Edison by Pallavi Sharma Dixit
Edison by Pallavi Sharma Dixit is a gem of a novel and a paean to Edison, New Jersey’s Little India.
Dixit’s debut novel is crowded with people and noise, music, movie stars, and mobsters. We follow an unlikely hero named Prem, the youngest in a family of great wealth in Delhi. Shy and lacking ambition, he eschews even the idea of joining the family business, preferring to sit in a darkened room watching Bollywood movies.
It’s passion for the song and spectacle of Hindi films that drives the story — and its readers — from India to Edison, New Jersey, where Indian immigrants make up nearly 25% of the town’s population of 100,000. Dixit, born in India, grew up in Edison, so she knows the territory. What may begin to feel like the script for a Bollywood movie-in-the-making is a palpable story filled with three-dimensional characters, plots and subplots.
A Rocky Start in a New Land
Prem’s well-intentioned father bankrolls his son’s efforts to make his own movie — but we’re not 30 pages in before Prem has failed colossally, lost the money his father had given him, and ends up in a JFK airport parking lot with two Indian strangers who take his wallet, his passport, and his tongue scraper. “America is a country of unscraped tongues,” one of them announces before leaving Prem alone and bereft in a country where he knows no one.
In a rare bit of good luck, our man sees a taxi with a turbaned driver who, when he learns Prem has no place to stay, takes him to Edison where the Indian immigrant community is like an extended family.
A temporary mattress on the floor in a room shared with four other men becomes Prem’s home-away-from-home for the next few years, where he will drink his chai, talk with his new roommates, and try to understand the mystery that is his life. The world for Prem and his new “family” of co-workers, neighbors, aunties, and uncles is defined by Bollywood songs, Bollywood dialogue, Bollywood dreams; and his days look like bits and pieces of Bollywood films, including a love-at-first-sight. A brief glance at the grocery store owner’s daughter, Leena, convinces Prem that finally, things are going according to script.
A Stage for Dreams and Drama
Dixit knows her movies, however, and with 400 pages to go, the book takes every detour and plot twist known to the silver screen and some from real life in Edison, New Jersey. There’s family drama, money problems, gangs, gambling and broken hearts. There’s mind-numbing work, cricket matches, parades, secrets, failure and success. And all the while, readers may fall in love with the ragtag cast of misfits and dreamers.
About Pallavi Sharma Dixit:
Pallavi Sharma Dixit was born in India and raised in New Jersey. She was a winner of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Pages in Progress Prize for Edison, her debut novel. Her work has been supported by the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship Program, Intermedia Arts, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Loft Literary Center, and the Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Program. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, two children, and their dog.
