{"id":1441,"date":"2014-06-26T10:54:04","date_gmt":"2014-06-26T05:54:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/?p=1441"},"modified":"2014-08-28T00:42:10","modified_gmt":"2014-08-27T19:42:10","slug":"book-review-the-last-taxi-ride-by-a-x-ahmad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/2014\/06\/book-review-the-last-taxi-ride-by-a-x-ahmad\/","title":{"rendered":"BOOK REVIEW: “The Last Taxi Ride” by A.X. Ahmad"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest post by Holly Jones<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"The<\/p>\n

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Writing a thriller set in New York with a South Asian protagonist is far easier said than done in these charged, geopolitically aware times. But A.X. Ahmad\u2019s The Last Taxi Ride\u00a0<\/em>reaffirms how successfully such a work, in the hands of an aware, skilled writer, can simultaneously entertain and inform our understanding of the world without being crushed under the weight of cultural and immigrant sensibilities.<\/p>\n

Ahmad introduced the world to ex-Indian Army Captain Ranjit Singh in The Caretaker<\/em>, the first book in the trilogy, which showed Ranjit as a new immigrant struggling to provide for his wife and daughter on Martha\u2019s Vineyard until he landed a job minding the home of a US senator and his compelling, complicated wife. A mysterious break-in at the senator\u2019s home landed the Singh family in trouble. Ranjit managed to unravel the mystery behind the break-in before time ran out for all of them, but by the story\u2019s end, neither his marriage nor his fragile sense of home in this new world had gone unscathed.<\/p>\n

As the second novel opens, a now-divorced Ranjit Singh has transplanted himself to New York City. He works two jobs, awaits his daughter\u2019s arrival and spends his nights alone in a basement apartment whose mirrored tiles distort more than mask its smallness. All of this changes when a beautiful has-been starlet named Shabana Shah is found dead after riding in his taxi and he\u2019s accused of being an accessory to her murder. The outlook is grim and time short to produce proof of his innocence, but hope appears in the form of his employer, promising help if Ranjit finds Mohan, a military buddy from his past and the primary suspect in the murder case. Armed with a gun, cash and few leads, Ranjit sets out to find Mohan. He journeys into New York City\u2019s many neighborhoods and worlds and, for the most part, it\u2019s one heck of an enjoyable ride.<\/p>\n

New York is a much more complex landscape than Martha\u2019s Vineyard, yet, as with The Caretaker<\/em>, Ahmad makes skillful use of the setting to underscore mood, conflict and metaphor to the story\u2019s advantage. The Jamaica Bay shoreline isn\u2019t just a convenient spot for Ranjit to interrogate his best lead on the case; it\u2019s also a place where people pray and bring offerings for their gods. Central Park takes on heart and soul when described as \u201ca vast darkness illuminated by the globes of streetlights.\u201d \u00a0Little Guyana, in the heart of Queens, becomes more than just a neighbourhood: in Ahmad\u2019s hands, it becomes a map of one immigrant\u2019s loneliness. \u201cEverywhere Ranjit sees India, but somehow distorted, the colors wrong, the smells unfamiliar,\u201d Ahmad writes.<\/p>\n

In fact, there is not a single scene in The Last Taxi Ride<\/em> that doesn\u2019t, at some point, call to our attention how life in New York looks and feels for newly-arrived foreigners. The occasional heavy-handed reference aside, Ahmad wields his pen with a light, knowing touch so that readers, and particularly those not from South Asia, read a passage like the one below and grasp instantly the location, a world largely unfamiliar to them and the emotions that will help and hinder Ranjit\u2019s search: \u201cSome shopkeepers are brushing at their wares with colored feather dusters, and that gesture reminds him of India as does the smell of incense drifting out of the small shrines in the shops. How strange, he thinks, to transplant Indians to the Caribbean (and then to New York), where they lose their language, and all their memories of India. All that remains are these scattered gestures.\u201d Ahmad echoes and deepens this sense of what it means to make one\u2019s way through a new world over the course of the novel so that, by the end of the novel, it is as much a part of the setting as these characters\u2019 new home, New York City, and the two are as interwoven in the reader\u2019s mind as they are for the characters forging their new lives.<\/p>\n

Ahmad has cast many compelling plot lines in The Last Taxi Ride<\/em> and, at times, I felt there were too many. The primary plot thread belongs to Ranjit and his quest to find his friend and the truth behind the crime. But subplots multiply as the story unfolds: Ranjit\u2019s mourning of one love lost as new love – or something resembling it – finds him, the power struggle between has-been starlet Shabana and her sister, Ranjit\u2019s employer\u2019s import business and what it really ships, the organized crime ring somehow tied to so much of this, and more. It\u2019s a lot for one hero to resolve in 368 pages but Ahmad does a credible job tying up all the plot lines and concluding The Last Taxi Ride<\/em> with possibilities, versus loose ends, for the third book of his trilogy.<\/p>\n

As I read The Last Taxi Ride,<\/em> I often found myself smiling, cringing or both and that was, for me, the mark of a solid read and Ahmad\u2019s promise as an author. He infuses the thriller with delightful notes like a Greek chorus of taxi drivers, running jokes that only get better as the plot progresses, and lyrical passages that deepen, rather than slow, the overall narrative. He brings Ranjit to life with moments of such steely judgment and grit \u2013 my favorite being one involving pancakes, syrup and rats \u2013 that the quantity, or lack thereof, was one of my few gripes with the work. I wanted more of the tough hero moves former military officer Ranjit Singh must be capable of wielding. But, if the momentum Ahmad developed over the story keeps building, we\u2019ll see Ranjit as an even more fully realized thriller hero in the third and final novel of the trilogy.<\/p>\n

If you haven\u2019t read The Caretaker<\/em>, I recommend reading it before diving into The Last Taxi Ride<\/em>. Read slowly, because we have another year or so to wait for the next Ranjit Singh novel.<\/p>\n

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\"Holly<\/p>\n

Holly Jones\u00a0<\/span>has authored\u00a0short stories, essays, and articles for\u00a0various magazines, including<\/span>\u00a0the \u201cDispatches From The Anacostia\u201d and \u201cDispatches From The Capital\u201d series for\u00a0<\/span>McSweeney\u2019s Internet Tendency<\/span>.\u00a0<\/span>She co-founded the literacy non-profit 826DC, and\u00a0<\/span>holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts as well as an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business. She is currently working on a thriller set in Pakistan.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest post by Holly Jones     Writing a thriller set in New York with a South Asian protagonist is far easier said than done in these charged, geopolitically aware times. But A.X. Ahmad\u2019s The Last Taxi Ride\u00a0reaffirms how successfully such a work, in the hands of an aware, skilled writer, can simultaneously entertain and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[357,91],"tags":[306,295,303,304,302,300,301,298,305,297,299,308,116,296,307],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1441"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1441"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1448,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1441\/revisions\/1448"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}