LUCKY BOY by Shanthi Sekaran. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House, New York. 472 pages. Hardcover. $27.00
With Lucky Boy, Shanthi Sekaran performs a literary cantata that is as dazzling as it is soul-searing. Two disparate threads converge unluckily in Lucky Boy. One spools together the story of Kavya and Rishi in a reasonably stable marriage. Kavya is a graduate of UC Berkeley and works as a sorority chef, while Rishi works for a tech company. They lead a somewhat stereotypical Indian American life, balancing their bike-to-work Berkeley lifestyle with an India imported sensitivity to cultural expectations. The other has eighteen-year old Solimar Castro Valdez, an undocumented immigrant from fictional Santa Clara Popocalco, looking for the kind of stability that Kavya takes for granted. Lucky Boy traces Soli’s journey from naïve optimist to gritty survivor and elevates the book by shining a light on the deeply contested issue of undocumented immigration.
“It all started in 2010,” said author Sekaran, “I heard about this case on NPR about a Guatemalan woman who was fighting for custody for her child. She had been picked up in a factory raid, she was in detention, and her son was being adopted away from her,” Sekaran summarized. The case was that of Encarnacion Bail Romero who lost her child to the Mosers, a couple she had never met, all while she was in detention.
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It has been eight months since I started my MFA at Bennington College. In the last eight months I have cooked half a dozen meals. I pack my children lunches and I clean up the kitchen after my husband when he makes dinner for the family after he comes home from working in a Silicon Valley tech company. Cooking has never moved me. Motherhood has—but not the baggage of social dos and don'ts that accompanied it. I have done fewer play dates than the meals I have cooked in the past few months, and I rarely go to a birthday party. My husband takes the children to their social engagements. “But is this fair?” you might ask and I answer, “It is not about fairness, it is about what moves you as a person and how to keep that flame of what keeps you alive, burning within you, while negotiating roles in an adult world that still largely favors men over women.”
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Not another invite,” I groaned, picking up a thick cream and red colored envelope.
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LUCKY BOY by Shanthi Sekaran. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House, New York. 472 pages. Hardcover. $27.00
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