ਕਿਤਾਬ ਬਾਰੇ| About Book
A dishwasher working at a Toronto foodbank develops a fondness for Ms. Leanne Beaton and considers asking her out for coffee.
The matter proves more complicated than expected.
The story moves between Punjab and Toronto, between work and recollection, between what is remembered and what merely insists on returning. Kitchens become gathering places for hungers of various kinds. A photograph may contain an entire landscape. A passing remark may open onto years of history. Sometimes a person spends pages trying to understand another person. Sometimes he spends the same amount of time trying to understand a fish, a bird, or a sentence.
*Asking Out Ms. Leanne Beaton* is a Punjabi work of autofiction concerned with memory, labour, migration, language, desire, and the odd companionships that emerge while people attempt to make sense of their lives.
The book does not move in a straight line. It circles, wanders, doubles back, gets distracted, remembers something else, then returns carrying more than it left with. Certain images recur often: animals, kitchens, villages, walls, weather, food, and people who cannot quite leave one another alone.
Whether the narrator ever succeeds in asking Ms. Leanne Beaton out for coffee is, in some sense, beside the point.
By then, many other things have already happened.