Every Room Has a View

Naveen Gupta has died in San Francisco, where he lived for 30 years, prospered with the Silicon Valley boom of the 1990s, and raised a family in an upscale home where ‘every room has a view’ of the Golden Gate bridge. His will contains an odd request that he be cremated ‘on the shore with the proper rites and ceremonies’, exactly as he cremated his father in India three decades ago.

Told from Usha’s point of view, the novel alternates between the past how Usha came to America and became an American and the present the chaotic and comical attempts by Naveen’s friends to conduct elaborate Hindu ceremonies in San Francisco. Their efforts yield up Kris, alias Krishna, the jeans-clad pandit, who blithely condenses the thirteen-day rituals into a single day; a ‘cow on hire’ to be gifted to the pandit and then returned to its owner; a pyre of pinewood and a bottle of Gangajal filled from a faucet at the airport.

The fantastical events that unfold are tempered by the reality of Maaji, Naveen’s mother, who struggles to find her roots in America until she meets a community of senior citizens in Sausalito; Ajay, his teenage son who finds refuge in sullen silence and a passion for music; and Usha herself, who begins a journey of self-discovery as a widow.

As Usha struggles to honour her husband’s last wish-wondering what he could have had in mind, and knowing that Hindu ritual is an amalgam of high philosophy and cheap accommodationshe finally understands what it means for an Indian to live and die in America,