The Import by Jai Chakrabarti, 2023
The magic trick:
Inserting a character into a stagnant relationship that needs an outsider’s perspective
“The Import” gives us what, in many ways, is a standard, upper-middle-class American couple of the modern age – man and woman; the man an immigrant from India, the woman presumably born in America. They live in New York City. They have a 3-year-old son. They seem caught in between the self-centered yuppie lifestyle of their young adulthood and the pull of a more traditional nuclear family existence where everything revolves around the child.
The woman is exhausted by her career. The man is having an affair. They don’t seem particularly happy. They don’t seem particularly kind.
And into this picture, we have the import: a young woman from India, recommended by the man’s mother to come work for the family in New York for six months, taking care of their child and perhaps teaching him to speak Bengali.
What happens though is she becomes a spotlight of sorts thrown on this couple, how they are leading their lives, and on what their marriage has become. She brings an outsider’s perspective that begins to speak for the reader by the end of the story.
Of course too, because she’s from the man’s home country of India sent by the mother, she also presents a wide range of possible cultural implications and meanings for both the character and reader to ponder.
And that’s quite a trick on Chakrabarti’s part.
The selection:
When she smiled at him, he could see a winsome gap between her two front teeth, slight enough to at once be memorable and charming. They’d left Shay at home with his temporary babysitter, also a college-age girl, but one who spent more time on her phone than watching Shay’s antics, which, as he’d turned three, had grown increasingly complicated, the turns of his imagination both rousing and enervating. Shay ran to the door as soon as he saw them, though when Rupa entered, dragging her one large duffel bag, he retreated behind the cover of Raj’s legs.
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