“ANOTHER APPALACHIA: COMING UP QUEER AND INDIAN IN A MOUNTAIN PLACE” by Neema Avashia (West Virginia University Press, 168 pages, $20).
One of the early memories that Neema Avashia recounts in “Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place” happens just outside the South Charleston Junior Women’s Club, sometime in the mid-1980s. Neema, about 5 years old, is running around with her friends, popping salted peanuts into cups of Coke to watch the brown foam bubble up over their small hands. It might seem like any other West Virginia childhood memory, with one exception: Neema and her friends will soon be called by their parents to join the aarti – the final stage of the Hindu worship service in which light is offered to the deities – taking place inside.
“First left, then right, then counterclockwise. As each of us finishes, we pass one hand over the flame, then over our heads, a motion ingrained in muscle memory,” writes Avashia, describing the monthly service in which participants take a thali – a plate filled with cotton balls dipped in ghee and lit – in their hands while elders sing the familiar words, “Om Jai Jagdish Hare.”
The scene is emblematic in this memoir about a most un-stereotypical Appalachian upbringing. By 1990, she writes, Asians made up less than one half of 1% of West Virginia residents, with fewer than 2,000 of them Hindus from India – fewer people than the single Christian megachurch in her hometown. In the place where she was born, she is never fully an insider.
Composed of 17 thematically tied essays, “Another Appalachia” interrogates what it means to belong. The daughter of parents who immigrated to West Virginia from India for her physician father’s job in a chemical plant, Avashia grew up on a suburban street called Pamela Circle, where her father’s generosity (free medical help to neighbors) helped them gain acceptance. “Our basement record player spun Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton on repeat, and those songs, those voices, combined with seventies Hindi film music and Gujarati folk garbas, are the soundtrack of my childhood,” she writes.