The Leaving of Things

I was wholeheartedly looking forward to reading Jay Antani’s “The Leaving of Things,” with the premise of the story being very similar to what I had experienced as a young girl myself. The main character, Vikram Mistry is the Americanized son of Indian immigrants, and after spending much of his life in the States, his family is uprooted and they return back to India. But in the first chapter alone, I was thoroughly disappointed to find an unlikable and whiny teenager narrating this promising story with a pretty book cover.

The novel opens up with Vikram and his family in Bombay’s airport, patiently waiting to go through customs and ultimately boarding their final flight to Ahmadabad where they were to permanently reside. I wanted to like Vikram, especially since his experience of returning to his parent’s homeland was so similar to what I had experienced as a young girl when my parents took us back to Pakistan. I felt his fear, his isolation from the familiar world left behind in the States. But the truth was Vikram established himself as a selfish and over-dramatic teenager from the start and it never quite changed until the end of the book.

Another aspect that bothered me about Vikram was his obsession with his friends and girlfriend back home. Every thought, every revelation came back to thoughts of them, and after a while became annoying. His relationship with his girlfriend Shannon did not seem genuine either, and lacked any sense of true feeling. Whenever he longed for her or missed her, I didn’t believe him. And so, when they inevitably breakup because of the distance, I felt no remorse or sadness for him either. On a similar note, when Vikram enrolls in school and meets the American expat, Priya, their relationship also seemed very aloof and forged. There was no joy, as a reader, to see these two people supposedly connect and then disconnect.

The interesting facet of the novel was how the title tied in with the book, and it was not in a profound way that one would expect. The Leaving of Things implies the uprooting that occurs for the Mistry family—Vikram’s parents leaving their homeland for America, and later on their children leaving their home in America for India. But what it meant for me was how nearly all the characters—down to the minor characters—were continuously running away from their problems. First it was Vikram’s father who returns to India because things didn’t turn out for him the way he wanted. Priya’s father experienced a similar fate, caught up in a scandal back in Boston, he and his family leave and start afresh in India. And later on, Priya is about to have an arranged marriage, and instead of facing her problems she simply runs away. Everyone left something, or was in the process of leaving something. There was no accountability among any of the characters.

The only redeeming quality of the book was moments of beautiful prose and descriptions, the author does a really good job in transporting you to India—the sights, the sounds, the smells. It was all very vivid. This story promised to be a journey of young man's coming-of-age and self exploration, but that promised proved fruitless. With a bleak story line and a whiny teenager as the narrator, who had no redeeming qualities, this was a book that thoroughly disappointed