, whether people are flung across the globe or living under the same roof. When I began to explore these questions in fiction, I realized that the characters were all connected to a place, partly remembered, partly imagined, partly mythical, where I have never lived but which continues to fascinate me.