By Ryan Yeo

The Grand Arcade
Vinita Ramani
Epigram Books (2024) / 224 pages / SGD 20.90

The Grand Arcade is Vinita Ramani's debut fiction collection, and what an entrance she has made. Save for one or two stories that missed the mark, I was enthralled as I made my way through the book. Ramani creates extremely compelling characters who explore their own identities and challenge what is expected of them. The greatest strength in Ramani's writing is her ability to ground larger musings on exploration and identity in intimate moments for each character, allowing us to resonate strongly with them. Ramani doesn't just let us learn about the characters – she makes us learn with them.

The book cover gives us an exciting sneak peek into the collection: a giant peach that screams "female sexuality!" to prospective readers. Indeed, the women in Ramani's stories often thrust themselves into learning new things about themselves through their sexuality. 'The First Night of Initiation was Far from Transcendental' was a stunning introduction to the sexual exploration of Ramani's characters: the first-person persona goes to Phnom Penh with her boyfriend and gets high for the first time. This experience casts her boyfriend in a different light: for the rest of the night, she looks upon her relationship, and her boyfriend's immaturity, with stark clarity and honesty. Consider the following excerpt from that story:

D has irrevocably, irreversibly changed. He talks differently. Suddenly, where there should have been the traces of age and diminishing hairlines and maturity, I see a shockingly young boy in my bedroom. D is eighteen years old. He has miraculously embodied his "self" of a decade ago.

I did not know D when I was eighteen years old. This is a unique opportunity to get to know him and decide if we would have been compatible had we met at that age.

There is just one problem: I am still twenty-eight years old.

I am to woo a man ten years younger than me.

Ramani unapologetically thrusts the reader into the internal world of her characters. She doesn't stop at telling us that her characters' perceptions of the world have changed. Instead, she describes changes in the world as if they were indistinguishable from fact. We don't get the sense that D only seems to be more immature; he is totally transformed into someone 10 years younger. When her characters change their worldviews, we feel as if our worldviews shift with them.

Ramani's vivid storytelling continues to strike chords throughout the collection. Her female characters constantly challenge expectations by exploring their sexuality, and the reader is taken along for the ride. In 'The Life of a Cunty Woman', the protagonist Aranya navigates identities that are seemingly in conflict: she is non-monogamous, sexually active, and she is also a mother to a young child. In 'Parvathi Dreams About His Sex', previously published as a novella (Math Paper Press, 2012), Parvathi navigates several layers of expectations at once. Parvathi, a brown Hindu woman, shares a sexual relationship with Mark, a white Jewish man. Parvathi goes on a trip to Mumbai to seek answers to her questions about Shakti and Shiva, two Hindu deities whose physical union is captured in a lingam. Again, Ramani deftly weaves together multiple complex identities in her characters: Parvathi's questions of Shiva and Shakti's sexuality, her physical attraction to Mark, and their interracial and inter-religious partnership.

It is easy to address large themes like these in an impersonal way that is devoid of feeling. But Ramani doesn't do that. She does an excellent job at grounding the characters in very personal and intimate moments, and exploring the themes through those relationships. As such, the themes don't feel far removed from us – we feel the impact of these musings with as much force as the characters do. In 'Parvathi Dreams About His Sex', for example, Parvathi muses about the sculptors who were responsible for portraying Shakti's image. Ramani writes:

She wondered about the architects and sculptors who crafted these friezes and statues. To her, they seemed like the gods they gleaned from stone, riding eagles and peacocks, scooping basalt rock starting from the tops of mountains and chipping away to their bases. How erotic were their marriages? Did a man with calloused hands carving the hips of a woman in coitus with a demi-god study his wife's hips? If he prayed to the gods before beckoning them into rocks, did he pray to his wife, a goddess in hiding? Or did he carve demi-gods, men with tilted hips and broad chests? Did that lead him to deify mortal men, with sinews and hair, a man desiring a man because he too could be divine? Did these sculptors and artisans go home and beat their wives and sons? Or did all this love suffuse their being, reaching soul-deep?

What beautiful prose – Ramani effortlessly traces Parvathi's musings on sexuality, connecting them to her present moment! Later on, when describing a moment of intimacy between Parvathi and Mark, Ramani continues:

It wasn't foreplay. It was the hint of all that could come afterward, encapsulated in controlled, careful gestures. Foreplay became play. The breach had been closed, if at least for the moment. And now she thought that maybe she understood the artisans, the stonemasons, the men who made erotica on temple walls. She turned and took her turn, drawing him.

It is not just the vividness of Ramani's writing that draws the reader in. It is also her skill in grounding the larger themes in the smaller moments. Parvathi doesn't stop at thinking about the sculptors, or about sensuality. Instead, in her most sensual moments, she becomes the artist. We feel the impact of her epiphany as if our world has changed, too.

The Grand Arcade does not stop at stories on sexuality. The thread that binds all the stories is the stunning portrayal of how characters explore and learn new things about themselves, despite external pressures against that exploration. 'Same Same But Different, or the Fate of the Khmer Krom' is my personal favourite in a collection with many stellar stories. In 'Same Same But Different', Sukhreeb and Kim Sokun are refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. After moving to the United States, Sukhreeb and Kim Sokun are forced to change their behaviour to assimilate to their new environment; Sukhreeb eventually forgets the Khmer language in favour of English. But Sukhreeb unexpectedly meets a teacher named JP who introduces him to the genre of punk rock. Having grown up on revolutionary songs and classical music, Sukhreeb starts to find a new language for his emotions; punk rock validated the grief, rage and confusion that he felt. Consider the following excerpt from said story, on Sukhreeb's first encounter with punk rock:

[Sukhreeb] read the lyrics. Most of it didn't make any sense to him, and for a moment, he felt afraid. He felt the aggression in the words and suddenly wished he wasn't there at the library, sitting with this exemplar of punk looming over him. He looked up at JP, furrowed his brow and said, "I don't understand."

JP sat next to him and took the headphones that were connected to the vinyl player. He said, "It should not have happened."

JP's brief response did not seem in any way connected to the words, so Sukhreeb read them again, ignoring the words that startled and bothered him, words that seemed hard and cruel. And then he saw the familiar ones. Rice. Bowl. Black. Pol Pot.

Notice Ramani's skill in making Sukhreeb's growth vivid to the reader. When Sukhreeb listens to the song for the first time, he doesn't quite know what to make of it. Accordingly, Ramani describes the song as a wordless medium of aggression. Then, the familiar words begin to appear, and the crash of realisation comes down on us at the same time as it does Sukhreeb. The song was about the genocide in Cambodia; Sukhreeb was valid in feeling the same anger and confusion as the singer was; Sukhreeb's pain was palpable in the ordinary day-to-day things: rice, bowl, black, Pol Pot. And, at last, JP's words suddenly make sense to us in the same moment that Sukhreeb's anger is validated. The genocide should not have happened. Punk rock helped Sukhreeb to make sense of that feeling. We learn this at the same time as he does. How much more vividly could you write a scene like this?

The Grand Arcade is an incredible exhibition of how to write character growth in a compelling way. That being said, for all the flowers that I've given The Grand Arcade, I ironically found its titular story to be rather underwhelming in comparison. Ramani's incredible character work is missing from this story, which begins the collection. There is little character growth – it is the one story where the characters weren't being particularly daring in exploring their identities – and there are no personal, intimate moments that ground the larger themes of the story.

Don't let that dissuade you from reading the collection, though. The first story certainly wasn't a preview for the rest of the book, and you should certainly consider pressing on if you were disappointed. The Grand Arcade presents a world of vivid, intimate and thoughtful moments. It is full of fascinating characters who unapologetically bring you along on their journey of self-discovery. You might learn a thing or two about yourself, too.

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