In Nitin Deckha’s short story “1 900 Hey Baby,” part of his collection Shopping for Sabzi, a call screener at a phone dating service chases his ambition to become a chef and is manipulated by a sleazy talent scout. In “Spick and Span,” an unmarried New York social worker is forced to confront her insecurities about being over 25 and single, while organizing a Gujarati marriage convention. All of the characters in Dekha’s collection have one thing in common: they’re shopping for sabzi.

“Shopping for sabzi literally means shopping for vegetables,” says Deckha, an anthropologist who teaches social sciences in Toronto. “Like when you are looking for an apple, you pick it up, examine it and put it back. The same kind of idea applies to people’s lives and their quest for personal fulfilment.”

Though shopping for sabzi is an accusation levelled at young people in the title story, Deckha believes the habit is not limited to the young and the restless. “I think shopping for sabzi is something we’re all doing. I think it’s part of the zeitgeist. We’re all reinventing ourselves to get what we want,” he explains.

Rich in sarcasm and dryly humorous, Deckha’s collection of short stories offers a series of relatively light hearted glimpses into the middle-class struggle for personal fulfilment. Many of the tales surround the privileged, but often wayward, lives of thirty somethings as they search for success in its many forms. Whether they are struggling to advance their careers to greater heights, find love or simply get laid, the occasionally selfish characters are beset by a feeling of dissatisfaction with their current situation, dogged by a persistent feeling of doubt, or a desire for something better.

However, these are not stories of heavy personal crises and broken dreams, and the subject matter never gets too dark. The characters’ inner struggles are instead fleshed out from simple events in their lives. Sometimes these struggles seem banal, but Deckha has a way of writing about these mundane situations that creates the feeling you are looking at a poignant snapshot of life in motion.

The stories mostly follow the lives of young, white-collar South Asians, but exploration of their ethnic identity is done sparingly, or left out entirely. “Their South Asian identity is a part of it, but that is sort of the anchor rather than the foundation,” explains Deckha. “And their stories are maybe not universal, but certainly cross-cultural. I think it reflects an emerging time in Canadian literature where writers are more comfortable venturing beyond the familiar motifs.”

Deckha drew his characters from his experiences doing field work in London and from his brief stint in advertising in New York. This is his first book, but he is currently working on a novel that he says will expand on the themes he established in Shopping for Sabzi.