Writers imagining changing, fragmenting communities often seat themselves at a restaurant table. It is a vantage point that obtains prismatic views of social flux. Take two recent examples. In Empire Falls, his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Richard Russo centred his investigation of blue-collar life in a time of closures in a greasy Maine diner. In Transplanted Man, Sanjay Nigam used the changing fortunes of a neighbourhood curry place to map the ever wakeful pavements in a patch of New York City inhabited by migrants.Russo chronicled the last days of a fading way of life, with compassion and wit, anchoring his novel in stringent realism. Nigam, on the other hand, splashed his tale with doses of absurdity to foretell an inevitable future. Both, in the final product, delivered spectacular social and political commentary. Claire Allen’s visit to an Indian restaurant in London, in contrast, disappoints. Sarah arrives at the Mountain of Light, an Indian restaurant, to rent the flat above. It has just been vacated by Balu, who once worked in the eatery but now owns it. A friendship is forged over bowls of ice-cream and Indian delicacies. Sarah is just out of college and in and around the Mountain of Light she is forming a pseudo-family. Balu is battling the loneliness that’s come on with residence with his brother and sister-in-law — his failing health is deemed to have rendered him incapable of living alone and the sense of being at a remove from his real family spurs him to seek the company of young people at the restaurant. There’s Hari, a smart waiter, with whom Sarah has a fleeting affair. There’s Jude, her partner. And soon there are the ghosts of Josef and Ewa. Josef, now old and self-sufficient in London, finds in Sarah glimpses of Ewa, once a dancer with the Polish National Ballet. As past and present meet, as stories of love and loss intertwine with fresh jealousies, relations in this little group get charged. Sarah must sort out her todays from others’ yesterdays, she must negotiate her way through this multicultural web. And she does. Trouble is, Allen’s novel appears disconcertingly derivative in parts. The magical allure of exotic spices. The arresting tenderness of strangers in a fastforward world. The overlapping textures of memory and reality. The ability to easily vault over ethnic barriers. The changing definitions of home. These are truly some of grandest themes that propel insightful fiction. These are areas of inquiry in imagined landscapes that give us new ways of seeing the world around us. But in stashing them all into a slim book, and taping them together with remarkably lyrical yet uncomplicated prose, Allen at every stage seems to be attempting one task too many, leaving us with sudden endings. Like the meals unthinking diners sometimes order. Too few courses and too many of the day’s specials.
