Reema Rajbanshi’s Sugar, Smoke, Song is a linked-story collection about Assamese identity, appearance, and migration that moves between the Bronx, California, India, and Brazil. In a 2024 essay, critic Tina Borah reads the book as a work that connects racism faced by Northeast Indians at home with the discrimination Assamese immigrant families meet in the United States. Borah’s essay is a literary interpretation. It is not a survey or a sociological study of discrimination, and the rest of this article keeps those two things separate.
What the book is
Google Books catalogs Sugar, Smoke, Song: A Novel by Reema Rajbanshi as fiction published by Red Hen Press in 2020, running to 216 pages. Its description and Red Hen Press’s Fall 2020 catalog both describe nine linked stories. The book is not a single continuous plot. Each story can be read on its own, and the connections between them build up across the collection.
The settings are the Bronx, California, India, and Brazil. The Bronx is where many of the Assamese immigrant families in the book live, and India is where the earlier stories take place. The California and Brazil stories come later in the sequence.
How Borah reads the stories
Borah’s essay, published at LARB PubLab on July 24, 2024 and republished by Scroll.in on December 8, 2024, follows the collection in roughly the order it is arranged. She discusses the early stories associated with a character named Maina, a run of stories centered on Jumi, and the later stories set in California and Brazil. Her focus is on how identity and discrimination carry from one generation and one country to the next.
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Borah is an interpreter here, and her reading organizes the book around four themes.
Assam and the “periphery”
Borah places Assam and the wider Northeast in relation to perceptions on the Indian mainland. She describes how the region is often imagined through reductive ideas of danger or through romanticized difference. She draws on her own experience to make this point, so it should be read as her framing and personal account, not as a neutral survey of attitudes. The essay’s central claim is that the Northeast is treated as peripheral to the nation, not only geographically but culturally.
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Appearance and racialization
According to Borah, the characters in the book meet racial assumptions and slurs in India, and they are also treated as visibly different inside their own broader communities. Appearance is the thread she follows most closely. For her, it is the everyday way the stories show how identity is assigned to a person before that person says anything about who they are.
Diaspora and migration
The essay discusses Assamese immigrant life in the Bronx and the limits of the American dream for families who face racism alongside economic and cultural barriers. Borah’s reading is about how these pressures shape the characters in the book. It does not make claims about the experience of every immigrant from Assam or from India, and it should not be read that way.
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Grief and resilience
Borah links grief and inherited trauma with the characters’ persistence and their mutual support. Resilience, in her reading, is one of the book’s emotional threads, carried by family and community ties rather than by any single dramatic turn in the plot.
Quotations and how to attribute them
Two lines are often quoted from this coverage, and they come from different voices. Keeping them apart matters for accuracy.
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- Borah’s own sentence: “The Northeast is almost seen as an appendage to mainland India because of its geographical and cultural distance from the mainland.” This is Borah’s interpretation, published in her essay.
- Dialogue from the fiction: “We’re Indo-Burmese. We have indigenous traits. Assam was the last part the British added to the Raj.” Borah reproduces this line from one of Rajbanshi’s stories. It is a character’s words in fiction, not a factual statement by Borah or Rajbanshi.
Borah’s essay also cites a figure that is worth handling carefully. She writes that Northeast India shares “90 per cent” of its border with other countries. The figure appears in her essay, and it is presented as her claim. It should be attributed to her, not presented as verified geography or as an official statistic.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the evidence does and does not establish
- Established: the book’s title, author, publisher, year, length, and the nine-story structure with its four settings, according to the catalog and publisher listings.
- Established as Borah’s reading: the link between Assamese identity and racialization in India and immigrant life and racism in the United States, along with the themes of appearance, grief, and resilience.
- Not established: any statistical measure of discrimination rates tied to this book, or any independent study of how Northeast Indians are treated in India or in the US. The coverage examined does not provide such data.
- Not established: that the essay’s descriptions of the Northeast or of immigrant life apply beyond the characters and communities the book depicts.
About the author
Rajbanshi’s author profile at Nat. Brut supplies background on her work, and it is the main source for biographical context in this article. The book itself is the strongest primary source for what the characters experience, and readers who want the stories’ own framing should start there rather than with any single interpretation, including Borah’s.
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Where to read the essay and the book
Borah’s essay is available at LARB PubLab (published July 24, 2024) and in a Scroll.in republication (December 8, 2024). Both carry the same argument. The book is available in print under the Red Hen Press imprint, and readers should check current retailers or libraries for edition and stock, since this article did not verify those details.
For a reader approaching the collection for the first time, the most useful order is to read the first Maina stories and the Jumi sequence in the book’s own order, then read Borah’s essay. That way the interpretation can be checked against the stories rather than the other way around.
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