Immigrant identity, the violence of the Indian partition, and the disillusioning challenges of homecoming all find their place in these richly textured short stories by Nila Gupta. Gupta, born in Montreal and partly raised in India, adeptly captures her in-between experience with narratives that are fragmentary and ambiguous.

The Sherpa covers a large range of people, places, and issues. The stories battle questions of race and nationality without falling into cliché or forgetting the additional intricacies of gender, sexuality, or class. In one poignant tale, two sisters visit a compound of migrant Kashmiri Hindus, where they must come to terms with the injustices of the Indian state and their own self-interested motivations. In another, an Indian-Irish Canadian narrator longs to escape the demands of her mixed family and of the abused young boy next door.

The ambitious content is mirrored in the language itself, which breathes with raw energy and with an awkward poeticism that is both jarring and disarming. In “The Boy He Left Behind,” Hussain compares his current lover to an overused Post-it Note and later describes the day as an over-stuffed boy in a bursting vest. These imaginative leaps keep the writing fresh and the stories jaggedly intriguing.
    The diversity of the stories is their greatest asset; however, they also suffer from an over-exuberance in both content and form. Issues are sometimes raised too explicitly, as when in “Honeymoon in Kashmir” Amina struggles against patriarchy and religious fundamentalism at her family-owned sweet shop. As well, more streamlining of the narratives would have made for more tautness and depth.

With this first collection out of the way, Gupta can now hone her talent and strike with even more precise and incisive strokes.