New York Narcissism
Nikkitha Bakshani’s debut novel ‘Ghost Chilli’ is an ideologically confused work that seems to endorse the racial essentialism it purports to satirise.
A review of Ghost Chilli by Nikkitha Bakshani, 288 pages, Fleet (July 2024)
In Ghost Chilli, the debut novel by London-based American writer Nikkitha Bakshani, progressive systems of belief compete for primacy in the disorganised personality of protagonist Muskan, an anxious psychobabbler and hyper-race-conscious Indian expat working for foodie magazines in New York. If Muskan’s personal insecurities are the engine of the novel, her dislocated ethnicity is the fuel—a familiar metropolitan cocktail of worries about men, career attainment, and familial responsibilities.
According to Bakshani, Ghost Chilli began as “a much simpler book about the disorienting experience of immigration.” However, what she ended up producing is closer to a 21st-century multicultural spin on Carrie Bradshaw that recalls Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel A Little Life. But while Yanagihara drew upon hipster New York as a “post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past,” utopia in which the characters inhabit several sexual and racial identities at once, Ghost Chilli is a more ideologically confused text that seems to endorse the very racial essentialism it purports to satirise.
Muskan begins by awkwardly falling short of the evolving standards of polite society—missing supposed “microaggressions,” rejecting allegations of “sexual assault,” and being willing to “overlook” a “weird race” fetish “for her own gain.” But happily, she journeys from ignorance to enlightenment by becoming more fluent in the progressive orthodoxies against which she repeatedly stubs her toe; and by the end, she seems to conform to the luxury beliefs of her cultural set.
When Muskan changes her name on a dating app so that it sounds “more Western,” she notices that the change produces “four times the amount of matches.” She appears to believe that this is due to a “racial bias” rather than algorithmic changes. But then, she understands pretty much everything using the confused logic of psychotherapy and race-consciousness: from the daily news to her inability to get a boyfriend and hang on to her job.
Muskan berates “white people” in the foodie-mag industry—that “neoliberal-ass New York Times universe”—for “fetishizing” ethnic minorities in “long-form” articles that “nobody will remember three blue check tweets later”; while she tries to avoid “a victimhood-contest” during a first date, the man she meets nevertheless feels bad because he does not understand “the struggles of women or people of colour”; and when her therapist reminds her of the need for boundaries, Muskan retorts, “Boundaries are for white people.”
Questions occasionally arise that hint at thematic complexity. For instance, Muskan initially believes she was a diversity hire, only to later discover that she was accepted on merit. Is this a rejection of diversity initiatives or do her abilities as an Indian editor prove the effectiveness with which such initiatives promote minority talent? But more often, the book covers worn-out terrain and—as Inaya Folarin Iman recently said of Jeremy Harris’s Slave Play—“attempts to universalise […] coastal American middle-class therapy-obsessed progressive anxiety over race.”
