Review: Tell Me How To Be by Neel Patel
A novel that’s as much about the individual trajectories of the characters as it is about a woman of colour and a brown homosexual man in a first world country where they are forever outsiders
Tell Me How To Be, Indian-American author Neel Patel’s debut novel is narrated through the dual perspective of an immigrant mother Renu, who has recently lost her husband, and her younger son Akash, who is considering coming out to his family as gay. As Renu contemplates a shift to London from the States after selling the family home, Akash prepares to meet his mother and brother Bijal for a puja for their father before the house is taken over by the new owners. The first person narratorial voice alternates between Renu and Akash as they ruminate on the ways in which they are supposed to present an acceptable version of themselves and the parts they would rather keep hidden.
Both the narrative voices directly address an intended reader, who is different for each of the protagonists. For Renu, it is her first love Kareem whom she was forced to leave in order to marry her late husband; for Akash, it is his childhood crush, Parth, who was his constant companion growing up but with whom things eventually fell apart. Patel’s novel is as much about the individual trajectories of his characters as it is about a woman of colour and a brown homosexual man navigating a patriarchal world in a first world country where they are forever positioned as outsiders looking in. The intended “you” of the alternating voices is thus the haunting spectre of unfulfilled desires concretized in the figures of Kareem and Parth.
In an interview about his earlier collection of short stories, If You See Me Don’t Say Hi, Patel had mentioned that he wanted to steer clear of the “incomplete portrait” of the Asian immigrant perpetuated through stereotypes. In Tell Me How To Be, through his protagonists and the vulnerable positions they occupy within, both, the Asian family structure and the urban landscapes of the Global North, Patel attempts to complicate the homogenisation of migrant narratives within the Western literary imagination. In her 2009 TED Talk, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie referred to this phenomenon as “the danger of a single story”. Patel upturns and complicates this by presenting complex histories of migration particularly through Renu, whose parents “had left India in the 40s to do what was expected of them: follow the British”. Her parents had migrated to Tanzania where Renu grew up. She moved to London with her brother in adulthood before getting married and then shifting to the US with her husband. As Renu notes after her shift to the States, where she is either exoticised or subjected to agonizing scrutiny, “(p)eople get uncomfortable when you’re not what you seemed”.
Patel’s characterisation of Akash, which hits a more authentic note, is similarly laden with nuances that bring out his emotional landscape marked both by the trauma of growing up “different” within an Asian family as well as navigating racial stereotyping when in the company of his boyfriend Jacob’s white gay friends. Patel’s narrative moves through the first three parts, building to a crescendo, before providing a cathartic end in the fourth part. However, the ending isn’t one that the characters or the readers had hoped it would be.
Tell Me How To Be is hard to put down. It oscillates between humorous asides and heartbreaking prose. It is a balance that Patel delicately handles throughout the novel.
Simar Bhasin is an independent journalist.