“I untied my sari for your father, and I gave him a beautiful son,” Shakti said, “and he told me there is no other woman for him. What else is a marriage but that?”
Anil was in California and she was back home in Malaysia, halfway around the world, but her soft, clear, curiously young voice sounded as if she was standing right in front of him. He could practically smell the scented hair-oil she used. With everybody else, international phone calls meant static crackling or crossed connections; for Shakti transmission was crystal clear.
He said, shortly, “I don’t mind being a bastard.” There was no point in talking about his father. Anil had made himself into an engineer. A scientist. With an academic pedigree &mdash Princeton, Stanford, B.S., M.S. PhD, post-doc &mdash as immaculate as his birth was not.
From Splinters, a novel
Hi, I'm Shymala Dason, a Malaysian-born writer. My work explores the tension of the immigrant experience, from transplant shock and the challenges of changing social class to the chasms of mutual bewilderment that open up beneath the feet of families who find themselves scattered around the world.
Before leaving to focus on writing, I spent ten years on atmospheric science projects at NASA's Lab for Atmospheres and Lab for Extraterrestrial Physics. I'm also a writing coach for people in academia, technology, and business.
“All the Necessary Things”, Massachusetts Review Food Matters, Vol. 45, number 3; can also be read online (PDF link) at the magazine website.
“Without Anger”, in Topography of War: Asian American Essays (post-9/11 anthology from the Asian American Writers Workshop).
Previous publications include “Harimau”, MZB issue #15, a magic realism piece set in Malaysia.
The mathematics of studying atmospheres on Mars, Titan, or the Earth are very similar; each illuminates the other. The mathematics of the human heart are also similar, whatever the culture, wherever the place, or time. Ten years of working on atmospheric science teams at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and before that degrees in Applied Maths and Physics was unusual but useful preparation for the creation of literary fiction.
The first inkling about yoga came to me from a lady whose name I do not know, because she was the mother of a friend — to a Malaysian kid that meant that her name was “Auntie”. She didn’t move like anybody else’s mother — her bones seemed to be in different places, or possibly elastic. And she approached life with the happiness of a child with a balloon. I thought, “I want some of that.” Being a quick learner, it’s taken me fifteen years of intermittent yoga practice to begin to get a clue as to what she was about, and to begin to know who and what I am.
Middle-eastern dance is good medicine for the twin ills of a sedentary occupation and a tendency to take myself seriously in the wrong way. Improvisational dance, sacred dance, ecstatic dance, are all nonlinear enough to stimulate the right side of the brain, and make words appear on a blank page in more interesting ways than they might otherwise choose to do.
When I first came to this country, I used to take the bus from Bennington, Vermont, where I was in college, to New York city every couple of months, strafe the Indian ethnic neighborhood and Chinatown for basic nutrients such as fish sauce and curry powder, smell up the bus on the way back with all my packages and watch people edge away from me.
One of the delicious ironies of the immigrant experiences is that of a guest in my home telling me, “I don’t like Indian food.” It’s a particularly hard idea to digest, because a Malaysian will eat anything, at least once. And then there’s the cultural protocol question: does one get mad or laugh - or cry?
Namaste!