ABSTRACT
Love, desire, and romance as experienced by immigrant men and women from the Indian subcontinent in the New World appears as a recurring theme in Bharati Mukherjee's short fiction collections of the eighties, namely, Darkness and The Middleman and Other Stories. Mukherjee's Indian men are brought to life either through the satiric narratives of immigrant women or through the omniscient eyes of a first-person immigrant narrator. The South Asian immigrant woman in Angela betrays no passion or desire for Menezies, nor any desire for a more erotic relationship for herself. In Mukherjee's short fiction, the satiric narrative contrasts interior monologues with public actions as the principal device by which characters confront their own concealed desires. Her Indian men are unromantic, overwhelmingly acquisitive, and slightly ridiculous. Their rejection by their romantic, sensual, and sensitive women in Mukherjee's short fiction emphasizes the crumbling masculine power structure in the South Asian immigrant community in the United States.
