Nishanth Injam’s debut book, ‘The Best Possible Experience,’ is an emotionally charged telling of an immigrant’s longing for home
By Ashwini Gangal
The Best Possible Experience: About being visible
From experiencing “low-grade immigrant anxiety” to dealing with death, Nishanth Injam’s debut book, The Best Possible Experience, a collection of 11 short stories, packs an emotional punch. Originally from Khammam, Telangana, Injam came to the U.S. around 13 years ago, at 22. After an unhappy affair with computer science, he pivoted to professional writing. In an interview, Injam tells India Currents how his book comes from a place of longing for India, his emotional struggle to feel at home in the U.S., and how, if he got a do-over, he would probably not make the move from India to America.
Injam lives in the suburbs of Chicago with his wife and son and is working on his second novel.
Edited excerpts from the interview:
India Currents: Your book is fiction, yet it reads like non-fiction. After reading these stories, I feel like I know you fairly well because it betrays your interiority to a great extent. What is this genre? Transparent fiction?
Nishanth Injam: It is fiction. Perhaps this is true of all brown artists and writers living in the U.S. — as a brown immigrant, traditionally, you don’t have visibility, you’re almost never seen. Subconsciously, part of your work becomes about being visible, about making the space to be rendered fully human. So I think it’s inevitable that the work I do will in some fashion turn into a self-portrait.
Except for a couple of them, the stories are not directly drawn from my life. Also, it wasn’t just a desire to write stories of my life but was also about trying to capture India. For instance, there’s homophobia, Islamophobia — I was trying to say, ‘my home might have been ugly but it’s still my home.’ It came from a sense of wanting to represent home in all its beauty and ugliness.
IC: Right, caste comes up in the book too. About being invisible in America, what do you mean? Aren’t we more conspicuous because we’re brown?
NI: For instance, I have to repeat my name and elongate all the syllables at coffee shops. There’s a total loss of another language that I use. There’s mannerisms… you can’t read white people as well as you can read Indians because you don’t have that shared history and all those years of cultural jargon and knowledge… I lost my intuition.
So it feels like there’s a part of you that will forever remain hidden. Having to contend with that hidden part, having to explain yourself to people, having nobody see you for how your family and friends back home might have seen you makes you invisible. There’s no more to you than ‘Oh, you work in tech?’ — That reduction is something I felt strongly against.
IC: These stories seem to come from a place of deep pain and sadness. Now that the book is out in the world, how do you feel? Has the pain subsided?
NI: I was trying to take my feelings and keep them close to me. In my real world, my mom died, my grandfather died, my grandmother got dementia, my dad’s health is not in good shape, so I had grief. The core of grief is still there, but I’m not consumed by pain. I don’t know if catharsis is the right word but having expressed it makes it easier.
At the time, I was missing home and it seemed important to recreate home and keep it next to me. So I was writing from that — from the pain of alienation, the pain of exile.
IC: Speaking of exile, I see how the H1B visa, without ever being mentioned in the book, comes up several times. Is that what you’re alluding to when you speak about being “trapped” in America?
NI: The visa for sure was a part of it, especially when I look back to my early years here. I had a student loan and though I hated my job I couldn’t switch because the H1B restricts you and you have to find somebody else who will sponsor you and all of that. Until you get the Green Card you’re left hanging, and there are all these restrictions that make you feel like you’re not actually free.
But even more than visa categories and any of those systems, when I say exile I mean that sense of loss. I’ve always felt more connected to India, to my family in India. So it’s a sense of ‘Oh, I cannot be with them, I cannot be in my home.’
IC: That’s rough. Is immigration worth the psychological cost?
NI: At times I really think that moving here was probably the biggest mistake I made. I don’t know that I would make the same choice if I could go back. I can see how a young woman who maybe got into an arranged marriage in a traditional patriarchal setup where she might suffer would have a much higher quality of life and more freedom in the U.S. — there are definitely so many advantages to living in the U.S. — but for the kind of person I am, perhaps this came at a great cost. That’s my sense.
IC: It’s hard enough admitting that to oneself. It’s commendable that you’re admitting that openly.
NI: I’m not living my day-to-day with regret but there’s still that clarity that I made this choice hoping for something, but perhaps that was not the right choice.
IC: Ironically, you have an American accent…
NI: I think two years ago I started pronouncing things differently, so it’s easier for people to understand me. This is really funny because I code-switch; it’s hard for me to control it. It’s all crisscrossed in my head now.
My brain is confused! (Laughs)
Read – BOOK REVIEW: HISTORY OF A WOMAN-THROUGH THE AGES, MISSED VOICES AGAIN
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Ashwini Gangal is a fiction writer based in San Francisco, who has published stories and poems in literary magazines in the UK and Croatia.
Courtesy: India Currents (Posted on November 27, 2024)
