Brown Man in White Light is subtitled ‘An Immigrant Romance’, and indeed its protagonist drifts through a series of romantic relationships, but all these are viewed through a prism of language and nationality that makes the book much more weighty than it might seem at first glance.

Robi Sen, the aforementioned protagonist, is a tenured professor of English at a university in Iowa. He had returned to India and married Nondita a few years earlier, but when the book opens, Nondita has suddenly decided to leave him and return to Calcutta.

He saw her life, tied to this small apartment, so very few friends, and an ocean of others all around, these others with a different language, different lives, and she very still in the middle of this ocean, in one place, drowning in place.

Robi must find a new footing, and while he drives alone for miles around the rural areas surrounding the university town, his background and opinions are slowly revealed to the reader. He is an immigrant, neither poor nor rich, not fleeing poverty or violence, and his conflicts about choosing to become a US citizen are thoughtfully explored.

The novel is perceptive and gently pleasant at first. It was written a few years ago, but becomes all too topical when Robi is investigated by the FBI for “teaching terrorist literature”, specifically a memoir by a Muslim boy growing up in Spain. His department chair promptly backs away, putting him on administrative leave “until this investigation is over”. He is barred from faculty meetings and disinvited from lunches with colleagues. His relatively recent American girlfriend Carol breaks things off. He is a sensitive man, and is deeply shaken by the shocking events:

there was a void in him, a vacuum and a fear that had been washed clean and grown sharper, more intense. It pushed up against his throat as he tried to swallow.

Robi is clever, gentle, kind and playful in a distinctly Indian way. (In a movie, he’d be played by Irrfan Khan). He is an observer, always with a voice in his head commenting on each person or event, and then watching his own reactions.

He wondered where she’d learned that.

Such a loss, and at such an age. It was impossible to imagine.

He is also quite passive: mostly content to drift along until events or others force action upon him. During his academic suspension, a woman suggests that it’s a good time to visit his parents in India, and so he does. In India, many people are eager to introduce him to appropriate women for a second marriage, and so he meets them. He can imagine a life with each of them, and it is they who are unwilling to move forward. Eventually, his father suggests that it is time for him to return and face his shadowy accusers, and so he flies back to Iowa, setting the stage for the last third of the novel when he breaks out of his resigned compliance.

The other characters in the novel are seen through Robi’s eyes, and so their motivations can sometimes only be guessed at, which is entirely fitting.

She was smiling, perhaps teasing him; he couldn’t tell.

From its start, the novel notes accents and language.

Pronob had been in the U.S. many long years, but still he had kept his gentle Calcutta tones, unlike so many others who came here.

It is quietly amused at life.

Robi [...] watched a roving gang of ducks. [...] You couldn’t let yourself be seen running from a duck, he thought – especially if you had tenure.

[Trains in India] if you were a child of a numerical bent, counting the bogies whose sides said, so mysteriously for so long, “Tare” and “Do Not Loose Shunt” [...]

Ashi, she said, not looking at him. [...]

Esho, he said, Do come, as though this were an ordinary goodbye and she would return.

Of course, as an immigrant novel, it explores the decision to move abroad or stay in one’s home country, and does so with elegant, introspective depth from many angles. Robi ponders his own life-changing decision to become a US citizen years ago, made partly so that Nondita could join him in the US. Later in India, Robi considers whether Carol would have moved to India with him.

If it weren’t for his suspension, she’d have married him, he thought, and she wouldn’t mind living here, she loved India, she said. And the next instant [...he realized...] he would never have asked her to do what he’d done, what he’d already made Nondita do for him, give up her home.

The pleasure and ownership of one’s hometongue is a thread running continuously through the book, especially when Robi is evaluating possible new relationships (“glad that she had answered him in Bengali...the pleasure palpable of those few syllables from across the room”) He is charmed when a new Hindi-speaking acquaintance, Kavita, turns out to speak some Bengali as well. He has an amusingly irritated reaction to American Ed Jones who speaks Hindi and dominates every conversation (but eventually turns out to be one of the few people who is actively supportive of Robi).

What right did [Robi] have to claim Hindi as his own, living as he did in the U.S., speaking and working in English, hardly ever using Hindi even with his friends?

He felt Indian, that was why.

This thoughtful, intelligent novel is full of unexpected pleasures.