As the fifteen-minute mark neared, Suzanne interlaced her fingers and placed them on her lap, her tell that she was ready to wind the interview down. “Thank you so much for coming in. We’re going to be meeting at the end of the week and we’ll let you know.”
As we were all saying our goodbyes, the wife turned to me and said, “It was lovely meeting you, Kumar.”
I looked straight at her for a few long seconds before responding. Messing up my easy name earlier was one thing. But this was something else entirely, not even in the same ballpark. I could feel my back tighten. “It’s Raj,” I finally said, feeling a sliver of heartbreak.
The expression on her face changed. I couldn’t tell if it was embarrassment or defiance or indifference. At least if she’d been embarrassed, I’d know she felt bad. I noticed, too, that Suzanne was listening to the exchange. Her face had slightly contorted, as if she’d just witnessed a car crash and knew that I had gotten rear-ended. The rest of the committee had either not heard it or, as was typical with this group when something untoward happened, didn’t know how to react.
The woman had leaned closer to her husband and was now cradled in his arms. They were amiably chatting with the other committee members.
A few months before, Suzanne had asked me to be on the committee, saying that I would be “a perfect addition, a friendly face.” I remember the quote because the words, and their juxtaposition, had wormed through my ears for days. What exactly was I adding? I was, indeed, quite friendly. But was my presence also a show of diversity? Did they all think I was the token who wouldn’t rock the boat? I hated the idea that this was what they thought of me, and yet I’d proven them right by not barking at that woman for calling me Kumar. There were already too many TC events—Labor Day barbecues, Wednesday evening doubles socials—where I clearly stood out, but pretended not to. And that’s why at first I didn’t want to be on the committee. And yet I knew that if I didn’t do it, the TC would likely continue on the same as ever.
Privately I had a plan: I wanted to darken the TC, which had only a handful of nonwhite members, all of whom had white spouses, as I did. It was my midlife project, after years of ignoring the fact that all of the social circles I had been part of—high school, college, graduate school, work—were overwhelmingly white. I had tried not to make too much of this fact. I had convinced myself that my presence in these circles was the start of the change I wanted to see in the world. But then that change never seemed to come. It was almost always just me and a lot of kind, well-meaning white folks. There are members here who still refer to “Orientals” and ask me about the “African mind.” And in the face of it, I’ve mostly said nothing, because I just want to play some tennis and not give a lecture.
My family had arrived in America not long after my eighth birthday, and I had started the third grade in a threadbare public school. The first friend I made lived upstairs from us, his family recent refugees from Vietnam. Perhaps because of the basic lunches we all ate in the school cafeteria together or the small apartments we returned to at the end of the day, I got along with the white and black kids, moving easily between them. But starting around junior high, I noticed that there were classes filled with mostly white kids and classes filled with all black kids. I was placed in the “advanced,” white classrooms. And by the time I arrived in high school, the divisions felt cemented. I spent the school hours with my white friends, who, at the end of the day, walked home up the hill, while all the black kids and I took buses back to our neighborhoods far away. It was only some years later that I connected the image of all those buses lined up after school with the policy of busing. The black students were brought in to diversify the school, but remained very much separate within it.
And throughout this time, there was only the smallest handful of Indians. In that environment, I’d come to see myself as the person in the middle, someone who could talk to everyone, translate across the aisle, and bring people together. Maybe it was that I hated conflict, or maybe I could genuinely empathize with different points of view, find some common ground.
When we’d first started the interviews the previous week, it was a thrill to sip local wine, sit back, and watch how the machinery operated. Couples came in, some nervous, others overly confident. Their sponsors peacocked, we dog-whistled about the importance of family and the culture of the club, and I pulled out my go-to phrase about how this was “our shared backyard.” I was very aware of the fact that, for once in my life, I was in a position of judgment, and I could sense—like a dog can sense a coming earthquake—that this made a lot of the potential candidates uncomfortable. When a couple first walked in, they would chat easily with the other committee members, but with me they seemed at a loss for how to make small talk. I enjoyed it all in the way my historian friends enjoy discovering a hidden corner of an archive, a trove of formerly redacted documents returned to their original integrity that finally prove whatever they’d long been hypothesizing about a certain time, place, and event.
Now, as we were reaching the end of the selection process, not having interviewed even one Asian-American couple, I had the sinking feeling in my belly that I was on a small raft, trying to make my way up the white water instead of down. I knew most of these sponsors. I liked many of them. We tended to share similar views on organic produce and politics. And yet, no one had sponsored a couple who did not, in some much more literal way, replicate themselves. I couldn’t help but feel that my efforts at darkening the TC were going to be thwarted despite my best intentions; at the end of this whole process, I’d still be one of the darkest folks around, which didn’t say much. And thus, as the next couple and their sponsors filtered into the room, I continued to be struck with the weariness that comes from having wasted time.
For the next three interviews, I kept mouthing incensed lines to myself: “It’s Jane, right? Oh, Amy? Sorry, they sound so similar.” “No, it’s Raj, not Kumar, but I do a pretty decent brownface, if that makes it easier for you.” “Why is ‘Raj’ so hard to pronounce? I get ‘Becky’ right.” I couldn’t quite parse the source of my anger. I was mad at that woman for getting my name wrong twice, but perhaps even angrier with myself, for hoping that, given time, I could be part of this club without losing some vital part of myself and my dignity.
Another couple left and I gazed out the clubhouse window at the fading daylight. Before I could catch myself, I let out a full, uncontrolled yawn.
“Are we boring you?” Suzanne asked in a tone that seemed to cut and soothe at the same time.
Of course I was bored. And disgusted. But I didn’t want to let Suzanne or anyone else in on how vulnerable I felt. “No, no. The kids haven’t been sleeping well lately. Bed-wetting.” A lie, but the first excuse I thought of.
Suzanne’s boys seemed as if they had never peed or eaten or talked out of turn. On the court, they mimicked perfectly the strokes the pros had taught them; they seemed destined to become either the Bryan or the Menendez brothers.
I could sense a slight tremor on her face, as if my fibbed account of our familial chaos would rub off on her.
“There are ways to stop that,” she said.
“I’m sure there are,” I said.