Sabina Khan writes her novel Meet Me in Mumbai in two parts. Part I focuses on the life of Ayesha Hameed, a Muslim teen from India who is finishing high school in the United States so as to maximize her future potential. Here, she meets Suresh Khanna, a Hindu teen also from Mubai who is an exotic stranger but who totally “gets her.” As fellow Mubaiites, the pair share common rituals, foods, and similar backstories. Eventually, they fall in love, and after a glorious weekend together over the Thanksgiving holiday, Ayesha discovers she is pregnant.
All of Ayesha’s lies and subterfuge have turned her into a poster child for bad decisions. As timing would have it, Suresh is called back from Illinois to India for a family emergency: his father is dying, So, Ayesha is left to survive this dilemma on her own. Suresh advises her to get an abortion on the premise that neither of them is ready for the responsibility of a child. But when she is in the clinic for the procedure, she flees, realizing she can’t go through with what feels like the absolute wrong decision.
Instead, she has the baby and gives her up for adoption to a lesbian couple living in Texas. Unable to survive the emotional aftermath and blaming her cowardice, Ayesha returns to India to a family support system with her secret intact. She believes she can face her own cowardice but not her family’s disappointment.
In Part Two, Khan focuses on the fairly idyllic life of Ayesha’s daughter living in Texas, Mira Jensen. When Mira reaches her late teens, she doesn’t feel at home in her own life. Having been called a coconut—brown on the outside but white through and through—Mira feels like a guest in her own life and wants to be rooted to something bigger. In her search for belonging, she leverages her friendship with Nikhil Verma, a young man from Mubai whose supportive family has helped him through the gender identity process and who now assists Mira with her ethnical and racial identity issues.
However, in her search to find her roots and connect to her heritage, Mira fears she will jeopardize her relationship with her moms, Mel and Samantha, in her present life, and she’s affair that this wound will never heal completely.
Ultimately, as Khan takes readers on this journey, we all learn a convoluted and diverse definition of what it means to be family and how not only family is a messy business, but that all “relationships are complicated, and there aren’t’ always second chances” (340). We further recognize how being completely honest may be complicated and difficult but also has potential to produce good feelings and a sense of satisfaction. Sometimes the things we miss in a relationship that we choose to sacrifice are the small, mundane acts of thoughtfulness.
Khan also does an exquisite job of describing pregnancy. If a woman chooses abortion or giving her baby up to adoption, when we cut someone out of our lives, we may be excising a part of our self. After all, “how do you explain to someone that a part of you is going to be leaving you soon, and you’re supposed to continue living your life, but you can’t even breathe because this part of you has become your oxygen, vital to your survival? But you’ve promised to let it go and now you feel guilty for wanting to break that promise because then you’ll be taking away a lifeline from someone else” (137).
- Donna