This essay looks at Boman Desai's new novel, Asylum, USA and its exploration of diasporic consciousness. The search for home, the essay demonstrates, is a series of negotiations of space. It involves the ordering and re-ordering of power relations as they are embodied in space. Further, it argues that the sense of home or belonging is achieved through a dialectic of two major spaces: intimate space and spaces of framing, or what I term parergonal spaces. This dialectic, the essay argues, is the protagonist's relationship with individuals and the larger community, USA.

Boman Desai's novel, Asylum, USA (2000), illustrates a diaspora consciousness in terms of spaces. A diaspora consciousness, James Clifford argues, is constructed both positively and negatively. It is negatively constructed through discrimination and exclusion. It is constructed positively through "identification with world-historical cultural/political forces" (Clifford: 256-7). Clifford, exploring the structure of a diaspora consciousness, writes: "Identifications not identities, acts of relationship rather than pre-given forms: this tradition is a network of partially constructed histories, a persistently displaced and reinvented time/space of crossings" (268).

Boman Desai presents a different picture of the Indian diasporic experience in America. Here, there is no longing, search for roots or anxieties of displacement. Instead, what Desai does is to celebrate assimilation, adjustment, and appropriation of various kinds. One of the most important areas of Noshir's negotiation of his diasporic condition in the USA is his experience of space.

This essay looks at the spatial practices and transformation of space in Boman Desai's novel. Desai's novel is essentially about the search for a "home" away from home, to delineate a space of affections and mutual dependency in a land where nothing even close to it exists for him. Desai's novel deals with the way space is constructed and modified. Noshir Daruvalla's search for home in the USA is cast in the form of a series of spatial negotiations, between an intimate space and a larger, communal (as in community) space. Many of these negotiations occur over the iconography and symbolic values (including emotional) of space(s). In other cases, the negotiations are far more "real", effecting changes in the physical structure and arrangements of space(s).

Spaces of `Home': Boman Desai's Asylum, USA, diasporic consciousness, power relations, discrimination and exclusion, spatial practices, transformation of space, mutual dependency, spatial negotiations, iconography and symbolic values.