"When the first rumble came, no one in the visa office, down in the basement of the Indian consulate, thought anything of it. Immersed in regret or hope or trepidation (as is usual for persons planning a major journey), they took it to be a passing cable car."
The references here hint that this story is taking place in San Francisco. The rumbling sound instantly creates a connection to earthquakes, and no city in the country is more closely associated with cable cars than San Francisco. The precise city in which the story is set is never explicitly identified, however. It is a mystery that seems easily solved, but is never confirmed. One could take this to be an example of a method of storytelling in which the beginning is a type of foreshadowing of the ending, The difference being that the mystery on which the novel comes to a close is not so easily assumed. This opening is also more straightforwardly an example of foreshadowing, however. The stories told by the inhabitants of the visa office are punctuated with recurring instances of mistaken assumptions.
“Everyone has a story. I don’t believe anyone can go through life without encountering at least one amazing thing.”
The premise of the novel is that this diverse group trapped together by random fate in a visa office following a devastating earthquake pass the time waiting to either be rescued or die by telling a story about one amazing thing that happened in their life. Uma is initially introduced as student who is forced to miss her Medieval Literature class because she had to come to the visa office. Her attempt to focus on the copy of Chaucer is doomed because the officious atmosphere of the office is ill-suited to immersion in the bawdy pleasures of the Wife of Bath. The immediate establishment of the connection with Chaucer’s influential compendium of individuals taking turns telling stories is, of course, essential. This novel is another addition to an increasingly long list that are similarly based upon the premise of people who have come together for one reason or another telling standalone stories that are connected to each other only as a result of a shared theme.
"Jiang had loved Mohit, a passion frozen into foreverness by the destiny that separated them. A passion that he suspected, by the tremor in the old woman’s voice, still existed. Jiang had cursed fate for separating them, but wasn’t she lucky, in a way? Had they married, at best their love would have been like the comfort of slipping one’s feet into a pair of old shoes. At worst, it would have been like his life."
A man named Mangalam works in the visa office and his attracted to another worker, a young woman named Malathi. He is married, however. It is not so much an unhappy marriage as a marriage in which the passion has been used up. While he checks to see if the phone lines are back to working, his mind wanders to the story told by Jiang. She is an elderly Indian-Chinese woman now and the story is about a doomed romance with an Indian man in your youth. That love affair was taboo and destined to end unhappily as the result of the fate of being two people coming from two different cultures. Although the thematic bond of the novel is the premise of strangers telling stories, within those individual stories are other unifying themes. One of those themes which is broadly applied is the role that fates plays in life. This theme obviously kicks off with the fate of being in in that particular office on that particular day at that particular moment when the earthquake struck. But the portrayal of how fate impacts existence is encapsulated in this particular moment described in the quote above. Mangalam’s observation that Jiang curses the fate that kept her and Mohit apart when in fact it may actually have been the thing that kept that passion alive inside her forever becomes commentary on fate and perception. Mangalam’s upbeat interpretation of the very same events that Jiang views as tragic illuminates how the fickle quality of fate really lies less in the timing of its arrival than in how it will eventually be perceived in recollection.
