Finding Soho

The Bonesetter’s Fee and Other Stories by Australian author Rashida Murphy is a collection of short stories that span a childhood in India and adulthood in Australia. The evocative stories in the first half of the book transport the Indian diaspora reader to a distant but still intensely familiar Indian landscape. They capture the unique cadences and life rhythms of a past era in that country. The interiority of homes and domestic landscapes features pre-eminently in the stories. Memory is a powerful trope in her writing. The domestic landscape that emerges through her writing is suffused with the joyous conviviality and haunting hostility of familial figures. The interior world of family lives takes the foreground in her stories while the outside world of the era looms quietly in the background. The characters’ beliefs, attitudes and behaviours form the prism through which the influences of the outside world on the domestic family universe can be observed and understood. The interfac...

Against a backdrop of increasing migration from Asia to Australia, the experience of Asian visitors and immigrants coming into Australia has changed over time; rather than disorientation, Asian migrants coming to Australia may experience a relatively more comfortable ‘settling in’. Drawing on existing networks and connections with established Australian residents (occasionally facilitated by family networks back home), new visitors and migrants can foster a sense of community fairly quickly and use support networks to gather information, manage the logistics of travel or settlement and participate in social events. The traditional pressures that attend physical relocation may thus feel less urgent and onerous, and the affective impacts of cultural adjustment may be less significant. Communities of settled migrants can provide a potentially helpful safety net or point of reference for newly arrived migrants, making these people feel like a part of an existing community and thus helping ...

Sampurna Chattarji's Absent Muses covers a wide swathe of experiences and sentiments. Reading her collection is a journey through the poetic consciousness as it encounters, contends with and finally captures the many different experiences of the writing subject. It is, as it were, a collection of collections, a collage of the different images we map onto the world. The recognizable characters that crowd her everyday reality are the muses that inspire poetry through their absences. Their conversations are like "alms" clutched tightly in the hand. She says she must read them later in open palms, even as sometimes they are swept clean by time, memory and, as it becomes acutely evident, geography. Chattarji's poems are strongly embedded in the dynamics of human friendship and relationships. Some of her poems directly speak to or about friendship and relationships but many are about their absence, or the shadow of their overwhelming former presence. In 'Translations...