Illegibly Queer: On ‘All This Could Be Different’
Early in Sarah Thankam Mathews’s debut novel, All This Could Be Different, our narrator, Sneha, describes two friends who take to each other “like Parle-G and chaiya.” The analogy made me laugh, and I snapped a photo of it to send to my sister. Like most Indian kids, we grew up dunking Parle-G biscuits into hot milk tea. As Jaya Saxena writes, “Parle-G is the taste of childhood for anyone who grew up in an Indian household.” But for people who didn’t, the reference likely won’t make much sense.
Novels, in the Western cultural imaginary, are about access. They purportedly double as portals into other worlds, other bodies. Throughout my Creative Writing major in college, I had the advice to “be authentic but ” hammered into me—to be exotic enough to titillate the imagined white audience, but not, Mathews explodes this rule: She denies access.
