Content area
Full Text
Featured Review Deepak Unnikrishnan. Temporary People. Brooklyn. Restless Books. 2017. 240 pages.
Deepak Unnikrishnan's Temporary People is a riveting debut collection of twentyeight short stories written in a mélange of stylistic registers. Fiction, Unnikrishnan writes, has "barely addressed the so-called guest workers of the (Arabian) Gulf." Divided into three parts-"Limbs," "Tongue," and "Home"-Temporary People addresses this absence and explores how "temporary status affects psyches, families, memories, fables, and language(s)." Critical here is the fleeting, groundless, and ephemeral quality of the temporary; its propensity to efface or render ghostly the stories of individual lives. As Muthassi in "Sarama" says: "Everybody . . . has a past that ought to be heard. The present...