Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows

The first thing I need to tell you about this book is that it’s not a cute title — this really is about erotic stories for Punjabi widows. Nikki applies to teach a memoir-writing night class, where she thinks she’ll be helping Punjabi grandmas write their memories. The program admin has promised the students a qualified ESL teacher, because that’s 100% how community center night classes work.  Tell the teacher they’ll have creative freedom, tell the student that the teacher has loads of experience, and then lock the classroom door, run away, and let the class work it all out themselves.

Since the author had such A+ realism about community center teaching, I assume that there’s A+ realism about British-Punjabi life, too.

As often happens with a first-year teacher, the students tell her what they’re going to be doing in class. One student wants to learn to write (beginning with the alphabet, not her memoirs), but the rest of the students find a sexy Harlequin book in Nikki’s bag and start their steamy storytelling.  The widows have some really racy stories, and although at first I was a bit uncomfortable — Grandmas! At the temple! — of course they’re humans with sexual desire. The stories start to be shared, which makes it harder and harder to keep the class and the authors quiet…

Nikki’s class seems like the main focus of the book. At first, I thought there was a B-plot about runaway girls, young women leaving the restrictive Punjabi community and making new lives in London, and another minor theme about the Brotherhood (think Reddit incels with the Punjabi patriarchy behind them) investigating women’s behavior, but eventually, all the stories connected in surprising ways. Although the story deals with the immigrant experience, this is not a cute east-meets-west story. There is pretty serious evil hidden in the community, with women’s lives at risk, which creates an unsettlingly dramatic final act in what first seemed like a colorful slice-of-life novel.