A novel about a young man receiving a painful education outside the college classroom.
Tagore’s tale opens as Rohan, a college freshman, parts with his father, who’s just delivered him to Irvine College, which the young man discovers to be a university with an impressively diverse student body. However, Rohan’s Indian father tells him, “Just do one thing for me, okay? Stay with our own kind. Do that, and you’ll be just fine. I promise.” The approval of Rohan’s father looms in the teen’s mind as he dives into many new experiences, both academic and social, that the first year at college offers. As he begins pledging at an Indian fraternity, he also finds himself falling for Azada, a beautiful Muslim student in his English class. It turns out that the frat is driving anti-Muslim sentiment on campus, and when a contentious Muslim leader is slated to visit the school, Rohan is forced to think through his allegiances and his unexamined beliefs: “It was the cost of these illusions—not only on ourselves, but those we love, those we want to—that was finally beginning to trouble me.” Tagore sets the story just a few years after the 9/11 attacks, and she has those events linger at the edges of the novel as xenophobia threatens to rear its head. The author also tightens the grip that Rohan’s troubles have on his life in an expert manner, which effectively drives the story forward. Indeed, events occur at a blistering pace until the protagonist is finally backed into a corner and forced to deal with his troubled emotions. Overall, the story remains bitingly relevant even 20 years after 9/11.
A powerful and timely story about the effects of intolerance on an academic community.