Border Less

By Namrata Poddar

Dia Mittal is an airline call center agent in Mumbai searching for an easier life. As her search takes her to the United States, Dia’s checkered relationship with the American Dream dialogues with the experiences and perspectives of a global South Asian community across the class spectrum--call center agents, travel agents, immigrant maids, fashion designers, blue- and white-collar workers in the hospitality industry, junior and senior artists in Bollywood, hustling single mothers, academics, tourists in the Third World, refugees displaced by military superpowers, Marwari merchants and trade caravans of the Silk Road, among others. What connects the novel’s web of brown border-crossing characters is their quest for belonging and negotiation of power struggles, mediated by race, class, gender, nationality, age, or place. With its fragmented form, staccato rhythm, repetition, and play with English language, Border Less questions the “mainstream” Western novel and its assumptions of good storytelling.
Border Less was a finalist for The Feminist Press’s Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. Chapters from the novel won the Short Story Contest organized by 14th International Conference on the Short Story in English, judged by Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise; the New Asian Writing Prize; and appeared in The Best Asian Short Stories anthology. The opening chapter, in a slightly different form, was published in The Kenyon Review.
PRAISE
“Border Less challenges the traditional form and aesthetic of the western novel with a narrative of interconnected stories as layered as the human experience itself. Each of the novel’s carefully drawn chapters explores questions of belonging and identity, complicated by geographic, racial, gender and class distinctions, to name a few. Poddar is an ambitious and important new voice in the tapestry of global literature.” -- Aline Ohanesian, author of Orhan’s Inheritance, Finalist for The Dayton Literary Peace Prize

“Border Less is a novel that invites the reader into the twists, turns, and corkscrews of immigrant life. From call centers in India to affluent eateries in Orange County, CA, these characters are irreverent, sometimes raunchy, anxiety-ridden, but most of all, explorative. Poddar has a sensitive touch to moving between time, space, and generations to present a continuous portrait of adventures and hardships in a racialized, Brown body." -- Morgan Jerkins, New York Times Bestselling Author of This Will Be My Undoing
“Namrata Poddar delves with heartbreaking delicacy and precision into the solitary struggles of her characters, whether in the teeming, sweat-drenched Mumbai metropolis or on sunny Californian shores