The Middleman (Criticism)

Criticism

Bryan Aubrey

Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century literature. In this essay, Aubrey discusses "The Middleman" in the context of the experience of recent immigrants to the United States.

Bharati Mukherjee is known for her compelling stories about the experience of recent immigrants to the United States from the Third World. Although "The Middleman" takes place not in the United States but in an unnamed Central American country, it features the same theme. Alfie Judah is a naturalized American citizen who found his way to the United States via Baghdad and Bombay. He has learned many American ways, although he remains an outsider wherever he goes. In fact, the very term "middleman" is a metaphor of the immigrant experience, suggesting someone who is caught between two cultures, a full member of neither. Alfie, despite the American-style informality of the shortened version of his first name by which he introduces himself, is an outsider several times over. First, he is a Jew, and if there are any people in the world who have become familiar, over the course of many centuries, with what it means to be outsiders, it is the Jews. Alfie grew up as a Jew in Baghdad, an Arab city dominated by Muslims. He refers to the different, "lenient" nature of his upbringing in Baghdad when he recalls how he was taken as a child to "see something special from the old Iraqi culture," the stoning to death of a woman for adultery. As a member of a minority group, Alfie was clearly set apart from the dominant culture of his society.

Then when Alfie immigrated to the United States, he became a double outsider, so to speak. As a dark-skinned Iraqi Jew, he would have been regarded by many as a foreigner, and possibly a foreigner not to be trusted. Of course, given Alfie's chosen method of making money in his newly adopted homeland — he got involved in some kind of financial scam which landed him in trouble with the authorities — this mistrust might have been justified. But it is not quite as simple as that. An immigrant such as Alfie cannot come to the United States and straightaway become president of the local bank, join the country club, and volunteer at Little League. Yes, Alfie is the kind of man who makes no distinction between a moral and an immoral way to live, but in his defense, the path to success in the United States did not lie as wide open to him as it would have done to his WASP neighbors. (WASP is an acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and refers to the American elite who occupy the vast majority of positions of power in the country.) Mukherjee herself came to the defense of Alfie, her character, in an interview she gave to Alison B. Carb in Massachusetts Review. "He [Alfie] attracted me because he was a cynical person and a hustler, as many immigrant survivors have to be." Her comment suggests that it is too easy to make moral judgments about Alfie and the way he chooses to survive in an alien environment. As an immigrant herself, Mukherjee has the ability to see things from the immigrant's point of view. Indeed, she once commented, in an interview with Beverley Byers-Pevitts, that "The Middleman" was the most "autobiographical" of her stories. She explained that the origin of the story lay in a trip she made to Costa Rica, where she was "stuck among rather complicated, difficult people." She tried writing the story with a Bengali woman in it but realized that this was implausible. Switching from third-person to first-person point of view, she discovered the character of Alfie, who fitted the story perfectly. With that in mind, it is easy to see some common ground between Mukherjee and her character Alfie in the sense that they both gave up a rich cultural heritage in order to come to the new world. Mukherjee was raised in a Hindu Bengali Brahmin family. She wrote in "Two Ways to Belong in America" of "surrendering those thousands of years of 'pure culture,'" to become an "immigrant nobody." So it is with Alfie Judah, as he recalls the "once-illustrious" Judahs whose family heritage goes back to places such as Smyrna, in Turkey, where there has been a large Jewish population since the seventeenth century, and Aleppo, an ancient city in northern Syria which traditionally had a large Jewish population, one which shrank drastically during the mid-twentieth century. In those two allusions to cities known for their Jewish communities, Mukherjee creates a sense of a rich cultural identity extending back hundreds of years or more, which has been lost by Alfie Judah as the price he pays for his decision to come to the United States. (Although, it must be said, Alfie shows no regret at all about this. He has learned to adapt — and he did manage to land in the immigrant-rich city of Flushing, in the borough of Queens, New York City, which in the 1980s had a large Asian-American population.)

When from a legal point of view, life gets too hot for Alfie in Queens and he ends up in a strife-torn Central American country, he becomes even more of an outsider. Technically, he is an American citizen, but he is not American in the way that Clovis T. Ransome and Bud Wilkins, the two white Texans, are American. Although he has learned some "New World skill[s]" such as how to open a beer bottle by hitting the cap against a metal edge, he cannot share the easy camaraderie of Clovis and Bud — before the one betrays the other, that is. Alfie is forever outside their world. When he tries to explain Ransome's fanatical devotion to the Atlanta Braves baseball team, for example, Alfie says, "There are aspects of American life that I came too late for and will never understand." This is the puzzled statement of the immigrant everywhere. There are some things about every society that a person cannot understand unless he or she has been born and raised in it. Quasi-tribal allegiances to particular sports teams that go back generations and are rooted in local pride and sense of place are among the most noticeable examples. The immigrant may try hard to understand; he may learn all the rules of, say, baseball, and all the players' names and all the baseball statistics, but compared to the lifelong fan, his understanding will always be superficial, lacking in real emotional depth.

But Alfie Judah is no more at home with the indigenous population of this unnamed country than he is with the Americans. The Indians regard him with puzzlement. Because of his dark skin, he is spared the hostility extended to white Americans, but the locals cannot place him. When Maria introduces him to Andreas, the guerrilla leader, Andreas looks him over and says, "Yudah?" and frowns. Maria just shrugs, and Alfie is more or less left alone. When the guerrillas come looking for Ransome in order to kill him, Maria has to explain the presence of Alfie to one of them. Alfie hears her say, "Jew" and "Israel," which apparently is enough to make the guerrilla lose interest, since his target is the gringo, the American. Alfie, therefore, wins a kind of grudging tolerance born of indifference. He may be a middleman, but in this society, he is a kind of nowhere man, his origins, nationality, and allegiances unknown. Alfie, a born survivor if ever there was one, is used to this outsider status, and it does not disturb him. To some, he says, he is an Arab, to others an Indian. (Of course, he is neither.) For his part, he is content just to observe this new country from the outside and pick up whatever knowledge he needs that will serve his purposes. A cunning man, he knows more than he lets on, as when he understands some of the Spanish spoken around him but pretends he does not.

Denied the social connections provided by a shared culture, Alfie appears to seek only one connection to compensate for the lack, and that is the temporary, emotionally meaningless coupling provided by a woman's body in the heat of desire. The language of lust transcends all differences, if only for a short while. The fact that Alfie, himself a married man, has just seduced another man's wife, in the man's own home, does not trouble his conscience. He lives without morality or guilt, on the margins of society, picking up whatever scraps happen to fall his way.

Despite all Alfie's faults, Mukherjee presents him in a sympathetic light, and the reader warms to this character. What is likable about Alfie is that he does not self-consciously play the role of expatriate; nor does he particularly care about embracing American culture and the American dream. There is insouciance about him, a kind of casual indifference to the things that seem so important to others. He does not cling to the past — and Alfie Ju-dah, one senses, has had many pasts — but is ready to reinvent himself, as the American expression goes, whenever the need arises. Wily to the last, he is a match for any situation.

In the interview in Massachusetts Review, Mukherjee identified Alfie as a character typical of her stories about immigrants. These are characters, she said, who

want to make it in the new world; they are filled with a hustlerish kind of energy Although they are often hurt or depressed by setbacks in their new lives and occupations, they do not give up. They take risks they wouldn't have taken in their old, comfortable worlds to solve their problems. As they change citizenship, they are reborn.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on "The Middleman," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Teri Ann Doerksen

In the following essay, Doerksen gives a critical analysis of Mukherjee's life and work.

Bharati Mukherjee has developed a reputation for exploring, through her writings, the meeting of the Third World and the First from the perspective of the immigrant to North America — to Canada and to the United States. Although she is well known for her novels, she has received critical acclaim for her two volumes of short stories, as well; several stories from her first collection, Darkness (1985), were singled out for awards, and her second collection, The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), earned a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories focus on the immigrant experience, but she resists attempts to categorize her as a "hyphenated" writer whose appeal is limited to certain ethnic groups; instead, she characterizes herself as an American writer in an established American tradition. She says in the introduction to Darkness:

I see my "immigrant" story replicated in a dozen American cities, and instead of seeing my Indianness as a fragile identity to be preserved against obliteration (or worse, a "visible" disfigurement to be hidden), I see it now as a set of fluid identities to be celebrated. I see myself as an American writer in the tradition of other American writers whose parents and grandparents had passed through Ellis Island.

Mukherjee is one of a growing number of authors who resist efforts to push to the sidelines literature featuring the richness of immigrant and ethnic communities and who redefine through their works what it means to be American. Along with the Native Americans Paula Gunn Allen and Leslie Marmon Silko and the Chinese American Amy Tan, Mukherjee depicts a United States that can no longer imagine itself in monolithic terms, that "is about diversity, not uniformity," as Allen was quoted as saying in an article in the Chicago Tribune (17 March 1991). In the same article Mukherjee said that "The ethnic voices were always there, but there wasn't a recognition of a community of writers until the de-Europeanization of our country became physically evident in the mid-80s." Mukherjee's short stories reflect her growing interest in representing a more and more inclusive view of what it means to be American. While most of the stories in both volumes are set in the United States or Canada, the first collection focuses primarily on Indian immigrants; the second presents a kaleidoscope of perspectives, including those of an Anglo Vietnam veteran, a newly arrived Ugandan American, and a third-generation Italian American introducing her family to her Afghanistani refugee boyfriend.

Mukherjee's renderings of interracial tensions, of the encounters between East and West, and of the experience of expatriation to Canada and immigration to the United States are drawn from her personal history. Mukherjee was born in Calcutta on 27 July 1940 to Sudhir Lal Mukherjee, a wealthy chemist who had traveled and studied in Germany and Britain, and Bina Barrejee Mukherjee. Both parents were Bengali Brahmins, members of the highest Hindu caste. Although Bina Mukherjee had not had an advanced education, she, like her husband, believed that their three daughters should be educated. In a 1987 interview with Geoff Hancock, Mukherjee said that her father "wanted the best for his daughters. And to him, the 'best' meant intellectually fulfilling lives. My mother is one of those exceptional Third World women who 'burned' all her life for an education, which was denied to well-brought-up women of her generation. She made sure that my sisters and I never suffered the same wants."

Although Mukherjee's first language was Bengali, she was taught English at a bilingual Protestant missionary school in British-ruled Calcutta. Soon after India gained its independence in 1947, the Mukherjee sisters left with their parents for their first trip outside the country; Mukherjee attended boarding schools in England and Switzerland for three years before returning to Calcutta and enrolling at Loreto House, an English-speaking school run by Irish nuns. In a 1990 interview with The Iowa Review she recalled:

There was an instilling of value systems, cultural value systems, which now strikes me as so ironic. The nuns were Irish to begin with, but in the outpost, they became more British than the British. And during the schooldays we were taught to devalue Bengali plays, Bengali literature, Bengali music, Bengali anything. And then we went home — I came from a very orthodox, traditional family — so we had to negotiate in both languages. But, as I'm sure happens with minority children who are being channeled into fancy prep schools and all, it created complications within the Hindi community, within the Indian upper-class community of my generation.

Tensions between Third World and First World values became the foundation for much of Mukherjee's writing.

After graduating from Loreto House, Mukherjee attended the University of Calcutta, where she received a B.A. in English, with honors, in 1959. At about that time her father had a dispute with a business partner and moved the family to Baroda in western India, where he worked for a large chemical firm. Mukherjee received an MA. in English and ancient Indian culture from the University of Baroda in 1961.

After Mukherjee finished her M.A., her father arranged for her to attend the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. She received an M.F.A. from Iowa in 1963. On 19 September 1963 — during their lunch hour — she married Clark Blaise, a Canadian novelist, whom she had met at the university. They have two sons, Bart and Bernard.

Mukherjee became an instructor in the English department at Marquette University in Milwaukee in 1964; in 1965 she took a similar position at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 1966 she and Blaise accepted positions as lecturers at McGill University in Montreal. Mukherjee received her Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from the University of Iowa in 1969 and was promoted to assistant professor.

While teaching at McGill, Mukherjee wrote her first novel. In The Tiger's Daughter (1972) Tara Banerjee Cartwright returns to India to find that her childhood memories of wealth and Brahmin gentility do not jibe with the dirt, poverty, and political upheavals she encounters. Tara's father, "The Tiger," is closely based on Mukherjee's father. In 1973 Mukherjee became an associate professor and went to India on sabbatical. In her second novel, Wife (1975), Dimple Dasgupta, an Indian woman, moves with her Indian husband to New York City. The gap between her husband's expectations of her and those of the culture in which she finds herself are so large, and her mental state is so shaky, that she finds herself torn between killing herself and killing her husband; she chooses the latter alternative, stabbing him in the neck as he eats a bowl of cereal.

Mukherjee and Blaise spent 1976 – 1977 in India, where Mukherjee was directing the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute in New Delhi. They had contracted with a publisher to record their experiences independently, Blaise as a Westerner visiting the country for the first time and Mukherjee as a returnee whose perspective had been shifted by ten years in North America. The result was Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977). Mukherjee became a full professor at McGill in 1978. She also served as the chair of the writing program and as director of graduate studies in English.

In the 1990 interview with The Iowa Review Mukherjee noted that after the Canadian government allowed Ugandan Asians with British passports to enter the country in 1973, "I started to notice on a daily basis little incidents in my corner Woolworth's in Montreal, or in hotel lobbies, on buses, things just not being quite right. Then it ballooned into very vicious physical harassment by 1977, 1978." Soon after Days and Nights in Calcutta was published, Mukherjee and Blaise moved to Toronto, a hotbed of racist violence in Canada, and learned of people of color being thrown onto railroad tracks and run over intentionally on the streets. Paralyzed by anger over her encounters with racism in her adopted home, Mukherjee stopped writing for almost ten years, and she and Blaise decided to leave Canada permanently. They resigned their tenured positions and took part-time, temporary teaching jobs at colleges around New York City. When Mukherjee began to write again, she chose a new genre: the short story.

Mukherjee's first book of short stories, Darkness, published in 1985, reveals her outrage at the racism she had encountered in Canada and the optimism she associates with living in the United States. Most of the twelve stories in the collection were written while she was writer-in-residence at Emory University in Atlanta in the spring of 1984, although some had been written in Canada. The tone of the stories moves from bitterness about the difficulty of maintaining Indian identity in Canada to a cautious hopefulness about the potential for successful assimilation into the culture of the United States.

The stories in Darkness feature characters from Southern Asia and provide a mosaic of perspectives on this kind of immigrant experience. Several stories are either set in Canada or involve characters who live there and depict the overwhelming racism encountered there by people of Indian origin. "The World According to Hsü" is told from the point of view of Ratna Clayton, an Indian woman married to a white Canadian academic in Montreal. The couple is on vacation on an island off the coast of Africa; the uprising and coup that occur during their visit correspond to the internal upheaval Ratna feels at the news that her husband wants to take a position in Toronto: "In Montreal she was merely 'English,' a grim joke on generations of British segregationists. It was thought charming that her French was just slightly short of fluent. In Toronto, she was not Canadian, not even Indian. She was something called, after the imported idiom of London, a Paki. And for Pakis, Toronto was hell."

Other stories extend beyond the middle and upper classes to the experience of poor immigrants — who are almost always assumed by those in authority to be in Canada illegally. In "Tamurlane" a Toronto restaurant is raided by Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers who are looking for illegal immigrants. Gupta, a lame cook who has his papers, at first resists the unjust arrest in the only way he knows how — with his cleaver — then reaches for his passport; but one of the Mounties shoots him through the very document that proves that they should not have tried to arrest him in the first place. In the award-winning "Isolated Incidents" a young white Toronto social worker is made aware of the vast gap between classes when a visit to an old school friend, who is now a famous pop singer, coincides with an incident in which an Indian immigrant is pushed in front of a subway train and an encounter with a plaintive Hispanic client who wants her to save his sister from being deported.

In "Nostalgia" the reader is introduced to Dr. Manny Patel, who is proud of his white wife, Camille; his young son; and the money he has earned in the United States. At the same time, however, he longs for the familiarity of the culture he left behind in India. Patel's nostalgia takes on substance in his lust for an Indian girl he meets at the market and romances at an expensive restaurant. Patel ignores the waiter's plea for help in getting a visa for his nephew, because "he didn't want this night to fall under the pressure of other immigrants' woes," only to find, in an ironic twist, that the entire experience was engineered: the girl he is romancing is the waiter's niece, and he is blackmailed into helping with the visa and giving them money, as well. Patel, suddenly aware of his disconnected-ness from his Indian heritage, reacts in a way that proves that he is also disconnected from his family: as the story ends he is planning to bribe his wife with a cruise to make up for his infidelity and humiliation. A story later in the volume, "Saints," illustrates the long-term repercussions of Patel's detachment. Many years later Camille and Manny have divorced; their son, Shawn, cannot understand his father's coldness or his mother's attraction to men who cheat on her and batter her, and at the end he is walking the midwinter streets "like a Hindu saint," peering through the windows at Indian families and hoping for a glimpse of his own identity.

The most pervasive theme in the volume, appearing in some form in nearly all of the stories, is the tension between the changed cultural and sexual expectations confronting Indian women immigrants to North America and the unchanged values of their traditional Indian parents and husbands. "A Father" is a particularly vivid illustration of this theme. Mr. Bhowmick discovers that his daughter is pregnant and is overjoyed by his visions of a grandson and by the notion that his intelligent but awkward daughter is loved by a man. He is willing to forgive the fact that she is pregnant out of wedlock; after all, he reasons, "Girls like Babli were caught between the rules." He congratulates himself on his progressive ideas; but the brittleness of his position becomes apparent when he discovers that his daughter was impregnated by artificial insemination rather than by a boyfriend. His self-congratulatory acceptance explodes into rage and violence, and he beats his daughter with a rolling pin until his wife calls the police.

"Visitors" also plays on immigrant uncertainty about how much acceptance of Western culture is allowable. Vinita, a young immigrant bride, is receiving visitors on her first afternoon in her new home. She is faced with a difficult decision when a young man she has met comes to the door: in Calcutta it would be inappropriate to be with him un-chaperoned, but the rules are different in New Jersey. He, however, judges her by Calcutta rules, taking her invitation to tea as an acknowledgment of her desire for him. She repulses his attack, but the experience has made her long for something more than she has. She finds herself longing to "run off into the alien American night where only shame and disaster can await her."

Darkness received generally favorable reviews. Mahnaz Ispahani commented in The New Republic (14 April 1986): "Mukherjee has created some complicated inner lives, and evoked the sensations and the traditions and the combustion of two very different cultures. Unlike many writers about the immigrant experience, Mukherjee does not succumb to guilt or to maudlin memories about the past. Instead her work soberly celebrates resilience. Like most of her characters, she has no thoughts of turning back."

After Darkness was sent to the publisher, Mukherjee acquired a National Endowment for the Arts grant and took time off from teaching to begin writing another series of stories about Indian immigrants to the United States. This work was interrupted by an event that led to another nonfiction book: the 23 June 1985 bombing off the Irish coast, apparently by Sikh terrorists, of Air India flight 182, en route from Toronto to New Delhi via London, in which 329 people were killed. In 1987 Mukherjee and Blaise published The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy, in which they argued that ultimate responsibility for the disaster lay with misguided Canadian government policies on immigration and multiculturalism.

After the completion of The Sorrow and the Terror Mukherjee returned to the stories she had begun earlier, but in a much different frame of mind. During the intervening years she had settled permanently in the United States, and as she wrote the last of the stories for her second collection she was preparing to become a citizen. She continued to be concerned with the racism facing Indian immigrants to Canada, but she began to approach the issue from a more hopeful perspective. Early in 1988 she took her citizenship oath in New York City; a few months later The Middleman and Other Stories was published.

The Middleman and Other Stories reflects an exuberance that contrasts with the uncertainty and sense of betrayal that pervades many of the pieces in Darkness; Mukherjee said in the 1990 interview that "by the time I came to write The Middleman, I was exhilarated, my vision was more optimistic. I knew that I was finally where I wanted to be." The stories also shift away from her earlier focus on Indian immigrants to include new arrivals from Uganda, the West Indies, and Afghanistan. Except for a few darker stories, the collection celebrates the kaleidoscopic nature of the new American population. Finally, Mukherjee adopts a new narrative perspective in the stories: while Darkness explored the immigrant experience from a third-person-omniscient standpoint, The Middleman and Other Stories allows many of these new American voices to speak for themselves; some of the narrators are native-born Americans who are learning to live with the changes brought to the country by the recent arrivals. All of the stories address the tensions and hopes produced when "new" Americans meet "old" ones.

As diverse as the stories are, they fall into definable categories. The first is a new one for Mukherjee: stories told from the point of view of white Americans who are seeking, with differing degrees of success, to make sense of the new America emerging around them. In "Loose Ends" the Vietnam veteran Jeb Marshall has become an assassin-for-hire in Florida. Bitter and unable to accept the changes that immigrants have brought to the United States, he sees people of Hispanic and East Indian descent as threats and views himself and his wife as "coolie labor in our own country." In Vietnam, he thinks, he sacrificed to "barricade the front door" and protect his country; now he wonders, "who left the back door open?" Checking into a cheap motel run by an East Indian family, he is enraged when he realizes that to them he is unimportant: "They've forgotten me. I feel left out, left behind. While we were nailing up that big front door, these guys were sneaking in around back. They got their money, their family networks, and their secretive languages." He rapes and murders the young Indian woman who shows him to his room, believing that by doing so he is taking back "his" America. In "Fathering" another veteran, Jason, faces a power struggle between his common-law wife, Sharon, and his daughter, Eng, whom he fathered in Vietnam and who has just arrived in the United States.

The largest group of stories consists of those that are told from the point of view of first- and second-generation Asian immigrants as they become acculturated in the West. In the title story, "The Middleman," Alfie Judah, an Iraqi who has just become a United States citizen, is employed by an arms-dealing syndicate in a Central American republic; the syndicate is secretly run by an American businessman and the president of the country. Alfie has an affair with the businessman's wife, who is also the president's mistress. When — to his surprise — he survives the discovery of the affair, he decides to see how much money he can make from his inside information about his former bosses. This jaundiced view of entrepreneurship in the Western world is echoed in "Danny's Girls." The unnamed narrator, a teenage Ugandan refugee, admires Danny Sahib, another boy in his building, whose business is "selling docile Indian girls to hard-up Americans for real bucks." But when he becomes infatuated with Rosie, a Nepalese mailorder bride, he realizes "what a strange, pimpish thing I was doing, putting up pictures of Danny's girls, or standing at the top of the subway stairs and passing them out to any lonely-looking American I saw — what kind of joke was this? How dare he do this, I thought, how dare he make me a part of this?"

Two stories explore meetings between new immigrants and families who are well established in the United States. In "Jasmine" an illegal emigrant from Trinidad finds a job in Michigan caring for the daughter of the Moffitts. The feminist Lara Hatch-Moffitt is blithely unaware of the hypocrisy of her exploitation of the teenage immigrant to further her own career; Bill Moffitt also exploits Jasmine by having an affair with her. (The explosive potential of the situation established in "Jasmine" led Mukherjee to expand it into a novel of the same title, which was published in 1989.) In "Orbiting," one of the strongest pieces in the collection, a second-generation Italian American family gathers for that most traditional of American holidays, Thanksgiving, at the home of the eldest daughter, Rindy. The dinner is complicated by the introduction of Rindy's new boyfriend, Ro, an Afghan refugee. Ro's presence changes the way the more-established Americans see the holiday they are celebrating, and the assumptions they have about what it means to be an American. When Ro explains the politics that forced him to leave his country and the torture he suffered in jail, Rindy's father and brother are shocked out of their complacent belief that "only Americans had informed political opinions — other people staged coups out of spite and misery." As Ro's story continues, Rindy observes that her father is beginning to look ill; she notes with acerbity that "The meaning of Thanksgiving should not be so explicit." Victoria Carchidi calls the story "a comedy of manners worthy of Jane Austen, whom Mukherjee has acknowledged as an influence on her work. We see misunderstandings, and correct understandings, where least expected as the characters enact in miniature the ballet of complementary moves that is America."

The last group of stories encompasses a category that is familiar from Mukherjee's previous work: stories of Indian women who have immigrated to the United States or Canada and are struggling with the distance between their cultural background and the new society in which they find themselves. In "A Wife's Story" Panna Bhatt is studying for a doctorate in special education in New York City. When her husband, who manages a cotton mill north of Bombay, arrives for a visit, he asks why she has not worn his mother's gold and ruby ring to the airport. She explains that it is not safe to do so: "He looks disconcerted. He's used to a different role. He's the knowing, suspicious one in the family. I handle the money, buy the tickets. I don't know if this makes me unhappy." By the end of the story she knows that she will not return to India with him. The final image is of a woman discovering a new sense of herself: "I watch my naked body turn, the breasts, the thighs glow. The body's beauty amazes. I stand here shameless, in ways he has never seen me. I am free, afloat, watching somebody else." In "The Tenant" a young professor from India is torn between her desire for a connection with her Indian heritage and her desire for independence. She has dinner with the family of an Indian colleague; afterward, he drives her home and then masturbates at the wheel of the car while she watches, aghast. She turns to personal advertisements for Indian companionship, then to her armless landlord, and, finally, back to the man she had met through the personals. It is a story of searching without finding, but without the bleakness that might have pervaded a similar story in Darkness.

The most powerful work in the collection, "The Management of Grief," grew out of Mukherjee's experience researching the Air India crash. Mrs. Bhave's husband and two sons are killed in the disaster, and in the following weeks she becomes a focal point for misunderstandings between the Canadian government and the grieving families. She is disappointed in herself for being unable to show the emotion she should, for not wailing for the dead; others in her community wonder if she really loved her family, since she can take their loss so silently. The Canadian authorities, on the other hand, try to use her to inspire a similar stoicism in the other bereaved Indian families. The authorities also assume that the survivors will be comforted by the identification of the bodies of their loved ones, while Mrs. Bhave and the others take their only solace in the belief that somehow their families might have survived: "In our culture, it is a parent's duty to hope." When Judith Templeton, a social worker, asks for Mrs. Bhave's help with the other families, she reluctantly agrees; but Templeton's ignorance is too much to bear. Not only does Templeton want Mrs. Bhave to talk with a Sikh family — members of the ethnic group responsible for bombing the plane in which Mrs. Bhave's family died — but she also confides that the "stubbornness and ignorance" of two survivors "are driving me crazy." Finding herself more in sympathy with her traditional enemies than with the Canadian social worker, Mrs. Bhave asks to be let out of the car at a subway stop. This strong declaration of self is followed by eventual release from grief: after many months, she hears her family's voices telling her to "Go, be brave," and she begins a new life, a new "voyage."

The Middleman and Other Stories was a commercial and critical success, garnering the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Eleanor Wachtel noted in Maclean's (29 August 1988): "In The Middleman, Mukherjee has plunged herself into the throes of American society. In return, she offers acute insights into the clashes that mark a nonwhite's entry into that culture."

At the time of the publication of Jasmine Mukherjee was invited to become a distinguished professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Since then she has published two nonfiction books, Political Culture and Leadership in India: A Study of West Bengal (1991) and Regionalism in Indian Perspective (1992), and two novels, The Holder of the World (1993) and Leave It to Me (1996). Critics have found Mukherjee's work to be a shaping force in a new American literature that reimagines the United States as a multifaceted rather than a monolithic entity, and her work is beginning to be the focus of scholarly inquiry. She speaks to an America that is culturally rich and diverse; while she acknowledges that such diversity comes with discomfort and sacrifice, she shows that it also provides tremendous rewards.

Source: Teri Ann Doerksen, "Bharati Mukherjee," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 218, American Short-Story Writers Since World War II, Second Series, edited by Patrick Meanor and Gwen Crane, Gale Group, 1999, pp. 228-234.

What Do I Read Next?

• Mukherjee's novel Jasmine (1989) emerged out of the short story of the same title published in The Middleman and Other Stories. Jasmine follows the life of a courageous young woman who leaves her native India and learns how to survive in the alien environment of the United States.
• Jhumpa Lahiri was named by the New Yorker magazine as one of the twenty best young writers in the United States. In her first collection of nine stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Lahiri writes about the Indian American experience in all its variety.
• Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America (1996), edited by Sunaina Maira and Rajini Srikanth, is an award-winning anthology of poems, stories, photographs, and essays that explores many aspects of the South Asian experience in North America. Many of the writers discover that they do not have to choose between identifying with South Asian or American cultures, but they can create their own culture that values heritage yet is also new.
• Living in America: Poetry and Fiction by South Asian American Writers (1995), edited by Rustomji-Kerns, is an anthology of Asian American authors, some native-born, others immigrants and refugees. It contains poetry and short fiction by established and new writers. Many of the contributions reflect the concerns of a predominantly middle-class, educated South Asian community as it comes to terms with a new culture and defines its identity.
• Lan Samantha Chang's critically acclaimed Hunger (1998), consisting of the title novella and some short stories, explores the experience of Chinese immigrants in the United States, some of whom find that their offspring, raised in America, are more attuned to American values than traditional Chinese ones.