Chronicles from the Past: A cultural Record

Migratory people without a sense of history and a sense of citizenship live incomplete and, often, unfufilled lives. The world is full of them; many live in countries where they are minorities, sometimes living on the fringes of their newly adopted land, sometimes forced to and other times of their own will to falsely embrace an idea of separatness. Yet how they arrived in their newly adopted land, or what their forefathers endured and sacrified before them, is an area of void, clamoring for illumination. It is imperative that the descendants of these pioneers chronicle their trials and tribulations; it is their cultural record that should be preserved for posterity.

"Oyster Bay and Other Short Stories" is fictional collection of cultural narratives, a thin slice of history, of a close-knit community of Indians -- Asians -- in Tanzania.

As I state in the author's note in the book, the central theme of this anthology and the novella, Middlemen, explore the social and political ethos of an immigrant Asian community, descendants of Indian indentured workers, merchants and traders, in East Africa, particularly in Tanzania, during the late 1960’s and a good part of 1970’s – post independence era -- a period of a rapid social, political, and economic transformation within the country.

It was a time of immense confusion, especially for this closely knit and socially exclusive Asian community. From all this turmoil emerges a young detached narrator who chronicles his self discovery, coming of age, wading through sketchy history of his people, trying to make sense of tumultuous cultural and political befuddlement around him. With passage of time the narrator's voice matures: from a pubescent naive boy to an introspective young adult.