The Best Possible Experience: Stories

by Nishanth Injam

Overview

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR • An emotionally rich collection of short stories, painting a fascinating portrait of contemporary India and its diaspora and a yearning rendering of the people and places we call home, from a major new literary talent.

“A full-hearted, brilliant debut of necessary beauty.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars and New York Times bestseller Friday Black

"Injam's stories made me want to cast all else aside and return home.” —Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning

Vivid, vibrant, and unwaveringly affecting, The Best Possible Experience brings us intimate, impeccably realized accounts of individuals living in one of the most populous countries in the world and in its American diaspora—all haunted, in every sense of the word, by a loss of home.

Classically elegant in prose and consistently modern in outlook, Nishanth Injam’s stories ques­tion what it means to have a home and to return home, and show, above all, that home is not a place so much as it is people who are ready to accept you as you are. We see a young man trapped on a bus on the way to visit his parents as his fellow pas­sengers vanish into the restroom. A family, newly in America, determined to host a perfect luncheon for their son’s white classmate—with no idea what to serve him. A woman who returns to a small vil­lage in India every summer to visit the grandfather who raised her, a man who lives with the ghosts of his son and his wife. And a man preparing for his green card interview with the American woman he has paid to marry him.

A sui generis talent, Injam first started writing after coming to the United States from India in his twenties. The Best Possible Experience, his profoundly personal debut collection, delivers a universal in­quiry into the idea of belonging and preserves in writing the home he left behind, before it was lost

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593470237
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/16/2024
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.19(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

NISHANTH INJAM received an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. He received a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and a Cecelia Joyce Johnson Award from the Key West Literary Seminar. His work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Re­view, Zoetrope, The Georgia Review (which won the 2022 ASME Award for Fiction for its publication of his story), Catapult’s Best Debut Short Stories 2021, and The Best American Magazine Writing 2022. Raised in Telangana, India, he now lives in Illinois.

Read an Excerpt

The Bus
 
The bus has a bathroom. Other buses that leave Bengaluru for my hometown don’t have bathrooms. They pull over on the highway when you have to pee, or they stop at a dhaba and the driver asks passengers to go so he won’t have to make extra stops along the way.
 
The bus is a luxury coach, dark brown from the outside. It has a thirty-two-inch TV and reclining seats and air-conditioning, all of which makes me think: What a good deal. It’s the Diwali weekend and every long-distance coach is full of techies going home. Securing a ticket was impossible, but then I came across a new office at the back of the bus station, a travel company by the name of Alphonso Tours, and they made it happen.
 
The driver is busy tinkering with a hearing aid as I get on the bus. “Don’t use the bathroom for number two. Only number one,” he says, not bothering to look up.
 
I feel the air-conditioning already—sweet. The bus is nearly full. I look at my ticket: 20B. An aisle seat next to a bearded man on his phone, music blasting out of his earbuds. I sit down and relax my feet and begin watching the Bollywood film playing on the TV, a film in which the hero shoves the heroine from the roof of a tall building. Nothing like a movie to alleviate the boredom of an overnight bus ride. We’re past the outskirts of the city now, and farmland has started to appear on either side of the road. I haven’t gone home in months, and I’m torn—can you tell, K?
 
An hour passes. The bearded man takes a selfie and posts it on Instagram. I turn my neck to stretch, and the seat behind me is empty. I remember seeing an old woman with a large nose there, and I can’t tell if she’s moved to a different seat or if I’m confusing her with someone I know from somewhere else. My eyes fall on the bathroom; that’s it. She’s gone to the restroom. But then a passenger in the front, a burly man in 5D, stands up and closes the bathroom door behind him. I turn to my back and count six empty seats in the dark. I don’t remember seeing so many empty seats when I got on. Weird. Must be exhaustion. I continue watching the movie.
 
Five minutes later my eyes drift toward the bathroom. The burly man still hasn’t come out. 5D is empty and I’m disgusted. This man hasn’t listened to what the driver said. Instead, he’s taking an extraordinary dump. People are like that, I guess.
 
A lot of passengers are sleeping, some snoring. The bearded man next to me is watching a YouTube video on his phone: a man keeps springing a toy snake in people’s faces and capturing their reactions. My neighbor laughs whenever the prank results in an especially outsized response.
 
I try sleeping, but the movie is loud.
 
I take deep breaths, but sleep doesn’t come. I can sleep on the bus only if I’m in a window seat. You know that, K. You must remember the time we went on a school picnic and you took the window seat, not on the way to the orchard but on the way back home. Our bellies were stuffed with mangoes, and I told you the bus would make me puke if I didn’t have the window and you called my bluff and we fought over it. God, the kids we were, it wasn’t a pretty sight. You were stronger than me and you felt that you’d won, but I clutched at my throat and retched hard enough for some phlegm to fall on my shorts. You were sorry; you gave me the window seat and offered the kerchief Mom tucked in your shirt pocket. When I began to feel the mangoes in my throat, you told me to take deep breaths and sleep until the feeling subsided. I remember your face, blank, staring ahead, thinking who knows what, as I sloped against the window, falling asleep. Now you’re dead and I’m stuck on this bus.
 
It’s nothing new. You’ve been dead for a while, long enough for me to nod when people ask if I’m an only child. Long enough for me to forget that I had a brother. When you’re twenty-three, everything that happened in childhood feels like a lifetime ago. That’s just the way it is. Sorry, K. I don’t think of you often. Except when I’m on a bus and I’m going home, and what home is has changed irrevocably, not because I live and work in Ben­galuru now, away from our parents, although I shouldn’t say our parents because they’re not the parents you’d remember, they’re my parents now, and I promise there’s no satisfaction in claim­ing them for myself. It’s just that people change and they’re not who they were, nobody is, and that’s what I’m trying to say, that life has changed for all of us, and home has too. We no longer live in the one-bedroom apartment on the hill; we fell to the ghetto soon after you died. What home is has changed so much that I don’t even know how to define it, but here I am, just thinking about all the ways it’s changed, and you, K, are on the top of that precipice.
 
The first thing anyone sees at home is a garlanded photo taken on your tenth birthday. You’re grinning stupidly and mak­ing a victory sign. It might be the only photo of you that doesn’t include me. Did you know that Mom doesn’t make beef curry anymore because she can’t stop herself from bringing up the fact that you used to gnaw at the shin like a dog? Or that Dad carries a passport photograph of you in his wallet to remind himself that if he’d had enough money, he’d have been able to afford the surgery for your head injury? After you died, I became the center of attention. Not right away, of course, but with time, which is what I’d always wanted, but not like that. You were always their favorite, you could make them laugh, make them feel like parents. I just make them feel like needy children now. I send them money, but I never answer their calls or tell them about my life in the city. What’s there to tell? I don’t go home except when Mom pleads and pleads. When I’m home, how can I ignore your stupid grin? How can I take their attention all for myself? I never have this problem in the city. There, people just see me as me; they don’t think of me as a stand-in for the other.
 
I open my eyes. 5D is still empty. Has the burly man passed out on the toilet and hurt himself? Then the bathroom door slides open, as though the person who last used it failed to latch it properly. The room is empty. Where has he gone?

Table of Contents

The Bus 3
Come with Me 18
The Immigrant 34
Summers of Waiting 59
Lunch at Paddy’s 88
Sunday Evening with Ice Cream 106
The Protocol 128
The Math of Living 151
The Zamindar’s Watch 157
The Sea 179
Best Possible Experience 190
Acknowledgments 211

Editorial Reviews

Longlisted for the 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Longlisted for The Story Prize 

Named a Best Book of the Year by the Chicago Review of Books
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
An NPR Book of the Week
Publishers Weekly Book of the Week

“Stunning…Injam’s narratives strike a perfect balance of darkness and light.”
—New York Times Book Review

"So rich and so beautiful."
—Sacha Pfeiffer, NPR's "Weekend Edition"

"Hilarious, heartrending, and wise, Nishanth Injam's stories made me want to cast all else aside and return home.”
—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning

“The Best Possible Experience is a full-hearted, brilliant debut full of necessary beauty. Injam writes of longing, of love, of home and of the Indian diaspora, and as one reads the stories, they find that together they create an epic mosaic of life.”
—Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black and Chain-Gang All-Stars

“In Nishanth Injam's enthralling, deeply intimate stories, characters contend with what it takes to survive grief, heartbreak, disappointment, another culture, and each other. Full of surprises and truly breathtaking moments, this is an exquisite debut!”
—Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

"In these wise, intricate stories, Nishanth Injam shows us, with lancing clarity, the shame and embarrassment of immigration, the ways in which relationships form and dissolve around silences. His is an arresting new voice in contemporary Indian—and American—fiction."
—Karan Mahajan, author of Association of Small Bombs

“The stories in The Best Possible Experience paint a gorgeous and devastating portrait of what it costs, literally and psychically, to make a new life away from home. Nishanth Injam has a gift for capturing complex characters facing the unsettling strangeness of unfamiliar places and increasingly unfamiliar selves. This is a graceful and sophisticated debut from a wonderful new writer.”
—Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections

"These hauntingly beautiful stories of arrivals and departures, of love and loss, are a reminder of the transporting power of fiction. The Best Possible Experience is quite possibly the best debut collection of the year."
—Peter Ho Davies, author of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

“An emotionally rich collection of short stories that paint a fascinating portrait of contemporary India and its diaspora. Nishanth Injam’s stories prod at our understanding of home and departure with a classical elegance and modern eye. Beautiful at both the individual and collective levels, The Best Possible Experience is truly a profound debut.”
—Chicago Review of Books, “12 Must Read Books of July 2023”

“Alive with vivid, vibrant, and affecting writing…powerful portrait…This collection is truly a can’t-miss release.”
—Chicago Review of Books, “The Most Anticipated Chicago Books of 2023”

“Injam’s sparse language and attention to detail render the subtlest conflicts with tenderness and care…We witness a spectrum of social classes, castes, religions, and other identities clashing and interacting in these short stories. Just as there is no one way to be Indian, Injam demonstrates that there is no one way to depict the tenuous relationship between home and migration, or between necessary phases of growth and change.”
—Chicago Review of Books, “Transition as Entry Point in The Best Possible Experience”

“Stunning…The Best Possible Experience is not just a story collection about immigration or immigrants, but about our capacity to feel, to tap into the deepest parts of ourselves, and an exploration of what we find in those depths.”
—Chicago Review of Books, “The Oceans Inside of You: A Conversation with Nishanth Injam”
 
“Dynamic and insightful…Injam succeeds in equal measure with the variety of styles, and he offers enriching details about the various experiences his characters face as immigrants and offshore workers. This is a triumph.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Perceptive and penetrating…A quietly powerful look at a fundamental human desire—for a sense of home, a place to belong…Injam compares and contrasts his many characters, their situations and experiences—specifically, what constitutes home for them and how they cope. Masterful descriptions convey their heart-rending memories and hard-hitting emotions. An enlightening collection full of cultural and societal insights, The Best Possible Experience is a must for readers who loved Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Samanta Schweblin’s Seven Empty Houses.”
—BookPage, starred review

“Eleven gems make up Injam’s stellar debut short-story collection showcasing exquisite quotidian beauty haunted by seemingly inevitable loss…“The Best Possible Experience,” which proves to be exactly what Injam provides lucky readers.”
—Booklist, starred review

“Vivid examples of the emotional price relocation extracts from individuals leaving their homes for better prospects…What marks this well-crafted collection of stories as special is its candidness, as well as, the maturity of the author’s voice.”
—Money Control

"Meticulously crafted narratives…Eloquent meditations on grief…An array of characters and circumstances that capture contemporary concerns with grace; the language, well-rendered details, and strong story structures combine to deliver revelations. Injam’s title story, in particular, is a testament to his command of the short form.”
—Kirkus

From the Publisher

★ 05/01/2023

The protagonists in Injam’s dynamic and insightful debut collection explore cultural identity and family relationships in India and the U.S. In “The Bus,” the narrator, a customer support worker for Bank of America, takes an hours-long bus ride from Bengaluru to his hometown to visit his parents. The trip turns eerie as one passenger after another gets up to use the restroom and then disappears, and the remaining passengers feel the need to escape as the air in the bus grows increasingly cold. It seems their journey ends in their deaths, though a playful tone offsets the morbid theme (“I knew about planes, but I didn’t know these things happen on buses too,” the narrator’s seatmate tells him). In “The Immigrant,” Aditya plans to relocate to Philadelphia from India to help earn money for his mother’s lung transplant. On arrival in the U.S., he’s met at the airport by Indian students who advise him on how to act around white people. The inventive form of “The Math of Living” conveys how a coder at the Chicago Tribune reflects in mathematical terms on his impending visit back to India, where he expects everything to be “formulaic” after reuniting with his family (“My father will do or . My mother will do or ”). Injam succeeds in equal measure with the variety of styles, and he offers enriching details about the various experiences his characters face as immigrants and offshore workers. This is a triumph. (July)

Publishers Weekly

2023-05-09
Young Indians and Indian Americans try to find their footings in the world in this contemplative debut story collection.

In “The Bus,” the opening story, a man embarks on what proves to be a strange and unexpectedly perilous visit to his hometown. In “Summers of Waiting,” a woman living in the U.S. returns to India to visit the dying grandfather who raised her. For Aditya, in “The Immigrant,” his first semester as a graduate student in the U.S. is a struggle to survive. In “The Protocol,” another Indian immigrant seeking to stay in the U.S. takes a chance by marrying an American woman for a visa. Most of Injam’s characters experience deep emotion but don't know how to communicate their love and longing, perhaps constrained by societal expectations of their gender, sexuality, or religion in expressing how they feel. Many of the stories serve as eloquent meditations on grief, but “Lunch at Paddy's,” which tries to be more lighthearted, falls flat. In it, a man named Padmanabham is bewildered by what to serve when his son invites a White school friend to lunch. While some of the humor lands (what kind of grocery store doesn’t stock Maggi?), the story’s attempt to showcase the multifaceted anxieties of recent immigrants doesn’t quite work; why doesn’t anyone, including the two kids plenty exposed to American culture, suggest ordering a pizza? But almost every other story offers readers at least one moment of pure literary satisfaction. Linked by theme and tone, the entries are different enough to merit the reader’s investment in the rich worlds the author creates for each of them. While the collection takes little risk, it offers an array of characters and circumstances that capture contemporary concerns with grace; the language, well-rendered details, and strong story structures combine to deliver revelations. Injam’s title story, in particular, is a testament to his command of the short form.

Injam comes close to fulfilling the promise of his title with these meticulously crafted narratives.

Kirkus Reviews