Book Review

The characters in Ranjan Adiga’s collection Diversity Quota desperately need help. Their plight is perfectly captured in the thoughts of Nirmal, a lonely divorcee in “A Short Visit,” who knows he would have to “ask for help someday. Just like he had always known he had needed it.”

Adiga’s ten stories, set in Nepal or the United States, follow Nepali characters who uneasily navigate race, class, and border divides, while wrestling with familial expectations and personal desires and limitations. In blunt, unadorned prose and through distinctive situations, the stories throw a spotlight on what it is like to belong nowhere completely, tumbling out organically while remaining highly economical.

Many characters are acutely aware of not fitting into the American world even as they long to do so. In the opening story, “Denver,” a young couple, Sameer and Puja, attend an NFL watch party hosted by the wealthier Sharmas. Despite winning a visa lottery, which their families vigorously celebrated back in Kathmandu, Sameer churns with anger at having to fit in. When they reach the Sharmas’ house, he sits in his car for a moment, aware that he’s entered a neighborhood “where people never shout or fry their food.” His host wears shorts and flip-flops and his hostess’s hair is dyed purple, marks of their “acquired but irrefutable Americanness.” As he gets through the evening, making conversation and watching a sport he doesn’t understand, “a slow strain of anger” forms inside him that ultimately finds some release in an exertion of superiority over his wife, when she becomes sick after one drink too many. “You never really drank in Nepal,” he reminds her.

Adiga has a talent for putting his characters in mostly successful, deliciously weird situations that demand attention. “Leech,” set in Nepal, opens startlingly: “When Ram looked in the mirror one morning, he saw a leech dangling from his nose.” Ram struggles with attraction to his wealthier classmate, Juneli, unable to figure out what exactly he thinks of him. When Juneli once emerges from the bathroom wearing only a towel, Ram can’t tell “if this was an invitation, or if such a display of comfort canceled out any possibility of romance.” His is a world in which class markers are blatant—the shade and quality of skin, accents. Ram is Madhesi, a migrant community known for its ties to India, and is often mistaken “with derision” for an Indian, highlighting a tension that runs through these stories: Nepal’s uncomfortable relationship with its massive neighbor and Nepalis’ pride in their distinct identity. Adiga thus challenges the perception that a country’s population is monolithic, a nuanced take this reviewer born in India—a profoundly complex mix of communities and cultures—particularly enjoyed. In this story, when Ram ultimately gives in to his temptation to steal from Juneli’s purse, he ensures that his worst fear of rejection and condemnation comes true.

The collection also insightfully recognizes the existence of a subtle pecking order in discrimination. In “Spicy Kitchen,” Nepali Bikram works at an Indian restaurant and is constantly afraid of being ejected because he does not have a work permit. Discriminated against though he is, he still exhibits casual bias against his Somali coworker Ali, suggesting that because Ali is African, he should know every African capital and pondering the fact that he’s never met a “nerdy African.” Later in the story, when white diners accuse the pair of theft, Bikram is quick to shift blame to Ali.

The collection finds aching pathos in stories like the aforementioned “A Short Visit,” where Nirmal’s father visits him after his divorce from Katie, a white woman. His father can’t understand how Nirmal can bear living alone and tells Nirmal that he’d secretly reached out to Katie to berate her, a revelation that causes a rift between father and son. Nirmal is thus too American to relate to his father and his assumption that he’s lonely because he’s divorced, yet he cannot relate to a Nepali woman he meets at a party, Sabina, nor his white ex-wife, Katie.

Notably, desire runs through these stories as uncomfortably as other emotions, and characters experience attraction mixed with irritation, guilt, and shame rather than pleasure. In “Spicy Kitchen,” Bikram is vaguely attracted to his employer, and in “Leech” to Juneli, further complicating their relationships. In the opening story, seeing his wife’s bare legs in public turns Sameer on, a feeling that mingles with “mild irritation.” And later in the story, in an unexpected turn, Sameer goads a semi-drunk Puja into recounting her escapades with past boyfriends, a tenuous attempt to forge connection through jealousy. Thus desire becomes another burden, another reason to call for help.

While written directly, almost chattily, and with little flourish, Adiga demonstrates remarkable skill with endings, which provide just enough closure, while thought-provokingly opening outward. “The Diversity Committee,” about the fight for survival among faculty members in a midwestern liberal arts college, concludes deceptively simply with the Nepali protagonist, who’s tormented with worry about whether an American student would accuse him of harassment, telling himself to “[C]alm down, everything will be just fine.” We wonder if it will be fine, even as we want it to be for all of these thoroughly human characters. There is not an unconflicted bone in Ranjan Adiga’s characters, which is precisely what makes Diversity Quota so affecting.