Sonora Jha’s The Laughter is set on a college campus in Seattle in 2016. Debates around Trump-or-Clinton, race, class, LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, and the like, animate all students. Amidst this, we meet Dr Oliver Harding, an ageing, White, English professor who narrates the novel with a confessional tone — but why, is initially unclear.
His life has just been disrupted by the arrival of a young, dynamic, Pakistani professor of law, Dr Ruhaba Khan. She reignites in him a lust he thought impossible after his wife left him. With a daughter who doesn’t want much to do with him, and his only hobby (knitting), he spends his days hoping to run into Khan, waiting for a call or text. His obsession is rooted in her “exoticness” as a graceful, coy, repressed hijab-clad Pakistani woman. When Khan’s teenage nephew Adil comes from France to live with her because of Islamophobic sentiments in the country, Harding takes a liking to the boy, mentors him, and starts spending more time with him.
But Harding can’t properly let Khan and Adil into his world, perceiving them as only caricatures of themselves. When protests break out on campus, he sides with the conservative White population that believes people of colour will overtake them with all the anti-discrimination policies coming up. When he sees Khan advocate unabashedly for people of colour, he realises she is more outspoken and radical than he thought, and attempts to situate himself in her good books by acting liberal and supportive. But in his mind, he “could not fathom why the citizenry around (him) was in a scramble to align so personally with the Blacks…” and adds, “I ached for White Silence.”
Jha brilliantly represents the fumbling, narcissistic and conservative White academic adamant in his ways, severely lacking self-awareness. The three central characters are provided space, even if Khan and Adil are only presented through Harding’s eyes. An exception is the scene where he secretly accesses Khan’s email draft folder and lets us into her interiority.
The writing is sharp and funny with painstaking attention to detail. Jha paints a world so believable that it transports you to that campus in Seattle. The novel’s politics aren’t limited to the college campus, but engages with universal questions around identity and belonging against the backdrop of upcoming presidential elections. The story serves as a reminder of the power of Whiteness, especially in liberal academic spaces which can mask disturbing personal politics.
