On the weekend that eighteen-year-old Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge, I tucked my infant son into his carrier and took the train to my childhood home in New Jersey. My mother wanted to see me. She wanted to talk about the death—of the tragedy of it, and a single damning fact of the story that seemed, when she turned it over and over in her mind, to implicate us all. Of more manageable concern were the boxes of college books that, seven years after graduating, I still hadn’t unpacked from my parents’ basement. She and my father were talking about selling the house, and she wanted them gone.
The details were trickling in, but this is what we knew then of Tyler Clementi’s story: He was born and raised in New Jersey, roughly a decade behind me. He played the violin throughout his childhood and teenage years. When he came out to his mother, an evangelical Christian, she had withered at first. Then she had held him and asked him never to hurt himself.
“God,” my mother said. “That poor woman.”
I was new to motherhood then, and my love for my son was still feral—more instinct than emotion. In the months before and after his birth, I had run through all the wretched possibilities. Stillbirth. A fatal diagnosis. Sudden infant death. In the final months of my pregnancy, as my husband and I walked across the Manhattan Bridge to our Brooklyn apartment, I pestered him with impossible questions. What would you do if the baby fell into the river? If you were carrying him on your shoulders and he slipped? Would you go in after him?
My parents came from India in the 1970s. They were beneficiaries of the 1965 Immigration Act—legislation that stood on the shoulders of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—banning raced-based quotas in immigration policy. Designated as “skilled workers,” they settled into suburban America—a curated community of white, heterosexual, middle-class families. In another town, Matthew Shepard was murdered. In my town, a math teacher announced that he would refuse—if asked—to teach a gay student. In the hall of Congress, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was written into law. Anita Hill was discredited. Monica Lewinsky became a national punchline. My adolescence pulsed with jokes about sluts and knee pads and blow job lips.
On the night before Clementi’s suicide, his roommate, Dharun Ravi, filmed the early stages of a sexual encounter between Clementi and another young man, then posted it on the internet and invited others to watch. Though the intensity of this violation was shocking, the sentiments behind it were not. FUCK MY LIFE, Ravi wrote to a friend when he discovered Clementi’s social media profile. He’s gay. Fearful of his roommate’s sexuality, Ravi apparently dressed each morning behind a makeshift wall.
Ravi was born in my parents’ Tamil Nadu, and we were raised in the same immigrant enclave of New Jersey. It’s a large community but scattered across the state. When I was younger, my parents would drive hours each weekend to socialize with people they knew from back home. I searched my extended family for any connection to Ravi. I wonder, had I known him, if I could have saved both boys.
In 2019, four young Black girls were verbally assaulted at a high school homecoming game in suburban New Jersey. At first glance, the case was wrenching and typical—the hurling of racial epithets, the targeting of African Americans in a historically white setting, the power gap between victim and perpetrator further widened by age and gender. The distinguishing detail was the assailants’ identities; they were both Indian-American.
In her essay “A Racist Attack Shows How Whiteness Evolves,” historian Nell Irvin Painter discusses the boys’ cruelty as an enactment of American whiteness. She writes, “The assailants are demonstrating how race is a social construct that people make through their actions. They show race in the making, and show how race is something we perform.”
I send Dr. Painter’s article to my mother, but she isn’t fully convinced. “But you grew up here,” she tells me. “And you aren’t broken.”
The most striking photograph in my parents’ house is a memorial. It is a picture of my eldest first cousin, laughing on the beach, taken a few years before she died in childbirth. Of all the details that have been passed down over the four decades since, there is one that still strikes me. When a relative called her father—my uncle—to convey the news, he repeatedly corrected the man as though the information were being misdelivered. You mean the baby died? Uma must have survived. The baby must have been the one who died. The baby had, in fact, survived. She is still alive, and now a mother of three. But in that moment, my uncle tried to will away the worst possible loss by trading it for one more bearable. Take my grandchild and let me keep my child.
I think, too, of a moment when I was eight or nine years old, watching a classmate who was mercilessly bullied, step into her mother’s car. They hugged, and the mother smoothed her daughter’s hair before returning her hands to the steering wheel. I was struck by the sadness and beauty of this. Somebody loves this girl. Some-body’s pain is greater than hers.
At his 2012 hearing, Dharun Ravi’s mother delivered a tearful plea on her son’s behalf. As a mother, I feel that Dharun has really suffered enough. Her accent is so familiar to me, so Tamilian. The way she rolls her R and opens the O into an A. Mather. This intimacy both heightens and softens my rage.
In the end, my parents decided not to move. I’ve taken my favorite of those college books and left the rest just as they were. My father, who has long viewed our New Jersey neighbors with a mixture of amusement and anthropological curiosity, occasionally levels ridiculous threats to get rid of the boxes. “I’m going to take your copy of The Feminine Mystique and leave it on Mr. Harmon’s porch,” he once said, referring to our neighbor whose house is flanked by military flags and who, when his wife left him, hung a sign that read Good Riddance, Bitch over his door.
I generally avoided Mr. Harmon growing up, but I always liked his children. They were sweet kids who kept to themselves. In credit to my mother’s point, they didn’t seem broken. Quiet, maybe, and a bit sad, but intact. I regret that I didn’t talk to them more. I passed the sign countless times and wondered what it was like to live in that house, but I never thought to find out.
During his first trial, there was a looming threat that Dharun Ravi, an Indian citizen, would be deported to the country he left at age five. It’s a detail that seems both particular to the case and germane to the American criminal system. The extremes of justice can beget new cruelties.
When Ravi’s conviction was overturned in 2016, the court wrote, “The sense of loss associated with a young man taking his own life defies our meager powers of reason and tests our resolve to seek consolation.” To mourn the loss of a young life is to imagine the joys that were once possible: the hours of music he would have played, the requited and unapologetic love he may have experienced, the privacy around his most private moments. Dharun has really suffered enough. How much of Clementi’s joy would have been enough?
In researching an upcoming novel, I recently had coffee with a man who had, at age fifteen, fatally shot a classmate during a high school argument. I wanted to know what reconciliation had looked like in his life—with himself, with his family, with the family of his victim. Woven into our conversation was the work he had pursued in his twenty-five years incarcerated in the Louisiana State Penitentiary; he served as the Angola librarian, mastered American Sign Language, and volunteered at the prison hospice. At his second trial, the victim’s mother approached him and took his face in her hands. He expected her to hit him. Instead, she kissed him and said, “You’re going to be all right.”
He and I discuss the lines of culpability. He says, “At the end of the day, I did it.”
“But you were a child,” I counter.
He repeats, “But I did it. And I have to spend the rest of my life seeking mercy.”
We talk, too, about the imperfect world in which violence is bred. Would he have pulled the trigger if someone else had noticed his pain? If his classrooms had offered him anything meaningful? Why did it require a prison sentence for him to be surrounded by books? Only in a broken country would a fifteen-year-old have access to a handgun to begin with.
But you grew up here. And you aren’t broken.
Following the murder of Trayvon Martin, my cousin—a lifelong suburbanite—told her teenage son to stop wearing a hoodie. She and I have discussed racism before, but always remained on the familiar terrain of brownness, chronicling racial epithets that nobody likes to talk about, but nobody dies from either.
Now, we talk about Trayvon Martin, and we talk about motherhood. We talk about the way sons slip gradually from boyhood. How she remembers when she had to pick her son’s clothes for him, slip them over his body, ask him to hold up his hands before bath time so she could help him undress. Eventually, I understand that she is seeking an answer to a question she hasn’t directly asked: Is a brown mother of a brown child entitled to fear?
I’ve had some version of this conversation in the years since. With my Iranian neighbor in New Orleans, where I now live. With my childhood best friend, who moved from India to the States as a child and then left for England as an adult. With my cousin who survived her mother’s death. With my own mother. We are neither black nor white, but from a distance, we are more likely to look black than white. This is the technicality that pushes us from one America to another. And this is the condition for which we have to seek mercy. We are more accustomed to enacting whiteness than to touching black grief.
I have a theory about the boxes, and everything else I’ve promised—and failed—to move from my parents’ basement. It comforts us all. I want a place to store these artifacts, which might eventually acquire some practical or sentimental purpose. My parents need to be reminded of the persistent hold of parenthood, that their children are within reach. I’ve surrendered any expectation that they will ever sell the house or move from that street. That, too, is a comfort. At any time, I can go back home and take in the photographs and the books. I can see which neighbors still live on the block. I can sort through everything broken and everything owed.
Sheila Sundar is a writer based in New Orleans. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, Catapult, Guernica, and other publications.
