The Sherpa and Other Fictions

... I was profoundly moved and impressed by Gupta's talent. It is clear Gupta draws from her own experiences and emotions. Her writing is wildly descriptive, her characters deeply complex yet relatable on so many levels. The book is filled with raw emotions, of loves lost, betrayal, grief, and longing for a past one can never return to. The stories are as rich, diverse, and colorful as her imagination, and they stirred my desire to travel to India, to involve myself in the culture, food, and smells that Gupta so eloquently describes.

In each story, I had an aching empathy with each character, situation, and story. While small bits of Canada are sprinkled throughout the stories, it is truly the stunning visual images of India she paints throughout the novel that make this collection of stories a literary masterpiece and work of art. While it may not seem that significant, another thing that struck me was Gupta's grasp of the appropriate length for each of her stories. I fell most in love with the stories "Only Child" and "Honeymoon in Kashmir." In both, readers will contemplate what overt and covert means Indian women take to navigate and declare their freedom from oppressive traditions, both in Canada and India, whether choosing to study at a university one's parents disapprove of or helping those in lower castes instead of marrying as tradition would have it. One particularly powerful story, "In The House of Broken Things," will move readers when a woman betrayed by her country stops at nothing to help those in need.

Gupta artfully and eloquently weaves the important issues of today into all her stories, from intolerant attitudes towards homosexuality and oppressive male attitudes towards women to the challenges of being an immigrant or a second-generation and the plight of refugees. For anyone looking for to be transported to nine wonderfully different worlds, question the way the world works, and fall in love with Gupta's characters, smell, and scenery, I highly recommend this collection of short stories.

Ranging from the Himalayas to the Don Valley Parkway and back, Nila Gupta's debut collection of short fiction is both graceful and powerful.

In The Sherpa and Other Fictions, she looks at the places she's known as home and bravely zooms in on areas of possible contention: a woman modernizes her father's sweet shop while he's on his death bed, Toronto cops raid Bloor Station, a daughter resists an arranged marriage. Gupta's appreciation for subtle rebels and unconventional romantics is clear.

Based in part on her own family's migration from India to Canada, the nine stories in The Sherpa interconnect in slight ways. The title story, in which the narrator visits India for the first time since moving to the West and is warned by her father to "behave like a daughter for once," rings with the authenticity of personal experience.

Gupta's characters are real, distinct, charming, wise and well developed — a major success for a first short story collection. Ultimately, it's her clean, swift and poetic writing that makes this collection unique. She navigates both cultures and countries with a fine tune to detail and thankfully avoids some authors' practice of inserting what feels like glossaries into the work.

Gupta's writing is smart and sincere. Her reflections and focal points are that of an astute, politicized young woman — a hopeful new voice in the Canadian lit scene.

In the affecting opening story of Nila Gupta's debut, a young Toronto woman ignores parental warnings to revisit the landscape of her earliest childhood: a dusty hillside town near troubled Kashmir...

Next up is Honeymoon in Kashmir, the title an ironic dig at a middle-aged sari salesman whose elaborate plan to marry fails when the headstrong love object flees to join a feminist group. More intricate than the opener, this story is a pleasing mix of skilled construction, vivid imagery and sharp characterizations.

In The Boy He Left Behind, a Canadian child of India is called back to the homeland to deal with his deceased mother's estate. Taking leave of his Toronto boyfriend, he finds himself recalling the moment he was caught in the midst of sex games with a treasured boyhood pal, Hussain. ...Gupta's portrait of a gay man in the throes of erotic nostalgia — a leap toward lost puppy love — is graced with tender nuance. The closing moments leap forward again, dovetailing old losses with present hope.

High Regards offers a frigid army base on a Kashmir mountain and a young medical officer's emerging understanding of a hierarchy ruled by corruption, from which even his beloved uncle is not immune. Layered into the intrigue of brutal power games is a veiled story of illicit love, never explicitly confirmed, and the more moving for it. The story's details suggest careful military research, but Gupta's labours remain virtually invisible...

...The Mouser presents a suburban Toronto teen on a forced mission downtown to care for an aging aunt. ...Gupta's final image of loss and betrayal achieves a squirm-inducing pathos, admirably free of sentiment. ...

...Nila Gupta remains a seductive storyteller. With richly evoked settings and a solid grasp of character, she probes the gaps between generations and continents.

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 engage 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 overstuffed boy in a bursting vest. These imaginative leaps keep the writing fresh and the stories jaggedly intriguing... .

Exposed to many cultures, award winning author Nila Gupta offers a brand new anthology of short stories in The Sherpa and Other Fictions. Containing eight inspired and inspiring stories, based on subjects such as the wars around the war, the loss of loved ones and the proceeding grieving process, and so much more than that. Deftly composed and written, The Sherpa and Other Fictions is a fine addition to community library short story collections and for any lover of the format in general.

Nila Gupta is weathered in the arts through her history of writing and directing for both the screen and stage. She is an accomplished literary voice from Montreal as she has won the 2004 K.M. Hunter Award for Literature. However, it is perhaps her experience in theater and film that makes her work, The Sherpa and Other Fictions read as intricately, grippingly and seamlessly as watching a film by Iñárritu or Almodóvar. Her collection of East Indian immigrant stories poignantly flows from beginning to end so that one can almost taste the curiously spicy flavours of the snacks she describes or feel the sheerness of a sari or dupatta against one's skin.

Although Gupta spent only her early years in Jammu, India, before immigrating to Canada in 1967, her nine complex tales of lives torn between homeland and a new foreign territory are infused with an authenticity so sharp that one can only gasp and wonder at the adversities the author had possibly experienced growing up. The book begins with "The Sherpa", a soft introduction to Gupta's eloquent prose about a young Torontonian girl returning to India to find the familiar warmth of an auntie from her childhood. Revisiting one's origins and the lost dreams that recur in the process seems to be a common theme in stories like "In the House of Broken Things" and "The Boy he Left Behind". However, she also elegantly touches upon the often unmentionable and unseen difficulties of life such as growing up homosexual among such traditionalist societies, the chronic tragedies of war in places largely overlooked by the media, or stagnant gender inequalities.

What makes Gupta's storytelling so electrifying is her ability to weave such startling and honest ethnic stories in a pattern easily relatable to many Canadians, whether they be of Indian ancestry or not. My favorite of these tales is "The Mouser" which brutally captures a snapshot of Sadia's adolescent life. The author further transcends herself in this tale by evoking both the abysmal feelings of child abuse while later vibrantly describing the eroticism and clumsiness of teenage encounters. The Sherpa and Other Fictions will have the reader in a state of shock, despair, and hope for the characters. One is inevitably left longing for more from this author.