The following is an excerpt from Optional Practical Training by Shubha Sunder. She is the author of the story collection Boomtown Girl, which won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. Originally from Bangalore, India, she now lives in Boston with her family.
Told through a series of conversations, Optional Practical Training follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman navigating her post-college year in the U.S. on a student work visa. As she teaches math and physics at a private high school near Cambridge, she quietly resists the expectations of those around her—family, colleagues, landlords, and students—while longing for the space to write. Through their words and assumptions, a nuanced portrait emerges of a woman shaping her identity, ambition, and sense of belonging. It is now available to purchase from Graywolf Press.
There was this immigrant man, the landlord told me, Indian, like you, who came to this country around the time of the First World War and wanted to become a citizen. He was Sikh. He had a long beard and a turban, and his lawyer had to convince an immigration judge he was white, since only white immigrants were allowed citizenship back then.
Was he fair skinned? I asked.
The landlord, a professorial type with his round spectacles, corduroy jacket, and assortment of mail tucked under his arm like a stack of student papers, seemed pleased by my question, as if I had raised my hand in class and said something insightful. What this episode in American history had highlighted for him was not so much his country’s racist past—of that he had always been well aware—but rather, the tricky concept of race itself. How do we define it? The lawyer’s previous client had been a Japanese man, and during that trial the lawyer—who was himself, needless to say, white—had placed a hand alongside his client’s to demonstrate the similarity between the foreigner’s skin color and his own. But the judge was unconvinced. You’re not white, he told the Japanese man, you’re Oriental. So, for his Indian client, the lawyer was forced to try a different tack. This man is of high birth, he said to the court. In his society members of the noble Brahmin caste look down on darker, lower castes the same way we whites in America look down on the Negroes. Therefore, he is one of us and should be given citizenship.
Are you Brahmin? the landlord asked me, pronouncing the a sound as if he were saying “apple.” We were standing in the wood-paneled foyer of his building in Cambridge. I had come to see the apartment I’d found listed on an online forum the previous week, a time when I’d still been a college student, living on the small, tranquil campus outside Philadelphia that had for the last four years, since 2002, been my home in America.
I spent a lot of time in India, he continued. Delhi, mostly, but also Goa, at a hippie commune. I was in an altered state much of that time, I might add. It was the seventies, after all.
In our email exchange, the landlord had been terse, stating only that the apartment was available starting in August and that he would see me there May 18 at 8:00 a.m. I’d wondered if I had put him off by describing who I was and my reasons for moving to Boston, but now it seemed clear he was a congenial sort, just not over email.
I remember, he went on, how the matrimonial columns in Indian newspapers used terms like “wheatish” and “dusky” to describe women’s complexions. Is it still like that?
I said it very much was and that Fair & Lovely cream, which he might have seen advertised alongside those personal columns, remained a popular product.
Remind me, he said, you’re a graduate student, yes? High school teacher, I said. Math and physics.
That’s right, he said. I remember now.
He led the way up a staircase that, like the paneling in the foyer, was of dark, rich wood. From the sidewalk, the building resembled a large house. But inside it was obvious how the doors—two on each landing with brass numerals—were entrances to separate flats. The steps creaked as we ascended, and the sound thrilled me, as if I were climbing a formidable mountain, hearing the footsteps of those who had gone before. On the third level, he produced a key and revealed a bright studio apartment slightly larger than the dorm room I’d vacated the previous evening before taking the overnight train to Boston, with a stove and sink against one wall, and a bay window facing the street. Eleven hundred a month, he said. Heat and hot water included. If you don’t like the furniture, I can remove it.
I said I would find the furniture useful, since I had none of my own.
It’s an international community here, he went on, leaning against the doorframe with his hand on his hip. There’s a Harvard postdoc downstairs, an anthropologist from Colombia. I was an anthropology major, too, in college. Never imagined then that I’d end up in real estate. He looked at the ceiling and shook his head in wonder. When I bought this building twenty years ago, it was a mess. I had visiting scholars from Africa and from China say, We thought America was supposed to be a first world country—why are these places like third world dwellings? People who want to bring back rent control forget how embarrassing some of those properties were.
I walked to the bay window and looked out at the view. The rent would be almost half my monthly pay.
What do you think? he asked me. It’s nice, isn’t it? You’ll like the neighborhood, too, I have no doubt. There’s an Indian restaurant right around the corner. And Christina’s further down. Fantastic selection of spices. The young woman down the hallway is a musician, from Latvia or Estonia, I forget which. She performs regularly at the Lilypad, next to Bukowski, where my discussion group meets.
At the group’s last gathering, he said, a participant said she couldn’t help despising the Sikh man for the move his lawyer made in court. She’d known a Sikh kid growing up, known that his parents had fled India, where they’d been harassed and threatened for being Sikh. The kid was a junior in college on 9/11, and a week after the attacks he was accosted on the street and pummeled by a pair of white guys. They thought his turban meant he was Muslim—they said this in their police statement, as if, had he been what they thought, their actions would have been justified. It disgusts me, the woman said, when members of different oppressed groups, instead of banding together, become caught in a competition to see who could be “more white. She had to remind herself that there was a larger issue at play, that the Sikh man was essentially trapped. He had to claim he was white because that’s what the system demanded. And though these systems are created by people, they become like air and water—they’re all around and within us. When an individual acts a certain way, we jump to ascribe his actions to his character, forgetting that, like iron filings bending to a magnetic field, those actions are governed by systemic laws. But where’s the question of free will then? someone in the group asked. Are you saying this Sikh guy, presumably of sound mind, could not recognize the perverseness of the case his lawyer was making?
It wasn’t the first time, the landlord said as he led me back down the stairs, that the discussion group had found themselves talking about free will. So many questions seemed to lead to the possibility that everything, all our choices, were predetermined. I believe, he said, it’s a question you physicists tackle as well, yes?
I wouldn’t really call myself a physicist, I said, since all I had was a bachelor’s degree in the subject and a teaching certificate.
On the front porch, we stood surrounded by rain, curtains of water rippling over the lawn and its border of thick-leaved shrubs, obscuring the street and the houses facing us. My mind felt clear. I wanted the apartment. It was the bay window that convinced me. Broad sill; tall, bright panes: already I could picture myself sitting for hours in that nook, coffee and writing journal at hand. My dorm room had had a similar setup, with a trapezoidal bench fitted to the angles of the window, looking out over a tree-lined pond and, behind it, the president’s mansion, whose slate roof turned rosy on clear evenings as the sun went down, a smaller, paler, gentler sun than I’d grown up beneath in India.
You’re here on a green card? the landlord asked, raising his voice over the sound of the rain. He was a tall man, well over six feet, with long, straight limbs and a slight potbelly pushing at the buttons of his corduroy jacket. His eyes had the darting quality of a bird’s, and his lips kept puckering in an expression of mild amusement.
I told him I was still on a student visa, that once I started my teaching job I would be in OPT status. Optional practical training. It was valid for one year. After that I’d have to get a work visa. But the school would sponsor me. The school where I’d be teaching.
Will you go back to India at some point, do you think, or stay here?
I don’t know for sure yet, I said. My plan for the next few years was to teach at the school and, in my spare time, write. I had begun a novel in college and intended to finish it as soon as I could.
The landlord smirked, then nodded, as if he didn’t want to be the one to tell me my plans were fanciful. Everything is before you, he said. Let me know by tonight if you’re interested.
■
At Café Rustica on Beacon Street, I took off my drenched canvas shoes and placed them under my chair, along with my socks and the collapsed, dripping umbrella I’d wrestled against the wind on my walk from the landlord’s. My backpack and suitcase were also wet, but my passport and papers, I was relieved to find, had stayed dry in their plastic folders. As I was rolling up the cuffs of my soaked jeans, Theta arrived. There’s this vortex in Canada, she said, sucking in tons of chilled air from the ocean. Coldest spring on record.
She shook out her raincoat, grimacing as if the water drops scattering from it smelled foul. I can’t believe I have another three years to go. I’ve thought about quitting the program just to get away from the weather. It’s making me depressed, it’s making me sick. But my dad would kill me if I quit. He’d say, I came as a refugee, I came to escape genocide, and you’re fleeing from what? The snow? Go buy yourself some mittens and stop whining.
She folded her thin body into the seat across from me, knees to chest, and I was reminded of how she used to brush her teeth in our dormitory bathroom: wrapped in a towel, balanced on one foot with the other beneath her like a heron. She’d been a senior my freshman year and one of the first people to welcome me when I arrived from India. She was glad to see me, she said now, glad I’d gotten in touch. On the walk over, she’d thought about what a different person she’d been in college: an extrovert, a bringer-together of people. The mere thought of attending a party these days, let alone organizing one, made her want to lie down from exhaustion. She blamed the weather more than her doctoral program. She’d grown up in New Zealand and Oregon, and in both places her body had always felt at one with the temperature. Cool, fresh, stable. The Northeast was a different story. Starting in college, she’d been plagued by tension headaches and bouts of acid reflux, symptoms she’d assumed were due to other things: dining hall food, academic stress, the need, particular to our college, to show up to every single late-night party so you wouldn’t be labeled a nerd. These days, in summer, the hot, sticky air turned her body into a heat trap. By early October, while others were out picking apples and enjoying the foliage, she had to stay indoors and drink glasses of water, fifteen or more a day, to douse the fires raging beneath her skin. For about three weeks in the fall, she said, I feel good. Then when the deep cold kicks in and the darkness to go with it, I turn rigid. My muscles become stone. It must be an even bigger challenge for you, the winters, coming from India.
I told her that I’d suffered from asthma through my childhood and adolescence in Bangalore, that within a day or two of arriving in America I’d stopped wheezing. Orientation week was the first time in my life I could properly fill my lungs.
Amazing, she said, shaking her head. Amazing that you had to come here in order to breathe. Let’s get a drink. My treat.
As we sipped our lattes, hers made with soy milk, she told me she was avoiding dairy to see if that would help her temperature regulation. She’d gone off wheat, too, with her now-former boyfriend, a guy from rural Vermont who’d tried to convince her that living in the city didn’t allow her to fully experience the glories of winter. In February, he’d taken her up a mountain not far from his family home. I assumed, she said, that I’d be on the bunny slopes with an instructor while he skied the advanced trails, but no, he wanted us to hike up this remote path to the very top, way past the ski lift. And he didn’t even bring skis—just this flimsy plastic sled, not much more than those trays we used to steal from the dining hall to ride down Radnor Hill. He strapped it over his backpack. He looked like a red turtle. He gave me these tights to wear under my insulated pants and this face mask he said would keep me warm no matter what. For the first half it was bearable. Then my toes started to go numb. Wait till we get to the top, he said. Just wait. You’ll feel this amazing surge, better than sex. My legs were starting to cramp, and my hands, too. I tried taking small steps and large steps, tried breathing all kinds of different ways. Wait till we get to the top, he kept saying. Then you’ll understand. You’ll understand everything. Nature will throw everything at you, and you’ll come through.
Well, we get closer to the top and the wind is so ridiculous I can feel it lifting me off the ground. And he’s acting more and more excited. I can see less and less because now there’s fog—or maybe we’re high enough that the fog is actually cloud. I see what I think is him a few feet ahead of me, and I try to focus on the little pocket of warm air around my nose, held in place by the mask. Soon I’m bent double, charging the wind like a bull, angry as hell. With him, with myself for following along. I fall a couple of times, scrabble, get snow in my mask. And all of a sudden I realize I’m going downhill, the fog is clearing, the wind is no longer knocking me over. I can’t see my boyfriend anywhere. I tell myself he’s just ahead, even though I know he’s probably behind, searching frantically for me. I can’t make my feet turn around. I’m in the grip of something—not exhilaration, not desperation, just a state of perpetual motion, like when I hit my running stride and feel I can go forever. By the time I got to the bottom, my fingers, toes, and the tops of my ears were frostbitten.
A pair of skiers, packing up their car, had gawked at her as she approached. She made her accent extra British—as people like her and me did in situations when we had to prove we were sophisticated. Excuse me, so sorry to disturb, I’m in a bit of a fix here, you see, my friend and I got separated. If there’s any way you can give me a ride into town, I’d be ever so grateful.
I’m used to being the only non-white person around, she said, but this couple was something else—they made me feel like a rare animal escaped from the zoo. On the drive, they said things like, Your English is so good—where are you from? No, where are you from? Where are your parents from? Is Theta a Cambodian name? No, I said, my father wanted me to be a mathematician. And for them this was the most incredible thing they’d ever heard. It was like I was supposed to have grown up in a jungle with monkeys. They gave me their phone number, told me to call them the next time I was in the area. They’d have me over to their house, they said, they would put me up in their guest bedroom. They were part of this dinner group, which every month had a different theme. Last month was Sweden, this month was Mexico, guess what it would be when I visited? They didn’t even ask me if I cooked Cambodian food, or if I liked to cook at all. They just said, We can’t take too much spice—you’d have to turn down the heat.
Theta’s voice had grown shrill, her elfin features contorted into a snarl, and I was reminded of the evening when we’d been part of a group attending a dance in the city—an event for Philadelphia-area international students, held in a building with a high rotunda and balconies overlooking the Schuylkill River. On our walk back to the train station, a man driving by shouted something from the window of his car. I didn’t catch the words—my ears were still ringing from the thumping dance music—but I surmised from what the others were saying that he’d told us we didn’t belong here. Theta’s reaction was louder and angrier than anyone else’s—overblown, I couldn’t help thinking, in light of the grand reception we’d just been given, hundreds of us foreigners from across the world; it was all warmth and camaraderie as we danced and bounced around a six-foot-high inflated globe, but to her all of this meant nothing in the face of a fleeting encounter with a disgruntled stranger.
She propped her elbows on the table and covered her face with her hands. My boyfriend was
right, she continued, speaking through the gap between her palms. Climbing that mountain did make me understand everything. I realized I don’t want to adjust to this place. Dealing with white people is hard enough, dealing with white people and being miserable with the weather just isn’t worth it.
Outside the rain had lessened, but the sky was still overcast, which made the hanging lamps in the café seem extra cheerful. The brick walls glowed, and I envisioned, on fine days, walking here from my studio apartment to have a drink and write. I retrieved my socks and sodden canvas shoes and started to pull them on. I’d worn the shoes for the last four years, I told Theta. Through the winters. My feet had been chilly, but I’d learned to swallow something hot before venturing outside and then walk as briskly as I could to work up a sweat. I’d never felt like an outsider at college, not in a bad way. On the contrary, I’d felt welcomed from the very beginning, pampered even. There were moments when I couldn’t believe my good fortune at having been allowed to come here.
She leaned forward as if about to admonish me but then seemed to rethink what she’d planned to say. So, have you found an apartment?
I believe I have, I said. A room of one’s own, so to speak. How much will you be paying?
I told her, and her mouth opened in shock. Make sure you have enough left, she said, to buy a pair of winter boots. Cambridge sidewalks in January are the freaking tundra.
Excerpted from Optional Practical Training by Shubha Sunder. Reprinted courtesy of Graywolf Press.