Delhi, India

“We Didn’t Like Him,” “If You Sing Like That For Me,” and “A Heart is Such a Heavy Thing” are set exclusively in Delhi, India. Sharma elicits the differences between his home country of India and his adopted country of the US by interspersing his Indian based stories with his US based ones. In We Didn’t Like Him, Sharma describes “the lanes” of the neighborhood. These lanes are the streets that people live on and where businesses are set up. Sharma evokes a crowded and clustered feeling in the lanes “The lane had three-and four-story houses on both sides, so closely pressed together that the alley was always in shade” (Location 633). Each lane has its own community and the narrator worries about Manshu starting his business as it “was giving our lane a bad name” (Location 752). The Old Vegetable Market in “A Heart is Such...