The Good Muslim of Jackson Heights

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'Life in Jackson Heights is a celebration, a jingle-jangle of tongues, a fishgig of disparate cultures, and an elegy for lost homes.' In Jackson Heights, New York's Little India, hardworking, honest-togoodness traders rub shoulders with ruthless entrepreneurs, reclusive antique dealers, homeless nobodies, larger-than-life merchant princes, lawyers, doctors and IT specialists. Into this heady mix land the urbane and sophisticated Amolinis?Siraj and Shabnam?sectarian violence in their Central Indian hometown having driven them into enforced exile. While Shabnam, enrolls in law school, Siraj makes peace with his new surroundings and his academic career takes off. But his secular moorings suffer a severe shock when, with the banning of The Satanic Verses and the storming of the Babri Masjid, large cracks begin to disfigure the harmonious faade of Jackson Heights and even his relationship with his wife. He recuperates from what he thinks is the ultimate disaster?he is falsely charged, by the FBI, of complicity in a terrorist plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge?only to be rudely yanked back to the primal darkness of 9/11.

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Jaysinh Birj patil's novel Chinnery's Hotel was published by Ravi Dayal and Penguin India, and by Bodiam Books (UK). For a number of years he taught English at Marlboro College in Vermont where he makes his home. He has also taught at M.S. University, Baroda and Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. His poetry has appeared on both sides of the Atlantic.