Never Have I Ever season 1 episode 4 recap: …felt super Indian

Never Have I Ever episode 4 examines identity and culture, as well as the divisions that people impose upon each other.

In episode 4 of Never Have I Ever, Devi finds herself confronting her Indian-American identity and what she wants from her future. But she’s not the only one—cousin Kamala is just as lost about her path forward. We recap the events of the episode.

Ganesh Puja

Ganesh Puja—a festival celebrating the Elephant god, Ganesh—is one of the biggest events in India. And apparently also in California.

Nalini, Devi, and Kamala are nervous about this Ganesh Puja—it’s the first since Mohan’s death and since Devi was disabled. But they plan to put on a brave face in front of the snooty and sarcastic aunties.

That plan doesn’t go as well as Nalini had hoped—the sympathy for her loss is bad enough but it’s the weird correlations the aunties keep making between Nalini’s very real tragedy and their inconsequential problems that really drive her up the wall.

The other problem is that the aunties are very good at giving advice—but nobody seems to stop to think whether Nalini even wants their advice. Maybe she just wants to talk about Mohan—whose loss the family isn’t handling very well on Never Have I Ever—instead of being told that he won’t ascend to heaven until she spreads his ashes? Who says that to a grieving widow?

Nalini tries her best to keep calm, in the hopes of making a good impression and staying on everyone’s good side—one never knows when you will need these people!

But it’s been a terrible day and she just needs one win—which she gets in the form of the pandit (priest). It’s quite the honor to get a little extra time with the pandit (Anjul Nigam) and offering to drop him off at Home Depot earns Nalini some brownie points and the first understanding words of the day.

The Career Counselor

There’s another important reason for attending Ganesh Puja in this episode of Never Have I Ever—Ron Hansen-Bhattacharya. The sole white man in attendance at Ganesh Puja—as a plus one for his Indian wife—Ron is a career counselor who gets every single one of his charges into Ivy League colleges. Devi needs this man to help her get into Princeton.

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If she can find him, that is. Why would it be hard finding one white man amongst hundreds of Indians? Because he’s hiding in a room far away—he may have taken an Indian name but Ron’s doing nothing to be part of the community.

When Devi finally discovers him and makes her pitch to get into Princeton, Ron is less than helpful.

According to him, Devi’s stellar grades, hard work, determination, extra-curricular activities, and volunteering experience don’t make her stand out—she’s just another Indian girl applying for college.

Instead, she should focus her application on her dead father and the loss of her mobility—something Devi absolutely refuses to do. She isn’t just another Indian applicant—she’s a remarkable young woman with abilities to make any college proud. Ron doesn’t see that and Devi storms out, furious.

It doesn’t help that Devi’s already had a confusing run-in with a friend of hers from Stanford—a fellow Indian-American who has completely embraced his Indian heritage after rediscovering his identity at college.

That’s not how Devi feels—she’s not completely Indian, but she isn’t entirely American either, as white Americans keep reminding her.

With nowhere to go and nothing to look forward to, Devi takes her frustrations out on a school locker—only to be discovered by Paxton, of all people. But this is a good meeting—he’s understanding of her anger and even compliments her on the sari she’s wearing. Things are looking up!

The Outcast

Kamala is the only one who attracts positive attention at Ganesh Puja—all because she’s engaged to an engineer she’s never met. This only makes her feel like more of fraud considering she only recently got back together with her boyfriend—as we saw in the previous episode of Never Have I Ever.

When it’s time to pray to Ganesh, Kamala has only one thought in her mind—that her fiancé should fall in love with someone else so she can be free. And her longing for this is so etched on her face that even the pandit sees it. Yikes!

If Kamala was hoping for some kind of inspiration, this puja is not it. She meets Jaya (Aarti Mann), the outcast in the community, with a story that could change Kamala’s life.

Like Kamala, Jaya was once engaged to a very suitable Indian boy, but came to America and married someone else. The marriage didn’t last and now she’s alone with her children—in the shadow of her two brothers who have done exceedingly well for themselves. She’s shunned by everyone around her and is desperately lonely.

Kamala tries to put a positive spin on Jaya’s life—this could eventually be her life, after all—but Jaya point-blank declares that she wishes she’d listened to her family. This is not what Kamala needed to hear.

Final Thoughts

This episode of Never Have I Ever was quite an astute examination of Indian-American culture. I like that the writing didn’t denigrate every aspect of it but that it also held a sharp lens to the way people interact with each other when they feel duty-bound to because of a sense of community.

Unlike the first few episodes of the show that gave viewers fairly clear answers by the end of the 30-minute run-time, this episode offers no resolutions to the characters.

Devi is still as lost as she was before—even more so because she’s realizing how much she misses her dad and how she doesn’t have an outlet for that pain.

Nalini is similarly alone in her grief—aside from Devi and Kamala, her immediate family seems to be far away and she has no one to share her loss with.

Kamala is in a worse situation than she was in the previous episode—the one person who could have inspired her has pretty much told her to do an about-turn on her convictions.

It will be interesting to see how the characters react to their circumstances in upcoming episodes.

Never Have I Ever is currently streaming on Netflix.