Every Room Has a View by Sujit Saraf – book review

An NRI`s last wish 

When we first meet Naveen Gupta, it is a few hours after he has passed, suddenly, unexpectedly. Naveen,  a US citizen who has lived in America for more than three decades, leaves behind his mother,  his wife Usha and a teenaged son, Ajay. And right now, Naveen`s body has been placed on the dining table in the room with the most spectacular view of the bridge, a view Naveen had looked at admiringly often when he was alive.

Sujit Saraf has fleshed out an event in an NRI family, adding small backstories of challenge and compromise, to give us an interesting look at desis abroad. The story moves at a measured pace, what unfolds has a sort of inevitability to it, yet holds the reader`s attention steadfastly to the page.

The title derives from the fact that Naveen Gupta buys a house that afford some spectacular views of the Golden Gate bridge from virtually every room. The view becomes a status symbol, a pointer to Naveen`s success in California, a talking point with just about every visitor – friends, delivery and repair persons– who enters the house. Some chapters in, the reader wryly notes that the view of the bridge from the kitchen window is blocked by Naveen`s mother`s puja alcove, and in other rooms, one has to angle oneself awkwardly or peer hard for a sliver of the view. Which could well be an allegory for a life lived away  from one`s country of origin, enjoying everything the place of one`s residence has to offer,  but aslant.

The story moves back to how Usha and Naveen wed and Usha joins him in America, how Naveen was  blazing a professional trail with a Silicon Valley start-up, how Usha, tiring of doing the desi party/festival days circuit, takes up a job in a loan office nearby. Then it moves forwards, to how their quiet son forges a brilliant path for himself gaining entry into Carnegie Mellon university on a scholarship, and how Maaji, who comes out to help with the newborn, stays on permanently.

Naveen`s close coterie of Indian friends — Mahesh, Shukla and his helpful wife Shanti, the crass  but well-meaning Bhandari, are all painted into the story seamlessly.  The narrator is quiet, intelligent Usha someone whose placid exterior we study, wondering if it will crack. Ajay who is learning Indian classical music enthusiastically and obeys his parents implicitly with no suggestion of ever acting out, is an enigmatic  figure, and we look for cracks there,  too. These are people with interior lives hinted at though not fully revealed.

His final wish

Naveen drops a  bomb in his will: he wishes to be cremated on a pyre, his ashes immersed in the ocean with all Hindu rites …in California. After they get over their shock and dismay, his friends are determined to call in an Indian priest for the elaborate puja, carry his bier to the edge of the water at Marina Green, build up a fire, sprinkle Gangajal on the dead man`s body, get his son to do the obsequies and carry out a cremation. If the descriptions of the body being prepped for the cremation borders on the macabre, that points to a certain determination to adhere to one`s roots and rites, despite the challenges of the hardwood floor risking ruin from the ice bags, of getting a (tawny) cow into the house, of cremating a dead body on public grounds. Tradition throws a loop over all gathered in the house- with- a- view and the reader watches it slowly tighten.

Matching the quiet style of story-telling is the quiet vein of humour. Usha recalls Naveen`s instructions when she first `married into America.: a rubber is not an eraser but a condom never say negro use black or better still African American a bathroom is a restroom say excuse me instead of the Indian `What?` no one here says lady when they mean woman a footpath is a sidewalk. Elsewhere, she wonders if Naveen`s last words were a comment on the view.

Another bromide explored in the book is the oft-repeated and initially meant comment from NRIs that they have no plans to stay on indefinitely and mean to definitely return to India. What we see is the largely transactional relationship they seem to have with the US as against the nostalgic relationship with their mother country.

Every Room Has a View by Sujit Saraf. Speaking Tiger Books. 256 pages. Rs 499

This appeared in Deccan Herald of 4 October 2026.

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