Queen of Dreams; by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.

I read this after seeing Mistress of Spices, and for a while it looked like another tale where realities of India are dressed up in extraordinarily exotic garb hiding the reality that is far more complex and beautiful, because the readership in west is unable to take in the latter and is going to think the former anyway.

And then came the scenes describing those racist attacks, phenomena we had heard all the way here - not in main news, even though it concerned our own people, but in provate tales and general muted stories that were told in a way that was indisputable - in US post 911. I read, now fully awake, horrified, and while the scenes rang true I realised that it was a reality that had been never far from the surface.

We had lived there in a parallel universe believing in justice of the system, in fairness, in rewards for merit. And yet when the slumbering beast awakes it does not discriminate between Chinese and Japanese or innocent citizens and would be terrorists, it only knows the difference of colour and features. Technicolour is acceptable, sepia is suspect, must have gone the reckoning.

Later happened the accelerated migration of expats returning home and their mother country had wanted them back anyway, all those years, always.

So it was vaguely ascribed to the prosperity accelerating back here - which was true, but not to that extent, not the way they were used to back there in their adopted home - and no one questioned if they had come back running due to the terror, of not being dealt with in fairness and being denied justice, all becuase they were sepia tone - and not technicolour - people.

After all we still have a nation, a place to return, our own country, and there is no reason why any of us should have to suffer a holocaust out there after working hard to make it sheer on merit and fighting the biases that are racist and more - and certainly those biases are neither limited to another time nor to the geography of another continent, look at the klan and its neo nazi active versions reported through their own media other than mainstream news - so the mother country had welcomed them en masse, though their return looked like a preference for cultural and other home comforts that now was undeterred by the previous era of economic difference on a much more huge scale. The difference still does exist, but there is a lot to be said for being close to your own people, eating your own food, went the comments.

The scenes described here and their truth were all brushed under the rug for sake of economic expediency of the hour.