Life and Death in the Workplace
Review of Jenny Bhatt’s Each of Us Killers (US: 7.13 Books, 2020)
By HO Kin Yunn
Jenny Bhatt’s debut short story collection Each of Us Killers delves into the lives, and deaths, of her stories’ protagonists, richly fleshed out in their moralities toward career, power, and identity. Conveying with nuanced effectiveness the intersections of oppression that her characters face as Indians, locally or abroad, Bhatt creates in her fifteen stories an adroit, unflinching body of work that challenges the status quo. Her stories ask: ‘What does living a hyphenated identity really entail?’ and ‘How complicit are we in the lives and deaths of these individuals?’ In turn, they produce complex and uncomfortable answers.
Each of Us Killers explores the tribulations of the working life, reflecting Bhatt’s own varied occupational experiences; before she became a writer at 40, she was a bartender, engineer, cook, saleswoman, and yoga instructor. Yet, the collection is far more than an occupation-themed anthology. Speaking with Electric Lit, she reminds us that “as a single woman, your career is your identity—if you’re not a mother or wife, you are your work.” While many of the gendered aspects of a working identity come from Bhatt’s personal experience, the other caste, class, and racial aspects are informed by her time spent between Gujarat and the U.S., her conversations with migrant workers and housemaids from Rajasthan, as well as her travels to municipalities such as Una where she spoke to communities about the Gujarati lynchings of 2016.
As such, Bhatt writes with a welcome deftness and sensitivity about the hardships faced by the lower-caste, particularly their social immobility due to an unchanged status quo. In “Mango Season,” she uses space and setting to familiarize us with the different conditions afforded to people of differing statures. From the “odor of humanity” that permeates the public buses, to the “pistachio-green buildings” where “every window and balcony beamed brightly,” we journey through these different locales with Rafi, on his way to work as a sari salesman in a boutique store. Rafi, like most of Bhatt’s protagonists, has the ambition to make a better life for himself; he “cheer[s] inwardly” when he sees Modi’s face on a billboard, the Prime Minister being the symbol and trailblazer of class mobility. The reality of Rafi’s situation however is discouraging: decades pass without Rafi being able to meaningfully advance his prospects. Bhatt contrasts Rafi’s life against his elaborate dreams to emphasize his disillusionment. His dreams put him center-stage in a Bollywood-esque sequence of a great feast and dance, one that becomes more exaggerated the deeper he falls into sleep, “snoring on his scant bedding.” From a romanticized dream filled with “stirring songs” and “resounding clapping,” he awakens to crying children, loud radios, “acrid smoke from burning rubber tires” and “three-legged cats.” Here, one bombardment of senses is traded for another, emphasizing the polarity between the reality Rafi lives and the one he yearns for. Such incidences of disillusionment pervade many of Bhatt’s stories, where her protagonists strive to lift up their circumstances but find themselves grounded by inequalities. Her stories’ entry points may be the various occupations of her protagonists, but her main focus is the honest representation of South Asian culture in both its triumphs and its tribulations. Thankfully, her penchant for lush descriptions and her ability to imbue serious moments with vibrancy and airiness help to keep her stories from being too dispiriting in their conclusions.
Dealing with prejudice born out of entrenched social systems thus seems to be the challenge facing most of her characters. In “Return to India,” the story leading up to protagonist Dhanesh’s final moments is revealed by the eulogic testimonials of others around him. This narrative style, where Dhanesh does not speak at all, leaves him unable to defend himself from generalizations such as “Hindu men [know] how to keep [their] women in line.” Additional backhanded comments, such as it “wasn’t easy for Dan to start taking orders from a woman, given the part of the world he’s from,” indicate the gender-based expectations compounded with the racial flattening that flavor his colleagues’ perceptions of him. Dhanesh’s fatal encounter with an American who can’t differentiate one “darkie fella” from the next is the final nail in the coffin of misguided perspectives and repressed voices, a theme that Bhatt navigates throughout the collection. As an U.S. immigrant herself, Bhatt expresses carefully the complexities of place-based discrimination: the complex racism/casteism in India and America’s xenophobia and its own recipes for racism and misogyny.
Indeed, much of the authenticity and depth in Each of Us Killers comes from Bhatt’s own experiences to inform the gendered struggles that Indian women typically endure. In “Life Spring,” Heena, a single woman, runs her own baking business while recounting a toxic relationship. Despite being upper-caste and having the agency to pursue a life of passion and independence, she finds her material successes come about from various compromises she has to make with men in power; from the “Mira-Bhayander corporator” whom she feeds “large pieces of honey-date fudge for the cameras,” to her neighbor’s husband gifting of a “discounted membership at the gym” that “brought more regular customers.” Unfortunately for Heena, both her past and future see her having to navigate such entrenched inequalities, echoing the predicament of many Indian women living between the old world of patriarchy and a new one of supposed opportunity. Her high caste does not spare her the whims of men inordinately afforded power in a country that largely accepts it. One can thus only imagine how such struggles would be far worse for women who do not have the privileges of caste on their side.
Several other stories in the collection focus on the different struggles women are subjected to, notably “Disappointment,” which explores the whitewashed exoticization of Indian women, and “Pros and Cons,” which deals with the self-internalization of gendered repression. These stories, along with “Life Spring,” suggest that while women are more than capable of finding greatness within, men’s support and opposition still matter in a world where men occupy positions of power. Admitting this doesn’t necessarily signify defeat, but rather conveys the reality that we are all complicit in our failures and compromises. Gender is one more potent thing that women have to negotiate.
Although Bhatt’s characters are active and articulate, they operate within oppressive systems of power that are deeply embedded in societal policies and beliefs. This is most evident in the collection’s titular story, “Each of Us Killers.” Bhatt references the 2016 Gujarati lynching as the backdrop for this story inspired by her own experience of posing as a journalist in a neighboring village to the site of the incident. Such a narrative style allows her to write from the collective perspective of the village, grieving and indignant over the deaths of two siblings, Vishaal and Bindu, who had dared to voice their opposition against the unjust treatment of their lower-caste contemporaries. The narrative is propelled by the reporter’s inquiries through his “clean-shaven, well-groomed” lens of buoyed privilege; Bhatt’s choice to counterpoint the reporter’s probing and the villagers’ collective voice helps underscore the reality that most public accounts of the incident came from those in the upper-caste. Bhatt’s story thus serves as an un-silencing, revealing the suppressed rage of the Dalit community toward not just the deaths of the siblings but the entrenched oppression “constantly bearing down on them like a suffocating, leaden rock.” Certainly, by virtue of the story’s (and collection’s) title alone, it is clear that being complicit, even by silence, contributes to not just a symbolic death represented by the community’s utter voicelessness, but the actual death of one of the community’s own. Bhatt recognizes the double-standards afforded to those of lower caste, and voices this recognition through a soliloquy from the village’s panchayat representative:
We know the law is one thing and our karma is another. We are of low birth. It is our fate to do the work no one else will. We may also get abused and beaten up. What is the use of complaining? Chaitra month will not end and Vaishakh month will not begin. Our lives have but one season.
Indeed, it is these internalized social ‘realities’ that outspoken individuals such as Vishaal hope to resist and challenge, but the battle is not just upwards. There is a grave lopsidedness to not just the quantity but the nature of the attention given to Vishaal’s suicide as compared to the death of Bindu. While Vishaal is regarded as revolutionary, inspirational, and able to make things “more bearable” for his village, Bindu, whom the reporter had no knowledge of, is a “firecracker” whose “silly chit” is seen by her own village as futile and self-destructive; something to be suppressed for its impotence as well as for her own safety. The intersectionality of gender and caste is on full display here, for within Bindu’s own community, her ‘woman-ness’ remains a hurdle to overcome. There are inauspicious parallels here to the 2021 Atlanta spa massacre of several Asian women, and the troublesome lenses we selectively use to view the tragedy and the motives of its perpetrator.
In truth, everyone lives a hyphenated identity; father, husband, son, mother, wife, daughter, Indian, American. Bhatt highlights that identity only becomes problematic when it is socially imposed. Discussing the film “Bend it like Beckham”, columnist Nadya Agrawal proposes that, if there are women like the protagonist Jesminder who “work within the system to change the rules,” then “we need girls who don’t care about the system at all.” Girls who are fine with not caring about soccer and its masculine connotations. Perhaps ‘not caring’ is an extreme reaction, or non-reaction, but certainly a privilege—Bhatt’s protagonists do not have the luxury not to care, unless they are perfectly fine with the status quo as it is. Unfortunately for them, it is a great deal of status quos to contend with and a great deal of deaths that result. The situation seems bleak and beyond contemplation, but Bhatt’s ability to weave the struggles of her characters into captivating narratives is certainly one way to bring outsiders a step closer to understanding these situations better.
Writing on the subject of the Asian American short story in A Companion to the American Short Story (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Wenying Xu posits that “Asian American writers are unified in their struggle against stereotypes” and in their “endeavor to transcend ethnicity.” Each of Us Killers utilizes the short story to take incisive looks past stereotypes and into the lives of Indians born into situations that demand far too much endurance of them. The collection is certainly somber if compared to the more celebratory tones of other works of fiction by members of the Indian diaspora such as Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, yet its strength lies in Bhatt’s close examination of the fabric of her characters’ lives. Her empathetic pursuit of understanding “through the lens of work,” as Bhatt puts it, facilitate not just the un-silencing of ideals, motivations, and vulnerabilities of her characters, but also help to contextualize the burdens they shoulder in environments and situations that may be familiar to us. In reading their stories and acquainting ourselves with their struggles, we thus understand how we may be more complicit in the lives they lead, and the deaths they endure, than we would like to think.
Ho Kin Yunn studied English and Film at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. His work has appeared in Cha, Twenty-Four Flavours, PLACES, and SingPoWriMo, among others.
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