Sanjay Talreja's Downward This Dog!

Reviewed by Amy Mitchell

Mawenzi House, 2017

Sanjay Talreja’s Downward This Dog! is a wonderful collection of loosely-linked stories about immigrants from the subcontinent and their experiences in Toronto. These stories are expansive and perceptive; they are recognizably grounded in the world we live in right now, and all of the characters, even minor ones, are alive. The collection is, in turns, fun, angry, gentle, and complicated, and Talreja isn’t afraid to examine difficult issues, such as the impact of 9/11 on non-white communities and on the radicalization of individuals living in North America. Downward This Dog! provides the reader with both a great read and a lot of insightful material to reflect on afterwards. I very highly recommend it.
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One tendency that I dislike in stories is authors’ decisions to hold their narratives at one remove from the material problems of life in the twenty-first century. The day-to-day challenges and complexities that we all face or at least know of get elided in favor of simply focusing on characterization and plot, with the result that the story could take place in a somewhat-detached (although usually first-world) Anywhere. I was delighted to see that Talreja very adamantly does not do this. Even if they are not directly affected by these issues (and they often are), his characters are very aware of problems such as the miseries of contract-based work for young adults, the failings in Canada’s vision of itself as truly multicultural, the lack of support that immigrants receive once they arrive, and the exploitation of international students. Consider the statistics that Baby, a young graduate with a Masters in Economics from the University of Toronto (“main campus,” as her proud father likes to point out), knows about immigrants in Canada:

Figures reeled off in her head. Thirty percent disguised unemployment, sixty percent small-business failure, unaffordable mortgages, bankruptcies within four years, divorces, separations, depression—that would be enough to take the wishful thinking of these people [new immigrants surrounding her near a subway station] and turn it into a sorry, quaking mass of worry. If the realization that you’d been had didn’t dawn upon you in four years, you were seriously deluded, her report to the Foundation had said. Not in those words, of course, but something to that effect. Canada wanted immigrants to come and rescue this aging, shrinking country but was not really interested in helping these poor souls do anything else other than survive.

Baby will obviously rocket past these problems herself, thanks to her graduate education, but she knows all too well how they affect the people she cares about, including her father (whom she tries to break of calling her “Baby”). He and his immigrant friends are scheming to open a new restaurant (Italian, with a white friend and co-worker fronting it for customers who may be put off by the non-white chefs), and the story strongly implies that they are left to the slightly-dubious ingenuity of their planning and fundraising because there aren’t any other viable options for them.

Talreja is also a filmmaker, and I think that this is what allows him to break out of another short story mold: the tight, neat, perfectly encapsulated little jewel that is well-crafted but incapable of covering much ground. The stories in this collection have impressive range, sometimes covering decades in a relatively small number of pages. “Postcards” and “Postcards 2,” for example, trace all of Sharif Hussain’s adult life, from when he is forced to start accepting bribes as an official in India to his eventual death in Canada, where he has ended up with his adult son, Sikander. We learn the history of his family, his sister’s disappearance in Partition, his ultimately frustrated attempts to resist corruption and the injustices of the caste system, Sikander’s distaste for what he sees as Sharif’s moral capitulation, the diasporic distribution of his extended family across the entire globe, his white daughter-in-law’s perspectives, and more.
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The amount of ground these two stories cover is enormous; and yet, this expansiveness is necessary for capturing the interior dissonances that Talreja investigates in his characters, especially Rukhsar in the titular story “Downward This Dog!” Rukhsar is an international student from Pakistan who is studying in Toronto in the 2008-2009 academic year. On top of culture shock and trying to adjust to a foreign academic system, she also has to deal with the fact that her country is suffering from serious conflict in her absence. She worries that her activist parents will suddenly disappear, and she feels guilty for focusing on seemingly simple, mundane things a world away in Canada. She is able to enjoy Christmas as a guest in Haliburton (north of Toronto in cottage country), for instance, but she can’t sustain that kind of simple happiness for long:

Jan 8, 2009

It seems like a lifetime ago when we were in Haliburton laughing so loud that our sides hurt. Classes have begun in their grimmest earnest and the weather has now turned. A messy ice storm was followed by a whirling, blinding blizzard—the likes of which I’ve never seen. The ice storm left frozen branches on trees, phone wires suspended in glass, leaves that seemed to tinkle … but it wasn’t all magical—the roads and paths are slippery and treacherous and I walk gingerly, as if I am a child, learning to put one foot in front of another. The air has a sharper, brittle feel to it and the icicles in the wind bite and stab their way through my coat. I walk home, head bowed, teeth chattering, not even looking up at the sky.
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The birds are gone from the trees outside my window. I am back, submerged in my books, too paralysed by what’s going on elsewhere to pay too much attention to what’s going on over here. It’s hard to think about this uneventful place while all that carnage is going on.

Rukhsar is also battling Melanie, the daughter of one of her professors, who is first shocked that a young Muslim woman would be proficient in yoga, and then decides to exploit her expertise by opening a yoga studio and inviting Rukhsar to teach there—with payment constantly deferred, and eventually with Melanie’s bald statement that Rukhsar’s sessions were “all voluntary and I was not a certified yoga teacher, and I should be happy for the chance she gave me.” But Rukhsar is intelligent and resourceful, and despite everything else in her life, she manages to fight back: “No downward for this dog.”
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“Downward This Dog!” also demonstrates a theme present in several stories: the distortions that occur when cultural practices, authenticity and the marketplace all collide. I’ve already mentioned the quandary around so-called “authenticity” facing the group of immigrant chefs who want to open an Italian restaurant:

Abdul Aziz stopped him with an emphatic wave of the hand … “When I put a poster of a black guy like me on a photo of New Venezio, specializing in pizza from Calabria, who is going to come?”

“All these people praise the food in our restaurants. But no one goes to the kitchen to see who is actually cooking. You and I—we know that most of the Italian, French, Greek, Spanish food in Toronto is mostly being prepared by our people,” Ravi rattled off, wanting to nip this kind of thing in the bud.
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“People don’t know that,” Abdul Aziz insisted.

Yoga is perhaps the most egregious example of what happens when North America commodifies other cultures’ practices. Rukhsar has nothing but scorn—and a little wry humor—for the yoga machine in North America, including its various levels of teacher certification and the strange hybrids it has spawned:

​For your much-vaunted, supple-bodied, anorexic instructors, it is about the quickness of the pose, body adjustment, and aerobic exercise … I have heard this strange beast being referred to as power yoga. Perhaps you didn’t understand the message in the few elevated days you spent in India but there is no such thing as power yoga—it is yet another invention of the caffeinated, dollar-obsessed west. Pray, what is that if not another excuse to bang in as many classes as you can in a given day so that you can rush to your bank with more money?

At one point, Rukhsar snorts to herself that she should maybe go to India, too, to learn about yoga.
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Finally, these stories are compassionate, and this compassion is most evident in Talreja’s treatment of Sikander, a man who seems profoundly lost and who flirts with radicalism as a result. There is no easy way to explain why anyone chooses to go down this particular path, so Talreja partially presents Sikander’s experiences through the increasingly horrified, confused and frustrated eyes of his white wife. We do, however, see flashes of first-person narration by Sikander, which highlight the suspicion he suddenly felt he was constantly under after 9/11, despite being a successful corporate lawyer in Toronto. He subsequently attaches himself more strongly to his mosque and to conservative voices within it, only to have it raided by the police. Eventually, he veers toward and then away from fundamentalist Islam, and instead obsesses for a time over a kind of new-age amalgamation of all the major religions, only to cast that aside, too. Sikander is deeply wounded by the way his world and the people in it turn on him after the Twin Towers attacks, and in his subsequent emptiness he wanders spiritually. His home, where his elderly father has now joined him and his wife, becomes repellent to him:

I can’t make myself go home. There is something unbearable about the place—my father’s scratchings in his room, his loud snores, the disappointed look in Anna Maria’s eyes. Even my prayer mats and all that I have put up on the walls, all fill me with distaste. I cannot imagine confining myself like a caged animal, beating the walls until my head and body explode and splatter into a thousand pieces.
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Somehow, I find myself wandering in the mall. From store to store I ramble, searching for something that isn’t there. I don’t want the new phone, elegant shirts, or those overly long TV shows. Why am I there, I ask myself, sitting in the sterile food court, sipping coffee that has long turned cold.

He finally manages to find at least some temporary peace when his father dies and he goes through the elderly man’s papers—included in them is an account of where everyone in his extended family has come from and moved to, at least as far as his father could trace the information. Sikander is struck by how his family now essentially embraces the entire globe and all of its major religions. The point of the story as a whole is not to provide an argument about how or why radicalization can happen, but rather to show us the disconnected, painful interior landscape of someone who heads—at least temporarily—in that direction.
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Downward This Dog! is therefore an astonishing and accomplished collection. It will speak to many different readers on many different levels, and it is, at the same time, quite simply a wonderful read—I ripped through it in a couple days. It deserves more attention that it has so far received, and I look forward to new work by Talreja.

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​Amy Mitchell is The /tƐmz/ Review's social media editor (as well as a writing editor) and a college professor. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Western University. Her reading tendencies have been described as "promiscuous"; she is interested in a wide range of fiction and poetry, and particularly enjoys finding new and interesting works in translation.