A Dextrous Debut

It’s no small feat to have your debut novel reviewed in The New York Times; it’s an even bigger coup to receive glowing praise from longtime book critic Dwight Garner. Bindu Bansinath ’18, SOA’23 achieved just that. Garner called Men Like Ours (Bloomsbury, $28.99) “bold and darkly comic” and “painfully funny,” concluding, “it announces Bansinath as a genuine and offbeat talent.”

The accolades are more than justified. Men Like Ours is a deliciously complex — and frequently hilarious — story about a South Asian immigrant community in suburban New Jersey whose women get drawn into the investigation of a close friend’s death. For a number of complicated reasons, they are all painfully slow to acknowledge he should not have been trusted.

At the center of the case is Anita Sharma and her rebellious teen daughter Leila — described in the prologue’s cast of characters as a “snob” and a “tart.” Their tale jumps back and forth in time, unpacking the mother and daughter’s fraught relationships with each other and their neighbors on Willow Road. All of the women are simultaneously at each other’s throats while watching each other’s backs, especially concerning their recently deceased “brother,” Matthew Pillai. It’s not always a comfortable read, but Bansinath’s storytelling is always astonishing; once the mystery is solved, you’ll likely turn back to the beginning to rethink the whole thing.

Bansinath, a senior writer at New York Magazine’s The Cut, says the seeds of Men Like Ours were planted in her senior year at the College. She had an idea for a story about a teenager in an Indian-American community — similar to her own New Jersey hometown — who was in a distressing situation; the story took root in earnest after she attended a literature seminar that examined themes surrounding sexual predation.

“That was my first reckoning with Lolita in an academic setting, and I was really curious about the perspective of the young girl,” Bansinath says. “As readers, our only access to her is occluded by the person telling the story as she’s being shuttled across state lines. What would it be like to access the voice of someone in her position?”

Bansinath soon found it alienating to focus exclusively on such a dark narrative; instead, she considered the orbit around her character Leila. “This is a neighborhood where many people feel isolated, yet they do have each other. But then, what do we really owe our neighbors? What about the self-interest you have when the door is closed? Those were questions I started exploring,” she says. “And I’ve always loved a good Greek chorus, so the communal voice of these women just clicked from there.”

In this excerpt, four of the women — Hema, Jyoti, Nasreen and Devika — grieve the abrupt loss of Matthew, whom a day earlier was found dead in his BMW on a Jersey backroad. As they clamor for more information — pictures, preferably! — their feelings reveal painful backstories.

Bansinath began drafting Men Like Ours while she pursued an M.F.A. and, after graduation, while working as an assistant editor at Harper’s Magazine. She joined The Cut in 2021. The novel was acquired by Bloomsbury in 2023.

At The Cut she has a varied human interest beat, which keeps her flexing an assortment of writing muscles; Bansinath’s 2025 story “The Nanny Squatter” is being adapted into an Apple TV limited series starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Cecily Strong. She’s also thinking about a second novel. “I’m still very much in this ‘post-book’ phase — having worked on it for nine years, it’s kind of surreal not to be,” she says.

Bansinath recognizes that outside of grad school, it will be hard to find that kind of time again; she also understands it’s really about finding the idea that will keep calling you back to the page. “For me, that’s always the key,” she says. “When I was writing Men Like Ours, it was like, ‘I have to work on my book’ — you just become so immersed in it. It’s exciting to feel that sense of hyperfixation about a story. I hope to find it again and again.”

— Jill C. Shomer

---

I Have to See a Horror to Believe It

HEMA SHARED THE news in the women’s neighborhood WhatsApp group chat, to multiple anguished-face emojis. There were women like her, who wanted photos because they needed to see a horror to believe it. And there were women like Jyoti Kaushal, who wanted them for emotional closure.

“Dateline always has photos,” Jyoti said, cradling a baby bump. “Also reenactments.”

Even before Matthew’s death she’d been grieving. (“And has not shut up about it,” said Devika.) Last spring Jyoti’s youngest brother had died unexpectedly. Out of seven siblings, she and this brother were closest in age. They sometimes climbed trees to a richer neighbor’s rooftop. Jyoti would stash a kitchen knife in her undershirt. At the top she’d set the blade on the ground for her brother to take, superstitious they’d fight if they exchanged the weapon directly. Her brother would slash two tender coconuts off the neighbor’s palm tree.

“I thought we’d get flogged,” Jyoti said. Her brother harbored no such fear. Once, he tiptoed the perimeter of the roof, surveying the city from a new vantage point, the harsh white of the shop lights and the light smog. It’s still shit from here, he decided. Jyoti watched him. She and this brother leached off the same womb. As infants they drank the same disgusting clots of Nestlé milk powder. Still, a dissonance: Jyoti’s brother climbed high. She had not been raised to look anywhere but down.

Then adulthood, marriage, immigration, the whole cliche. The telephone ringing; news of the terrible accident. Her brother, a day laborer, had been working construction at a luxury high-rise when he fell. Jyoti’s siblings attended the funeral and watched the brother’s soul evaporate in black puffs.

“Me, I could not travel abroad in time, I didn’t see the body, I had no closure. I looked for him everywhere, everywhere.”

Months after the missed funeral, Jyoti thought she saw her brother at a Kmart in Hamilton. She was shopping for intimates when he appeared, dark-haired and broad-backed with a slow and delicate gait. Jyoti called out his name. The man didn’t turn. She followed him wordlessly, palms damp, her red shopping cart between them as they wound past clearance coats and training bras. In the linen aisle she tapped the man’s shoulder. Bhai?

“It was Matthew who turned to me and said, I’m sorry, sister,” Jyoti said, dabbing her inner eyes with a soiled napkin. “This whole time here nobody has called me by that name. I didn’t know I’d lose him, too.”

JYOTI DROVE TO THE local precinct to request crime scene photographs, to no avail. After that the women dropped the issue of photos altogether, afraid they might offend the officers, who didn’t consider them capable of such sick curiosities.

“As for me, I still would have asked, if only these other women hadn’t stopped me,” said Nasreen Farouk, seventy-seven, maître d’hôtel of Kwality Meats. Half of Kwality operated as a shopfront selling butchered meat and halal marshmallows. The other half was a canteen-style dining hall furbished with fat green carpet nobody ever cleaned. The business was cash only. Nasreen stored her savings inside her bedroom closet.

“Two years back, someone broke in and stole it. The police said, Open a bank account, pay taxes next time. Assholes. But Matthew, bless him, gave me a personal loan. From then on, he was like a son to me. Or at least a very distant nephew.”

The sight of dead bodies didn’t bother Nasreen. She told the women how she’d grown up in a town plagued by religious riots. Men fought with so much mania that eventually there was no town left, only foothills of soft black soot. Nasreen wept in her mother’s skirt. Amma, where will we go, what will we do? Her mother tossed her a week’s worth of bloody underwear and said, The washing.

Apart from these dispatches, the details of which no one could confirm, Nasreen didn’t speak much about her past. Trauma grew jammy inside her, like stone fruit. It dripped out of her unbidden and always sounded out of place. Then again, some memories had no proper place. After Nasreen heard about Matthew, she closed both sides of Kwality out of respect and dined alone at the IHOP on Route 1. A waitress drizzled a ribbon of syrup across her stack of senior-citizen-priced pancakes.

Nasreen cut into the fluffy rounds of dough. “I cannot tell you how many bodies I have seen. Paraded like floats, they were.”

“Um, ha-ha.” The waitress glanced at the wall clock.

“I mean, can you believe these officers? Do you think I’m afraid of a little-little blood?”

POOR MATTHEW’S BODY. Without pictures the women imagined the scene inside out: Matthew alone, a brooding hulk trapped in a coffin of engine and metal while the other drivers overtook him, sunroofs open, dragging lazy hands through a soft-boiled breeze. Shotgun passengers ate rest stop fries and stank up the car with the fug of grease and fat. The last bits of daylight receded behind a line of orange clouds. To imagine a horror didn’t soften it. That only made its edges sharper. The women debated who this horror had hurt more:

“It gives me chills to think about,” Hema Rao shuddered. “My dogs weep.”

“My heart is aching so much, I take two Tylenol a day,” Jyoti Kaushal said.

“I am aching so so much, but I don’t take even one Tylenol,” Devika Gill said. “See what all I endure.”

Pain was a moot point. In the four years the women had known Matthew, he’d become a brother to each of them. Though only a visitor, he’d become as permanent a fixture to Willow Road as Devika Gill’s trashy Home Goods foyer lamp.

(“Hold on, hold on, hold — who said trashy?” Devika said. “Such nasty women. Who cares what they think?”)

Twenty minutes later the women spied the hood of Devika’s foyer lamp poking out from her recycling bin.

Excerpted from Men Like Ours by Bindu Bansinath. Copyright © Bindu Bansinath, 2026. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury.