{"id":1451,"date":"2022-04-13T22:33:10","date_gmt":"2022-04-14T02:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/?page_id=1451"},"modified":"2022-04-15T14:05:26","modified_gmt":"2022-04-15T18:05:26","slug":"sheila-sundar","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/sheila-sundar\/","title":{"rendered":"Sheila Sundar"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Death of Tyler Clementi<\/h2>\n

Originally published in Threepenny Review<\/em><\/h6>\n

 <\/p>\n

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\u2014of 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\u2019t unpacked from my parents\u2019 basement. She and my father were talking about selling the house, and she wanted them gone.<\/p>\n

The details were trickling in, but this is what we knew then of Tyler Clementi\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cGod,\u201d my mother said. \u201cThat poor woman.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was new to motherhood then, and my love for my son was still feral\u2014more 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?<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

My parents came from India in the 1970s. They were beneficiaries of the 1965 Immigration Act\u2014legislation that stood on the shoulders of the 1964 Civil Rights Act\u2014banning raced-based quotas in immigration policy. Designated as \u201cskilled workers,\u201d we settled into suburban American\u2014a curated community of white, heterosexual, middleclass families. In another town, Matthew Shephard was murdered. In my town, a math teacher announced that he would refuse\u2014if asked\u2014to teach a gay student. In the hall of Congress, \u201cDon\u2019t Ask, Don\u2019t Tell\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

On the night before Clementi\u2019s 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,<\/em> Ravi wrote to a friend when he discovered Clementi\u2019s social media profile. He\u2019s gay.<\/em> Fearful of his roommate\u2019s sexuality, Ravi apparently dressed each morning behind a makeshift wall.<\/p>\n

Ravi was born in my parents\u2019 Tamil Nadu, and we were raised in the same immigrant enclave of New Jersey. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

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\u2014the 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\u2019 identities; they were both Indian-American.<\/p>\n

In her essay, \u201cA Racist Attack Shows How Whiteness Evolves\u201d, historian Nell Irvin Painter discusses the boys\u2019 cruelty as an enactment of American whiteness. She writes, \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I send Dr. Painter\u2019s article to my mother, but she isn\u2019t fully convinced. \u201cBut you <\/em>grew up here,\u201d she tells me. \u201cAnd you aren\u2019t broken.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The most striking photograph in my parents\u2019 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\u2014my uncle\u2014to 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.<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s car. They hugged, and the mother smoothed her daughter\u2019s hair before returning her hands to the steering wheel. I was struck by the sadness and beauty of this. Somebody loves this girl. Somebody\u2019s pain is greater than hers.<\/p>\n

At his 2012 hearing, Dharun Ravi\u2019s mother delivered a tearful plea on her son\u2019s behalf. As a mother, I feel that Dharun has really suffered enough.<\/em> Her accent is so familiar to me, so Tamilian. The way she rolls her R<\/em> and opens the O<\/em> into an A<\/em>. Mather. <\/em>This intimacy both heightens and softens my rage.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In the end, my parents decided not to move. I\u2019ve 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. \u201cI\u2019m going to take your copy of The Feminine Mystique <\/em>and leave it on Mr. Harmon\u2019s porch,\u201d<\/em> 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<\/em> over his door.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s point, they didn\u2019t seem broken. Quiet, maybe, and a bit sad, but intact. I regret that I didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s a detail that seems both particular to the case and germane to the American criminal system. The extremes of justice can beget new cruelties.<\/p>\n

When Ravi\u2019s 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. <\/em>How much of Clementi\u2019s joy would have been enough?<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

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\u2014with 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\u2019s mother approached him and took his face in her hands. He expected her to hit him. Instead, she kissed him and said, \u201cYou\u2019re going to be alright.\u201d<\/p>\n

He and I discuss the lines of culpability. He says, \u201cAt the end of the day, I did it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut you were a child,\u201d I counter.<\/p>\n

He repeats, \u201cBut I did it. And I have to spend the rest of my life seeking mercy.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But you grew up here. And you aren\u2019t broken.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Following the murder of Trayvon Martin, my cousin\u2014a lifelong suburbanite\u2014told 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019t directly asked: Is a brown mother of a brown child entitled to fear?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I have a theory about the boxes, and everything else I\u2019ve promised\u2014and failed\u2014to move from my parents\u2019 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

Sheila Sundar earned her MFA from Boston University in 2019. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in\u00a0<\/span>The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Threepenny Review, Crazyhorse, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books<\/i>, and elsewhere. She is currently working on her first novel, and she lives in New Orleans with her family.<\/span><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Death of Tyler Clementi Originally published in Threepenny Review   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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2391,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1451"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2391"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1451"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1490,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1451\/revisions\/1490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}