“Stories of Jackson Heights”  questions the current immigration system in the US and depicts the trials and tribulations of a South Asian family caught in the throes of a harrowing immigration experience. The play is set in Jackson Heights, Queens, well known for its diversity and cosmopolitanism and therefore could very well be your story, my story, any community’s story. Theatre reaches an enhanced level of relevance when it showcases issues and problems of our present times. This theatre will provide an experience that will make you think, ponder, and hopefully enable you to take action in a meaningful manner.

Manas is still haunted by the horrible nightmare: his whole body engulfed in flames. The communal riots in East Pakistan reduced Manas Roy’s ancestral home to ashes and forced the Hindu man to escape Dhaka. The pain of that forced exile would have healed over time, but Manas could never forget that his dear friend Musa colluded with fundamentalists on that fateful night. Manas escaped to neighboring India and studied in Kolkata before making his way to New York to pursue a Ph.D. and work as a journalist reporting on the United Nations.

This play explores the desertion and abandonment of South Asian women by their husbands in a foreign land and in the home country as well. This is due to the global migration of workers from South Asia to the Unites States and other Western countries. The basic premise of the play is derived from research based on Manavi’s occasional Paper No. 6, Transnational Abandonment of South Asian Women: a new face of violence against women, written by Urjasi Rudra and Shamita Das Dasgupta and an article, Abandoned and Divorced: The NRI Pattern, written by Shamita Das Dasgupta published in infochangeindia.org. Two out of 10 NRI marriages reportedly end with the wife being abandoned.