Common grounds

Nalini Jones’s universal portraits

September 18, 2007 4:33:57 PM

A SLOW CHURNING: Jones.

Nalini Jones’s ties to Rhode Island are through her father Bob, a producer for the Newport folk and jazz festivals for more than 40 years — she was born in Newport during one of her parents’ frequent sojourns here. Her ties to India are through her mother Marguerite, who grew up in a Catholic suburb of Mumbai (Bombay) and took her children on frequent visits to her homeland.

It is those connections that Jones celebrates in her debut short story collection, What You Call Winter (Knopf). She currently lives in Connecticut with her husband and baby daughter, but Jones will be in Providence on September 25 at 7 pm for a book signing at Books On the Square (471 Angell Street, 401.331.9097), with Jim Shepard, from Williamstown, Massachusetts, reading from his book, Like You’d Understand, Anyway.

The nine stories in Jones’s book focus on four families in the fictional Santa Clara neighborhood of Mumbai, with various siblings and parents seen at very different times in their lives. And though Jones is very skillful at layering her characters with flashbacks and internal reactions to their present lives, the reader has the bonus of piecing together snippets of those same characters from other stories.

“I had to work hard to have characters living in a place where I had never lived,” Jones admitted in a recent phone conversation. “The fact that they’re set in India reflects how much I used to visit there and how I was constantly yearning to go back. It was such a vibrant world, with young uncles and aunts and cousins all over the place. If you go to a suburb of Bombay as a kid, what you’re taking in is remarkable — everything you see is amazing. That kind of detail is heightened. These stories were a way for me to travel back there.”

It’s no surprise, then, that a child’s perception colors several of them. In “The Crow and the Monkey,” a family crisis — a mother leaving her husband and children — is seen through the eyes of her young nephew (Jude), to whom she has confided her love of painting. The pre-teen girl (Marian, Jude’s sister) in the opening story, “In the Garden,” also puzzles over a world of adult conflicts and is frightened by her own emotional and physical changes. In two other stories, another young brother of Marian’s and her pre-teen daughter are scarred by random acts of violence.

Among these themes of lost innocence and family relationships, another strong motif emerges: migration and the idea of having more than one “home.” For Jones, this grew out of observing that four of the five children in her mother’s generation left India, and that her mother referred to trips to India as “going home.”

“For me, the writing of these stories began with bewilderment and confusion,” Jones reflected, “about how some relationships worked or how distance works in families or how people resolve things that don’t look resolvable. It’s always a slow churning; I have to explore a question and figure it out.”

Though Jones has been around music all her life — she’s been on staff at Festival Productions since ’94 and has been the co-producer of the Newport Folk Festival since 2004 — it was her love of reading that pulled her toward writing. Though she likes contemporary fiction that’s edgy and fast-paced, she sees her own work as “a little old-fashioned, a little quieter.”

Indeed, the intergenerational relationships in Jones’s stories have an underlying tenderness. The adult children may be frustrated by their parents’ attitudes, but they are also patient with their bad habits — the drinking of an old man or the soap operas of a lonely older woman — and their fears, such as selling the family home to developers.

And as Jones explores the many reasons why people leave their homeland and settle in a new country — a job, education, a mate, a different lifestyle — she pays tribute to her mother and all immigrants. Though the setting of all but one of these stories is India, Jones creates such carefully detailed portraits that the characters are as universal as they are memorable, with remarkably resonant descriptions of place and insightful metaphors about feelings. What You Call Winter is a captivating read.