For most artists, “Don’t quit your day job” is less the personal criticism a speaker may intend, and more a generic necessity. On its own, an artist’s craft is unlikely to provide a living, and the readymade judgment that “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” makes for a meaningless distinction. And when the practitioners of a craft turn en masse to teaching it, the result is a kind of irony, or even a vicious circle that says a lot about the health of the particular avocation, or even the culture in which it’s practiced. Given the right biography, however, the conundrum can resolve itself. That brings us to Westminster University’s professor of Creative Writing, Ranjan Adiga, and his premier collection of short stories, Adversity Quota.

Adiga was born in Nepal and subsequently acquired the skillset required of a writer, which includes access to his chosen medium, his language, enriched by the experience with multiple tongues provides, along with the sensitivity to culture that comes about in much the same way. Not for nothing did so many of our authors trespass boundaries that others avoid crossing. For this reason, before plunging into Adiga’s ten diverse episodes, it wouldn’t hurt to review our knowledge of Nepal, the familiar-sounding but exotic nation of the author’s birth and one of two generic settings—the other being the American West—for his stories.

Sandwiched between China to the north and India to the south, Nepal is home to eight of the world’s ten tallest mountains, including the tallest, Mt. Everest. Its capital, Kathmandu, appeals to the world’s spiritually curious as a Hindu and Buddhist equivalent to the way Salt Lake City does as Zion to Latter-day Saints. Religious tolerance and an educated, even cosmopolitan segment of the population coexist with widespread poverty and political unrest, which counter the impulse that brings Americans to Nepal and may account for the population of well-off Nepali immigrants that forms the backdrop for stories like “Denver,” which opens Adversity Quota.

Local readers who remember the pre-Olympics putdown for the 2002 subject of transformation—that it was “Park City, Colorado”—or, for that matter, recall numerous school shootings, first in Columbine in 1999, and on to Evergreen in 2025, may have an insight into Adiga’s setting his story in Denver, where John Denver’s hit song, “Rocky Mountain High” encouraged permitting new residential housing sufficient to quintuple the Centennial State’s population. That some of that influx included the well-heeled Nepalis among whom “Denver” is set signals the relatively non-sectarian nature of growth in the West, which would eventually extend to Cedar City, the setting of Adiga’s “Spicy Kitchen.”

Ranjan Adiga’s prose is transparent, or what on the East Coast might be styled “Mid-Atlantic.” In other words, international and light on regional characteristics. Of course it’s quite likely that as a student in Nepal he learned to speak English better than many students do in the US. Those two stories, “Denver” and “Spicy Kitchen,” suggest something more. Those of us who’ve taught writing know the value of knowing one’s audience in order to appeal to a specific readership and not cause offense. Yet in these two stories, Adiga chooses to write in a fashion Utah students are encouraged to call “graphic,” by which they really mean explicit. In “Denver,” an arranged marriage first goes on the rocks due to the wife’s greater sexual experience, but is then apparently healed when they set aside their expectations in favor of genuinely intimate sharing.

In “Spicy Kitchen,” on the other hand, where a miss-matched pair of emigre employees, one African and the other Asian, clash due to status issues over which they have no control, a candid visit to the men’s room predictably fails to work similar magic. If I had to justify these seeming failures to accommodate the local audience, I would venture to guess that Adiga knows his Utah readers to be more sophisticated and open-minded than their various leaders want to believe. Either that, or the author is unwilling to compromise his advanced ideas of the appropriate diction for use in 21st-century literature. Either way, he’s probably correct.

If all it did was detail the lives of Nepali immigrants in the West, or their differing levels of Westernization, Adversity Quota would be a narrow book indeed. But by cutting back and forth between life here and half-way around the world, Adiga reveals some of the vast differences between nature and nurture, and how much each may alter or even influence the other. He goes on to use the power of stories to grant entrée into the otherwise inscrutable minds of those we mistakenly believe are alien to us. In his final story here, titled “Dry Blood,” a woman assures herself that the mild slaps she gives her servants for small infractions are not only understood, but appreciated by both parties and valued as tools of communication. I am reminded of a couple I knew who felt servants were treated as second-class citizens, and so chose not to hire any when living where such service was commonplace. In turn, they were puzzled by the locals’ seeming hostility to them. Only when it was explained to that they were considered stingy and unwilling to contribute to supporting those less fortunate, but still worthy, citizens, did they take the opportunity to mend their ways and then were fully accepted among a people they had come among intending to help better themselves. A little less counting on their own values and more time spent reading about the lives of others might have got them off to a better start.

Diversity Quota
Ranjan Adiga
University of Wisconsin Press
164 pp.
paperback
$17.95

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.