In focusing on Miranda’s experience in her relationships with Dev and Laxmi, “Sexy” explores how racial and cultural identity informs interpersonal interactions and how engaging across intersections of cultural difference can be both enriching and challenging.

In particular, “Sexy” engages with feelings of alienation but, rather than presenting these as the experience of Indian Americans as a minority group in America, the story presents Miranda as the minority identity in the story’s social grouping. She is the only non-Indian character and is shown to be a young person dislocated from the cultural environment in which she has grown up. While Laxmi has an extended network of family and friends, Miranda appears isolated. When Miranda tries to engage with Bengali language, food, and culture, she finds herself at a loss: the alphabet is a “scribble,” and foods are “unrecognizable.” Lahiri here reverses the immigrant experience, making Miranda the outsider in the story. Paradoxically, this feeling of difference is what Miranda considers her commonality with Dev, that he “understands her” and knows “what it’s like to be lonely”; the story tells us that he moved to Boston from India for college and could barely understand the accent.