Sameer Pandya: Author of "Members Only" Talks Tennis, Brownness, and the Power of an Immersive Writing Routine
In Sameer Pandya’s debut novel, Members Only, Raj Bhatt, a middle-aged, Indian American professor, experiences the unraveling of his seemingly successful immigrant narrative over the span of one short week. An offhand comment at his exclusive tennis club draws accusations of racism. A complaint accompanied by a doctored video by a group of conservative students at his university brings charges of reverse racism. Complicating the racial tension is Raj’s own feelings of inadequacy and invisibility as he struggles to find belonging in the spaces he navigates.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Sameer via telephone where we discussed the importance of establishing a writing routine, the messy nature of open democratic spaces, sports as part of the American narrative, code switching’s role in racialized experiences, and how music can create common language among generations.
Let me start with, I really loved this book. You wrote incisively about issues we are not talking enough about. So much of our discussion on race encompasses the black and white spheres, but your character, Raj, shows us some of the issues that exist between those two spheres, in the “brown space” as you term it. On page 24 Raj is thinking about his position in the TC, as well as what some more diversity would bring to the club. “If Bill knew the invisibility that I’d felt, which I suspected he did, then I hoped that would mean he and I could see each other clearly.” Given this book will come out as charges of police brutality and racial protests are engulfing our country, can you discuss Raj’s feelings of invisibility as a man of color?
I use this notion of invisibility in a couple of ways. Raj’s own intellectual biography is shaped by Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, which overlaps very much a central part of my own intellectual coming of age. That book was extremely important to me and remains extremely important to me. Part of the invisibility I'm trying to work out is what the nature of his invisibility is — is there a way in which Raj is visible and included until it is determined that his exclusion is necessary? He occupies a particular kind of invisible space that when he sees Bill, he first recognizes. There is something similar about their experiences, but the nature of Bill's invisibility is going to be different from Raj's. I hoped to infuse Raj with enough self-awareness so that he is not thinking in complete one-to-one connection between the two. And yet of course they have an incredible amount in common. They are doctors, but they're two very different types of doctors. One is a doctor of philosophy. The other is a doctor of medicine. There is a love of the game. They both have boys. But Bill is African American while Raj is Indian American. So on one level, I think there is a connection between the two, but what Raj is experiencing in this book is a particular kind of racialized experience that in some ways is similar, but also very different from the necessary arguments being made in our country right now. There are systematic forms of recent racism that have shaped the lives of African Americans in this country. Part of what Raj is trying to work through is the conversation on race that we are all having, and the ways in which race operates sometimes in smaller, quieter, yet pernicious ways that shape Raj’s life.
Raj also explores another topic so important to our national conversation. On page 136 he says, “The writers of this site seemed incredibly alarmed — threatened — by a more diverse nation, with a changing workforce and a changing set of voices.” This is a powerful statement about our collective lack of judgement about truth in news. The site in the book is Freedom Now, but the parallels to real “news” sites are uncanny. It comes up again when the Mansfield video is released on page 228. This is a doctored video, spliced together to create an image of Raj that is untrue and biased. This is obviously an issue in our current climate. Can you talk about what you hope to come out of including this situation in Members Only?
Part of the reason why the classroom becomes such a vital democratic space is that we can arm young folks with the tools to recognize what kind of information is being thrown at them, who is producing information, and the ways it is embedded explicitly, or implicitly. We're teaching them to do with the media what we're teaching them to do with the novel: what is the subtext, who is narrating, whose view is being worked out. At a certain level when you are teaching literature, you are actually doing those various jobs all at the same time. I often say to my students, you're going to forget this book. You're going to sell it. You might give it away. You can do whatever you're gonna do with it. That's perfectly fine. I'm just hoping you will remember the conversations we've had around how I want you to read the book, as opposed to the details. I think that close reading, critical reading practice has become more vital in terms of that second video. I didn't sit down to create a scene that perfectly encapsulates how the media is operating. It seemed organic that this video would be created through splicing. And perhaps the point of that section is let's be extremely careful about how we assess where information is coming from. As Raj says, you can take this to the media department or the audio visual department and they will show you the digital stitching. Make sure students and everyone else recognize the truth is the ideas that are within the stitching rather than the stuff that you see directly.
The same issue crops up later in the week with Robert and his attachment to Alex and Holly. I liked what Raj had to say, “...these ideas you’re getting from Alex and Holly, from so-called news outlets like Mansfield — you need to stay away from them. [They are] telling you that you and I are completely different kinds of people based on the color of our skin. We’re not.” Given the current crucible of racial tension, where does the narrative of brownness fit in, as you described it, “the underdiscussed experience lived between black and white,” and the idea of belonging?
America has multiple racial narratives, multiple racial histories, that operate all at the same time. I think this is in some ways why we've been having these conversations the way we've been having them. There are different experiences very much shaped by that black, white binary and locating your position within it. This notion of brownness is my attempt. It was one very specific example to think through the privileges that Raj has. What is he able to do? What is he unable to do? I think the notion of liminality, particularly because he is an anthropologist works really well with this idea that you are betwixt/between. You are neither one or the other and what that looks like. What it is for Raj, and what I find particularly interesting, is it's not a stable space. He is in essence code switching — code switching when he's speaking to the committee, code switching when he is by himself, code switching when he picks up the phone and calls his mother.
I think about this notion of belonging a lot. What are the emotional, political, and social desires we have to belong to groups. It is pretty darn profound, the feeling one gets when you are protected and you have space amongst peers. What I tried to do with this novel is use the question of race, but also class to think about the ways in which the lines of belonging shift around. How does class shape the ways in which people are included into certain groups and the ways that we should be excluded in others. The car you drive or the cut of your jacket, the watch you're wearing, or any of these things shapes the way people bring you in. I wanted to think through how race shapes it. There are other modes, and I wanted to be very specific about the experience Raj has. Hopefully for readers, this specificity allows for the broader thinking on that term, as well as how they see themselves experiencing these notions of belonging.
On the note of education, on page 333 Raj is talking to his students about everything that happened over the week and he makes the statement, “There is no better place I know than the classroom for us to work through big ideas, and to discuss what we agree and disagree on.” Is this the role you see educators in as we move forward from listening, reading, and protesting about racism?
This is a campus novel and I wanted to write within a tradition I really love, and at the same time reflect the ways in which college campuses have changed in our current moment. I wanted to use this novel to show the ways it remains this remarkably productive public space where we talk and argue, teach and learn. For me, the classroom has always been a sacred space. I was an undergraduate who loved the university. I had not done particularly well in high school, but somehow when I arrived in college I felt like I had found my mother ship. That line that you quoted from the end of the book is very much what Raj Bhatt, the narrator, believes his role is within these kinds of arguments and conversations that are swirling around in the book. What he is offering is an occasion for conversation and debate as a way of working through ideas in some ways with some of these students that have been set in stone. He is offering the opportunity to say, “Let's take what you know. Let's take what I have said, and let us try to dig through it in the best way we can.” That is part of what I was trying to get at with this novel.
Throughout you have pretty deep tennis knowledge such as the mentioned Lendl backhand on pg. 166, and I read your articles on Federer, Murray, and Lin for ESPN- what is it about sports? I felt like Raj treated the tennis court as almost a democratic space where you were judged on your ability, not your ethnicity, but that space operated in the construct of the TC, a site of racism in the novel...how do you see sports operating in our society, what is their role to play in the national conversation on race?
I love sports. I love watching it. I loved playing it. When I came to this country, when I was eight, I picked up tennis because there was a tennis court next to us, and there was a man who would come by and take serves, and I started collecting his balls. There’s something outside language in a way when it comes to tennis. I've always loved the feel of it. I've loved the way you can use the racket to produce so many endless kinds of shots. It's one of the pleasures of watching different tennis players. All of them right now have different styles, different ways they could have produced the magical shots they produce.
I do think part of the American narrative is that sport is a space of pure meritocracy. You either win or lose based on your skillset or ability. But, that court does not exist in a vacuum, it's placed somewhere. In this particular example of this book, you have to walk through very socially segregated space in order to get there. For me, sports operates two ways, separate but never at a distance from the world we exist in. When a player steps on the court, he or she brings a tremendous amount of back history. I will not be the last one to admire John McPhee’s Levels of the Game. It is an amazing work of nonfiction about two different men arriving on court, Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. He uses this one match to tell an entire story about these two very different men playing against one another. That's what I wanted to do with this book through Raj’s story, to show how much he loves the court, how much he thinks of it in the same way. It becomes the metaphor for the classroom. There are similar kinds of open democratic spaces, and yet those open democratic spaces can get really messy. I wanted to show that space, and then show the mechanism for it all at the same time. We write these books, cross our fingers they resonate and serve as a mode to have these difficult conversations
On page 287 Raj describes his practice of spending Fridays writing, even though he considers his progress inconsequential. Could you describe your own creative process? What is the most important piece of writerly advice you could give someone with a work in progress?
Writing books is ultimately a pretty serious undertaking. You must feel like you want to write, that you need to write. For years the early, early morning has been an important time of the day. There's always been this balance of figuring out my teaching job, kids, and wanting to write for a while. That period between 5:00 AM and 7:00 AM before anything else started, hopefully, where my mind was still here, where there was no internet, became my time to write.
A lot of people say this, and I just want to concur, the daily act of writing has always been the main thing. Sometimes you take a break, you do other things, you work on different projects. But I have found that when I'm in the middle of a book, in the middle of an article, in the middle of an idea that’s grabbing a hold of me, I just need to write regularly. I have this particular routine that works for me because there's a certain consistency I appreciate. But, you have to figure out the thing that works for you, and then stick to it.
There is something about when you set that time for yourself to be completely immersed in your writing that is powerful. I'm careful to use this, but it becomes its own meditative practice. You're working with no other noise happening.
Can you talk about your journey with Members Only? How long between the idea and publication and what were the milestones along the way?
You write books and you think they are the right book. You work through it and you are excited, but then you realize that part of the exercise is actually writing the book so you can put it away. There are a lot of trials and errors. I had had this idea of Raj Bhatt tapping on my shoulders for a long time. I wanted to create a character that serves as a particular kind of American, Indian American. I'd had him around in my head, but I did not have the story to place him in. My first book was a book of stories. I saw myself being comfortable as a story writer.
I wrote out what is the first chapter of this novel as a short story. This was late 2016. I passed it out to friends. They consistently said stopping at page 25 is not going to give enough credit to this narrative you created. In the summer of 2017, I received a fellowship in Italy which I feel very fortunate about. It was six weeks and not having the daily work of teaching and children and everything else, I just worked really, really steadily for those six weeks. I produced the very, very rough draft of this novel. I put up the six days of the week, and wrote an epilogue. I came home and worked on it further. Then the summer of 2018, I sent it out to agents and the agents I worked with loved it. We sold the novel in August of 2018. My editor and I went through all the copy edits, and then the galleys were produced late 2019. I am excited to say it will be released on July 7, 2020.
Finally, I love when Neel starts playing Raj’s music on the morning ride, even though it leads to trouble at school with his drawing. Music is almost a background in this novel. If you don’t mind sharing, what is on your current playlist?
The music is incredibly important. From everything I listen to, like my father's records in the 1970s when we lived in Bombay, I grew up in the Bay area in the 1980s music scene and went to college in the early 1990s. All of the music is reflective of my own coming of age. In terms of what I'm listening to now...there's a 13 year old and a 10 year old in the house, there’s a 13 year old and a 10 year old in the car. They always seem to have very clear opinions about the kinds of things to listen to.
I think it's a reflection of our moment that hiphop is what they love. They love engaging with it. They love listening to it. I'm listening to it. But it’s a thrill because music at a certain age, is the way in which you are defining yourself. You're defining yourself particularly sometimes in relationship to your friends, but also in contrast with your parents. I listened to heavy metal in junior high, and then I listened to hip hop in the late eighties. These were things that my immigrant parents were not listening to. They had no access, there was no common language. Now we have common language. I mentioned Harry Belafonte in the book — I very much had common language with my father over that. With my own kids, I don't want to be the source of them listening to something because I don't like it. I'm happy to listen to Kendrick Lamar and feel it in the way that they are.
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.
About the Interviewer
Carrie Honaker is a writer currently based in Panama City Beach, Florida. She is a voracious reader and kitchen sorcery addict who found her inner writer at the Blue Ridge Writing Project in 2010. Most days you can find her plowing through a book, writing or dabbling with a new recipe. Currently, she is working on a memoir encompassing themes of motherhood, food, and loss interspersed with family recipes. You can find her on Twitter: @writeonhonaker, Instagram: @corkdorkva, and on her blog Strawbabies and Chocolate Beer.
