Mostly set in New Zealand and India; Snakes, Cows and Avocado Sandwiches is a collection of short stories and poems that ambitiously tries to be one single book. It succeeds because it is interesting as a saga of a family from 1940s to 2010. It is a eulogy to the mom, a life writing exercise with travel writing, fiction, vignettes, prose poems and even a vague shadow of a novel thrown in. Curiously embroidered with a host of short pieces, it tries to break the density as it is written for the modern day fast-food, 16GB-Ram generation. It is a story of an immigrant in New Zealand, struggling to, keep his mom alive, find joy and above all, survive.
The book explores diverse themes, as it probes into the magical realism of ghosts and dreams, negotiates with the dead, understands how writing is a form of narrative therapy, stretches the English language, relates the immigrant experience and is a narrative on Snakes, Cows and Avocado Sandwiches, which is, a collection of short stories and poems inspired a mother’s life and written after her death.
The stories begin in Ahmedabad, which, besides being the birthplace of the mother, is also the birthplace of cultural roots, religious beliefs and traditional mores.
The backdrop of ghosts, dreams and the immigrant experience in New Zealand help the author embrace his warrior past, and use it to overcome petty racism and ignorance.
‘The book is filled with foreign words and has a glossary on the last pages. Not all stories have a clear-cut sequel, like ‘Yellow Tails’, that ends as a slice of life story followed by the poem ‘A Fish called Karma’. The individual stories do finally come together in ‘Letters to Mom’.
The immigrant experience continues in ‘Mana’, ‘Mangere’, ‘Manurewa’, as it does in ‘Yellow Tails’, ‘Ode to Winston Peters’, the black and white dog poem, and other poems like ‘Fish called Karma’, ‘Green bird’, and concludes at ‘Cloudy’.
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