Review: This is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara

You cannot read Vauhini Vara’s new short story collection, This is Salvaged, without coming across a story and / or characters that reflect your own life. Such is the intimacy and compassion with which Vara crafts her fiction and her characters.

A slim volume of 180 pages, this work from the author of The Immortal King Rao (2022), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, does everything a good short story collection should: it engages from the start, each piece grips the reader as it moves through various themes — of human loss and grief, loneliness, growing older, addiction, and the meaning of life.

What is the meaning of life? And who has the right to grieve the dead? In Irates, a young girl learns to cope. Swati’s life seems to have lost meaning following her brother’s death from cancer. Her best friend Lydia is also devastated, which annoys her. There is a rotten smell that follows Swati, which later turns out to be a decomposing egg-roll in her backpack. This indicates how her parents are dealing with the loss of their son. They don’t notice Swati missing as she takes a job at a telemarketing office. But she is not alone in processing her grief, as Lydia offers her company and comfort.

READ MORE: Interview: Vauhini Vara, author, The Immortal King Rao – “I’ve grown up with lots of different identities”

In I, Buffalo, a woman tries to hide her addiction when she is surprised by a visit from her family. They are worried for her. She is careless and a total mess; she blacked out and forgot where she threw up. The family decides to find her vomit together. This is the story of a woman who has hit rock bottom. But her family is there to help her pick up the pieces even as sharp smells of bodily fluids come into focus.

The titular story, This is Salvaged, explores the changing nature of art and why we make it. Another piece, Unknown Unknowns, depicts a family learning to live in a world where the richest men mine space and colonise other planets. In The Hormone Hypothesis, two women bond over shared grief — the loss of human relationships and of time as they both go through yet another biological shift. Vara writes about hormones – pregnancy hormones, menopause hormones. The new friendship highlights the importance of community for women: “She said that men experience the same feelings – woe, misery, terror – but are not allowed to share them, whereas women gain strength from sharing ourselves; it’s what allows us to keep living despite all that we suffer - knowing that we’re living it together.’

What Next is about genetic inheritance and connections with past generations. Here, a single Indian immigrant keeps secrets from her daughter about the identity of her father.

Vara’s characters are always breaking the mould of stereotypical expectation. Many of these pieces explore the importance of family relationships and the loneliness of women, young and old. Loss and grief are recurring themes, which perhaps comes from the author’s own experience of losing a sibling. But while death and cancer feature prominently, this is not a universe without hope. Indeed, this is fiction about finding hope in the midst of chaos and is, therefore, quite comforting. As the title suggests, there is something salvageable in every situation. In its entirety, This is Salvaged is a haunting volume.

Sharmistha Jha is an independent writer and editor.