"Not for the Faint of Heart, and Certainly not for the Thin of Skin"

Phawker responds to Saira Rao's sister:

First I would like to commend you on penning the most posh piece of hate mail we have gotten to date — and there have been some impeccably crafted forked-tongued missives, believe you me. (I was going say “articulate” but that would just open a whole other can of worms.) Second, I would like to make clear that the idea to draw your sister as Shiva (yes, I asked for Shiva, NOT Vishnu) was, for better or worse, mine and mine alone and I take full responsibility. It is my understanding that Shiva is both Destroyer and Benefactor and I thought that was emblematic of your sister’s broad satire of the judiciary.

Funny. Even funnier is that Nita Rao would call a depiction of her sister in the pose of a hindu god a "repellant racist illustration" and "a cheap, bigoted joke" when her sister's novel contains this scene:

In the novel’s climax, the judge’s husband dies after long illness, and the cognitive dissonance of the grotesquery overwhelms the putative narrative. According to Raj, Judge Friedman works all through her husband’s illness, curses out his doctors, then dragoons her clerks into organizing a shivah. The shivah scene itself is a nightmare. The judge reads a prepared speech about her husband’s archaeological work; other relatives manage to soil both themselves and Friedman’s clerks with not one but two forms of bodily waste.

By the end of this abasement, a counter-narrative has all but driven the official one from the stage. A distraught woman screams at her husband’s doctors with hopeless hope to plead for any chance to save him. When he wanders off, naked and disoriented, she is unable to deal with the pain of seeing this brilliant former scholar reduced to such a state. She throws herself into her work but can’t keep the grief from breaking through. Her family, never much given to public displays of affection, struggles awkwardly through the shivah, not knowing what to say. And her clerks are too busy flirting with each other to give the deceased’s sister an honest answer about whether the bread is wheat-free, leading directly to severe digestive trouble.

You know what's "a cheap, bigoted joke"? Making shit and puke jokes about a religious ceremony marking the real-life death of someone's long-time husband. And I forget what it is, but there's a word for people who lampoon Jews and Judaism as a whole. Reading her letter to Phawker, I see Nita Rao's got a good vocabulary; maybe she knows what it is.

Comments

[Spork City]

The book also contains the line "cranked out more bench memos than the Catholic Church cranked out pedophiles."