Optional Practical Training Shubha Sunder

GENESIS OF THE NOVEL
Like Pavitra, I too came to the US for my undergraduate studies and then took a job as a high school teacher both to maintain my legal status in this country and to pay the bills while I pursued my personal desire to become a writer. This was almost 20 years ago now. I certainly didn’t think then that my life at the time would be good material for a novel, but when I started writing OPT, I couldn’t help but be drawn back to that time when I was setting out to find a room of my own, so to speak, and adapting to my American students and colleagues, whose demands and judgements of me were constantly catching me off guard. The conversations throughout the book are inspired by the many times in my own life when, during what feels like an easy interaction, someone says something that makes me start. At times outrageous, at other times enlightening, sobering, or offensive, these moments during conversations make me feel like I’ve glimpsed myself (and by extension, my race, culture, country of origin, or other aspects of myself) through another’s eyes and been alerted to how different their perception of me is from my own self image.

THE QUESTIONS EXPLORED
I didn’t do any research for this novel beyond some minimal fact checking. My writing was driven by questions that have always haunted me as an immigrant. Who am I in the eyes of America? What does it mean for someone like me, who grew up in a relatively affluent family in India, a so-called third world country that was subjugated for over a century by British rule, to come to America, which has its own deep ties to British Empire, not as an asylum seeker or refugee or economic migrant, but as a young person trying to figure out how to become an artist? What does it mean to benefit from the advantages that America confers on the educated and English-speaking, and from the freedoms that Americans of color fought and died for? Yes, Pavitra is in the US legally, but legal immigrants, while they may have a relatively privileged path, are not immune from precarity, given the delays and uncertainties in the immigration system. What does it mean for someone like her to be here? These questions don’t have easy answers, and my charge as a novelist is to explore, through language, the spaces around and among the false binaries and reductionist portrayals we’re surrounded by.

THE CHALLENGE OF ENTRY POINT
The biggest challenge was figuring out the entry point—where and how to begin the story. I’d had the idea for an immigrant novel titled Optional Practical Training for a long time, but I’d been thinking about it too abstractly—assuming it needed to be told in third person, with multiple story lines etc. I began writing this book during COVID lockdown, in the spring of 2020. My life was at a low point: my husband and I had just separated and were trying to figure out how to co-parent our son, who was then a year old; my finances were in disarray, and I had no idea how I was going to continue to pay my rent. I was shocked and dismayed at myself—my decision to break up my family and inflict pain and instability on the people closest to me. In my state of shame and self-recrimination, I couldn’t help but take stock of what had led me to this point. What was my life? Facing this question meant recalling my younger self, at 22, fresh out of college as an international student, knowing I wanted to be a writer, moving to Boston because it was a literary city, and trying to find an affordable place to live. I started to write a scene in the first person where the narrator doesn’t speak much about herself. Rather, she observes and records what others say to her. As I kept writing, I discovered that Pavitra’s filtered account of others’ voices painted a complex landscape of her inner and outer worlds. The book showed me how we construct our identities through conversations: how the things that people say to and about us inform our sense of who we are in the world.

Words Paridhi Badgotri
Photography Chris McIntosh