Lara’s Theme by Madhuri Vijay, 2025
The magic trick:
A stunningly brilliant sentence of summarizing truth tucked in the middle of the story
For my money, one of the very best New Yorker stories this decade. This is one of those stories that could’ve been broken apart into an entire collection’s story cycle. There is so much going on here – and not just like a novel. There are literally several stories’ denouements here. Lucky us to have it all assembled as one amazing portrait of a family of four in Bangalore, India.
As such, there are many, many magic tricks at work. Instead, I’d like to highlight a passage that just leaps off the page and smacks you in the face. The smack hit all the harder because my defenses were down. It was mid-story. One section had just wrapped. I was reading to get the new section started, mentally settled into the expectation of transition sentences and scene setting. What I got was this:
“Buried within every family, perhaps, is the secret desire to self-destruct, to push intimacy to its ugliest extremes.”
And to be clear, my default was correct! This was scene-setting transition work into the funeral scene. But my goodness, what a brilliant transition.
Right there is a nugget of truth that not only summarizes this story well, it neatly ties up the truth behind most stories, novels, writers’ bodies of work, everyone’s entire lives. It’s one of those sentences you write down in a notebook if you keep such notebooks. And if you don’t keep such notebooks, this is a sentence that reminds you to start keeping such notebooks.
And that’s quite a trick on Vijay’s part.
The selection:
He frowned. “Tony says I have to practice.”
“Why?” she jeered. “Are you and Tony going on a world tour?”
On any other day, Tarun would have offered a quip of his own, the two of them would have performed their mocking duet, but on that day he gave her nothing. He just stood there, wearing the ironic smile I’d noticed the day Kavitha first visited. When she realized that he wouldn’t back her, she whirled to face me. “Did you hear, Kushal?” she cried. “Your father’s going to be a famous musician!”
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