One of the first pieces of fiction Mary Anne Mohanraj wrote sparked some controversy when she posted it online in 1993. In “Season of Marriage,” which she describes as a “sweet arranged-marriage story,” an Indian-American woman named Raji asks her parents to find her an Indian husband after she dumps her American boyfriend. It opens with Raji at the end of her wedding day in New Dehli, contemplating the results of her rash decision, then shifts into a long, steamy description of her first night in bed with her husband, Vivek.
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Raji and Vivek briefly reappear in Mohanraj’s new book, Bodies in Motion (HarperCollins), a collection of 20 interlinked short stories that follow two families across 63 years, shifting between American and Sri Lankan settings. The stories are populated with women, and a few men, who are faced with choices that invariably pit South Asian traditions against contemporary Western values. They’re also infused with the eroticism that’s defined most of Mohanraj’s writing career, which began when she was a student at the University of Chicago and discovered newsgroups dedicated to erotic stories.
But the stories she found online were “incredibly bad,” she says. “I think that was the first time in my life I’d been exposed to really bad writing.” Figuring she could do better, she wrote her first erotic story, “American Airlines Cockpit,” about a pair of bored women who seduce the pilot and copilot on a flight to England. (Mohanraj archives the “embarrassing” story on her Web site, www.mamohanraj.com.)
Mohanraj says that while her parents were pleased with the cookbook collecting her mother’s recipes that she self-published in 2003, they’re still not comfortable with her writing erotic stories. “My mother often asks me why I don’t write children’s books instead,” she says. “They were really unhappy about it for a long time–we had a lot of screaming fights about it. I think now that I’m moving toward more mainstream stuff, even though it deals with sexuality, they’re dealing with it better.”
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