In Aruni Kashyap’s collection of thirteen short stories, The Way You Want to Be Loved, characters tied to Assam confront familial guilt, racism, homophobia, and the isolation endured by young people living far from home. As the stories cross oceans and time periods, Kashyap keeps readers engaged with his impeccably developed characters as they forge bonds to assuage their loneliness. Each story complicates the question of what it means to live in solitude.

Several stories connect with each other. In “Minnesota Nice,” Himjyoti, a young Assamese man, moves to the American Midwest where he must establish himself in a new home. In the companion story, “The Umricans,” Kashyap continues Himjyoti’s tale while shifting to the second-person point of view, a choice that is radically effective because it immediately heightens the reader’s empathy for Himjyoti as he feels increasingly far from home, particularly when his mother falls ill. At this time of difficulty, the relationships he builds with local Americans, who prefer email to difficult conversations and sympathetic text messages to quality time, fail to provide him with a meaningful community like the one he knew in Assam. The story culminates with the deepest sense of solitude—an unfamiliarity with oneself. In such a moment, Kashyap writes, “you mourn because you have become someone you always despised.”

For some characters, isolation stems less from geography than from the trials of their closest relationships. Lovers fight and retreat, family members disappoint, and newlyweds fail to connect. In the title story, Kashyap returns to the second person to deliver a story of the unraveling of a male friendship due to unrequited love. The months that follow the rejection bring immense loneliness, which Kashyap depicts sharply and pragmatically:

It has been two months, and you feel like a malnourished, yellowed patch of grass under a brick. You stop calling him, not because you dislike him now, but because you don’t want to throw up or spend any more nights sleepless. After a point, you start keeping to yourself […] Your silence is frightening.

In “Bizi Colony,” a young man narrates the pain that his family has suffered through the years at the hands of his troubled younger brother’s violence, thievery, and eventual drug addiction. When the narrator wakes up in the hospital after a suicide attempt, he sees his best friend, Niyor, beside him. Niyor is close enough to the family to know that there is profound turmoil in the home, but as an outsider, he cannot know its exact nature. The narrator, bound by familial allegiance and pride, cannot bring himself to reveal the magnitude of the suffering that has led to this attempt on his life. A simple description of their relationship hints at its depth while shining a light on its shortcomings and the information that remains unshared between the two young men:

Niyor didn’t ask me about the sleeping tablets […] When we were young, we had planned to marry the same girl. Later, we had planned to marry on the same day (two different girls, of course). We had conversations that no one else understood. So, I knew that what he was really asking was what this was all about, but that day, I just couldn’t tell him.

If the narrator were able to explain his pain to his friend, he likely would find some relief from it, but to do so would mean discussing the embarrassment that the brother has caused the family. By presenting this double bind,  Kashyap emphasizes the role that familial identity plays in the lives of his Assamese characters, for whom he suggests traditional family values prevail. 

While most of the stories are told in straightforward prose, Kashyap’s gift for elaborate language shines in “For the Greater Common Good,” a story that reads as a folktale and tells the story of a family whose deceased father, a trained sorcerer, sends his “spiteful” spirit to haunt them. Here, Kashyap pays tribute to the rich folklore of Assam, a region known for its ancient history of sorcery and witchcraft. In this story, the characters’ loneliness is not conveyed as it is in the other stories, by means of  pragmatic observations of mundane life, but instead looms hauntingly in the descriptions of the Assamese village of Teteliguri:

Of course, when the trees in the stunted hills that guarded the village started to sway, there was a storm. But the chill reigned only on nights when the winds froze the stones and then carried the bite of it into the houses of the village, an uninvited guest.

As he masterfully weaves his way through literary styles, Kashyap conveys the rich beauty and pain of his homeland from a place of approachability. Neither knowledge of the longstanding conflict between Assamese natives and the Indian government nor an appreciation for the nuances of different regional languages is necessary to understand his characters’ experiences. Rather than reading as history lessons, Kashyap’s engaging stories honor the rich history of Assam and the resilience of its people, who have built tight communities and complex families. Most interestingly, these deep, beautiful alliances often result in the same failure to prevent solitary suffering as the characters’ seemingly less meaningful bonds forged in America. The changing nature of their home territory, as the region faces intensifying political conflict, complements the new terrain that many of these characters face as they move abroad.

With these stories Kashyap suggests that neither shared nationality, nor profession, nor even family can guarantee mutual understanding. While moments of reprieve from solitude can be found through meaningful relationships, certain solitudes remain forever unreachable from others, so deeply are they enclosed within feelings of shame, pride, and pain. These interludes, far from futile, beautifully buoy the solitary through the deepest waters. 

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Aruni Kashyap is the author of His Father’s Disease: Stories, the novel The House With a Thousand Stories, and a poetry collection, There Is No Good Time for Bad News. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian UK, The Boston Review, Catapult, and elsewhere. In Assamese, he is the author of a novel Noikhon Etia Duroit and three novellas. A recipient of fellowships from Harvard Radcliffe and the National Endowment for the Arts, Kashyap is an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia, Athens. 

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Mia Carroll is an engineer and writer. She lives in Manhattan with her husband.