Susham Bedi's magnum opus ‘The Fire Sacrifice’ offers a deep dive into the NRI experience

In Every Room Has a View (2025), Sujit Saraf’s novel about prosperous Indian-Americans living in Silicon Valley, a dark comedy unfolds as the central characters set out on a search for a Hindu priest in San Francisco. Eventually the jeans-clad pandit they zero in on takes far too many liberties with Vedic rituals, much to their chagrin. A similar anxiety pervades the opening pages of The Fire Sacrifice by Susham Bedi, originally published in 1989 as Hawan and recently translated into English by Jerry Pinto.

In the world of Hindi literature, Bedi (1945-2020) is known as one of the pioneering chroniclers of the NRI experience, depicting the inherent in-betweenness of her immigrant characters’ lives. In addition to her novels, Bedi was known for her work as a foreign correspondent in the 1970s and 1980s, bringing slices of European and American life to Indian readers.

Guddo, an immigrant to New York following the death of her husband, is searching high and low for the ingredients required to organise the titular hawan. To calm herself, she repeats a Sanskrit mantra she has chanted since childhood—a self-soothing action she will repeat during stressful moments in the novel. The Sanskrit words she repeats are ancient and immutable, immune to change at a time of upheaval in Guddo’s life—she has brought her youngest son Raju with her to the US, but her daughters Anima and Tanima are back home in India, living in a hostel and finishing their medical education. Her sisters Gita and Pinky, who had already migrated to America by the time Guddo arrived, are initially helpful but even fraternal ties are tested by the social and economic challenges of migration.

The professional and personal trajectories of Guddo, her children and her siblings’ families, form the bulk of the novel. Bedi is excellent at giving readers a realistic, down-to-earth portrayal of everyday life in 1980s’ New York, The now-familiar beats of the Indian-American experience are all here—the punishing experience of working-class jobs, the academic and personal freedoms of the American university campus, discrimination at the workplace, and being turned into convenient villains for bigoted, economically marginalised Ronald Reagan voters.

At the heart of it all is Guddo—smart, resourceful, resilient but also a flawed human being who Bedi depicts without sentimental excess. For example, Guddo is convinced that a man’s worth is assessed mostly by his financial and social standing. Some of her fondest memories of her life in India involve her status as the wife of an engineer, a senior government officer.

Much later, she regrets this world view because it leads to her rushing her daughter Anima into an unhappy marriage. There are other little hypocrisies that Bedi teases out gently and not without compassion—Guddo is judgmental of Indian women wearing pants and skirts before she realises that American clothes flatter her own figure as well.

Through the characters of the next generation, Bedi turns the novel into a crystal ball, foreshadowing what feels like every major NRI issue depicted in 21st century pop culture. Guddo’s niece Radhika turns into the archetypal self-loathing Indian, speaking with an exaggerated twang, dismissing the women of her family as sheep, and demanding that her family call her “Laura Johnson” instead.

Radhika’s sister Kanika’s attempts to assimilate are different but in the end, equally in vain. Her straight-As and budding medical career, we learn, are not nearly enough to offset the transgression she has in mind—she has fallen for Michel, a fellow doctor who happens to be African-American.

Guddo’s son Raju becomes a precursor of the Indian-American geek (think Rajesh Koothrapalli in The Big Bang Theory) with his computer skills, suspected neurodivergence, and fixation on video games (he’s besotted with Donkey Kong, a nice, era-appropriate touch).

Repeatedly, Bedi comes up with passages that begin as an offhand observation but become laser-focused in terms of politics and sociology. Be it her take on cultural appropriation or gender relations, she is sharply prescient. Bedi shows, for example, how men use the fault lines of the immigrant experience as excuses for the way they treat the women in their lives. In the second half of the novel, a taxi driver called Arun shocks Guddo with his two-faced behaviour. Arun has no compunctions about being in a live-in relationship with a white woman who is also his landlady. At the same time, he encourages his parents to look for an Indian bride for him, confessing to Guddo that he’s just stringing along his current girlfriend.

Jerry Pinto’s translation is elegant, and he never uses a three-dollar word for the heck of it. When the occasion, sentence structure and or lexicon call for some flamboyance on the translator’s part, he is more than up to the task.

Bedi belongs to a line of Indian-American writers like Usha Priyamvada, Bharati Mukherjee and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni—creators of ambitious, multi-modal NRI lives. In other novels like Lautnaa and Navbhum, she depicts the clash between Indian and American values, especially in romance and marriage. But The Fire Sacrifice is her magnum opus, where her craft, sensibilities and politics come together in the most harmonious manner.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.