Book Review

First-person narration is a slippery position to speak from. The reader may come to know a character from the inside, but the one-sided perspective may obstruct other vantage points from which to understand the story. In The Great Gatsby, alternately, hearing the story from Nick Carraway doesn’t bring readers closer to understanding Carraway so much as the people around him whom he keenly observes. As a classic of white literature, this type of narration—the I who eludes—doesn’t always seem readily available to narratives where the pressure of representation escalates the stakes.

Such is the pressure that Shubha Sunder faces and counters throughout Optional Practical Training, her debut novel about Pavitra, a woman from Bangalore who lives in Boston. After graduating with a degree in physics, Pavitra opts to extend her visa in the United States through the program that shares its name with the novel’s title. She signs a one-year contract to become a math and science teacher at a private high school in Cambridge, but her dreams of writing pull her. In each chapter, the opinions of fellow teachers, as well as neighbors, friends, lovers, family members, and even Pavitra’s landlord fill the pages, leaving little room for Pavitra’s own voice to speak or even think.

But rather than reading as an underdeveloped narrator, Pavitra’s elusive identity speaks to—and against—the representation that her interlocutors expect of an Indian woman and narrator. Take her landlord, not portrayed as a villain but as a kindhearted if shortsighted man, who takes her for tea and describes his disappointment when a Filipino writer sets a novel in Boston. He already knows that world, he says, and wants to learn about a new one, as if seeing the same places through someone else’s eyes does not occur to him. But then he catches his judgment, and he tries to see it differently: “It must be a bit of a tightrope walk, he imagined, for writers like her and me to decide where we belonged.” Pavitra’s reply is not captured.

At the school where she teaches, the woman who works on Pavitra’s H-1B application to extend her time in the States lets her racist thoughts flow in conversation, while Sharanya, the only other teacher from India, warns against sharing their traditions because it becomes a burden of tokenism. “Why am I expected to take this on?” Sharanya says of planning the school’s Diwali program, articulating the ways that representation can become its own form of fetishization.

Despite the diverse array of perspectives at the school, the white ways win. One of Pavitra’s supervisors, Marissa, critiques her teaching approach as such: “You’ve been here long enough to know something of our rules—I don’t mean school rules, I mean rules: of seeing, of listening, of thinking. Can you see and hear yourself through our eyes and ears?” When Andy, another supervisor, balks at the idea, encouraging Pavitra to be herself, Marissa tries to leverage her shared womanhood with Pavitra to say that not everyone can afford to be themselves in the workplace. “Well, then,” Andy says, “what, who, is she to be?”

With so many voices projecting their images of who Pavitra is or should be, it’s difficult for Pavitra to articulate her own identity. When a colleague asks why she became a teacher and she repeats what she’s said before about being a teacher’s assistant, enjoying teaching and helping others, the words ring false to her own ears: “Now they felt like someone else’s.” Talking with Ram, whom she grew up with in Bangalore, he says that perhaps the reason they’re in the States is to be free of judgments back home. “We can hear ourselves think for the first time,” he says, but even this feels like a mockery of Pavitra’s experiences, where everyone else’s thoughts crowd her own.

Even so, Sunder creates a strong voice in Pavitra, who eludes definition but whose presence stuns in its rare diffusions. Attending the Educators of Color Conference, Pavitra finds herself somewhere outside of the conversation: “Perhaps it was the title itself I objected to, as if someone had put a baggage tag around my neck. Had I been asked, I’m sure I would have thought of all kinds of other ways I’d rather be identified, but I also knew I didn’t have a choice, that this was who I was in the eyes of the world—of America at least—and there was no getting around it.” The moment is identification by negation, but it still sees Pavitra knowing where she doesn’t fit, beginning to carve out a space for herself.

Late in Optional Practical Training, Pavitra begins work on a novel, defining her goal for the narrator as “an observer, a Nick Carraway sort, present but always peripheral.” It’s a metatextual moment that defines Sunder’s own goal in Pavitra, a narrator who is more than her place of origin but unsure of her place in the wider world. By imbuing Pavitra with ambiguity, Sunder makes way for an identity that is slippery, as all identity is.

In an earlier visit from her cousin, Pavitra poses for a rare photograph at her writing desk, allowing for the possibility that her cousin will send it to their parents, whose request for more pictures of her life had gone ignored. “There, I thought, now you can see me.” But what we see of her slips from our framing.