In this land of opportunities, being an immigrant can often feel like playing a round of Twister. A certain contortion of mind, language, and will power seems written into the script; a lot of territory remains untouchable.
Shubha Sunder’s debut novel Optional Practical Training is named after the year-long uncertain space of temporary employment in the U.S., which international students can apply for upon completing their American degree. Sunder is a writer and teacher based in Massachusetts, author of the debut short story collection, Boomtown Girl. Like her, the protagonist and narrator of her novel moved to the U.S. for college from Bangalore, India, and she has just moved to Boston to teach maths and science at a private high school as part of her OPT. She is also an aspiring writer.
As Pavitra navigates her OPT year in Boston, a year shaped by cultural dissonances, we enter spaces of immigrant life that carry a quiet resonance for those in the know. The conversations in and out of classrooms, of workspaces. The precarious stability offered by a visa status. I spoke to Shubha Sunder about writing a novel that takes place within a year and the liminal space of being on a temporary visa.
Sarah Anjum Bari: Let’s talk about the title. How does Pavitra’s OPT status frame the story?
Shubha Sunder: The thing about OPT is that it’s such a liminal status. It lasts one year but I think it can be renewed in some cases to two, but then that’s it. After that you either go home or you have to have a different visa and be categorized as a different kind of “alien”. That made me realize that the whole novel has to take place within a year. She really can’t count on anything. She doesn’t have furniture, that’s why she needs a furnished apartment, but she’s not going to buy furniture because she doesn’t know for sure if she’s going to be able to stay for more than a year. The title, it’s so bureaucratic. The acronym is very important. It’s kind of like a dog whistle—everyone who’s been a foreign student in the U.S. will know immediately what this title refers to, but if you weren’t a foreign student in the US there’s no reason for you to know what Optional Practical Training is. That’s why the letters O-P-T are highlighted [on the book cover]. So it’s just weird and interesting I hope. Optional Practical Training [represents] the shock of arrival, it’s the cold plunge when the immigrant is dropped into the host culture and has to fend for themselves.
SAB: How did Pavitra—or this story—come to you?
SS: For a long time I had this idea of writing my first immigrant novel, because Boomtown Girl, my book of short stories, was set in Bangalore. And then during the thick of Covid lockdown, this is spring of 2020, I was in a place in my personal life where I had been dragged low. My marriage had fallen apart, my soon–to-be ex husband and I were figuring out how to co-parent our one-year-old. I was moving from our two bedroom condo into this tiny apartment. It was a state of mind that [felt like] rock bottom. I felt that if I’m going to make a contribution with my writing, it has to be right now. And so being in that one room apartment took me back to my first year in Boston, which was my first year out of college.
OPT is such a liminal status… That made me realize that the whole novel has to take place within a year
I started writing this scene which became the first chapter of the book, where this young woman is trying to find a place to live. That has to be the first thing she does when she gets to this city that’s foreseeably going to be her home for the next year. I just wrote down whatever came. I put it away, didn’t look at it for a while and then I did again, and I was like, Oh, it’s written in first person, but she’s not the one who is doing most of the talking. The landlord and other people are talking to her, about her. This is interesting because this is an immigrant story but it’s not so much an immigrant telling their story, as it is a story of America being reflected in the things Americans tell this young woman. She’s very young—old enough to be independent but she’s impressionable, at 22—and the things that people say to and about her are really going to form her sense of identity in this new context. And they also reflect back on who America is.
Once I figured that out, everything followed from there. I was able to draw from basic facts about what would happen during this year in this person’s life—it’s the nature of the diaspora, right? She’s not going to be the first Indian person in Boston by any means. So there’s going to be someone there before her, who’s going to make contact, so that prompted the chapter with the reunion with the childhood friend. And then of course someone else is going to follow and look to Pavitra for advice. That’s the scene [with her younger cousin visiting Boston from India]. So I had these two reunions which made for an interesting tension [between] someone who had a very thorough set of reasons for why he was going to stay in America, and someone else, the cousin, who has an equally thoroughly constructed argument for why she’s going to go back to India. There’s a moral aspect in each of their arguments—it’s the right thing to stay, it’s the right thing to go back. That’s one layer.
The other layer is that we have Pavitra, who’s taking all this in. So how are these conversations going to inform who she’s going to become and what she’s going to do?
SAB: That’s what struck me about this book. This form of a novel-in-voices. But we very rarely hear from the narrator, and we get brief outward demonstrations of her character. Is Pavitra really this quiet, demure person, or is the silence a device through which we understand her experience as an immigrant in America? What role is silence playing in this story?
SS: I don’t think she’s a chatterbox. I think the book demonstrates ways in which she’s outgoing. She takes the initiative to meet people, like the guy downstairs who becomes a love interest. You can’t be a quiet person and be a teacher. But I see this very much as a narrative that’s retrospective—it’s written in past tense. It’s a story told by someone who has been in the United States for a while. She’s rooted when she’s telling the story, she’s tracing back the origins of her life in the U.S. Her personality comes through in the details that she remembers. How she describes the things that people tell her. It’s how my memory works as well. I don’t so much remember things I’ve said, but I do remember things said to me. That’s how the novel operates.
SAB: How did you invent and characterize these other voices propelling the novel?
SS: I was conscious of how characters operate in relation to one another even when they haven’t met each other. I wanted to have conflicting, diverse perspectives. So in early drafts there were characters and conversations that I later eliminated because they were doing things that had already been done. Each conversation maps onto one character, and I wanted each one to be distinct. To be painting a different face of this prism, ultimately, that we see the novel and Pavitra through.
Some rules I set for myself were that nobody gets a free pass, including Pavitra. When something happens again and again in the book, people’s prejudices and biases get revealed. And so do her own. She says cringeworthy things too, and she makes her own assumptions and judgments about America that are not necessarily true or well thought out. I had some conversations with my editor about how far in the direction of caricature I wanted to take the characters. For example, the HR woman, Lila, who appears now and then to handle the OPT paperwork for Pavitra. She is almost borderline ridiculous. But the landlord, who we see is as “American” as Lila, is way more nuanced and complicated. He reveals himself to have all these layers.
SAB: In response to a friend arguing that writers should cater to the familiar territories of their reader, Pavitra reflects that, “People in India grow up reading books by English, European, and American writers, writers who’d never considered it their job to help little brown children in the tropics understand cold, white, Western worlds, yet we read them without complaining, with joy even.” Microaggressions, cultural stereotyping and misunderstandings are things she faces frequently throughout the book. Another scene that stayed with me is when Pedro, the guy from downstairs, and Pavitra go to the Zakir Hussain concert. The audience is late, they continue to talk during the performance, and Pedro is offended on behalf of the Indian classical musician. But Pavitra’s point of view reveals how this way of attending an event is rooted in its own historical and social culture. How would you say this novel is engaging with such conversations on navigating unfamiliar cultural spaces?
SS: Something I’ve always been attuned to is the earnestness with which people feel the need to state their values. People really want to be seen as unprejudiced, as having the right views on race, gender, class. You know, when a character states their opinions and then says something that’s directly in contradiction? The vegan poet towards the end of the book? That was one that I let myself have fun with more so than the other characters. I just love how he says, I’m not one of those vegans who goes around telling everyone why it is important to be vegan, and then he goes on to do exactly that. It’s just human nature, it’s who we are. But I find it specific to certain so-called liberal, progressive, East Coast and New England spaces that I’ve been in. I’ve witnessed these kinds of contradictions. This earnestness to believe and see the world a certain way, but not being able to quite do it. You see how it’s gotten us into this political mess, because I think at some level these declarations have a falseness about them.
As for Pavitra—she can speak English, she’s been in the US for 4 years on a college campus, so she’s not completely a fish out of water. But she’s about to truly discover the depths of the differences between the world that she’s been raised in and the world that she’s in now. When we go to a new place, we make judgments on the place based on what we’re told by locals and by people who’ve been there before. The things we’re told as the foreigner then inform how we proceed to be in that culture. There’s lots of opportunity for misunderstandings, for gaffes, unintentional insults, and making assumptions that are inaccurate. That’s the territory I find really interesting as a foreigner and a writer.
SAB: Could you talk about one of the major themes outlined in Pavitra’s experiences—the idea of teaching as a performance, and the different teaching styles your characters project based on the learning environments they themselves experienced?
SS: I’ve been a teacher now for close to 25 years. I did my MFA and switched to teaching creative writing. It’s been interesting to look back at the ways I’ve had to mould my teaching self to do the job well. Growing up in India, the classroom is not a place of enjoyment necessarily. You don’t go there to be entertained. But I think to some degree that is an expectation here. People think they’re going to college for an experience. Boredom is not something that’s considered okay. I’ve had to be conscious of that as a teacher myself. This whole notion of whether education is something that you pay for, an entitlement, is a big question and one that I think about a lot. If the student is a paying customer, it puts you in an awkward position because you can pay for services—for beautiful lectures, for a stimulating classroom environment, one on one time—but you can’t pay for an ‘A’. That’s where the waters get muddied. Education is an entitlement that society provides with the view of turning out an educated citizenry, someone says that in the book too. I think a lot about how these two things are at odds. And I think this makes teachers quite stressed out. You can see that in the U.S. on college campuses, public and private schools. Responsibilities and expectations get heaped on teachers as a result of things in society that are way beyond their control.
So these conversations around teachers, with colleagues and students, certainly those are inspired by conversations that I’ve been a part of.
SAB: This book is coming out at an especially precarious time in American politics. Trump’s inauguration may bring a particular set of difficulties for current and aspiring immigrants. What kind of response or effect are you anticipating this novel to have in this climate?
SS: What I find interesting is that when I was an international student—this was post-9/11—certainly there was this closing off that was happening because of fear. Fear of the outsider, then it was fear of terrorism, and now it seems a broad fear and loathing of foreigners and immigrants in general. What I find striking is how privileged Pavitra’s situation is from our present-day perspective. As an international student, she wasn’t being advised to get back to campus before Inauguration Day because there’s no way to trust that this new administration, one that openly flaunts its xenophobic credentials, is going to let her back in. Immigration has always been a fraught and integral part of America’s identity, so I don’t think there would ever be a bad time to write an immigrant novel. In general, I hope the book takes the reader to a place outside of the tired language of political rhetoric, one that’s more “real” and, for lack of a better word, more nuanced.
