Hazy Passages

Tom Zoellner speaks with Sameer Pandya, author of “Our Beautiful Boys,” about football, India, teenage hazing, and the tyranny of success.

By Tom ZoellnerMarch 28, 2025

• Fiction

SAMEER PANDYA’S new novel, Our Beautiful Boys, centers on a mystery. What happened at a party in the desert among high school football players that left one of them badly injured? One of the prime suspects in the beating, Vikram Shastri, is more of an academic superstar than a football maven. He joined the team only out of curiosity. But he has a number of secrets to hide, some of which we learn and others we do not.

Pandya excavates the layers of race and class among Southern California’s upper middle class, which have some mirror images in India, the place that Shastri’s parents have tried to escape in their own ways. Pandya spoke with LARB in an emailed interview.

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TOM ZOELLNER: The epigraph is from A Passage to India (1924). Can you talk about your fascination with the caves in that book and perhaps some of the ways that this novel is an American updating?

SAMEER PANDYA: I first read E. M. Forster’s novel in graduate school, and the talk then was, first and foremost, about his relationship to India and, more broadly, empire. But there was also a secondary conversation around how the inciting incident of the novel—the purported attack by the Indian character Aziz on the Englishwoman Adela Quested—takes place in a dark cave, where language turns into echoes. Here is that epigraph: “Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed into the roof. ‘Boum’ is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it.” Stylistically, Forster is not a high modernist like his contemporaries Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot. But his cave represents a broader modernist concern with unknowability, with indeterminacy, with the limits of language to adequately communicate. Now, one full century after the novel was first published, we have returned to these same conversations around unknowability and truth. We now talk about deepfakes and alternative facts. The cave is once again a really useful metaphor and location for an inciting incident.

During the initial long months of the pandemic, I would sit in my backyard and stare at the Santa Barbara foothills. And at one point, I noticed what looked like a series of caves in the distance. And there, somehow, the idea for this novel was born. The Marabar Caves outside of Forster’s fictional Chandrapore became the Native Caves outside of my fictional Southern California town of Chilesworth. I had an idea for what would happen in one of these American caves—four high schoolers would enter the darkness, and one of them would stumble out later, badly hurt—and I went from there.

My novel is an American updating of Forster in two ways. First, as I have already mentioned, his interest in caves and echoes and miscommunication helps me think through our contemporary moment. Second, and equally as important, the updating comes in the form of the Indian characters. When I first read the novel years ago, I really hated how Forster portrays Aziz. He is a bit sniveling. He is too insistently nice. He is too falsely philosophical. When I teach creative writing, I often talk about how Forster distinguished between the round characters—capable of change in the course of a narrative—and the flat characters, who remain the same throughout. In my updating, the father-son duo of Gautam and Vikram Shastri is a deliberate rewriting of Aziz. I give them the round treatment that Aziz didn’t get.

Some California readers may think of the scandals around hazing on the football team in Orange County’s Mater Dei High School. Did this ongoing news story serve as an inspiration of sorts?

While that story did not serve as direct inspiration, I have been inspired by stories like it, in terms of both football and the hazing. Let’s think about football first. At the professional level, it is an incredibly violent game with very large, muscular men crashing into each other. But they are adults. They know what they have signed up for. They are well paid. They understand the risks. And I, for one, have spent quite a few Sundays watching the game. But all these men, at some point, played the high school version of the game when they were boys becoming young men. And while the high school version may not be as violent, it is certainly dangerous. I am intrigued and then also horrified that boys play a deeply adult game and that we sit on the sidelines and cheer lustily. Several years ago, I was watching a high school game when I realized that there was an ambulance parked on the side of the field. It turns out its presence is required for every game. I sat with that for a bit.

At the same time, I am also intrigued by hazing rituals. Like what in the world is that? The internal logic seems to follow this basic idea: We are going to put you through pain and misery and discomfort. We are going to humiliate you. And if you get through it all, hopefully intact, we will somehow feel assured that you are devoted to us and the team? Logically, it makes no sense. And yet, there must be something socially necessary about it for the hazer and the hazed. Certainly there is an excellent anthropologist out there who has theorized and explained it all. But I am struck by the fact that no one ever seems to say that [this or that specific] case of hazing was proportional and necessary. It always seems to go wrong.

What unites the cast of parents in this novel is their obsession with academic degrees and various other markers of achievement. One character says that her son is “a reflection of the success of her parenting, a preview of his and their collective futures.” Do you think this urge is as powerful among native-born citizens as it is among immigrants?

I teach in the University of California system. One of the metrics of its success is that graduation brings large numbers of first-generation students into the middle class. It makes upward mobility real and lasting. The three families in my novel—and their obsessions with academic degrees and the achievements they allow—are interested in something else. They are already upwardly mobile. And where their children end up in college is not entirely dissimilar to how they have remodeled their house or where they have gone on fancy vacations. Let me give you an example. Recently, I was walking around one of the nicer Silicon Valley towns, and I noticed a really nice house. In the driveway, there was nearly $300,000 worth of fancy cars. And then there was a little sign in the yard: “Proud parent of an MIT student.” The juxtaposition was hard to miss.

But there is something more than just old-fashioned consumption. It is a need to replicate and build on what a family already has. It is also a statement on parenting, which is already such a nebulous, complex act. You don’t know what you are doing well, and you don’t know if you are that type of parent who will, to quote Philip Larkin, “fuck you up.” Getting a kid into college, and a good college, makes you think you did something right. Something good. And now, let me put a Stanford sticker on the back of my Range Rover.

With these three families in particular, the urge for all this is pretty equal. The Berringers are a white family with old money; the Shastris are Indian American and make good tech money; Veronica Cruz is single and does well as a celebrated academic. The Shastris are the only immigrant family here, and there is a way in which they use their immigration as one more driving force. In thinking about this urge, it is less an issue of native versus foreign-born than of how, within the upper middle class, race shapes and then imperils the ways one approaches this drive for achievement.

One of those major characters, Veronica, is a professor who describes her job mandate as challenging her students up to a certain point, “but not so much so that they would feel uncomfortable.” Yet plenty of discomfort follows her, along with a large helping of intellectual cruelty on the part of her colleagues. I was reminded of the similar rules-based paradox of football: you’re supposed to hurt people, but only so much (and this precept is violated all the time). Was this an intentional contrast between football and academia?

I went off to college when I was 18, and now, some 30-plus years later, I am still on a college campus. I love campuses. I love campus novels. In one way or another, campuses show up in all my books. The first is anchored by a novella about a graduate student; the second is narrated by a lecturer having a really terrible week; and this time, I have an eminent historian of Latin America as one of the main characters. Campuses tend to be our cultural canary in the coal mine. And the novel’s job is to follow that. To listen carefully.

In my first novel, I purposefully thought about the campus as a type of members-only club. Some have membership, while a lot of other people are looking in from the outside. I didn’t really set out to create any parallels between football and academia. But now that you mention it, academia is certainly gladiatorial in its own way. Everyone thinks they deserve to be quarterback or to get their hands on the ball. A touchdown—a book, a prize, tenure—is often seen as an individual feat, downplaying the big bodies that blocked for you along the way. But at the same time, the acknowledgments section of any academic book is a remarkable document that shows just how much of a team effort it is to produce a well-researched book. Both football and academia are deeply regimented by rules. But the big difference is that in football, the rules are codified. In academia, those rules tend to remain unwritten. And they sometimes change. And here, the campus novel becomes useful in tracking those changes.

Another tension in the novel is the complicated legacy that India throws into California, the beautiful idealism and the striving capitalist reality of both places expressed in different ways. Another main character, Gautam, “wondered if the long shadow cast by Gandhi and the Gandhian life—of simplicity and austerity and nonviolence—had been too much pressure for them, too much for anyone.” Has this family truly left the old world behind? Does anyone?

I left India when I was eight; I am now 52. Forty-six years here, eight there. And yet, the eight have had an outsize presence in my life, creatively, emotionally. In the case of Gautam and Gandhi, the family has this photo of Gandhi in their house, a copy of a photo that Gautam’s parents carried with them from India to the United States. At one small level, they literally brought the old world with them. And I use the photo to think about the long shadow that the past casts on the present. In many ways, this is a consistent theme when writing about immigrant families.

I am trying to think about the ways in which the past never remains the past for all three families in the novel. The Shastris of course. But also, the teenager MJ Berringer, who is trying to come to terms with his family’s wealth, trying to unburden himself of it in at least one way by walking around barefoot. Veronica Cruz is contending with the past by distancing herself from her parents, who she feels don’t understand who she has become.

And so, to your question about whether the family has left the old world behind, whether the past can be stopped from intruding into the present, I don’t think so. And the fact that you can’t makes for great narrative tension.

Silences, excuses, and half-confessions are scattered all over the book. In a climactic moment, a teenaged Vikram writes about how, on the football field, “despite all his Gandhian baggage,” he takes odd enjoyment from “the purity of laying out an opponent.” But just as important is what he does not write in his school assignment: his motivations for the crime at the center of the book. Is telling part of the truth sometimes enough? Can we ever expect full transparency from people?

Yes, sometimes getting part of the truth is better than none at all. We would like full transparency from people, and yet transparency does come with costs. One of the things that I was paying attention to in this book was the nature of families. How do they come together? How do they fall apart? What do kids say to parents, and how do parents respond? In this context, and in the context of the silences and excuses you mention in your question, I am particularly interested in the lies and half-lies we tell ourselves and tell others in order to keep on keeping on. To slightly tweak the Didion phrase, we tell ourselves lies in order to live: I feel great. That didn’t hurt my feelings at all. When I am done with this, then I’ll take a break. I love you. I’m just kidding. I am a good person. Things aren’t really that bad.

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Sameer Pandya is the author of the novel Members Only (2020), a finalist for the California Book Award and NPR’s “Books We Love” of 2020, and the story collection The Blind Writer (2015), long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award.

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Featured image: Photo of Sameer Pandya courtesy of the author.