Swimming in fraught waters

Set as it is in an upscale American suburb and focusing on the few nonwhite residents, this first novel may remind readers of Celeste Ng’s Little Flowers Everywhere, but to my mind, Vibhuti Jain’s Our Best Intentions tackles a complex race issue with a little less depth.

Angela (formerly Anjali — her name was changed to better ‘fit in’ ) Singh is a teenager at Kitchewan High “where she has been swimming six days a week all summer”. The daughter of Babur (who goes by Bobby), her mother Purnima walked out on them when Angela was six. Both father and daughter are still scarred by her departure: Bobby has avoided signing divorce papers, Angela secretly follows her mother on the internet, but her name is never mentioned in their house.

Angie is walking home from the pool when she finds a schoolmate stabbed and bleeding on the football field. This is not just any classmate, it’s Henry, the crush-worthy brother of Angie’s friend Samantha (Sam). And in the background, she sees Henry’s friend Chris, perhaps chasing someone? Perhaps chasing Chiara, one of the few black students in the school? Did she hear some yelling just before she found Henry?

Race and money play an explicit role in the events that follow. Angie is pressured into saying that Chiara stabbed Henry, and the residents of Kitchewan are only too ready to believe the worst of a low-income black child. The uprighteous parents are vocal in their demands for more security and safer schools, and, implicitly, for keeping out the rabble.

Where do brown-skinned Bobby and Angie fit into all this? Bobby has made a success of his taxi business, but it’s barely stable, and it’s a far cry from the white-collar luxuries of most Kitchewan residents. Angie and Sam were very close friends and swim-team companions, but of late, the differences in their financial situations has been putting a wedge into the relationship: Sam can easily afford the expensive summer swim camps that Angie cannot. Henry encapsulates privilege with his easy assumption that things will always fall into place for him.

The novel is told from multiple perspectives, and some are more successful than others. The third-person style gives the chapters in Angie’s perspective too much distance, so that the reader seems to be watching her from afar rather than hearing her own voice:

To stay composed right before a race, when her stomach is in knots, she concentrates her entire attention on a single spot a few yards ahead of her, in the water, in her lane. She studies it, the ripples on the surface and reflections of light. She stares and stares, imagining herself there, moving stroking, racing, breathing. [..]

Only it didn’t work in the principal’s office. Someone coughed, and her concentration was broken.

Bobby blames his wife for leaving:

Even though he thought what she did was selfish and unforgivable, he did communicate […] that she could come back right away and he’d forget about it […]. A concession he’d extended not out of a willingness to forgive, but out of a secret hope that he could avoid explaining to his family in Punjab that he, the son who’d made it in America, couldn’t keep his wife. Not that any of that mattered. Purnima refused. [..] It was as if the woman had no sense of duty.

Less successful is the chapter in Chris’s voice, which despite attempts to fill out his life, still makes him seem needy, unstable, and vicious. It would have been a more interesting choice to give him depth, and perhaps, more of a reason for his meanness.

Principal Mabel Burrowes also gets a chapter. She is black, also a rarity in this neighbourhood, and in her heart of hearts admits

Mabel […] cares for all her students. (Not to be shared, never to be said aloud — she does, on occasion, find it a fraction of a margin of a hair easier to care for the students with the darker faces in the sea of otherwise light ones.)

The author does not let either Angie or Bobby off the hook for their own complicity. Angie is nudged into agreeing with the popular view that this is all the fault of the black girl, but she knows immediately that something is wrong.

She recalls with a cringe how after she spoke, the detectives had leaned forward in their seats from across the desk. There was something predatory, hungry about them.

Bobby implicitly reinforces the hierarchy:

[Chiara]’s a drug dealer. In the newspaper today they said she’s homeless. You don’t know this girl. She doesn’t sound like a nice girl, beta. Why get involved?

For most of the novel Chiara remains an off-screen presence. Near the end, we finally get a chapter from Chiara’s perspective, but since it’s not in the first-person, it sounds just like the other teenagers: the difference is only in the content, which provides a fuller explanation of the events leading to Henry’s stabbing. Chiara and the events surrounding her become, therefore, a vehicle for Angie’s growing maturity, which is discomfiting.

The ending is rather pat and simplistic, making this seem more like a young-adult novel. (I’m not sure how it was marketed).

Still, kudos to Vibhuti Jain for breaking out of the dual-identity, Indian-or-American mould that is a central feature of so many Indian-American novels.