It is a rare gift—when you have been contemplating a formative experience for decades—to come across a work of art that breaks down and recreates that experience in a new constellation. For me, that nearly lifelong experience has been immigration, and the work of art reconfiguring it in new light is Shubha Sunder’s new novel, Optional Practical Training (Graywolf, 2025). The book follows a young Indian woman for one year while she works as a teacher in the Boston area—and grapples with her place in a society eager to weigh in on her past, present and future.
The novel is narrated by Pavitra, who came to the US from Bangalore, has graduated from a Pennsylvania college, and is embarking on her year of Optional Practical Training: a program that extends her student visa by twelve months so she can gain work experience in the US. She takes a job in a private school outside of Boston while living in Cambridge and begins trying to make sense of her new life, with no shortage of input from others.
Our first-page encounter with Pavitra’s new American landlord sets the tone. He carries on (and on) in a stream-of-conscious monologue, unfettered and unfiltered, while Pavitra herself fades into the background. He covers:
- Indian immigrants “like you” and their trouble getting citizenship
- Histime in India
- Places to eat Indian food nearby
- Places to buy Indian spices
- Places to meet other foreigners
- His own career path (and seeming disappointment)
- His discussion group
- Free will
In contrast, just a few lines are devoted to Pavitra herself (in fact, we will not learn Pavitra’s name until page twenty and rarely hear it thereafter).
Pavitra—as we learn in subtle, scattered mentions—dreams of writing a novel. Is the book we are reading that work? On a summer writing retreat after her year of teaching, Pavitra will tell us of her own novel’s heroine: “My goal . . . was to have her be an observer, a Nick Carraway sort, present but always peripheral.” Here Sunder seems directly communicative of her intentions for Optional Practical Training.
Another essential “how to read this novel” moment, for me, comes in the very first chapter, in a seemingly covert message ultimately shaping my entire understanding of Optional Practical Training. As Pavitra rides the train to the school where she will teach math and physics, she says:
“Soon I was passing the same backyards and open spaces I’d sped by in March, no longer barren and patched with dirty snow, but green, with that profusion of young spring leaves I associated with Impressionist paintings.”
It seems likely that Sunder intends her novel as an impressionistic representation of her own experience as a foreigner in a new land: her exploration of the way the self forms in the space between distant origins and immediate experience feels wholly authentic. Like Pavitra, Sunder taught high school physics while living in Boston. Like Pavitra, Sunder wrote in her spare time and describes seeking ways of conveying her origins without alienating those “Western readers expecting exotic India,” while carefully finding her place between Bangalore and Boston. “To be over here while writing about over there has been an exercise in defining who I am,” Sunder wrote in a 2023 essay in Lit Hub.
I have been reflecting on my own journey of “here and there” since the age of ten, first after leaving Russia and becoming an American, and then in my twenties, while living in Denmark with my Danish husband and contemplating if I could become permanent resident to a country whose rhythm consistently eluded my grasp. To this day, these journeys permeate my daily thoughts and nearly all my writing.
Yet I had never thought of the experience of identity-creation as inherently impressionistic: as a tableau of layered brushstrokes adjusting your perception of the image and, accordingly, your place within it. And that is, I realize now, precisely what that process of identity formation is, not just for those redefining themselves in diaspora but for anyone defining themselves within a complex world often simultaneously and without consent attempting to define you. The immigrant experience, particularly in its early days, happens to be a consolidated version of such an impressionistic layering of brushstrokes.
For Pavitra, these brushstrokes are formed by the approximately forty people we see her interact with over the course of her OPT year. Nearly all of these characters shower her with winding, often long, and sometimes overwhelming monologues verging on soliloquies—as if they have been waiting for years for a willing receptacle (a stranger, a friend, a therapist?) into which they can unload all they’ve collected.
When my mother and I joined my American stepfather’s family in Boston in 1991, I received a crash course in Americanism, paired with an education on what Russianness evoked in American minds. Well-meaning Bostonians:
- Showered me with New Kids on the Block and other tapes of unfamiliar music
- Dropped off clothes their own kids no longer wanted
- Offered cold breakfast cereal it took me quite a while to get used to
- Blurted out to my ten-year-old self: “Babushka!” (grandmother) or “Do svidanya!” (goodbye) or, even more frequently, rattled off a string of Russian swears, asking me to correct their pronunciation
- Asked me if I knew much about Russian nesting dolls or proclaimed, “Don’t you just love borscht? I do!”—boiling down a complex culture into tangible tokens
While I found many of my own experiences poignantly reflected on the pages of Optional Practical Training, Sunder’s complex narrative also offers an instructive lifting of the curtain onto all that I have bypassed as a white woman moving through the world. A woman who works in Pavitra’s school’s administrative office says to her, as she is processing Pavitra’s paperwork: “And you’re from India—I know there are Muslims there, but it’s not like Iran, say, or Iraq. Besides, you’re such a sweet, tiny thing—how could anyone suspect you of being a threat?” Such lines, plentiful in Optional Practical Training, never lose their jagged edge. Later in the encounter, the woman adds: “I’m looking at you now [. . .] and you’re making me hungry, reminding me of all that great Indian food.”
In another pointed scene, Pavitra’s school principal tells her that to succeed, she needs to think of herself as a brand. The principal asks, “What about you would seem to us—not objectionable, not wrong—but quirky? Now, can you turn that quirk into a strength?” The advice is both appallingly dehumanizing and piercingly real, tapping into a common desire among immigrants to break from the cultural stereotypes binding us and become, rather than a representative of a group, a unique individual capable of offering something no one else can.
Pavitra is showered (drenched, really) with a steady stream of mostly unsolicited guidance on nearly every conceivable subject, from education to racism, individual creative dreams to romantic relationships. And this doesn’t only occur in America. In the only chapter that takes place in India, when Pavitra travels home before beginning her American job, her childhood friend Ajit foists myriad opinions on her. “You and your achiever mentality,” he tells her. “Sorry, I don’t mean to criticize you. You know I admire your focus.” And then: “I remember the short story you wrote in English class. [. . .] That was when I first felt attracted to you. Before that, you were just this boring, studious person with no creativity or imagination. Are you still writing?”
Everywhere Pavitra goes, it seems, someone is ready to remind her of where she comes from and what hurdles she is likely to hit as she moves ahead—and Pavitra’s openness and ability to quietly listen seems to leave her especially vulnerable to torrents people can’t control. “He realized his unfiltered outpourings might sometimes have a repulsive effect, but he hoped I could see he had zero intentions to hurt,” Pavitra tells us of a sort of apology email Ajit sends her once she is back in Boston.
As a twenty-five-year-old in Denmark, I tried to acclimate by joining expat groups. I listened for hours to longer-established expats complain about Danish culture. After more than a decade in the country, many of them hadn’t made Danish friends, were unhappy with their spouses, found the country geographically and emotionally stifling and flat. I’m embarrassed to say how deeply their impressions penetrated my psyche. How readily I absorbed their advice, without always taking the required step back to see if their paints matched the canvas I was trying to bring to life.
While acknowledging our natural tendency to impart our experience, Optional Practical Training also asks that we question the instinct to “help.” I’ve found that after reading so many unsolicited monologues, I am better able to pause my own. Recently, when speaking with an acquaintance—a Ukrainian refugee mother of two young daughters—who admitted to struggling (though from the outside her adaptation and achievements in America appear spectacular), I began formulating a list of suggestions but quickly checked myself, remembering Pavitra, and managed instead to ask: “What do you hope for? How do you see your future?” She seemed stunned by the question. Then, eager to answer.
Sunder, with empathetic and clear-eyed style, reminds us that a person’s essence isn’t only measured by how much she manages to blurt out when given the chance. We see the quiet, intelligent, sensitive heroine in the negative spaces she infuses with her own thoughts, and in the moments when she chooses to share how she responds to others. She readily notes, for instance, the positives of American students’ approach to learning when others critique the American educational system, jokes about “Indian Standard Time” when an Indian band is late coming on stage, and expresses her rage when her boyfriend describes the behavior of Indian people at a concert as “barbaric.” She becomes a nearly effaced narrator in rooms with others, but then carefully observes and absorbs what goes on around her. If Sunder is looking to offer us a new way of perceiving the formation of a foreign self, the strategy is striking and successful.
The forty-some impressions illustrate an extraordinary breadth of human experience, both containing and defying stereotype—ensuring each chapter is weighted with the same messy complexity as a day in the real world. Yes, there are white people like the landlord and the school administrator who are seemingly unaware of the impact of their words and worldviews. But there is also Jenny, a white woman Pavitra encounters at the end of the book, who grew up in India and seems to have contemplated the impact of British colonialism on India’s autonomy. Jenny also seems to understand the complexity of “home,” saying: “I must be a tortoise. Home is my life, everything that I’ve seen and been, and it just comes along with me.” There are kind immigrants who treat others with the respect they hope to receive in return, and there are immigrants like Keiko, sparring with an Iraqi cab driver and provoking others, as means of masking her own unease.
Sunder’s impressionistic lens also reveals that, perhaps, only in stepping back from intense initiations into new spaces can we see them clearly. It was only after settling in Denmark that I began understanding my relationship with America, recognizing that it had, for better or worse, become my home. Similarly, it was only after I left Denmark that I began making sense of the aspects of my Russian-American (and individual) nature that had chafed against Danish society—and to see what I could have done differently to adapt. Pavitra’s distancing demonstrates the importance of not drawing immutable conclusions about an experience, because another stroke of color, another layer, or another source of light can transform one’s entire impression of a landscape.
Writing, too, allows us to create that distance, so it is no wonder that Pavitra craves time with pen and paper. Even when she cannot gain geographical distance from Boston to see it clearly, we get the sense that her dream of a novel has to do with a kind of travel-in-place capable of inserting necessary distance between the self and experiences capable of overwhelming that self.
Through all of Pavitra’s OPT adventures, we find humor often veering into absurdity. Pavitra’s Indian friend Ram tells her about doing yoga with an American teacher. “It was absurd,” he says, “but living in the West meant living in an ether of absurdity.” A few pages later, he tells the story of a wealthy Indian Kailash who “housed his dogs in separate air-conditioned kennels and flew them every year to Switzerland on his private planes.” Now, “Kailash’s son was going to have [the Kailash’s mansion] reconstructed, stone by stone, on the fiftieth floor of the skyscraper he was building” where “a private elevator would take him and his Mercedes to the top, where the next generation of Saint Bernards would have penthouse kennels.” Absurdity, in other words, is universal.
This scene reminded me of one of my favorite essays: Alain de Botton’s “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.” To summarize: we are all the wrong person, because we are all flawed. We will therefore all wind up with people who are also wrong, and it’s up to us what kind of wrong we are okay spending our lives with. Pavitra’s time in America suggests a parallel thesis: “You Will Wind Up in the Wrong Country.” Every country is wrong in one way or another. What kind of flaws are you willing to live with, and within?
The book’s title, even as it sets up concrete temporal constraints, winds up being ironic. After all, there is nothing optional about the views Pavitra bumps up against at every turn. Not much practical about the advice she receives, either, skewing as it does toward the unique experiences of each speaker. Does Pavitra, then, end her OPT year any more trained than when she started? Sunder leaves the question for us to contemplate.
