The story:
'Nostalgia' deals with an Indian who has made his fortune in America. Dr Patel is married, has a son who studies at a prestigious college and he works in a hospital for mentally ill people.
One day he falls in love with an Indian girl and has an affair with her which results in disappointment after he learns that she takes advantage of him.

Excerpt from NOSTALGIA
On a cold, snowless evening in December, Dr Manny Patel, a psychiatric resident at a state hospital in Queens, New York, looked through the storefront window of the "New Taj Mahal" and for the first time in thirteen years felt the papercut-sharp pain of desire. The woman behind the counter was about twenty, twenty-one, with the buttery-gold skin and the round voluptuous bosom of a Bombay film star.
Dr Patel had driven into Manhattan on an impulse. He had put in one of those afternoons at the hospital that made him realize it was only the mysteries of metabolism that kept him from unprofessional outbursts. Mr Horowitz, a 319-pound readmitted schizophrenic, had convinced himself that he was Noel Coward and demanded respect from the staff. In less than half an hour, Mr Horowlitz had sung twenty songs, battered a therapy aide's head against a wall, unbuttoned another patient's blouse in order to bite off her nipples, struck a Jamaican nurse across the face and lunged at Dr Patel, calling him in exquisite English, "Paki scum. " The nurse asked that Mr Horowitz be placed in the seclusion room, and Dr Patel had agreed. The seclusion order had to be reviewed by a doctor every two hours, and Mr Horowitz's order was renewed by Dr Chuong who had come in two hours late for work.
Dr Patel did not like to lock grown men and women in a seven-by-nine room, especially one without padding on its walls. Mr Horowitz had screamed and sung for almost six hours. Dr Patel had increased his dosage of Haldol. Mr Horowitz was at war with himself and there was no truce except through psychopharmacology and Dr Patel was suspicious of the side effects of such cures. The Haldol had calmed the prisoner. Perhaps it was unrealistic to want more.
He was grateful that that there were so many helpless, mentally disabled people (crazies, his wife called them) in New York state, and that they afforded him and Dr Chuong and even the Jamaican nurse a nice living. But he resented being called a " Paki scum. " Not even a sick man like Mr Horowitz had the right to do that.
He had chosen to settle in the U.S. He was not one for nostalgia; he was not an expatriate but a patriot. His wife, Camille, who had grown up in Camden, New Jersey, did not share his enthusiasm for America, and had made fun of him when he voted for President Reagan. Camille was not a hypocrite; she was a predictable paradox. She could cut him down for wanting to move to a three-hundred-thousand-dollar house with an atrium in the dining hall, and for blowing sixty-two thousand on a red Porsche, while she boycotted South African wines and non-union lettuce. She spent guiltless money at Balducci's and on fitness equipment. So he enjoyed his house, his car, so what? He wanted things. He wanted things for Camille and for their son. He loved his family, and his acquisitiveness was entwined with love.
His son was at Andover, costing nearly twelve thousand dollars a year. When Manny converted the twelve thousand from dollars to rupees, which he often did as he sat in his small, dreary office listening for screams in the hall, the staggering rupee figure reassured him that he had done well in the New World. His son had recently taken to wearing a safety pin through his left earlobe, but nothing the boy could do would diminish his father love.
He had come to America because of the boy. Well, not exactly come, but stayed when his student visa expired. He had met Camille, a nurse, at a teaching hospital and the boy had come along, all eight pounds and ten ounces of him, one balmy summer midnight. He could always go back to Delhi if he wanted to. He had made enough money to retire to India (the conversion into rupees had made him a millionaire several times over). He had bought a condo minium in one of the better development "colonies" of New Delhi, just in case.
America had been very good to him, no question; but there were things that he had given up. There were some boyhood emotions, for instance, that he could no longer retrieve. He lived with the fear that his father would die before he could free himself from the crazies of New York and go home. He missed his parents, especially his father, but he couldn't explain this loss to Camille. She hated her mother who had worked long hours at Korvette's and brought her up alone.
From DARKNESS, Penguin Books, pp. 97-99

About the author:
Of Bengali origin, Mukherjee was born in Calcutta, West Bengal, India. She later traveled with her parents to Europe after Independence, only returning to Calcutta in the early 1950s. There she attended the Loreto School, Kolkata. She received her B.A. from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and her M.A. from the University of Baroda in 1961. She next traveled to the United States to study at the University of Iowa. She received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1963 and her Ph.D. in 1969 from the department of Comparative Literature.
Mukherjee married writer Clark Blaise in 1963. Together they have written two works of non-fiction, Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977) and The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (1987). After more than a decade living in Canada (Montreal and Toronto), Mukherjee, Blaise, and their children returned to the United States. Mukherjee wrote of the decision in "An Invisible Woman", published in a 1981 issue of Saturday Night.
Mukherjee has taught at McGill University, Skidmore College, Queens College, and City University of New York.





Buchdaten:
DARKNESS by Bharati Mukherjee
Taschenbuch: 208 Seiten
Verlag: Penguin Books Ltd (31. Oktober 1985)
Sprache: Englisch
Erscheinungsdatum: 26. Juni 1997
ISBN: 0140079300
Preis: € ???

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