ABSTRACT
Padma Hejmadi was born in Madras and grew up in India. She studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has lived in the United States since then. Her collection of short stories Birthday, Deathday was published under the name Padma Perera and was first published by The Women's Press, London, England in 1985. The Asian diaspora that Hejmadi sketches in "Weather Report" is set against the very different politics of (im)migration. It is more overtly caricatured in such stories as Bharati Mukherjee's Wife. Bharati Mukherjee writes in bitter terms of the mosaic model of multiculturalism officially espoused by Canada, and which she says, masked the actual hostility toward incoming Asians. She compares this position to the melting-pot model of assimilation in the United States, where, she claims, she finds herself as "just another immigrant". Group and communal affiliations are seen by Mukherjee as impediments to the growth of the single individual self.
