Members Only

by Sameer Pandya

  Eva and I turned to each other, the tears already pouring down her face. I imagined that she, like me, was most struck by the trunk. Seeing all those pill bottles, I was hit with the fear of exposure. We’d had our challenges with Neel and we did our best to keep it in-house. But our fears were not his fears. We squeezed the boys on their shoulders. Neel had the biggest smile I think I’d ever seen on his face.

  “What is it?” a nearby grandmother asked. It was kind of her to do so.

  Neel pointed to the title he had given it: The God of Removing Obstacles. “We have a Ganesh in our house and I wanted to make another one. You know, my interpretation. The base is papier-mâché, and I kept adding all the various pieces.” He spoke with such confidence and self-assurance.

  The old woman looked at Neel and then at us with joy on her face. “It’s quite the thing.”

  Without realizing it, without being able to stop myself, thick tears had begun streaming down my face as well. Would Neel and Arun remember sometime later in life that the first time they had seen their father cry was at a school art show, thankfully away from all their friends? It would, eventually, be a good memory for them. At least I hoped so.

  I was crying for this fearless and true thing Neel had created. A Ganesh of his own making. And I was crying for the boys, whom we tried to shape and mold, and who would one day come to love and hate all that shaping and molding, before they left us and shaped and molded themselves. They were also tears of rage. I still had not fully pieced together the week I’d had and what I’d learned. All that talk about belonging and membership had broken me, just like something else had broken my father, and his father before him. I kept thinking that I would arrive at some place where all of it might make sense, where I might feel some sliver of comfort. I’m not sure that place exists. Not for me. Maybe not for any of us. And yet, being close to the boys, and their big, beating hearts, I also felt a distinct sense of clarity. About a world, though increasingly darkened and frayed, I could now see and parse with greater precision. And with the recognition that, of all of the places I had been, right here was exactly where I wanted to be, standing in perfect, unsullied silence.

  Acknowledgments

  So many wonderful people have helped make this book:

  These past many years, my colleagues in the Department of Asian American Studies at UC Santa Barbara have provided an ideal, generative place to teach and write.

  I want to thank the partnership between PEN America and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation for the remarkable gift of time and daily Italian lunches in tiffins. My thanks particularly to Dana Prescott, Diego Mencaroni, and Lily Philpott.

  Many people have read, commented on, and been sounding boards on different iterations of this book. My deepest appreciation to them all: Falu Bakrania, Ryan Black, Lacy Crawford, Joe Crespino, Elizabeth England, Farrell Evans, Keshni Kashyap, Brian Lockhart, Bakirathi Mani, Keith Scribner, Josh Sides, Sumant Sridharan, Rajiv Vrudhula, and John Weir. And thank you to Terence Keel, Lisa Park, and David Pellow for the conversation, drink, and fortification.

  To my summer dinnertime friends: I’m so grateful to be stumbling through these years together.

  A big, hearty thank-you to my agent, Seth Fishman, who read this book quickly when I first sent it to him, and has since been a calm, steady source of support. To my editor, Naomi Gibbs, who has treated this book with such intellect and discerning care. My deepest thanks to her and everyone else at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

  I’m very grateful for the continued support, both big and small, from my family—my mother Ragini, my sisters Uttara and Meeta, and my in-laws Andy and Yvonne.

  To Ravi and Ishan, who will always be my boys.

  And to Emilie, for everything.

  A Conversation with Sameer Pandya

  There are some shared details between your life and the protagonist Raj Bhatt’s life—though mercifully for you, not all of them. Could you tell us a bit about your personal connection to this story?

  First of all, let me just say that all the good parts in this book are me and all the bad parts are Raj Bhatt! And second, and most thankfully, I have never made the colossal mistake Raj makes at the beginning of the novel. With all that said, there is a lot of my life here. I didn’t set out to write a work of auto-fiction. But I felt so emotionally tied to this book, an emotional honestly I hope I have conveyed to readers. Raj’s journey of figuring out his own racial identity, his engagement with what it means to get older, to raise children, to be a son and a husband and a father, is a journey I have taken. It’s a journey I am square in the middle of taking. And so if I wanted to be honest about Raj, I needed to be honest with myself. But at the same time, I am a fiction writer, and this is a work of fiction. The book takes place over a week, and I’ve made up a lot of this crazy week. I do live next door to a blueberry farm, but I have not, knock on wood, had a heart attack. And also, because this is a work of fiction, with its demands for narrative tension, I have created a certain amount of necessary distance between what I would do in a situation and what Raj does.

  Why did you write this book?

  I wrote it, first and foremost, because I wanted to tell Raj Bhatt’s story. One of my favorite lines from the book is early on, when Bill Brown, a key character, says that he knew a Raj in college. And Raj thinks to himself, “Everyone knew a Raj in college.” In writing this book I wanted to flesh out that Raj everyone knew, or, for that matter, didn’t know. I wanted to give him a past, a present, a deep inner life with wants and desires and failings. To make him human. To make his seeming difference recognizable. At the same time, I wanted to fill him with particularities—his memories of his early years in India, his growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980s, all the kinds of music he listened to, the books that have shaped him, the tennis he loves, and on and on.

  Among other things, this novel is about race in our contemporary moment. What are you working through here?

  Rightfully so, much of the conversation about race in America revolves around black and white. When I first arrived in the Bay Area in the early eighties, there were very few other Indian families. Thinking back to my own experiences, I wanted to write a novel about a character who exists in the brown space between black and white. It’s a space of passing in particular instances, of not fully belonging in others. And here plenty of conflict and confusion and uncertainty arises. An ideal place, of course, to set a novel. At the same time, I also wanted to initiate a conversation about how we talk about race now. Raj is accused of being a racist by both a liberal and a conservative group of people. How did he get here? This is the question the novel tries to explore.

  What did you have in mind with the genre of the novel?

  I’ve had Raj in mind forever. The question was how to place him in some type of narrative. Once the inciting incident at the beginning of the novel was set, I had to figure out how to structure the book. I did it by combining three types of novels I am fond of reading: the immigrant, the midlife crisis, and the campus novel. By combining these three traditions, I wanted, on the one hand, to shake up the traditional immigrant novel: while the experience of immigration certainly shapes Raj’s life, I wanted to explore the life of a character for whom immigration is a distant memory. On the other hand, I also wanted to “brown up” the midlife crisis and campus novels, which have traditionally had white protagonists.

  There’s so much tension in this novel, but also moments of real warmth—conversations Raj has with his wife and sons and mother and with his officemate, Dan. There are so many great people surrounding Raj, even as he’s facing some real challenges with others. Was that a hard balance to strike?

  First, at the risk of sounding a little sentimental, I really like people. And Raj really likes people too. And out of that I tried to create warm interactions between Raj and the people around him. He is, after all, trying desperately hard to reach out to Bill Brown at the beginning of the book. He is reaching out to troubled young Robert, even as Robert ma
kes Raj’s life miserable. But the challenges that Raj is facing with others and the affection he has for the people closest to him are not mutually exclusive. Raj is ensconced in his community—his family, his kids, his friends. So often in books about men in crisis, they are devising ways to bail on their families and their kids, and that finding oneself requires a man to be on his own. I’ve read those books and liked them. But that was not the book I wanted to write here. A lot is in peril in Raj’s life. His friends and family are not. And so in many ways it was a hard balance. But also a fairly easy one.

  There is a lot of music in this book.

  Like the father character. My own father used to listen to a Harry Belafonte record in our apartment in Bombay. And when we arrived in America, some older cousins of mine who had immigrated earlier introduced me to Cat Stevens, the Eagles, Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream. But as I got older, I started to make my own musical choices as a way of forming a sense of myself. I went through plenty of phases: heavy metal, classic rock; Black Sabbath, Physical Graffiti. Dylan and Springsteen and Nusrat after college. But perhaps the clearest through-line, from high school up to now, is hip-hop: NWA in the late eighties, A Tribe Called Quest in the nineties; Biggie and Jay Z; the Kendrick Lamar that I listen to with my kids. All these years of music make their way into an iPod that makes a brief appearance in the novel.

  Tennis is a central presence in this book. Why?

  In India, I grew up playing cricket and watching it on a black-and-white TV. In America, I turned to tennis, though it is nothing like cricket. Maybe they have a similar colonial/postcolonial sensibility about them. I have always loved the feel of being on the court, of figuring out when to use a racket as a tool of force or with the slightest touch. With singles, you are out there completely on your own. At the same time, I have also watched a lot of tennis over the years, particularly with my mother, who is a huge tennis fan. There is a lot of intimacy in sports talk. But in the context of this book, the tennis court—like swimming pools and golf courses—is a fraught social space, with said and unsaid rules that govern behavior and social life.

  And finally, what would you like readers to take away when they close the book?

  So many things I want readers to take away from their reading. But let me mention three. First, I want them to spend a week with Raj, in his head, seeing the world through his eyes. Second, I want them to think about what we talk about when we talk about race—more broadly, but then also more specifically, to consider the idea of brownness, an underdiscussed experience lived between black and white. And finally, on the broadest level, I want readers to think about the idea of belonging. What does it mean to want to belong? The heartbreak of when you don’t. This is something we all feel. It’s at the heart of Raj’s crisis; it’s at the heart of Robert’s crisis. And perhaps as a country, it’s a question we are all asking ourselves right now. What is the group, the place, I want to belong to? When does that desire to belong become dangerous? These are questions worth considering.

  Discussion Questions

  Humor plays a big role in Members Only. How do particular characters wield jokes and playfulness? Do responses differ depending on the character’s identity? How does the author use humor within the narrative, and how does that differ from the way his characters use humor?

  While Raj is keenly aware of the microaggressions, biases, and uninformed assumptions of his white colleagues and community, he has also jumped to his own conclusions about people around him. What are some of Raj’s blind spots, and how does he reckon with them?

  Raj is quick to feel empathy for other people of color in predominantly white spaces, often envisioning mutual points of connection with them. Do his expectations always match up to the reality of the relationships?

  Raj is sometimes jealous of others in academia or at the club. What is he jealous of, and where does his jealousy come from? What other negative emotions does he feel, and how and when are they expressed?

  While the novel takes place over the course of a week, Raj has occasional flashbacks to his childhood, his graduate research in India, and the time he spent living in New York. Where and when did he feel most comfortable, or most uncomfortable? What parallels does the author draw by placing Raj’s experiences in multiple cities next to each other?

  What does it mean to be between two cultures? Which other characters experience this? What do you think home means for characters, and people, who are between cultures? “I’ve learned to make nowhere the somewhere I live,” says Bill Brown. What do you think he means by this?

  In thinking about his formative years, and his place as someone who is neither black nor white, Raj says: “I’d come to see myself as the person in the middle, someone who could talk to everyone, translate across the aisle, and bring people together.” How does Raj continue to strive toward this idea of himself in his personal and professional life?

  We meet several generations of the Bhatt family. How does each generation experience exclusion and loneliness?

  In the middle of such a tumultuous week, why do you think Raj buys an expensive lamp to feel better? Talk about what the lamp represents, and Raj’s relationship to money.

  After hearing about a colleague’s secret child, Raj wonders if he too is living a double life. Do you think he is? If so, how?

  What are Raj’s personal insecurities, and how does Raj picture security in his life? What does he think he needs to feel secure?

  Something that many characters say is that a certain conversation calls for “further discussion.” How frequently do deeper conversations actually happen? What gets in the way of further, and fruitful, discussions? What facilitates them?

  About the Author

  © Lauren Ross

  Sameer Pandya was long-listed for the PEN/Open Book Award for his story collection, The Blind Writer, and is the recipient of a PEN/Civitella fellowship. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Salon, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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