T 1290.pdf - Pondicherry University DSpace Portal

mobile for them to indulge in the luxury of the retrospectivepast tense.They hit the page In full flight, and they movethrough the stories as they move through the world, at speed,with the reader straining to keep up with them. Throughout thebook, "the idiom of America in the 1980's is handled by MS.~ukherjee with much the same rapturous affection and acutenessof ear that Nabokov, another immigrant, brought to the idiom ofAmerica In the 1950's in w". (Raban 1988, 22) On onelevel, 23s Middleman is a consummated romance with the Americanlanguage.America is a place " where the laws of physics aresuspended, where people can defy gravlty, where magic is anunremarkable part of everyday life. Ms. Mukherlee's charactersare leviators who float clean over their tawdry circumstances".(Raban 1988, 22). The journey to America has turned theimmigrants lnto chronic travellers who llve, as travellers do ,from minute to minute, dangerously free of both past andfuture. Mukherjeemay be writing from first-hand experienceof what she calls " the process of immigration" yet she writesas naturally as on.? horn not lust to the language, but to theculture . Every story ends on a new point of departure.People are last seen walking out through an open door. ..planning an escape , or suspended on the optimistic brink of ablissful sexual transport. For these birds of passage, America