"Making Nowhere the Somewhere I Live": An Interview with Sameer Pandya
Hear Sameer Pandya read and discuss Members Only with Yoojin Na from our IG Live.
by Yoojin Na
Sameer Pandya and I met over Skype a few months ago. Though the interview was going to be conducted over email, I insisted that we talk face-to-face. I was curious to see how much of him was in Raj Bhatt, the protagonist of his novel Members Only.
The similarities were there right away. Sameer, like Raj, is a South Asian man in his forties, a scholar, a professor, a husband, a father, and an avid tennis player. Like Raj, Sameer immigrated from India to the U.S. at a young age, had a stint in New York, and returned to California to start a family. He even looked like what I imagined Raj looked like—approachable and handsome with a kind smile. But that’s where their similarities ended.
Pandya has been working on his craft for over a decade with successes to show for his efforts. The Blind Writer, a short story collection long-listed for the PEN Open Book award, precedes Members Only, which was chosen as a noteworthy book by NYT. Raj Bhatt, on the other hand, hasn’t published anything of importance since college, and with all the potential he’d initially shown, unfulfilled, he finds himself in an increasingly precarious predicament. Members Only isn’t just another tale of midlife crisis; it explores what happens when a member of “model minority” veers away from the preformed narrative and breaks the unspoken rules of race.
Yoojin Na: Last time you checked in with Epiphany readers, you were about to go on your PEN/Civitella Fellowship in Umbria, Italy. What was it like there? What did those weeks mean for you?
Sameer Pandya: They were six equally magical and sometimes difficult weeks. In the years leading up to the fellowship, I was teaching a lot and my wife and I were juggling our jobs and raising our then very young kids. In between all that, I had published my first book—The Blind Writer. And honestly, I was exhausted—from parenting, from some professional disappointments, from grading. The fellowship felt like a creative lifeline. Yet, going to Italy meant leaving my wife, who had a full-time job of her own, with two young kids for six whole weeks! I thank her every single day that without hesitation, she told me to go. When I got there, I had really bad jet lag for the first several days and I missed my family dearly. And in the midst of the sleeplessness, I felt like a fraud, afraid I wouldn’t get any work done. But then, Umbria pulled me in: yellow rolling hills, sunflowers, olive trees, lots of wine, incredible coffee, warm nights. I played tennis on real red clay while pretending that I was Yannick Noah. And I had dinner every night on a long marble table with a group of lovely, generous, and smart writers, artists, and composers from around the world. But most important of all, I had long stretches of quiet work time. I was housed in a beautiful studio in the 16th century castle owned by the Civitella Raineri Foundation. My intention was to work on a novel about India, but when I arrived, I was full of emotional tremors—about arriving into my forties and about the 2016 presidential election that was radically changing America in front of my eyes. So, I started writing very quickly about a middle-aged Indian-American man, in the midst of one very bad week.
YN: For years, you were working on Victoria Terminus, a novel set in India between 1918 and 1948. Then, you changed gears and wrote Members Only in a relatively shorter amount of time. How did this change come about? Did you feel an urgency to write Members Only? If so, where did this urgency come from?
SP: I have always wanted to write a novel about India. That may have something to do with the fact that I lived there until I was eight, and that I want to give those years—and the stories of my family—some artistic shape. It may also have something to do with a time in my life when I was in my twenties in the 1990s and I was reading all the amazing novelists writing about India—Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai. My understanding about myself as a writer was deeply shaped by my relationship to India. But at the same time, I have spent most of my life in America and also wanted to write a novel that reflected my experiences here. While I was reading the Indian writers, I was also making my way through Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Philip Roth, and so many others. And the urgency to write about my American experience—to think about race and to think through ideas of brownness—felt that much greater after the 2016 election. But ultimately, the shift from the India of Victoria Terminus to the America of Members Only was dictated by the story itself. I had originally written the first chapter of Members Only as a short story because that was what I was accustomed to doing. But there were too many compelling characters and the narrative motor was revving way too high to stop at page twenty or thirty. And once I kept going, a lot of this novel just poured out, as if I had fully opened a pressure-filled emotional tap.
YN: Several famous novels take place in a single day. Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday come to mind. Your book is unusual in that it takes place over a week. Why a week? Why not a month or a year? How did you come up with this structure?
SP: For me, the management of time in a novel is an important key to its success or failure. A book set over the course of a day needs to feel epic, a novel set over decades needs to feel intimate. With this book, I wanted to create a sense of breathlessness in the reading experience, a sense that one thing after another was happening to Raj. In one of her autobiographical pieces, Virginia Woolf writes about moments of being versus nonbeing; being is what we remember, nonbeing disappears. I wanted to write a novel full of moments of being. The story arc, as it developed, required far more than a day, but certainly less than a month or a year. A week seemed just right. We’ve all had really bad weeks and I wanted to convey a sense of that—the sense that with each passing day, more and more was accumulating on Raj’s shoulders. There was also the added benefit that chapters could be broken down by days. At one point early in the drafting, I wrote out each day of the week on a separate piece of blank paper and tacked them onto a cork board, adding plot points under each day, as they occurred to me. It really helped to visualize the book as a whole. But also, now thinking about it, we often use bad days or long years as the measure of time. Even months get singled out for their cruelty. Weeks get the short end of the stick. Members Only is a shout out to a week as an ideal measure of novelistic time.
YN: Can you tell us more about your writing and editing process?
SP: I suppose there are writers who are slow and methodical, who have a clear sense of where they are going at every part of the process. I’m not that writer. Once I have some sense of an arc in mind, the smaller arc of a story, the longer arc of a novel, I am frantic to get as much down as quickly as possible. And so I end up writing very messy first drafts. Then I go back and revise, adding layer after layer. I suppose it’s not very mindful of me—that I need to know the end of the journey to enjoy the journey itself. But with writing, I need to have some sense of the arc in mind so that I can adjust it along the way. With Members Only in particular, I knew the inciting incident that got the story going and I had a sense of the closing image. The work of writing and editing was filling in the roughly three-hundred pages between these two moments.
YN: Your book opens with a very entertaining yet cringe-worthy moment. Raj, the main protagonist, inadvertently blurts out an ethnic slur while interviewing a prospective member at a private tennis club. Can you walk us through the scene? Without giving too much away, can you elaborate on why this scene is essential to the book?
SP: In the opening scene, Raj mistakenly gets called a popularly known Indian name from a prospective couple, even though he has made it clear that his name is Raj. Seething from this, Raj feels downright giddy when an African-American couple, Bill and Valerie Brown, walk into the clubhouse. They are everything Raj wants—particularly, an occasion to diversify the club. Bill is someone Raj feels like he can be friends with. You know that feeling. You meet someone new and you envision them filling a lot of social holes in your own life. As the interview progresses, Raj gets both drawn into Bill, but also feels a deep well of envy at his sartorial splendor, his lovely watch, his skill on the tennis court, his social ease, his ability as a doctor to save lives. I won’t say anymore, but the blunder that occurs next is essential to the book because the moment is layered. And by layered, I mean that everyone in the room reacts to and understands the moment differently: Raj himself, the other four members of the committee that are there, the couple that sponsors the Browns, and of course, the Browns themselves. The differing reactions and interpretations and methods of rectifying the situation become the narrative motor of the novel.
YN: It’s also interesting that Raj gets accused of being a racist himself. Of course, Raj isn’t a racist, yet he becomes vulnerable to such attacks because he doesn’t follow certain social customs. Where do you think the unspoken rules surrounding race come from?
SP: I’ve always been interested in unsaid social rules and how we learn them. As long as these rules remain unsaid and uncodified, their presence can be denied, the details changed. A part of the immigrant experience is figuring out the rules, and the moments of misreading them—done purposefully or not—make for good fiction. The breaking of social customs is also an interesting moment. It’s a way of questioning the rules, a moment of showing what lies beneath all the rule-making. But to your question about race and rules. Unsaid rules of decorum and of customs are often used to police racial boundaries, to say who can be part of a club—both figurative and literal—and who cannot.
YN: Becoming a target gives Raj a belated understanding of the 2002 Gujarat riots that took place in his birth city. You write, “I didn’t think that men like Babu—poor men, with few options for upward mobility—hated their neighbors because they were a different religion. It seemed far more likely that it was because people like Anand had convinced them that they were poor because Muslims had taken the livelihoods that rightfully belonged to them.” Can you give the reader context for this realization? Are you suggesting that social equality would make people less vulnerable to baseless hate? Are there any other solutions?
SP: In the context of the racial strife Raj is experiencing in the present of the novel, he thinks back to a research trip he took to India when he was working on his dissertation, drawing a parallel between a young student he is struggling with and a young man he met in India. Raj thinks about how social inequality shapes the ways in which we portion out who belongs and who doesn’t. The greater the inequality, it seems to him and me, the greater the cases of religious and racial communalism. But the comparison I am making here is also meant to do something else. What Raj saw happening in the communal violence in Gujarat in 2002 is what he thought then was the strife of a particular place. What he is realizing in the present moment—even in the context of, by comparison, the banality of fights within tennis clubs and university campuses—is that these kinds of small fights amongst groups might be a signal to us that bigger tremors are afoot. That what happened in Gujarat in 2002 is what might be brewing in America. Reading the news these days, it’s hard not to think that the lines of division are getting more and more entrenched. As a writer, I have always been interested in exploring how small moments have embedded within them much larger, complex histories. That small moments can be predictors of big things.
YN: Plenty of fiction nowadays captures the Asian-American experience, yet, as a 1.5 generation Asian American, I’ve still struggled to find myself represented in literature. Members Only made me feel seen. What do you think are some unique challenges of being 1.5G? What was your own immigration experience like?
SP: Like Raj, I arrived in America when I was eight. It’s an interesting age to arrive. I had observed all the rules of social life in India and they were hardwired in me, even though I didn’t really know it. Then arriving in America, there was a whole new series of rules to learn. This is one of the reasons I’m so interested in the unsaid rules that govern social life. Immigrant writers often reflect this experience of cultural difference by showing how characters live a public life and then a private one. For me, I don’t think the difference can be so clearly marked. Our public lives are constantly in flux, same as our private ones, and the lines separating the two are often porous. This is my experience of being a 1.5 generation, of existing in America and India at the same exact time. For good reason, I tend to forget that I started at an American high school only seven years after I arrived in this country. High school is already hellmouth, but to fight off those demons when you are simultaneously thinking of the place you left and the place you now live can be brutal.
YN: On a more lighthearted note, what does tennis mean to you?
SP: Tennis means a tremendous amount to me. I grew up playing cricket in India and tennis was the first sport I turned to in America. Some colonial vestiges, I think. I love the geometry of a court; I love that a single racquet can produce such a variation of shots; I love the deep green of a hard court; I love how much my body aches after a particularly long match; I love the once-in-a-while grace gained from hitting a perfect one-handed backhand. I am also drawn to it as a social space, in the same way I’m drawn to a basketball court, a golf course, and the baseball diamond as social spaces of community and conflict. And I love the professional aspects of the sport. Arthur Ashe winning the U.S. Open, Ivan Lendl as the iceman, Roger Federer as the ultimate inside man, Serena Williams pushing the game to expand its sense of itself. I don’t really miss the constant live sports that I was addicted to before the pandemic, but I will sorely miss the summer season stretch of the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open.
YN: Can you talk about your relationship with Epiphany?
SP: Epiphany published one of my earlier stories called “M-o-t-h-e-r,” which I then used as the opening for my story collection The Blind Writer. It was such a thrill to share a table of contents with Derek Walcott and Elena Ferrante. I am so thankful to Elizabeth England, who was the fiction editor then, and Willard Cook, who has steered the Epiphany ship, for giving the story a home. I have been reading the magazine since, which has continued to grow and expand in such wonderful ways. I feel like Epiphany has been with me and cheered me on as I have grown as a writer.
YN: Lastly, what did you learn about yourself in writing Members Only?
SP: First, I learned that I can finish a novel—that I can take an idea from inception, through drafting, and then onto completion. It gives me the confidence to write more. Second, Raj Bhatt has been needling me for a long time. I needed to get his voice out. I needed to work through his inner life. I needed to see him grow. But perhaps most importantly, I needed to work through the larger issue of what it means to want to belong, and the heartbreak that ensues when you don’t. I needed to work through what it might mean to be brown in America. These are the realizations I give to Raj Bhatt, but of course, they are the realizations I’ve come to myself. As one of the characters in the novel says, “I’ve learned to make nowhere the somewhere I live.” Perhaps that’s what I’ve learned: to enjoy living in that nowhere and to create a meaningful place of community out of it.
Sameer Pandya is the author of the story collection The Blind Writer, which was long listed for the PEN/Open Book Award. He is also the recipient of the PEN/Civitella Fellowship. His fiction, commentary, and cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, including the Atlantic, Salon, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and Narrative Magazine. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Members Only is his first novel.
Yoojin Na is a writer and an ER doctor. Her work has appeared in Joyland, Quartz, The Rumpus, and others. She is working on a memoir that explores her identity as a 1.5-generation Korean American and a formerly undocumented immigrant. She currently lives in New York City.
