Book title: "The Sherpa and Other Fictions"
Author: Nila Gupta
Publishing company: Sumach Press
Released: March 2008
Number of pages: 176
ISBN- 10: 978-1-894549-70-7
ISBN -13: 978-1-894549-70-7 

Reviewed by Isabel Lau (Vancouver Correspondent - Canada)

Nila Gupta is weathered in the arts through her history of writing and directing for both the screen and stage. She is an accomplished literary voice from Montreal as she has won the 2004 K.M. Hunter Award for Literature. However, it is perhaps her experience in theater and film that makes her work, The Sherpa and Other Fictions read as intricately, grippingly and seamlessly as watching a film by Iñárritu or Almodóvar. Her collection of East Indian immigrant stories poignantly flows from beginning to end so that one can almost taste the curiously spicy flavours of the snacks she describes or feel the sheerness of a sari or dupatta against one's skin.

Although Gupta spent only her early years in Jammu, India, before immigrating to Canada in 1967, her nine complex tales of lives torn between homeland and a new foreign territory are infused with an authenticity so sharp that one can only gasp and wonder at the adversities the author had possibly experienced growing up. The book begins with "The Sherpa", a soft introduction to Gupta's eloquent prose about a young Torontonian girl returning to India to find the familiar warmth of an auntie from her childhood. Revisiting one's origins and the lost dreams that recur in the process seems to be a common theme in stories like "In the House of Broken Things" and "The Boy he Left Behind". However, she also elegantly touches upon the often unmentionable and unseen difficulties of life such as growing up homosexual among such traditionalist societies, the chronic tragedies of war in places largely overlooked by the media, or stagnant gender inequalities.   

What makes Gupta's storytelling so electrifying is her ability to weave such startling and honest ethnic stories in a pattern easily relatable to many Canadians, whether they be of Indian ancestry or not. My favorite of these tales is "The Mouser" which brutally captures a snapshot of Sadia's adolescent life. The author further transcends herself in this tale by evoking both the abysmal feelings of child abuse while later vibrantly describing the eroticism and clumsiness of teenage encounters. The Sherpa and Other Fictions will have the reader in a state of shock, despair, and hope for the characters. One is inevitably left longing for more from this author.