Story Masala

Author Robbie Clipper Sethi explores the difficulties faced by several generations of a Punjabi Sikh family living in the United States.

By: Ilene Dube

TimeOFF/Frank Wojciechowski
"You write stories to try to understand why things happen," says Robbie Clipper Sethi, author of Fifty-Fifty: A Novel in Many Voices.


   In Robbie Clipper Sethi’s new book, Fifty-Fifty: A Novel in Many Voices (Silicon Press, $24.95), a part-Indian, part-American teen-ager moves from New Jersey to California with her family. Rosa starts at a new high school in San Jose, and despite her high academic record is placed in remedial classes because of her dark skin and Spanish-sounding name. The teachers express surprise that the American-born Rosa has no accent.
   At lunch, she is rejected by table after table: the Korean table, the Vietnamese table, the California girls table, the Sikhs, until they direct her to the "fifty-fifty" table — those students who are half one background, half another.
   When Rosa dances with a Mexican boy at school, the Asians and Jews from her honors English class — thanks to her mother’s intervention, she is moved to the appropriate level class — say, "Rosa, you’re too young to have a baby."
   The novel, about three generations of a Punjabi Sikh family, explores themes of cultural assimilation for both those with mixed heritage and those with pure Sikh heritage who take up residence in the United States.
   With a 13-year-old son, Neil, an eighth-grader in Montgomery Middle School, Dr. Sethi, chairman of the English department at Rider University, has a knack for capturing the voices of teens and young adults. Dr. Sethi wanted the book to have a variety of voices, and each chapter is told by a different character.
   "The difference between New Jersey and California, as I see it," says Rosa, "is in California it’s in to be a group. And the stereotypes are different. We have different Hispanics. But I don’t have to live in groups that I do not believe in. I’m fifty-fifty."
   The three generations of the Singh family are spread out on three continents. Rosa, whose father, Hari Pal Singh, came from India to the United States as a college student, even feels out of place with her Indian cousins, dressed in tunics with embroidered beads, while she wears jeans and T-shirts. While her cousins’ kitchens are infused with the aroma of curries, in Rosa’s home pasta and shrimp is the cuisine du jour.
   Those who couldn’t put down The Bride Wore Red (Bridge Works Publishing, 1996), the first book by Skillman resident Dr. Sethi that was chosen as a Barnes & Noble Great New Writers selection, will find Fifty-Fifty shares the same humorous look at relatives who overstay their welcome. Whereas the first book was a collection of short stories subtitled Tales of a Cross-Cultural Family, Fifty-Fifty is about one large extended family.
   "Whenever you write about a large family, it’s hard to make explicit who’s who," says Dr. Sethi from her spacious home at the foot of the Sourland Mountains. In order to simplify this, a family tree appears before the first chapter, and subsequent chapters are headed with branches from the tree.
   "Telling it in separate voices as chapters was another way of controlling that," says Dr. Sethi, clad in a green velvet embroidered tunic.
   In The Bride Wore Red, the 13 short stories address intercultural issues from the point of view of American women; in Fifty-Fifty, on the other hand, we hear from all the Indian family members but not the American woman. "I was interested in the bloodline, and Jill Gill is an in-law," says Dr. Sethi.
   Despite the differences, both books capture the irritating habits of in-laws. These annoying traits are no different from those of Jewish, Italian, African-American or even WASP relatives who are set in their traditions and ways. In Bride, we meet an Indian Sikh mother-in-law-to-be who sees her son’s fair-skinned American future bride in the New Delhi airport for the first time and feigns illness, moaning in the car during the ride home. Indian in-laws criticize their daughters-in-law for not taking them shopping when they visit and grow impatient when they don’t deliver grandchildren. In Fifty-Fifty, Indian parents all want, more than anything, for their children to be doctors or, failing that, to at least marry one.

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Ms. Sethi will read from her new book, Fifty-Fifty: A Novel in Many Voices, at several area locations in the coming weeks.


   By far the most old-fashioned in her thinking is the family matriarch, Biji, who expects her one son and three daughters to settle in the United States so the family can all be together again. Yet she also sees America as a place that has corrupted her children and grandchildren. "In America…all girls choose for themselves. And marriage is such a matter of choice that women marry women, men marry men, girls have children without bothering to marry. Choice may be a good thing. If I had ever had the choice, maybe my life would have been different. But America has gone too far."
   "Biji was my favorite character to write," says Dr. Sethi. Her chapter, Exile, is one of the longest in the book, and was even longer before Dr. Sethi edited it down. "What I tried to do with her voice was to make it sounds as if she were speaking out loud in Punjabi. I wanted to make her language poetic and picturesque. I could use images and metaphors with her that I couldn’t with the other characters."
   Indeed, all Biji’s worst fears of her family living in the U.S. come to pass. Her son Hari settles here, but he hardly is the host she would like him to be for the rest of the family. All the grandchildren wind up in New Jersey and California for at least some part of their lives. Two granddaughters, Shakuntala and Nitasha, go to Rutgers but don’t get good enough grades to get into medical school and wind up in dead-end lab jobs. Somehow, this is because Hari did not help them enough, is Biji’s thinking.
   Shakuntala winds up pregnant from her live-in boyfriend, Asante, who is half African-American, half German. Asante never has money, lives at a "slow pace," and only works as much as he has to. These are, at first, the traits that attract Shakuntala to him, because they are so opposite the values her Indian parents in Nairobi raised her with, but when she becomes a single mother they are the traits that make her despise Asante and ultimately run away from him.
   Shakuntala and Rosa’s cousin, Nitasha, on the other hand, rejects her family’s attempts at arranging her marriage — "finding her a boy" is the jargon — and moves in with her female companion, again shocking the family.
   Dr. Sethi, who has been compared to authors Junot Diaz, Louise Erdrich and Julia Alvarez, finds the humor in these situations, as well as the irony of a Jewish young man who wants to quit college and join an ashram to "achieve enlightenment." He sits cross-legged on the floor, "ready to om himself out of the conversation." His Jewish mother blames herself for allowing him to talk her into a Hanukkah bush.
   "You create a character and then ask, ‘What is the worst thing they can do?’" says Dr. Sethi, whose stories have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Mademoiselle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Literary Review and many other journals. "What could Shakuntala do that is part and parcel of American life that would kill her parents? (Having a baby out of wedlock with a mate they have had no part in selecting) is totally foreign from what her parents consider family."
   "Because she’s in America circa 2000, she feels she can be open about having a baby without a husband, whereas when her aunt in India had a baby out of wedlock, it had to be hushed up and she had to be married quickly so her husband should never know. But all families go through these bad times."
   Shakuntala’s brother, Shawn, suffers from addictions. "Shakuntala and her brother are an expression of the modern world. I put them in New Brunswick, one of New Jersey’s saddest towns."
   The author, who met her husband, Davinder Sethi, when the two were in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley — Dr. Sethi has a doctorate in comparative literature — mines from her life.
   Davinder Sethi, CFO for a California company who commutes a week out of every month, is from a Punjabi Sikh family that has spread from India to Nairobi, England and New England. Not only does his family provide rich fodder, but Davinder himself is full of ideas for stories and often bursts into his wife’s office with new ones.
   "Whether they will develop into stories is a mystery," says Dr. Sethi. "He’ll say, ‘This one is for the books,’ and I may never use it. You get stories from everywhere. You write stories to try to understand why things happen. I write to try to understand on the outside what our life is like."
Robbie Clipper Sethi will read from Fifty-Fifty: A Novel in Many Voices for the Women’s College Club at All Saints’ Church, 16 All Saints’ Road, Princeton, Feb. 17, 1 p.m. For information, call (609) 466-2994. She will appear at the Princeton University Store, 36 University Place, Princeton, March 26, 7 p.m. For information, call (609) 921-8500. Dr. Sethi will read from her work at the Princeton Public Library, Princeton Shopping Center, 301 N. Harrison St., Princeton, April 24, 7 p.m. For information, call (609) 924-9529.