The Mathematical Values of Feeling Adrift
Photo: Karan Madhok
Nishant Injam’s debut story collection The Best Possible Experience (2024) features a cast of characters between India and the United States who are often homesick for another world: a world that could be a physical or a metaphorical distance away, a world they aspire to with the burdens of a life unfulfilled.
The unnamed narrator of in Nishant Injam’s story “The Math of Living” is an Indian immigrant in the United States, a coder who works for the Chicago Tribune. The narrator returns home often to see their parents in India, but each task in their life in the U.S.—and each return home—is described only as a larger template of repetition, leaving room only for the specifics which seem so insignificant that they aren’t even explicitly expressed. The template describes their every return and reunion with their parents. Injam writes:
My parents will be at the airport, waving at me from a sea of onlookers. They will be as excited as children. My father will do [a] or [b]. My other will do [b] or [c] or [d]. It’s not surprising that my parents will shower me with love. I know they can’t help it; they haven’t seen me for a long time. They will offer to take my bag and ask [e] questions about my well being. (152)
And on and on, until the passage of time turns the narrator numb to emotion. There are no ways left of expressing this grand loss—this separation from one’s country, one’s family, one’s identity, oneself—until only the ‘formulas’ remain, cold and incomprehensible. Injam writes: “There’s no mathematical value to feeling adrift in a white country.” (154)
Feeling ‘adrift’ is one of the major themes in The Best Possible Experience (Vintage Books, 2024), Injam’s mesmerizing debut story collection, featuring 11 tales with a cast of characters between India and the United States who are often homesick for another world: a world that could be a physical or a metaphorical distance away, a world they aspire to with the burdens of a life unfulfilled. Like the narrator in “The Math of Living”, these characters are saddled with not just an elsewhere, but a someone else. There are Indian immigrants in the U.S.A., grasping to the strands of memory of their homeland; there are young men and women desperate to straighten the disorder of their lives with work, marriage, and citizenship; there are buoys floating adrift from the guidance of parents, from the social pressures of caste and sexuality; and ultimately, there are faces of a young India left to sail alone, grasping for self-identity, while drifting further away from family and nation.
Injam revels in the thorny complexities of East and West in the many cultural crossroads… There are no easy answers to these conundrums. But where answers lack, stories bloom—and the pulse of this collection are these stories that defy clear objectivity.
One such story is “Summers of Waiting”, a tale about tragedy, nostalgia, and the lost meanings of ‘home’. Sita is a U.S.-based woman who returns to India to visit her aged grandfather Thatha at his village. After losing her parents, Sita was partially raised by Thatha, but with time, she left him behind, barely speaking across the distance of continents, in what is described as “the sort of distance that opened up between people who loved each other so much that they had to let each other go.” (59) Now, Sita seeks to return not to India but to the memory of India; while Thatha struggles to grasp over the memories of his long life, too. Sita needs Thatha’s stories, to the final remnants of her own past.
Sita floats on an uncertain raft between tangible truths and an abstract, undefinable cloud of complex emotions. While going through old notebooks from her schooldays, she muses:
Numbers and facts were like potatoes that could be held in one’s hand and examined. Loss and grief weren’t like that. And she, in [Thatha’s] unstated opinion, was better off studying the former. Her boarding school notebooks were filled with long equations and random scribbles. Her whole life had been studying then, except when she’d come home in the summer, and Thatha was doing his retirement thing… and they spent their afternoons each in their own world, not speaking much, him staring into space, and her doodling all over a notebook, and it was already evident that the whole summer was going to be exactly that, reflection after reflection, and in fact all summers from then on would be nothing but a jumping-off point for them—each summer infused with the echoes of summers past, each looking for another time they had once lived. (76)
There are many more characters in the collection who find comfort in expression only through the ‘math’ of life: in numbers, facts, codes, formulas. But those “echoes of the summers past” continue to whisper in their years—consciously or subconsciously—serving as reminders of the other world. The narrator taking a bus home in the fantastical “The Bus” is inundated with an array of seat numbers, tracking passengers as they go missing. In “The Immigrant”, Aditya arrives as a struggling student in Philadelphia, where he faces a gushing waterfall of tribulations while trying to grasp the social rules of American life: “All these lexicons, he was like a sand particle on a beach, wave after wave rushing at him” (37).
In “Lunch at Paddy’s”, Padmanabham—or ‘Paddy’—a recent immigrant to the U.S., panics at the prospect of hosting his son’s friend for lunch. “What was white-people food?” (89) he wonders. The family is in disarray by this social obligation, afraid of any Indian dish that would offend the guest. He is desperate to “programme” the day as he would a computer programme, to write an error-free code that would not spring upon him any unpredictable surprise. When he senses that his daughter could be growing jealous of the fact that his son had made friends in America already, he thinks, “Maybe programming errors were simpler to fix.” (100).
At the heart of the story is the anxiety of recent immigrants, worried of misrepresenting themselves and their entire culture in their ‘host’ nation. By the end, we’re left with a feeling of dread for Paddy, who fears his ability to adapt himself under the white gaze: to change the way heats, the way he treats his children, the way his family decorates their home. He has even changed his name to ease his transition into the new culture “He had no idea,” Paddy thinks, “American would turn him into such an anxious wreck. “But what mattered that the kids would have a good future, and Paddy took consolation in this fact.” (98-99)
Many characters like Paddy—and the specifics of the poignant situations they find themselves in—are likely to haunt the readers long after they’ve left the page. Like the uncomfortable unsaids of Jhumpa Lahiri’s tales, a grand weight of cultural and social trauma lies behind each of Injam’s immigrant stories, of silences that can’t possibly have words apt enough to fill them.
One of the most-captivating such tales in the collection is “The Protocol”, the story of Gautham, an Indian immigrant in the U.S., hoping to pay his way into a green card with a temporary marriage to an American citizen: a young black woman named Ashley. Gautham meets Ashley for the first time at a McDonald’s, where he arrives heavy with the emotional baggage of expectations and longings. He had the guilt of being a burden on his own mother, a domineering woman whose long shadow he couldn’t escape even across the oceans. He had lustful fantasies of blond white women, but aspirations of marrying a “traditional Indian woman who cooked and cleaned and touched Ma’s feet when they went to India” (129). Most of all, he longed to find love and stability before being ravaged by the arrow of time: while staring at his reflection on a train window, he grows concerned about his thinning hair, and feels the desperation to “find his woman before it was all gone” (136).
Gautham, like many of the other Indians in The Best Possible Experience, is stuck in two worlds: aspiring to assimilate to the West or ‘western ways’, but never able to fully shed the Indian traditional conditioning of his childhood. He wants an Indian wife, which he is unable to get until—he believes—he is able to secure his legal status. He is ignored by white women, who wouldn’t even “sit next to him in class, forget marrying him” (129). But he extends the same colourism towards black women, when he thinks, “He himself was dark-skinned, but if he married a woman darker than him in India, people would treat his children even worse than they treated him” (129).
Injam revels in the thorny complexities of East and West in the many cultural crossroads. In many of the stories based in India itself, the pressure of caste and religion further complicate the desires and motivations of his characters. There are no easy answers to these conundrums. But where answers lack, stories bloom—and the pulse of this collection are these stories that defy clear objectivity.
“Come With Me” opens in the familiar world of boyhood in small-town India, of young Arun exploring his first urge of sexuality with Salim, an older boy he plays cricket with. It’s an introspective and thoughtful story, building tension through Arun’s undefined desires and Salim’s charming and unpredictable personality, all peppered in with the religious divide between the two boys.
The set-up is familiar. Many stories in this collection rarely take risks beyond the expected, or tread new ground in the plot. Cliches are revisited, particularly in stories like “The Immigrant” where Aditya wonders of catching the light at the end of a dark tunnel (49) or thinks of dark humour as his best friend (52). The tensions in some stories are spoon-fed to the reader, like the Hindu-Muslim divide in “Come With Me”, or Aditya at the end of “The Immigrant” explicitly stating: “He could return home to India a failure and watch his mother die. Or he could stay and watch himself die, slowly, dispassionately. That was his choice.” (58) In most of these cases, the explicit is hardly necessary: the stories are already powerful enough to communicate the heart of these tensions.
For many protagonists in Injam’s collection, this invisible lasso is a reminder that no distance is far enough to shed one’s past, no one too adrift to not see a horizon beckoning them back home—even if the idea of a home is as artificial as a fruity-smelling detergent bar.
At its best, Injam’s prose is often uncomplicated and direct, with little dance of language to distract from the heart-wrenching power of the stories alone. Often, it is the attention to minute details that paint vivid, unforgettable pictures. In “Summers of Waiting”, Sita tries to ensnare a little bit of India back with her to America, seeking an ‘artificial’-smelling Indian detergent that she remembers from her childhood:
Even in the smallest of things, she felt it. When she was growing up, she’d barely noticed the detergent bar they used in the village, a local brand smelling of soapy citrus, but in the States, she’d come to miss the smell—the fruity artificiality of it. She’d tried to order it online but couldn’t find it. There were days when she would arrive at her apartment, tired from working, and relax by searching for soap on the internet. The other bars, she quickly found, weren’t artificial enough. (60)
There is always a better elsewhere, it seems—even if it was never the real thing.
The collection concludes with the titular story, “The Best Possible Experience”, a touching narrative about Alex and his father, Mr. Lourenco. A tour guide in Goa, Mr. Lourenco is an intense mediator and curator of culture and stories, one who his extremely serious about the business of mythmaking. His philosophy is to create the “best possible experience” for his guests, even if it involves embellishing and falsifying certain histories. And these histories include Mr. Lourenco own genealogy, a tale he adopts to claim Portuguese descendance for himself and Alex.
Mr. Lourenco is most passionate about taking flight and dreams to live vicariously through Alex, making every sacrifice he possible can to help his son become a commercial pilot. This is a literal desire of flight, as well as a figurative dream to fly away from the Earth that keeps him rooted to caste and community. In his eagerness, Mr. Lourenco is overprotective of Alex, and over-curious, too, poking his nose in his sons training, his relationships, into every aspect of his life, until Alex is hardly able to forge an identify for himself beyond that designed by his father.
In Alex, we again encounter a character seeking to fly, while remaining lassoed to the Earth. For many protagonists in Injam’s collection, this invisible lasso is a reminder that no distance is far enough to shed one’s past, no one too adrift to not see a horizon beckoning them back home—even if the idea of a home is as artificial as a fruity-smelling detergent bar.
And so, they continue adrift. In “The Protocol”, Gautham and Ashley worry that their sham will be exposed after an error at their green card marriage interview. Gautham tries to assuage Ashley’s guilt by blaming himself. He should never have left India, he says. “A country was an empty T seat; you should never leave in search of a better one. Once you go, there’s nowhere to return.” (147)
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar. He is the author of Ananda: An Exploration of Cannabis In India (2024) and A Beautiful Decay (2022), both published by the Aleph Book Company. His work has appeared in Epiphany, Sycamore Review, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, Fifty Two, Scroll, The Caravan, the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels (Aleph Book Company) and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2022 (Hawakal). You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
