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Rosie Milne

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows
by Balli Kaur Jaswal
HarperCollins
3.5 stars
Rising Singaporean author Balli Kaur Jaswal’s teasingly entitled and intricately plotted novel incorporates multiple storylines with elements of rom-com, mystery, and family saga.

The main protagonist, Nikki, is a 22-year-old, single, independent-minded university drop-out in London. She lives alone above the pub where she works while she searches for her calling, and for love.
In the way of adult children everywhere, she is breaking her parents’ hearts with her choices. But her parents are Punjabi immigrants to Britain, and so as well as negotiating all the usual intergenerational pitfalls, Nikki must also negotiate diverging cultural expectations, both between herself and her family, and also between herself and the wider Punjabi community.
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Nikki stumbles into a second, part-time job at the Sikh temple in Southall – a predominantly Punjabi area of London. She thinks she’s been hired to teach creative writing to Punjabi women, but only widows show up to her class and, apart from one, Sheena, they are not literate in English; they need adult literacy classes, not creative writing classes.
The widows find a book Nikki has bought as a joke: Red Velvet: Pleasurable Stories for Women. From the snippets Kaur Jaswal provides, it sounds dire, but the widows don’t think so. Sheena reads some of it to them, and they find it inspiring. They convince Nikki to let them spend her classes telling one another erotic stories.
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Once Kaur Jaswal has set this up, she intersperses the widows’ erotic stories through the rest of the novel. Most of them can perhaps best be summed up as: reader, he ravished me. One story, however, features Meera, a disappointed middle-aged wife, and Rita, the beautiful young bride of her husband’s younger brother – they all live together in the same house. Meera and Rita slip between the sheets for a little lesbian action.
But the content of the widows’ erotic stories is less important than who is telling them. Kaur Jaswal again and again stresses the disregard of older women in general, and of widows in particular, in the Punjabi community. In Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, she gives voices to women who are generally voiceless, and ignored, and she lets them talk about sex to boot.

The reader will cheer her on as she crashes through conventions and insists every woman, even if she appears invisible to the world at large, has a story worth telling, and can tell stories worth hearing, and should be heard, whatever she chooses as the subject of her stories.
The end of the novel satisfactorily closes all the various plot lines with happy endings – or in any case with the endings happiest under the circumstances. Many will enjoy the ending provided for one of the “widows”, Manjeet. She has in fact only been pretending to be a widow to hide her shame at being jettisoned by her husband for a younger woman. By the close of the novel, she has decided to put aside her faux widow’s weeds, and to strike out on her own.
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As well as being audacious, and generous, Kaur Jaswal’s latest novel is also often very funny, with good jokes throughout, and also plenty of jokes that aren’t really jokes.
When a woman is discussing the role of ghee as a lubricant, she explains the need to sneak it into small containers during cooking, under the nose of a mother-in-law, “otherwise it was challenging to get big drums of ghee into the bedroom without the rest of the family seeing”.
She has a lot of fun with the way Punjabi women talk about penises, by referring to vegetables: cucumbers, aubergines, and so on.
Kaur Jaswal’s language is vivid. One widow rants about the “dark territory of honour”, Another’s office is ransacked, and, afterwards, one of her desk drawers “hung open lewdly, like a tongue”.
Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows would be perfect for an all-women book group, but you have to hope it finds a readership among the people who perhaps need to read it most: men.
Asian Review of Books


Book review: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows - Singaporean author’s novel blends romantic comedy with family saga

Intricately plotted and audacious, Balli Kaur Jaswal’s story crashes through conventions to give voice to older women who in reality would have none in Punjabi society; the sex is a bonus

Erotic art from the Khajuraho Group of Monuments is a group of Hindu and Jain temples in Madhya Pradesh,

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows cover

Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows gives voices to women characters who are generally voiceless, and lets them talk about sex to boot. Photo: Shutterstock

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Intricately plotted and audacious, Balli Kaur Jaswal’s story crashes through conventions to give voice to older women who in reality would have none in Punjabi society; the sex is a bonus


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