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Aruni Kashyap, The Way You Want to Be Loved, Gaudy Boy, 2024. 256 pgs.

In the first story of Aruni Kashyap’s short story collection, the narrator, a writer of Assamese literature, is invited to a writers’ conference in Delhi. At the reading, he is questioned why he chooses to write about folklore and mythology instead of the insurgencies and violence happening in Assam. In response, he says, “I am free to write anything”. 

In many ways, that declaration sets the frame for the key questions that the collection interrogates. How should stories be written? Along with that: does fable make anything “less real”? These questions take on more importance given the collection’s role in spotlighting typically underrepresented stories from the Assam region in the Northeast of India, particularly queer voices. 

Two key threads intertwine in this collection: life in Assam and the life of Assamese in America. “Minnesota Nice”, continued in the story “The Umricans”, recounts the life of an Assamese man studying in America, and the tensions and microaggressions he encounters with his very American roommate. These stories are contrasted with the other extended story interwoven between them: “For the Greater Common Good” and “His Father’s Disease”, which follows a family in Assam—the first of which deals with a set of haunted manuscripts, with the second following a gay son and his tensions with society because of his sexuality. The contrast between these are jarring: the subtle microaggressions of the roommate against the obvious violence enacted against the family in Assam. But by pairing these two narrative spaces and pointedly distinguishing them, the work escapes comparing them on the same terms; rather, it creates a conversation on how violence is enacted in different ways on people. 

Kashyap demonstrates a strong range of writing— rom mimicking a soap opera in the dramatic and rather outlandish “Like the Thread in a Garland” (threats from a gun-wielding ex-boyfriend) to a more sensitive touch in the follow-up “Because a Mother-in-Law Was Once a Daughter-in-Law, Too”. Jarringly violent pieces like “Before the Bullet”, a reverse chronological story of a man’s execution, are immediately followed by sweet romantic encounters in “The Love Lives of People Who Look like Kal Penn”. There’s much abstract bizarreness in these pieces too, like the extremity of a terrorising younger brother in “Bizi Colony”. Kashyap excels most in creating sensitivity within dramatic events—rather than dramatic monologue, he retreats to condensed external observation. At the end of the dramatic and emotional arc of “Bizi Colony” the narrator projects outwards and describes the streets, the voice of the madwoman the final tune at the end of the book instead of the madman in his brother. Juxtaposing fantastical dramatic storylines with simple details is Kashyap’s strength: the push and pull between the grand and the granular, society and the individual, direct and indirect… 

All this is captured in the titular piece “The Way You Want to Be Loved”, which explores the ups and downs of a relationship between two men as one grieves his mother’s death. The strengths of Kashyap’s writing are most evident in rendering the narrator’s complex and non-linear healing process in vivid but not overly dramatic manner. He also explores myriad relationships: the main (queer) relationship, but also the narrator and his mother, him and his friend, him and his best friend. Woven into these very intimate relational portraits is the larger political existential struggle of existing as a gay man in a society that arrests you under a 377 law for being with a man. Placed near the end of the collection, the titular story also suggests a kind of healing for all the violence present within the pages: both the overt violence enacted in Assam and the subtle aggressions in America. A not straightforward process of healing that can nonetheless be embarked upon by taking a collective step forward.

The title speaks to the struggles of the universal want to be loved. Threaded through these stories is a sense of longing for such acceptance within societies that condemn one for existing as they are—as a queer person in Assam, as an Assamese in India, as an Indian in America. And yet they persist in a defiance to live just as they live, to love as they love. 

How to cite: Ho, Faith. “The Ways to Belonging in Stories: Aruni Kashyap’s The Way You Want to Be Loved.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 17 Oct. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/10/17/be-loved.

Faith Ho is a Singaporean undergraduate studying at Princeton University in the US. Her works have been published in the Tiger Moth Review, RICE Media, Singapore Unbound and in an anthology of Singaporean love stories. She also writes for her school’s publications. She enjoys photography, filmmaking, and trying not to fall on her rollerblades.

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