cover image No Other World

No Other World

Rahul Mehta. Harper, $25.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-06-202046-8

In this meandering coming-of-age novel, Mehta (Quarantine) follows a gay Indian-American man’s struggle to quell his childhood demons. Though 12-year-old Kiran’s parents are assimilated enough to fuel their traditional puja lamp with Crisco rather than ghee, he still doesn’t quite fit. Instead of taking the bus from school, “he walked. Two hours. Three hours. Sometimes four.” When Kiran’s sister, Preeti, begins dating a white kid, Shawn, he listens to their phone calls, delighted by how Shawn’s voice runs through his “small boy body, resonating, filling his chest.” He begins his own, proto-sexual relationship with Shawn, and because of it does nothing when he finds nearly naked Preeti in the woods, where Shawn left her tied to a tree with a jump rope. The relationship between Kiran’s guilt and his sexuality becomes evident as the story continues with his struggles in college and adulthood, when his parents force him to return to India following his “unraveling” in New York. But Mehta’s discursive style allows little room to dwell on Kiran’s quest for redemption, and instead follows the lesser dramas that bloat the book. All of the characters do share with Kiran “the desire, if only fleeting, to live another life,” one where they had made different choices, but little is added by each, in turn, being forced to accept the impossibility of doing so. As Kiran writes in his coming-out letter to his parents, “things are the way they are.” (Feb.)