Lion's Granddaughter and Other Stories

Susan Minsos is a sessional instructor of English at the University of
Alberta.

Yasmin Ladha blends a collection of cultures in her short stories. With
a pinch of this and that, ingredients from an
Indian-Muslim-Tanzanian-Canadian mixture, she cooks up tales for the
senses. In “Be a Doctor,” an immigrant teen experiences Safeway and
K-Mart, lives on a farm where she can drive, and remembers another life:
“It isn’t like this back home in Tanzania . . . [where] every
Saturday we go on a picnic . . . we sing Hindi film songs . . . And we
eat roasted peanuts.” President Nyerere’s nationalizing of “East
Indian buildings, mills and schools” sends Indian families to seek
other homes—for many, not in India but in Canada.

In “Be a Doctor,” “Aisha,” “Shabnam’s Secret,”
“Lion’s Granddaughter,” “Peace Flats,” and “Queen Bee,”
Ladha’s female narrator writes with the honesty of recollection.
Poetic and loosely structured, these snippets of past and present
capture the soul’s significant memories, snapped like sensual photos
in the narrator’s head. Unfortunately, in “Beena” and “Paris in
Bombay,” Ladha tries too hard to be artistic. She should ditch her
self-consciousness and write real stories, which she does so well.