Love and reconciliation, but also bitterness and anger

There’s a small flood of books by Indian-American authors in the last few years that are specifically about the second-generation Indian-American experience. Other Indian-American novelists have spanned multiple generations (Well-Behaved Indian Women, by Saumya Dave), some simply feature Indian characters without making much of their identity (Dava Shastri’s Last Day, by Kirthana Ramisetti), and then there are the collections of romance novels by Sonali Dev, Sandhya Menon, Sonya Lalli, and Nisha Sharma. But several sit squarely in the born-and-brought-up-in-America territory. Among these is Neel Patel’s debut novel.

Tell Me How To Be is about a family in the aftermath of the death of Ashok, the husband of Renu and father of Bijal and Akash. The two boys are grown up and independent, but as in most such stories, there is one success: Bijal, who has a huge house and a Porsche and a beautiful blond American wife. And, by Indian-American standards, there is one failure : Akash, who had bad grades in school, dropped out of college, and is making a tenuous living as a music producer in LA.

As also in many such books, there are secrets. Akash is gay, and when the book opens, he is in bed with his Caucasian lover Jacob. His family does not know about his sexual identity, and each call from his mother is fraught with the tension of whether she has found out from social media, from the inevitable desi gossip, or from some administrative oversight by Akash, such as forgetting to forward his mail to Jacob’s place.

This is the problem with lies: they always circle back to the truth.

Much of Akash’s life revolves around secrets. Some are barely hidden, such as his drinking: he has had blackouts on more than one public occasion. Some are deeper, such as his on-off relationship with Jaden, who is black, and his childhood passion for Parth, one of the few Indian-American boys in their small Ohio town.

The novel alternates two points of view: Akash, and his mother Renu. Both refer to their secret, distant loves as ‘you’, providing a connection between the sections, but not a writing style I liked. Akash’s sections are quite a bit stronger than Renu’s, unfortunately, and this makes the book seem unbalanced.

Renu too has a long-ago love that she has never forgotten; in her case, it is Kareem, an African Muslim with whom she had a relationship during her student days in London. But her family would never have countenanced a marriage, and so she married Ashok instead. There is a side-plot about a pregnancy and miscarriage that seems unnecessarily overwrought, but Renu moves on to a very comfortable suburban life in Ohio with her doctor husband and two sons.

Alas, Renu’s life in Ohio is miserable, and she makes that very clear. She is relentlessly angry and bitter, to her sweet-natured husband, to her kids, and to the people around.

My rage simmered like the oily sheen of a curry, splattering the stovetop and walls.

There are a few forced interactions with other Americans, where ‘blond’ is used as a shortcut for Caucasian, which I think is a little sloppy.

The women in my book club [..] are all very young and very blond

Renu has had diverse experiences in multiple continents, but the contrasts she draws are limited to ‘London’ vs ‘America’, which is rather like comparing cosmopolitan New York to a provincial village.

In London, there were others like me, doing the talking and fighting. But in America, where people still ask me where I’m from, and how I got here, and to what church I belong (none — I’m a Hindu), I keep my mouth shut.

This also seems simplistic and sloppy, given that the whole book is about subtleties of belonging.

In other ways, Renu is so stereotypical as to be boring, despite her wealth of cultural experience. To her young boys she says things like:

“You see what happens when you marry a white girl? You get bland food every day.”

When her son Bijal marries a Caucasian-American, her thoughts run along the lines of

My son [..] makes six hundred thousand dollars a year. God only knows what his “Jessica” does with it.

It’s hard to work up any sympathy for Renu, given her complete lack of sympathy for anyone else.

The minor characters are in the novel are one-note. Chaya is Renu’s closest friend, and she is relentlessly mean to everyone around.

“Do you see Timi?” Chaya whispers to me. “That’s her third helping of bhel. No wonder she wears a size twelve.”

Jacob, Akash’s lover, is impossibly kind despite Akash’s infidelities and unreliability. Parth is perfectly athletic, capable and doesn’t suffer from any identity hangups. Taylor, who runs the book club, is hopelessly bigoted with no redeeming features. Only Jaden seems to have depth, and is portrayed with both affection and hints of a life and experience beyond the glimpses in the novel.

This is an unpleasant portrait of the Indian-American community. The other Indians in small-town Ohio make comments like:

No chutney for the potatoes? Is she mad?

The novel does better when it comes to Akash and his agonizing journey to coming out of the closet. He writes about the casual racism of the upscale gay community in LA:

I’d fought with Jacob that night, saying the only thing worse than a straight white man was a gay one — because gay white men conceal their racism with sequins, while straight ones wear it proudly on their sleeves.

Akash’s relationship with music is also appealingly written:

Sometimes I joined in, freestyling over their percussion, arranging my own melodies, until someone would look at me and say, with wonder in their voice, Damn, Osh. You got skills. And for that brief moment I existed, I was real, a stray piece of thread woven into the fabric.

The novel can be darkly funny.

“Renu, I love your food,” he said. “I could die eating this.”

And then he did.

So it’s an uneven, imperfect novel, but there’s still something authentic at its heart. Neel Patel and his fellow Indian-American authors are opening a window into more subtle aspects of being brown and Indian, and in this case queer, in America — good for them.

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