In "Never Have I Ever" Season 2, Flawed Brown Girls Are the Point

Since its release, viewers have already called out Never Have I Ever’s Devi Vishwakumar as one of the messiest TV protagonists of all times — and it’s easy to see why. In only ten short episodes, Devi, nicknamed “Crazy Devi,” crashes her grieving mother’s date, betrays her friends, and manipulates her grandmother. While the show holds her accountable for her actions, empathetically portraying them as teenage responses to trauma and grief from losing her father, Devi is self-centered, more focused on what she can gain from a situation rather than making amends. “I wanna scream at her but then I remember she’s 15 and grieving,” tweeted one viewer. “She is the queen of terrible choices,” said another.

Twitter is right: Devi is messy. Still, I can’t help being a Devi apologist. Part of it is on principle: Asian women are often stereotyped as meek and malleable, and there’s something subversive about Devi’s awfulness. When Devi kicks over a trash can, I imagine the model minority myth taking a palpable blow. And part of it is personal. Politics of representation aside, I want to relish in my own potential for nastiness.

I sympathize with difficult protagonists like Devi. Like her, I was not easy for boys to like in high school. I organized protests and picked fights in history class, once making a grown male teacher cry. Rage comes easily, the first defense for women of color in a world that convinces us we’re crazy. There is something wonderful about throwing your head back and shouting from your gut, knowing that’s the only way you’ll be heard. Sabotaging yourself before someone else does so you’ll get a little power. Never Have I Ever levels with the destructiveness of young women, treating us as worthy villains in our own right.

But things change when a new character, Aneesa, ends up in Devi’s warpath. Aneesa is the only other Indian girl at school. She’s smart, sociable, and pretty. And unlike Devi, she’s actually compassionate. When she shows up, Devi, predictably, flips out. “Another Indian girl who’s prettier, cooler?” she agonizes. Later, she accidentally starts a nasty rumor about Aneesa that nearly forces her to move schools... again.

In many ways, Aneesa’s arrival feels long overdue. Mindy Kaling, the show’s creator, has been criticized in the past for writing Indian female characters who exist solely in relation to white people, minimizing female friendships or other WOC characters in favor of romances with white men. The truth is that exceptionalism is a natural response to a society that teaches us there is only room for one of us. White supremacy pits WOC against each other, valuing competition over collaboration. In the presence of other brown women, I’ve felt myself threatened, trying my best not to stare, but I can’t help glancing — it’s as natural and irresistible as looking in the mirror. I compare myself to them, unconsciously yet categorically, to see if I’m doing it right — “it” being the amorphous and amoral project of coming-of-age as a South Asian woman. It never occurred to me until later that other brown women feel the same insecurities, too.

This same dichotomy is explained in Cathy Park Hong’s seminal Asian American memoir Minor Feelings. “Instead of solidarity, you feel that you are less than around other Asians,” she writes, “the boundaries of yourself no longer distinct but congealed into a horde.” I know it’s true when I remember my own freshman year of college. On move-in day, I’d barely set down my twin XL mattress before I was mistaken for another Indian girl in the dorm. (Ironically, the same happens to Devi when Aneesa arrives.) A small identity crisis ensued then, but that had nothing on my bigger crisis, months later, when I realized, out of nowhere, that I hadn’t made a single close Indian friend — and worse, I hadn’t noticed. Not even on Diwali, when I attended a samosa-themed party as the only brown girl in the group. Suddenly, I felt empty and unmoored. It wasn’t a conscious decision — I was proudly Indian, loved my Indian friends growing up. What had gone wrong?

Deep down I knew, like Devi, that I feared being defined outside of my terms. College was a place for reinvention, and I knew what I wanted: to be viewed as interesting before I was Indian. If you asked me then what I valued about myself, I would’ve mentioned my creativity, caring nature, and knack for attracting excitement. The exact opposite of the Indian girls who I wrongly perceived as belonging only to each other, invisible to men, nerdy, sexless. It’s awful, but it’s how I felt — I am still unlearning this instinct. 

As I learn to love myself, I am regaining my love for other Indian women — the sense of home, comfort, unspoken belonging. I’ve had life-altering friendships with white women, but I’ve often felt a subtle, inescapable power disparity. It’s different with women of color, especially brown girls. People assume that I enjoy our friendships because we can share culture and food. That’s certainly part of it, but it’s not the biggest perk. For me, that’s the experience of bearing each other’s witness. The ways we notice and carry one another, form loving sisterhoods and fierce rivalries, mutually confirm one another’s importance, even when others have no reason to care.

Amid the discourse about Season 2, I’m reflecting on the purpose of shows like NHIE. Part of me believes the series should be pure escapism. All fun, nothing serious. But marginalized creatives are responsible for representation, whether we ask for it or not. People are rightfully irritated by the relationship between Devi and Aneesa. (It’s true that there’s an entire genre of films about white girls who are mean to each other, but for brown girls it’s different.) The characters can and must grow in future seasons. But in the meantime, I’m willing to extend compassion to Devi, especially because I want it for myself. I’m still building my sense of identity in relation to other South Asian women. I’m reading all the diasporic authors I can find — urgently, like I’m cramming for a test, learning to be South Asian through fiction. My friends and I are learning and growing together, in real-time.

In her novel Gold Diggers, Sanjena Sathian writes of morally monstrous Indian American characters, not-so-model minorities who abuse each other, whose behavior makes us all look terrible. (“Not in front of the white people!” I often begged silently of both.) In Gold Diggers, the protagonist describes himself as a “conceptual orphan” — a phrase which has stuck with me since. He is an orphan in the sense that neither Indian parents nor American adults can offer him an example of how to live. “We had not grown up imbibing stories that implicitly conveyed answers to the basic questions of being,” he explains. “What did it feel like to fall in love in America, to take oneself for granted in America? In the space between us and the rest of adulthood lay a great expanse of the unknown.”

As a conceptual orphan, sometimes I resent the responsibility of it all: navigating the unknown and representing perfectly at once. I can see Devi’s character seething against it too, gloriously. But sometimes it feels like the grandest gift, that brown girls get the opportunity to be our own visionaries, craft our own models of female friendship and solidarity. We are still figuring it out. Part of growing up — of parenting ourselves, sometimes — means having rough patches, being nasty and adolescent and petty. We deserve our growing pains, the gnarliest of puberties, the deepest of insecurities. I deserve this, and my girl Devi does too.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue