Poet-turned-novelist Devi S Las­kar’s debut book about racism in Trump’s America is heartbreaking. But it’s also a devastating story that sheds light on important issues that just can’t be ignored—like bul­lying and terrorism. The book is inspired by a true event in Laskar’s life—the Georgia Bureau of Inves­tigation raided her home and held her at gunpoint, on a legal matter that was later dismissed. This event gave Laskar the idea to write about a woman who goes from being polite and submissive to one who holds her ground.

 

The story opens with a South Asian woman as she lies bleeding on her driveway. She has been shot. Her life flashes before her in fragments and she struggles to understand the question she has been asked all her life: Where are you really from? The protagonist of Laskar’s novel—Mother or Real Thing as she’s referred to—has what might seem like the perfect life. There’s a lov­ing husband and three beautiful daughters in the picture and she has a solid career as a journalist and aspires to be a novelist. But the color of her skin—the Mother is born in America to Bengali immigrants—doesn’t let her enjoy all these good things in life in peace. Her daughters too have inherited her skin tone and that results in a lot of bullying at school.

 

The narrative jumps between the past and the present as an Ameri­can ‘nightmare’ unfolds right before your eyes. But the fragments are tied together by several themes and timelines which make it easy to get a sense of who Mother is even when the story moves backwards and forwards in time. Though surviv­ing racism in America is the main theme of the book, you also get a glimpse of the lengths many wom­en often go to, to maintain peaceat home.

Mother and daughter’s refusal to tell “the man of the hour”—as Mother refers to her husband in the book—about the racism they are facing so as not to upset him is an example of that. Laskar has also tried to show how women, more so women of color, have to juggle motherhood, marriage, and ambition, and fight for respect and sometimes even just mere acknowledgement.

 

Although the topic the book deals with is ugly, the writing is beautiful, almost lyrical. It temporarily relieves you of all the horror that’s going on. Laskar, by her own account, is a poet first and so the book’s structure was inspired by one of her favor­ite forms of poetry—a pantoum, a Malay verse form consisting of three stanzas. ‘The Atlas of the Reds and Blues’ is unlike anything you have ever read and Laskar’s “experiment” (writing prose in poetic form) works to keep a complex narrative crisp and engaging.