Sameer Pandya ’94 explores issues of race, belonging and midlife in his debut novel, Members Only (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020). The book follows Raj Bhatt, a middle-aged Indian American professor, over the course of a very difficult week — one that forces him to confront how society talks about race. Pandya, an assistant professor of Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara, discussed the book with ΢²ªÊÓƵ Magazine.
What was your inspiration for writing this book?
I have had this character tapping on my shoulders for years. I wanted to write a novel in the first person about an Indian American everyman. He has a certain education level and class level, so an everyman from a particular milieu. I didn’t know how to do it. And then I entered my 40s, and I began to occupy some of these emotional spaces that Raj Bhatt ends up occupying. And then I had this idea of a cringeworthy moment and wrote the opening chapter as a short story. I had a sense there was a lot more here, that I wanted to spend more time with this character. When I go back into his past and his early life, you have an added layer.
Cringeworthy is a word that’s come up in reviews of the book, too — in a positive way. What do you hope readers get from it?
There is a way in which the scene that gets us going is profoundly cringeworthy. I didn’t sit down to do it that way. The scene itself is incredibly fraught, and the cringing kind of arrives. But what I did try to do on purpose is give this character a self-deprecating humor. I think perhaps the reviewers were also speaking to being able to enjoy the journey with a character that is extremely self-critical, self-referential and self-deprecating at the same time. I tried to balance out the difficult moments with a certain lightness of humor.
How do you think this book fits with the national discussion about race right now?
Part of the reason race as a category has had a consistent presence in our American lives is it operates on all sorts of levels. In this novel, I try to think about the implicit ways race operates. What are the quiet moments that have a strong presence to them? And how, in this one particular character, some of those implicit moments build up over the course of a week and lead to the climax of the novel. This, in a smaller way, is asking the question of how we talk about race.
You majored in history at ΢²ªÊÓƵ. Did you always want to be a writer?
I loved my time at ΢²ªÊÓƵ. I majored in history and had a minor in English. When I left Davis, I wanted to be a writer, but, if I’m completely honest, I was scared and nervous. I did a Ph.D. and became a literary scholar. When I was at ΢²ªÊÓƵ, I wanted to be a writer. I put it off for quite a few years. I returned back to it full time with my full attention in my early 30s when I was ready. That ambition was clearly set at ΢²ªÊÓƵ — it just took a little bit of time to settle into it.