by Devyn Andrews
March 4, 2025
Optional Practical Thinking by Subha Sunder; Graywolf Press; 256 pages; $17.00.
As Newton’s Third Law of Motion has it, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Though I am certainly no expert in Newtonian mechanics, it strikes me that this is the last remaining vestige of my basic grasp of physics, knowledge that I must at some point have sufficiently demonstrated for the American public school system and then promptly forgotten. Like its pithy biology class equivalent (“the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”), all that remains of my understanding of the building blocks of the world and the truth governing its movement can be summed up by a single, nursery rhyme-like statement—reductive, and in a sense useless. This is language at its basest, meaninglessness disguised as truism.
Fortunately for the world, we have Shubha Sunder’s alternative vision for what language reveals about objects in motion, ourselves included. Sunder’s poignant and subtly wry novel, Optional Practical Training, takes place during 2006-2007 and follows high school math and physics teacher Pavitra during her first year of post-grad employment at a private school in the Greater Boston area. Pavitra, originally from Bangalore, India, moved to the United States to study at an American university. The story begins after Pavitra has been granted an additional year on her student visa to gain work experience, called “Optional Practical Training,” or OPT. And though she studied physics, Pavitra is a writer who envisions herself using the year to complete her novel manuscript. In a series of vividly-rendered scenes from Pavitra’s life during this 12-month period in post-9/11 United States, Sunder examines with beautiful compositional symmetry both the internal and external forces that shape us as individuals, positing narrative as a kind of vector in the ongoing search for oneself.
Written in the first person from Pavitra’s perspective, Optional Practical Training is equal parts campus novel and portrait of the artist. Forgoing long bouts of exposition, Sunder renders this year in Pavitra’s life mainly through recounted conversation with few dialogue tags and without quotation marks. This is not simply a stylistic move on Sunder’s part. Given the inherent subjectivity of first person, the novel seems less concerned with producing some kind objective viewpoint on these encounters than exploring the (far more interesting) landscape of how Pavitra reacts, remembers, and makes sense of these experiences. At many times, Pavitra herself is effaced by the long stretches of dialogue she recounts, both an apt reflection of the social and institutional violence enacted upon women of color and a compositional move that traces Pavitra’s complex and multifaceted sense of self. As an immigrant and a young Indian woman, Pavitra’s identity is in many ways positional. It is clear as she recounts these conversations with her landlord, students, family members, friends, and romantic partners that she is seen, treated, and spoken to differently by different people, and we often learn subtly about the biases and assumptions of people around her through the words they use.
In an early scene, Pavitra recalls an email she received after a visit with her high school ex-boyfriend, Ajit, on a short trip to India:
"He realized his unfiltered outpourings might sometimes have a repulsive effect, but he hoped I could see he had
zero intention to hurt. It was not in his nature to tend toward violence of any kind; as I might remember from our
school days, he’d always been the victim, never the perpetrator, of bullying….No doubt I considered him an idler,
a good-for-nothing—how could I not, when I came from a family of white-collar professionals descended from
the priestly class? While I’d have no trouble finding others who shared my opinion of him, he asked that I
consider for a moment the hypocrisy of my own situation: I claimed to be a writer, but I was terrified of coming
across as unproductive, which, were I indeed a serious writer, unafraid to spend hours each day dreaming and
doodling, I inevitably would to my Brahmin parents and relatives, who, as I myself had once said considered any
pursuit of the arts frivolous. At some level, I must share their view: I must feel guilt at spending time writing, so
therefore I had to keep up the appearance, to others and myself, that I was engaged in something respectable, a
proper, worthwhile use of one’s time. Hence my decision to be a teacher. He didn’t want to judge me, he said in
conclusion; the best thing for us would be to respect each other’s decisions and stay in touch, the way old friends
do."
There’s a sharply calibrated sense of irony with which Pavitra recounts Ajit’s email. By filtering the message’s contents through Pavitra’s recollection of it, the reader experiences the force of the assumptions Ajit makes about her without yielding valuable narrative space to Ajit himself. Sunder’s mastery of tone is what allows this compositional technique to flourish; Pavitra is afforded a greater degree of agency, pushing back against the narrative of another by reclaiming and positioning his words within her own story.
Similar dynamics play out throughout the novel as Pavitra interacts with colleagues, neighbors, and friends. She faces microaggressions both at school and in her personal life, and contends with the sociopolitical and bureaucratic reality of being considered an outsider by an increasingly hostile, anti-immigrant America. With each encounter, Shubha brilliantly deepens our central understanding of Pavitra as a complex, dynamic woman who, like all of us, live at the nexus of forces acting upon and emanating from within us.
Driving the novel are the dual forces of Pavitra’s job and her desire to write. While at first Pavitra seems to contend with the opposing forces of the hard sciences and art, Shubha often juxtaposes the two in a way that suggest that they are in many ways complimentary. Both teaching and writing are, of course, heavily entwined with communication and reaching an audience. By the novel’s close, we get a sense that perhaps the “Optional Practical Training” to which the title refers is meant for us as readers as well. As Pavitra teaches her students to think about momentum, and friction, and objects in motion, we watch as she responds, through story, to the factors that have shaped her identity.
Ultimately, Optional Practical Training is a moving, keenly observed novel exploring what it fundamentally means to be considered an outsider. Through her deceptively effortless prose, Sunder illustrates the push and pull of language, and the role of story in making sense of one’s experience and sense of self. It seems only fitting to leave the final words on the matter to Sunder’s Pavitra, speaking not only one of her students, but directly to us:
"I knew she was too worked up to listen properly, but not knowing what else to tell her, I recalled the example of
riding a bus around a corner. Our intuition says there’s a force pulling us outward when really the only force is
the friction between our body and the seat, directed inward, trying to keep us from sliding off.
What you need to do, I said, still trying to speak gently, is learn to tell the difference between equilibrium and
nonequilibrium."
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Equilibrium and The Self: Writing Identity in Shubha Sunder’s Optional Practical Training
FICTION
Image by Life of Pix from Pexels
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Devyn Andrews is a graduate of the University of Illinois Chicago Program for Writers. Her work has been published in Cutthroat, Memezine, and elsewhere. Previously, she lived in Boston and Sacramento.
