Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal is a novel whose title cannot encompass its content. It’s protagonist, Nikki, is a forward-thinking and open-minded young law school dropout. Living on her own in London (much to her mother’s disapproval), she works as a bartender and holds nothing but disdain for most elements of the traditional Punjabi life, like arranged marriages, for instance. However, when it looks like the bar she works at will soon go out of business, Nikki ends up taking a job teaching creative writing to Punjabi widows at the Gurdwara, or so she is led to believe at first.
The widows are perhaps the best characters in this novel – full of twists, they are never what you expect them to be. They are undoubtedly traditional and even conservative in some respects – some of them believe homosexuality is unnatural and immoral – while possessing a more liberal outlook in others, such as female sexuality. As Nikki interacts with them more and more, she grows herself. Over the course of the book, she stops dismissing her roots out of hand and instead finds a balance between Eastern and Western ideals. Most of the characters in the book are neither completely likeable nor despicable. Jaswal is instead able to maintain the balance of flaws and virtues that make up most people, thus making her characters feel that much more real.
One interesting thing about Erotic Stories is that it combines literary fiction and murder mystery and, well, erotica (surprise). It contains the mystery surrounding the death of a girl, commentary on internalised sexism, romance, as well as the portrayal of fanatical and Puritan groups, all within the same community. It addresses the struggles of immigrants in a new country, and the gap between first and second generation immigrants and their ideals.
In essence, the novel attempts to challenge the social image of older women, especially widows, as meek, pious, conservative, and devoid of sexual desire, and it does a good job of it. It’s funny and engrossing, right up until the vivid climax, and while it does sometimes require some suspension of disbelief, that doesn’t really take away from the story. Admittedly, parts of the book, particularly the ones dealing with the romance, come off rather cliched and overdone, and don’t really add much to it – in fact, the novel would probably have done better without that element entirely.
Overall, however, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows is a book worth reading, one that manages to cover a wide swath of topics reasonably well.
Edited by Devashree Somani
Images curated by Sanjna Mishra