Never Have I Ever

I binged the entirety of Mindy Kaling’s new Netflix serial, Never Have I Ever the day it was released and have thoughts. So many of them. So very many.

I’ll start with, how, last week, as I was watching Kim’s Convenience (which I love), I found myself wishing for an English show about Tamil people, with occasional Tamil thrown in. Master of None was one, I supposed, but it was really about one Tamil person, not a set of Tamil people. And then came Never Have I Ever. In the second episode, Poorna Jagannathan’s character says, to her niece who’s just called her Nalini Mami (Nalini Auntie), “Enna ma, kannamma?” (“What is it, dear?”), then a minute later, “Ayyayyo, oru nimisham” (“Oh goodness, [hold on] one minute”), in impeccable accent.

I could have cried.

I didn’t, not then.

Devi is a fifteen year old sophomore at Sherman Oaks High, who’s living with her mother Nalini, cousin Kamala, and the twin spectres of her recently-desceased father Mohan and the psychosomatic lower-body paralysis she experienced for a few months in the wake of his loss. She decides to deal with her ghosts by becoming obsessed over the hottest boy in her school, Paxton Hall-Yoshida. She carries this obsession to such an extent that she ends up alienating her best friends, Fabiola and Eleanor, and getting in a lot of trouble with Nalini.

Every episode is a further ride into Devi’s trauma-driven tornado of god-awful decision-making, every turn of the script leaving me both cringeing and touched to the quick. My friend, Alexandra, put it best: “It’s such a good portrayal of how grief manifests in anger and self-destruction.” You’re constantly yelling at Devi not to do it but you also, every second, know the unfathomably large well of grief it’s coming from. The writers have found pitch-perfect moments to tell this story; every scene zeroes in on and hits an emotional target.

I also loved the stories surrounding other characters: Kamala, Ben, Fabiola, Eleanor. And, to me, at nearly 40, the defining romance was not any of Devi’s but rather Nalini and Mohan’s relationship. (It doesn’t hurt that Sendhil Ramamurthy is hot as hell.)

So when did I cry? During the last episode. Full-on, no-holds-barred ugly crying. Patriarchal expectations of women have destroyed mother-daughter relationships from time immemorial: seeing the mother of one pair fight them and reach out to her daughter primed me for destruction. The daughter’s response completed it.

When the show was announced, someone in r/ABCDesis was convinced that it would be about a lost brown girl Finding Herself™ in the arms of a white suitor. There was risk of that, to be honest, but I’d say the show thoroughly side-steps that fate. There’s a lost brown girl; there are not one, but two, white suitors; and yet, where really she comes into her own and finds comfort is in the arms of her mother and cousin.

Did I think this show was devoid of flaws? No, there were two.

First, Kamala’s naivete regarding arranged marriage seems strange for a girl who has just moved to the US from India. To be sure, Kamala comes across as naive in many ways but those feel true to her background, while this does not. Nalini tells her that her prospective fiance’s parents will be looking for someone who can cook, clean, and care for their son, “They want him to marry a version of his mother.” While this last insight is may be new to Kamala, surely the first can’t be? Having grown up a girl in a South Indian household, even one that valued its daughter’s education, I can tell you that it has to be a rare creature indeed who doesn’t know that the most prized quality in a daughter-in-law is that she do as she’s told. We hope for a different future (I was lucky enough to get it), we fight for it, but it’s the one that’s breathing down our necks at all times. Hard to think of Kamala being entirely innocent of this pressure, even if she is a scientist. But—and I can’t emphasise this enough—this is one moment of slightly eyebrow-raising characterisation.

Second, when Sendhil Ramamurthy’s character says “thakkali sambar” in one episode, he pronounces it தக்கலி instead of தக்காளி (both would be transliterated into the Latin script as “thakkali” but the first word doesn’t mean anything; the second one means “tomato”).

So what about the famous Priyanka Chopra line? Utterly cringe-inducing … but that whole scene was meant to be cringe-inducing. The induction of cringes is a deliberate strategy through the show, used like a scalpel to produce emotional effects. Like the “Ganesh Puja” episode. There was so much there to induce cringeing: calling it “Ganesh Puja”, for one thing, the North Indian moniker, rather than “Vinayaka Chaturthi”, as Tamils know it; the fact that the whole celebration is, in fact, very North Indian-oriented, as these things in the US tend to be; Devi’s embarrassment and discomfort with anything remotely Indian. But they accurately describe a certain experience and the cringe-induction comes not from the writers misunderstanding a dynamic but from the dynamic itself being fucked-up, sometimes on many levels. Ergo, the way a white guy finds a brown girl beautiful is by comparing her to PC. It’s cringe-inducing not because it’s false but because it’s uncomfortably true in our reality.

And what about John McEnroe’s narration? A bizarre choice but … it ended up working for me, or at least not detracting from my enjoyment.

Overall, NHIE is a show that gets more right than it does wrong. Far, far, far more. But because it’s a show about a minority culture and exists as a lone duck in a pond of white swans, it faces the pressure to be everything to everyone in the wider duck community. It’s not. It can’t. It’s not fair to revile it because it isn’t the show one wanted to see. For everyone who wished for something different, I hope you get what you want. You deserve it, to see yourself in mainstream Western culture. You’re allowed not to relate to this one. But please, for pity’s sake, let those of us who do, have this. Just because it doesn’t appeal, personally, to you, doesn’t mean it’s guilty of a wide selection of isms. It can (and does!) do a great job of sidestepping internalised prejudices while still not speaking to your heart. (And an extra note for folks in India calling it “performatively Indian”: you especially don’t get to decide what the expat experience is like. Please have several seats.)