Annie Zaidi’s writing—in her poetry, plays, nonfiction, and fiction alike—has always engaged thoughtfully with the complicated reality of what it really means to be a person in contemporary India. In her latest novel, The Comeback, Zaidi turns her attention to a space that’s long captured her attention: the stage.

In The Comeback, we meet actor John K. (born Jaun Kazim), who in a fateful interview speaks without thinking and accidentally reveals information that ruins his college friend’s life. Asghar, the friend, finds himself unemployed and disgraced, and back in his and John’s hometown, Baansa. He refuses to speak to John, who himself is in a bit of a slump with his artistic career.

From afar, and through John’s eyes and ears, we learn that Asghar has started a theatre company, which becomes successful beyond both their wildest beliefs. Over a hundred-and-eighty pages, we follow John on a journey away from artifice and towards reconciliation, second chances, and a rediscovery of his artistic calling.

We spoke with Annie Zaidi about her love for theatre and playwriting, where The Comeback came from, and the trust and solidarity that the arts require.

The first thing that struck me when reading The Comeback is that it feels like it takes place at a distance from where the quote unquote “action” is. I found that such an interesting choice, where we're hearing about things from a distance, and we’re not on the stage itself. What made you want to set it at that distance?

That's interesting you pick up on that. It was not done consciously, but I think one of the reasons I wrote the book at all was that I felt like I was at a distance from everything. I was missing theatre. I wasn't writing theatre anymore, I wasn't even watching too much professional theatre. It came out of my own sense of feeling like I was missing out on something and wanting to be at the centre of things, but at the same time, being in a smaller place and recognising that being at the centre of things doesn't necessarily mean being in a big city. Sometimes you can be in a big city and still have serious F.O.M.O. because all the cool things are happening somewhere else, you know?

Also, a little bit consciously, I was thinking about our commitments to big cities in the arts. I think it's unconscious and we can't always control it, because we go where the money is, and we go where the big industries are. Writers tend to congregate around places where the publishing hub is, [actors] to where the film scene is. But at the same time, I think that we also are then controlled by the big scene. It's a trade-off, and we trade our own sensibility. The other possibility that is traded in is of actually having control over what you want to do, setting up your own thing in your own social context. So I think it comes a little bit from there, the sense of wanting and not wanting to be in the thick of things.

You note this in the book’s acknowledgments, the importance of art taking place outside of the big cities, but I think your book also talks about how art spaces like Asghar’s don't need validation from the big cities. I was wondering if you want to talk about that, but also generally what your experience has been with theatre in smaller cities.

I grew up without any theatre whatsoever, because I lived in such a small place and there was no theatre there. Except for what we did ourselves in school, and college theatre, there was nothing. If we didn't do it then it just didn't exist. So in a way, what I have written is a fantasy—it's not based on any reality that I know of. But I think even the fantasy must exist. We must have our fantasy and we must imagine that it's possible before it becomes possible.

In India, I know that people have their own small artistic scenes. But making a living from theatre in small-town India, I have not seen yet. I don't know how it might become possible, but in writing [this book], I was presenting a model for how it might possibly become viable. It cannot happen, say, in a very small town, but a town that has a university, is big enough to actually have tens of thousands of people for a potential audience, where you have bureaucrats and you have some kind of, for the lack of a better word, what we call ‘intelligentsia’.

In my imagination, I think that if you did something super cool in a small town at least once or twice a year, there's no reason why you can't build that audience. In the West, you do see it happening. In England, for example, every small town has its own local theatre. It does put on shows. Whatever kind of living people make, maybe they have small jobs on the side, whatever they do, but there are people who run theatre groups in small towns as well, so there's no reason why we should not also have that in India. Unlike books [and literature festivals], where you can just fly in, theatre requires year-round practice, and it is a slightly more expensive proposition—which is why the rigour of it is important, which is why the local group is important, because you can't just suddenly expect that overnight, a super-talented group will spring up.

I’d love to hear about how you chose to write from the perspective of Jaun. I found him such an interesting mind to inhabit, because occasionally he seemed so incapable of seeing what he was doing or how it was affecting people, but you really couldn't help but root for him. What was it like to build that perspective?

I decided from the outset to write from his perspective partly because he's the one that’s done this horrible thing. If I wrote it from Asghar’s perspective, it would be a very angry book. There was also the danger that, in Asghar’s voice, anything that he pulls off and accomplishes then becomes a self-aggrandising project. If he starts talking like, I went here and I did this and I made this happen, you would hate him, right? But from Jaun’s perspective… Firstly, he's a very unhappy man for all his success. Whatever success he's won, he's won it very hard. I think we root for him not just because he's flawed, but also because he's miserable. He's created problems for himself and others, and you need him to grow up, basically, just grow up and take some responsibility in life.

I think we all know people, never evil people, just a little bit selfish, who are just looking out for themselves and using people in small and big ways, in any way they can. I think you root for him because you identify a little bit with him. You know that not all of us have very high principles, not all of us have the courage that Asghar has. But you look up to Asghar, and somebody like Jaun also looks up to Asghar—looks up to him and knows that he cannot be him, but definitely wants to be around him, wants to be in the aura of talented, principled guys like that. What you're really rooting for when you're rooting for Jaun—you're not rooting for him to win. There's nothing that he's won by the end of it. You’re rooting for him to grow up.

There’s a lot of social media in this book. It’s how Jaun keeps track of people he knows, and it’s also how he projects an image of himself, sometimes for his work and his career, which are both ways in which most of us use social media, really. I was wondering what drew you to weave that in through The Comeback.

I have gotten onto Instagram only a month ago, so when I was writing this, it did not come from my experience of Instagram and social media, but I was observing at a slight distance. I have been on Facebook for many years now, and I've been on Twitter quite intensely in recent years. I look at these spaces and I also see what spaces work for whom—Facebook might work better for writers, but Instagram is definitely the place for artists, visual artists, people who want to be seen and looked at rather than just read. I was thinking about the ways in which people use social media to build their personal profile, to build their presence.

For the small independent artist, it's actually a tool. If you're a poet, you can put up a poem and people read you, and that's how you build your following. For an independent artist like Jaun, it also becomes a way of seeking work. Nobody's giving you auditions, nobody's looking at you, but you have an opportunity to force people to pay attention to you because you can do your own audition online. And if it happens to catch someone's eye… Maybe it's only a one in a hundred possibility, but the possibility exists. I see a lot of young theatre people use that—they'll go somewhere, they'll dress up, they'll take a picture of themselves in a new look, with moustaches, for example, or they'll take a lovey-dovey picture with a girlfriend. If I was a casting director, I'd be looking at them and thinking, “Maybe he could do a good job of this [role]”.

We are all using social media now in semi-professional ways. I use it in semi-professional ways too. Social media has sort of become an alternative space, almost like a physical space where we go and spend all our leisure time. I think about 90% of our leisure time now goes on social media. So you can't afford to ignore it anymore, especially if you work in the arts. That's why, by default, I think, for our generation, and I think it'll stay this way at least for the next few years to come, it's going to be this way—it will become both a tool and an archive of our lives. I was kind of using it in that sense as well, to explore both the possibilities as well as the compulsions of putting yourself out there. 

Names, or the absence of names, have always been really important in your writing. There are some books, like City of Incident or Love Stories #1 to #14, where there are no names for characters or places. But in other works of yours, like your play ‘Name, Place, Animal, Thing’ or The Comeback, names have such an importance. In The Comeback, the most obvious example is Jaun changing the spelling of his name to the anglicised ‘John’ when he becomes a film actor. What draws you to that as a theme generally and how you approached names and naming in this book?

With naming, I've always struggled a little bit. When I want to focus on the feelings that the characters are going through, and the particular moment that I want the reader to zoom in on, and I don't want them to think about the characters’ social identities so much or to approach them through the lens of identity, then I tend not to give them names. When I wrote Love Stories or City of Incident, [I left them unnamed], because it could be every man, it could be you, it could be someone you know, and how does the name matter? I wanted that everyman quality in those texts, so I did not give them names.

I think, in a country like India, particularly, names become overwhelmingly important because social identity is immediately identifiable. Even if it's an inaccurate identity—like in my case, when people hear ‘Annie’ they often mistakenly assume that I'm Catholic, which I'm not. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes you have a mixed identity, sometimes identity itself becomes complicated.

With Jaun, I gave him the anglicised spelling because John is basically a slightly insecure guy. He's fighting for his place in the big bad world of [cinema], he wants to be accepted. And there is a tradition of people changing their names for the movies to become more widely acceptable—in the 1930s or ’40s, this was very common; people like Dilip Kumar, Meena Kumari, all of them had screen names. Sometimes they change the names to appear majoritarian, like Meena Kumari, but sometimes they would change their names not to indicate a different identity—sometimes it was just names they thought were a little more cool. Why this one? Why not that one? Maybe because there are too many people who have the same name. Sometimes you just want something that’s a little more edgy, you know?

In the case of a name like Jaun Kazim, which is a very unfortunate way to spell it, the words Jaun and John both come from the same origin, the Middle East, basically. But if you spell it as Jaun, it is burdened in a particular way that I don't think an aspiring firm star would like. And a surname like Kazim does nothing at all. It doesn't have the glamour of the big Khans. It's just something kind of ordinary. And I don't see Jaun as the kind of guy who's content being ordinary, who is content to just carry who he is into his work. He wants to be someone else. I think that someone like him would want a different name. At the same time, he doesn't really want to pander, so he wouldn't go too far from his original name either. He still wants to be a little bit like himself, but he also wants to be cooler, to give off a sense that he is a somebody in the world.

The other naming choices that I make, I make from the social context. Jaun needed to be from a place, so I made Baansa, which is a fictional place, a C-town in Uttar Pradesh somewhere. When you place people like that in those towns, then their friends will be called certain things. What will his brother be called? Families in India often give their kids rhyming names, so Jaun’s brother [is named] Aun—another unfortunate name. I gave them slightly wacko names for a reason, because sometimes your parents are not thinking when they gave you these Jaun-and-Aun kind of names.

I thought this was a nice time to ask you, since this is a book about theatre and you've worked so much within the medium, what do you remember being your first brush with theatre? What's it like to look back on that now?

I think I have been performing on stage since I was very little, since I was six or seven—we used to do school dances and school productions. But I think when I was doing all these things, to me, there was no separation between performing on stage as a dancer or as an actor or as a singer, although I sang very poorly—but you know, you get shoved in the chorus anyway.

Up to the age of about 12, I was just doing things the way you were being told. Your teachers were telling you, this is a script. You have to do this, now you do this dance. Now you go here, enter here, exit there. I have no real memory of it. And it wasn't a conscious artistic enterprise. It was only in my teens that I was part of a one-act play. I remember reading the play. It was in my brother's syllabus; they had a collection of one-act plays, and one of those was picked up for performance. By then, I was probably 14 or 15. It was a comedy, a Mexican play---it was hilarious. I remember being cast in one of the parts, and I have a distinct memory of the theatricality of it, the drama, the way in which doing this play was different from doing another play. This is not Shakespeare, this is a comedy, it's modern. The social context is different.

Then when I went to college, I picked up the same play. And this time I directed the show. I did cast myself, but I cast myself in a different role, as one of the minor characters. And I cast my friends—other girls in college—for the other roles. From picking up the text and allowing the teachers and other elders to direct me at 15, to 17, knowing that there is this play, I know it works, it’ll work well for a teenage audience, and taking ownership of it, saying, I’m going to direct this myself—that was my first real brush with theatre. Or more than a brush, my first deep engagement with a text.

I love to read plays. I feel like I haven't watched a lot of live theatre, but I really like to read them. I know that it's obviously better seen or acted, but I personally find so much joy in just reading a play, and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on reading versus watching a play.

I love reading plays. I like watching plays too, but I think that they are fundamentally works of literature—and they're the original works of literature, actually, they were around before novels were being written. They're very malleable as well, or at least they should be. I think people have now developed a very narrow sense of what a play should be, how many acts and so on. In the old days, there were no rules like that, right? You made up the rules. You wanted to put in a song, you put in a song; you wanted to put in a dance, you put in a dance. You did whatever you liked. You wanted five acts, you wanted seven acts, you wanted to do it all night long, you did it. If they work on the page, then they work as a text, exactly like a poem or a novella or anything else. They give you the same joy, they give you the same laughs, they give you the same sense of character, tragedy, comedy, whatever.

I think because they're expensive to put on, we don't get to see them realised to their full potential. Most of us don't get to see them. The sad part is that publishers have also kind of retreated [from publishing plays]. They'll only publish it if it has been performed, or if they see the playwright is successful, or like in my case, if it's won a prize or something like that.

Can you imagine a world in which every town did have its own local theatre group and its own local playwright? If they were writing and adapting and translating in every city in India, we would have a much more robust play-reading culture as well. Not everybody necessarily needs to perform everything, but there's no reason why one should not have a book of ten new plays being published in, say, every state language at least, I think.

There's a moment in The Comeback that I really loved, which is when a young actor comes up to Jaun and is asking for help to break into Bollywood. And Jaun is thinking about how this kid will have to work so hard and have to be so scrappy, otherwise he just won't make it. And then Jaun just thinks, “It doesn't have to be that hard”. I just found that moment such a nice, simple realisation of the help that he has been offered and what he can offer forward. I was wondering generally how you think of community in the art forms that you have been part of, and how you thought of it within this book.

I think in some ways I have been lucky. This has not been the case from start to finish in my own career. I have struggled a bit to find community, to find people who will help. At the same time, I've always had writer friends. I went looking for them when I was quite young, in my early twenties. I was always looking for groups to join and places I could show up and feel like I'm also part of the community. In Bombay, it was a little more difficult for me, but online, once the Internet came, spaces started to open up a bit more and you could find people, especially people who were just starting out like yourself, who weren't yet published. I did make friends that way. And I always had writer friends even in college, and I still am friends with some of those people.

With theatre, especially, but also with books, I think you can't really do without your friends. You need that community. You need them to make your work better. In theatre, you just need them to make things happen. You can't do everything yourself. You can't play all ten parts on stage yourself. Learning to work with the group, learning to negotiate egos, learning how this thing works, actually—how a group can come together to make that small, little, brief bit of magic.

I’ve also had the experience and privilege of watching other people on the professional stage, where there is a lot of solidarity. I saw how people allow themselves to get shaped. For an actor to trust a director, to surrender some part of themselves to the process, to allow their bodies and minds to be used in a particular way, is an act of trust. And I've seen the way people trust in these people even beyond the stage—it’s not just that moment. Most people in theatre will have friends in theatre; similarly, most of us writers have friends who are writers. And that's how it works. You still also have friends from other communities and other professions, but the sense of community is vital. You need it to grow and you need it to sustain you and you need to do your bit to sustain it. You need to show up for them when they need you as well.

In the context of the book, this is a lesson Jaun has to learn. You don’t just take and leave. His journey is really about understanding that it’s not just all about you. And also to remember that the mistakes you have made, some of those mistakes have come from you only looking after yourself, and only thinking of yourself. So when there is an opportunity to collect yourself, and to stop yourself—he could have done the same thing as before, but he had the opportunity now to change that.

What is your writing process like?

My process is usually all over the place, but I'm a little bit old-school. I'm mostly just about “sit there and write something”. I don't always write creative things all the time. It's not like I'm always working on a novel—most of the time I'm doing a little bit of drudge work as well. Sometimes that’s just stuff you have to do for a living. Sometimes it's my own journaling practice, just sitting there and taking stock. Sometimes it's trying something new.

I sit down and I say, okay, I haven't written something for a long time. I should try and write something. I write a page. Two days later, I look at that page and I say, this is not going anywhere. Don't dig yourself in deeper. Just pick it up and toss it out. A lot of my writing is also that. Trying and failing. And that doesn't change: even after twenty, twenty-five years, I'm still trying, still failing. A lot.

A lot of my work is not going to be published, I know. I'm doing it as practice, so I do it. Out of that practice, something good emerges. Like this novella, for example. I wasn't trying to write a new novel. I just needed to cheer myself up; I needed to write something that gave me joy and optimism. They say write for yourself, which means writing not just to express yourself, but to write the things you want to read. That process is actually just allowing myself to trust in that moment and that feeling. Sometimes that feeling is very different; City of Incident came from a very different mood, structurally and emotionally. For The Comeback, the impulse was seeking joy, seeking hope, seeking second chances. The practice kind of follows the emotional quality of that moment in which I started writing.

In your writing, do you often see yourself intrigued by similar questions or ideas? Are you drawn to similar themes over the many years that you've been writing?

Some patterns repeat. The question of identity and belonging, I return to it a lot in my nonfiction. Sometimes in my fiction too, but more in my nonfiction, because that feels like a more direct and personal question for me. Where my place is, concepts of home, concepts of how I define myself, how my country responds to me—these are questions I keep returning to.

A lot of my work is shaped by cities, [directly or indirectly]. City of Incident is most directly about cities, but I am drawn to particular places. Prelude to a Riot is also a very place kind of novel. Everything that takes place there is about that town. In many ways The Comeback is also like that. It's a fictional small town, but it is very much a novel about place. Sometimes I narrow down a place, whether it’s real or fiction, and become a bit attached to that idea and keep working around it until it becomes a strong [backdrop] and I need to tell the story of people in this place. I am becoming more interested in history now. It comes up sometimes in my work, for example, in my play ‘Untitled 1’ and in Prelude in a tangential way. I find myself reading more history now, though I don’t know if I’ll write more history. Maybe in the future.

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In Alina Gufran’s debut novel No Place to Call My Own, we follow a young woman, Sophia, across countries, cities, and apartments as she searches for a place she can belong to. She becomes entangled with different people at various points in her life—men she meets and shares relationships with; her best friend, whom she clashes with on and off; her parents, who occupy a background presence. As the spaces and people around her change, the only constant is Sophia herself.

No Place to Call My Own is a novel-in-stories, told in snippets of Sophia’s life across her twenties and early thirties. Alina Gufran spoke with Helter Skelter in an exclusive interview about drawing inspiration from real life, creating intimacy between reader and character, and how her experience as a filmmaker helps her write better.

How did the journey of this novel begin for you? At what point did you realise that you had a book?

I’ve been writing prose my entire life. I actually started developing this as a collection of short stories, which happened during the pandemic. I was primarily working in the film industry, writing, directing, doing a bunch of things, as everyone does in Bombay, and the pandemic hit, and all projects came to a standstill. And this is a very privileged thing to say, but it was a bit of a boon in disguise. It also coincided with my complete disillusionment with the Hindi film industry, after many years of just writing commission scripts for other directors, which is a very particular kind of writing—I’d been developing my own work on the side, but it never just saw the light of day. I hadn’t shown it to anyone.

So it really started with one chapter, chapter three [‘Prague’], which came to me out of nowhere as a story deriving from my own experience in film school. The incident [that takes place in chapter three] is completely fictional, but the characters are loosely derived from the coterie of interesting people that I met in film school. I obsessively wrote the story for about three months. I kept editing it and trying to crack the plot. I sent it to a few peers, and the feedback was really good. I wish I could say I’m above external validation, but I’m really not. That gave me the motivation to continue writing. And then other bits and pieces started emerging. At some point it became clear to me that the voice across all these little snippets was the same. What was compelling to me was the character that was emerging, and her voice, more than anything else.

Then I figured that I could just focus on this character, and I could practically make her do anything, make her go anywhere, and contend with anything, because I feel like her perspective of the world and who I think Sophia is, or what she symbolises, was exciting to me. And then between early 2020 to 2023, when it got picked up by Westland, it was just the writing and the rewriting.

Each of the chapters in your book is named after a place that Sophia lives in or visits, as she seeks a place to call her own. How did you arrive at this structure, and what was it like to flesh that concept out?

The idea of her trying to inhabit various spaces was extremely important to me, because for Sophia, her main contention is a sense of belonging—to something or someone, an industry or her practice, even belonging to her best friend. And I feel like most of her contradictions and tensions in her life come from that place. They come from that inherent tension of who she is.

There were a couple of reasons as to why it was structured across several cities. One was quite technical: to give it a certain momentum and pace and a certain manipulation of time, which I also like to use as a reflection of her mental state. I could manage to fit in more in terms of an odyssey or a character’s journey if I was to experiment with place like that. Another reason was that I wanted to show how her journey from being hinged on factors outside of herself slowly changes with time, and how she arrives at a place where the time and the place become immaterial because the sense of belonging is finding its first feet within her. At the end of the book, it’s not like she’s arrived at that, but you can feel the first stirrings. That journey for me and for the character became really important.

Each chapter is more or less centred around a particular event or moment, and a reflection on everything around that perhaps has brought her to that moment. That, to me, created a sense of richness to the story and a sense of dramatic irony, because quite often, she could be meditating on something that’s happened in her school that doesn’t concern her at all, because that’s her way of looking at the world. What she’s really trying to do is look for answers within, or look for answers to her own pursuits. Turning this lens outward in this obsessive need she has to dissect everything around her and then relate it to her own experience, to me, felt like an interesting sort of thing to tap into as a character. Her concerns seem valid to me, but she is quite self-absorbed. So it’s interesting—it speaks to, perhaps, the generation we belong to, because a lot of the external concerns eventually become a mirror as well as a window to the reader, and speaks for myself, to my own concerns as an author and as a person in the world.

I know that some of the chapters in your novel have been published as standalone pieces online, some as early as 2020. How do you look at these pieces on their own versus in the context of your book?

I haven’t really looked at the standalone pieces for a very long time, not since the first or the second draft. There’s a lot of information threaded through the novel that, for me, felt important to reveal in chapter three, and not chapter one. The way I’ve written the story, or the way I’ve tried to capture Sophia’s voice, is to keep the point of telling or the voice as extremely intimate. It’s almost like she could be writing in her diary, or she could be narrating the story of her life to her best friend. And that’s a particular voice I’ve tried to retain throughout, so there are certain things I don’t want to translate. I haven’t used dialogue tags. And these have all, honestly, been battles, because it’s not very traditional. These were all very conscious decisions that were made to maintain her voice in a specific way. At no point did I want the reader to feel like the author is present on the page, or to feel like they are too far away from Sophia at any given point. My hope is for the reader to feel like they’re inside Sophia’s head, contending with the ten different things jumbling around in there. That’s really the kind of experience I wanted to create, more than anything else.

I think there’s subtle progressions in her relationship with her mom, her dad, her work and her best friend, Medha, that kind of happened through the book, which kind of become the emotional spine or the engine around which the novel hinges. The rest of the things that she ends up contending with are more symbolic of where she is in her life at the moment, and a comment on her evolving relationship with men, or work, or the sexism that she faces.

How do you approach editing your own work?

I am a very haphazard writer in that I rarely ever have an outline. I rarely have a structure. I actually have a running document on my laptop, where anything that strikes me, I just write it. I try not to be inundated by story so much. I feel like that’s very secondary to me. I try to give space for characters and the voice to emerge. And preoccupations: what is the character’s preoccupation? What is something that one can sit with for five to six years? In this particular case, it becomes identity and belonging and displacement and coming-of-age. For the next novel, these concerns might change. They’re also reflective of my concerns, given where I am at a certain moment in my life.

I think I’ve gone through each chapter about a hundred, two hundred times. I don’t know if there’s any particular rule I follow, but I try to trim the extraneous as much as possible. I try to not get caught up in language. Of course, language is extremely important, but in the editing process, I try to say less. The tendency can be to want to add more, to over-explain. But I do feel that by the time you’re on chapter five or chapter six, the reader has made their assumptions. They’ve invested the amount they had to invest. So I try to respect that about the reader, and I try to trim the fluff as much as possible. This is more from a line-editing point of view.

Structural editing is a beast! If I’m doing developmental structuring, I’m prone to Venn diagrams and charts, and I try to map out the protagonist’s relationship with each character. This is, I think, a screenwriting thing that I’ve picked up from school, where I’ll map out all aspects, including a backstory—I’ll go through questions about each character, down to what their favourite podcast is. Whether that information makes its way to the novel or not is immaterial, but for me as an author, it’s important for me to know these things, so I know how the character will react. I try to let the character dictate the story more than anything else.

I don’t ascribe very much to logic after a point in storytelling, although I understand it’s inherent to a good story. If you’re able to craft a compelling character, even their contradictions are believable, because that’s just how people are. Linearity is not something that people really function on the axis of, even in terms of thoughts or the way we feel about a certain thing. If I know the character that deeply in the story itself and the contradictions arise, I’m able to make sense of them and I’m able to flesh them out.

You mentioned drawing from real life—I feel like there’s sometimes a tendency to assume that if you’re a writer creating a character that is similar to yourself, that means that you believe the things they believe, or that you are like that. There are some biological or environmental things you share with your protagonist, like where you studied. I was wondering how you approach taking inspiration from real life in your fiction, and if you have faced this conflation of character and author.

I think this tends to happen quite a bit, and people always want to know how similar or dissimilar the character might be to the author. What people don’t realise when they ask that question is that in order for me to craft a character exactly like me, I would have to have that degree of self-awareness, which I absolutely do not.

Obviously, some traits or certain physicalities or mannerisms are constantly being perceived and picked up on from the environment. I derive a lot from the environments I inhabit. I’m quite a sponge, and I tend to really immerse myself wherever I am. I don’t know what that says about me as a person. I think it’s a difficult way to live life, but I think as a writer, it really helps, and the rest is just pure dramatisation. There’s also a bit of lying in there, because you can take a character—let’s say I vaguely met someone and I found something interesting about them—I will steal that, make that into a character, and start embellishing it with how I perceive them. It’s got nothing to do with who they are. It’s purely my perception. So there’s a bit of that as well. I’ve actually reflected on this quite a bit; I’ve always wondered if novelists or writers are really just control freaks, because we’re trying to manipulate so many lives when we’re writing.

I tend to want to write characters that are grappling with things that I might be grappling with, because I just feel I can do justice to it. It also, for me, becomes a way to interrogate my own concerns. It’s not as if I arrive at any answers at the end, but in some delusional way, it feels like a knot has been loosened. When I sit down to write, I’m not thinking about any of this, really. I’m just thinking about what’s gripping me at the moment, and I want it down on the page, and after a point, it has its own life. It takes me somewhere. It’s rarely ever where I expect to go. But then it takes me somewhere else, and then something else emerges. It’s like I'm constantly in conversation with my own work.

That’s such a lovely way to phrase it. Your book is set in urban India, and it focuses on a woman’s story and foregrounds her relationships—I don’t think I’ve read many books set in India of that sort. Were there works that you looked towards for inspiration?

I think more than inspiration, it’s just a matter of reading habits. I think what helped me, weirdly, was the fact that I haven’t studied literature, and I haven’t formally studied literary theory, so there was never any conception of who I’m supposed to read. At some point, I think when I was about fourteen, I was like, ‘Oh, I only have male authors on my bookshelf.’ I just switched one day. I just, very voraciously, started reading women, across the board. And that became the diet over a very long period of time. I don’t have to think about it now; it’s just second nature.

I think a lot of writers and authors who have inevitably influenced my work ever since I was a young person—so not this particular work, but also just my pursuits and aspirations as a writer—would not be people who are really considered part of the canon, because that was not really the time where women were given that sort of mantle. It would be a stylist or a modernist like Alberto Moravia or Shirley Jackson or Mary Gaitskill or Annie Ernaux.

I’ve also been greatly inspired by a lot of contemporary writers who are doing a very interesting job in marrying literary fiction with genre—they’re telling stories which are essentially, for lack of a better word, highbrow. They’re concerned with people more than anything else, but they’re also using genre mechanics to tell those stories, which is very exciting for me. Olga Tokarczuk is a very good example of that, especially Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Or writers like Alexandra Kleeman or Han Kang. I also had a huge Latin American literature phase, which did end up influencing me a lot—a lot of Cortázar and Borges, and now in the current scenario, Mariana Enríquez. There's not a lot about the way these writers write [or the kind of topics they address] that you’ll find in my novel, but I think the way they do it, their form, the concerns, the actual language itself, the particular construction of sentences, is something that has appealed to me over the years.

In terms of Indian novels, frankly, I feel I would not be the right person to be able to comment on this book vis-à-vis the larger South Asian landscape of literature. There’s so much I haven’t read. A book that stands out in recent memory is Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar. I think I found it at the right time, and I was really excited to read something like that---to read about motherhood in such a contentious manner, and in the voice of somebody who really wasn’t afraid to be seen as bad. I enjoy that because I just don’t think literature is the realm for politeness. I think Avni Doshi also did this particular thing with language, where it was very staccato, very pithy, not necessarily lyrical, and yet it managed to capture so much and say so much. Another one would be Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line. A stunning book, so different from what I’m writing, of course, but still felt like a watershed moment.

I do think a lot of the concerns [in my book] are so zeitgeisty—you know, there’s the pandemic, there’s social media, there’s all of that. So maybe people are writing [stories like this] and we haven’t heard about them because they haven’t reached the right editors yet.

What was your own journey to publication like? How did you find your agent and how did your book make its way to Westland?

I wrote to Ambar [Sahil Chatterjee, an agent with A Suitable Agency], who, frankly, has been my North Star during this whole process. I know a lot of my peers and some young writers I have spoken to have had their doubts about agents, but especially as a debut author, I could not recommend it more strongly. When A Suitable Agency expressed interest in my work, for the first time, I felt like writing books could be a reality—it felt like my writing had legs. Until then, I had no conception of my prose in a commercial sense, I had no idea of what that even looked like. All I knew was I wanted to write, and it was really quite naive, to be honest.

In due course, Sangha [Sanghamitra Biswas] came across it at Westland. I met her briefly in Goa, and it was really like finding the right fit, because we had about two hours where we chatted about every aspect of the novel. There were things she managed to articulate that I hadn’t even articulated to myself—they just existed in the aura of the story somewhere. 2023 was when I got signed on, and now the book releases in January 2025.

You engage in many different kinds of writing and creating—fiction, essays (you even have a piece on Helter Skelter), a podcast, and you write a personal newsletter. And, of course, you also work as a screenwriter. How do you negotiate these different forms of creating?

It’s interesting, because I feel like I’ve always wanted to write books. Films are very demanding too, but it’s very different. The energy is very different, because it’s very director-led. I’ve also been in directorial positions, and after a point, once the script is done, you have a team of thirty people supporting your vision. It’s like everyone’s working with each other to realise this vision. I think a true strength of a director lies in recognising the right people for the right roles—the right cinematographer or the cast or the editor, and then being able to have enough faith and trust to delegate that. So, really, it’s always a team that brings it to life, even though in the press or the way it’s perceived by the world, it’s very much always a director’s vision and baby.

The rest of my pursuits, nonfiction, podcasts, it’s really just a whim, sometimes—and I acknowledge the privilege of being able to say that. I’ve always managed to somehow hold a day job and write, but that very much comes at the cost of many negotiations with your personal life, such as making a certain amount of money or living a certain standard of life. Now I’ve arrived at a point where I don’t really feel the need to explain that. And luckily, I’m from a family that supports this constant negotiation. They had their doubts for a long time, but I think now we’ve arrived at a point where they’re like, ‘Okay, we don’t really know what she’s up to, but some of it is beginning to make sense.’

I’m nowhere close to being able to sustain myself just through writing books, although that is the eventual aim. I also have a very interesting relationship with films because it’s a big love, and I’ve also formally studied it. The thing with certain kinds of formal education, with any creative art, can be that it does make you a little didactic, a little pedantic, a little like set in your ways. I definitely think I’ve had a bit of a chip on my shoulder as far as filmmaking is concerned. Also, the stakes are very different. There are crores attached. There are constant stakeholders to impress. The realities of the industry [in India] are very different from how film is practised abroad, primarily because we don’t have enough public funding. Public funding makes a huge difference, because it really does give you the space to make whatever you want to make as a young filmmaker. In India, spaces like that are extremely limited. The landscape is changing now, but not so much, and very slowly.

With scriptwriting, the demands are very different from prose, but I feel like so much of my education in film and my work there has informed my writing. Even simple things like telling the story in the white spaces, or how I might choose to transition from one scene to another, works very differently for me because of my experience in screenwriting and editing. I actually have a very abusive relationship with filmmaking. It’s like a bad relationship. Every time things are good, I’m like, ‘Oh my god, this is it. I love this. Everything about this feels so good.’ And the minute there’s the first obstacle—and it’s really quite rife with obstacles—I’m like, ‘This is the worst. I should have never gotten back to it.’ But I don’t see myself moving away from films. I would like to write and make films for as long as I can.

Fiction, for me, is a very sacred private practice. It’s the closest to who I am as a person, and it feels the most visceral. I feel like when I write, or when I finish writing a piece, something within me changes, and I’m hoping that when a person reads my writing, something within them shifts. Films can have that effect, of course, but with prose, strangely enough, because it’s closer to home and it’s closer to me, it feels more expansive.

Earlier this month, Experimenta, the biennial festival of experimental film and moving image art celebrated its 12^th edition in Bangalore, presenting premieres, interactive discussions, and panels with guest artists, filmmakers and curators. Among its key segments were an international programme featuring films from Asia, Southeast Asia, and its diaspora on themes of belonging, remembrance, and shifting landscapes; a programme centred on feminist nonfiction from the Global South; and the India premiere of a restored version of the country’s first queer narrative on screen, long believed to be lost.

In conversation with Helter Skelter, Experimenta founder and filmmaker Shai Heredia spoke about the festival’s role in taking Indian experimental cinema to the world and how the success of Payal Kapadia’s film [All We Imagine as Light] bodes well for filmmakers like her who emerge out of experimental film contexts and are interested in filmic exercises that weave abstraction into narrative cinema. The role of the democratisation of technology in enriching cinematic form, the consistent lack of support structures for experimental film in India, and the importance of addressing current issues through a historical lens were also discussed. Read on for excerpts from the conversation.

What were some of the highlights for you from this year’s edition?

There was a curated section titled One Way or Another, that I co-curated with writer and film critic Erika Balsom. This set of films looked at feminist nonfiction from the Global South made from 1970 through to the 1990s. There were films from Chile, Peru, and Argentina. We had an Indian film by Nilita Vachani, Eyes of Stone (1990), and we also showed artist Nalini Malani’s film Onanism (1969). These were all archival films which are actually very difficult to source. They were a part of a research project that I've been involved with for a few years with Erika, so that's how this section came together.

Then we had the international programme that came together through the open call which was focused on films from Asia and also films from the Asian diaspora. We received about 400 films and we selected 28. This selection included a mix of films from Lebanon, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and Thailand. These were works from 2018 up to 2024, because the last time we had an open call was for the 2017 edition of the festival. Some filmmakers sent us three films that they had made, and then in some cases we chose one of those. So, it was nice to be able to see their bodies of work.

We also had the Experimenta Forum section through which we engaged in dialogue and conversations around filmmaking and curatorial practice. We had Erika Balsom on the first day, and filmmakers Priya Sen and Deepa Dhanraj on the second and third days. The ideas that were discussed were those that resonated through the films, because most of the films we selected reflected on or had some response to their own political context in that particular region. So, the Forum took up discussions about, for instance, how you make films in times of conflict.

Could you talk to me about the film Thokei by Srinagar-based artist Malik Irtiza which was given the Adolfas Mekas Award?

It's a film that uses performance and abstraction. There's a soundtrack that is built around protest sounds and songs. It's a very powerful piece. There is a poem that the filmmaker, Irtiza Malik, recites for Gaza. It's a very short piece, but within that, both aesthetically and in terms of form—the way it's structured and how the sound and image is crafted—the film is really strong. There were many other films that were also great, but I think there was a particular emotional quality that this film had which resonated with the audience as well.

In another interview, you spoke about how people’s interactions with the moving image have changed significantly thanks to social media and the increased access to different kinds of work and platforms. What were some of the most interesting engagements with the form that were shown at the festival this year—engagements that were perhaps reflective of the changes that have taken place in our techno-cultural landscape in the last few years?

I would like to highlight both the films that received a Special Mention from the Experimenta jury for the International Program—Babasaheb in Bengaluru, by Mahishaa, a Bangalore-based filmmaker, and Home and Hatred by Praagya Arya and Dimple Mishra.

Babasaheb in Bengaluru uses the form and technique of collage in a really interesting way. The screen is broken up between straight-to-camera interviews and text which is used both as image and content. The text operates as a sort of subtitle, because they are speaking in Kannada, but it appears very large across the screen. The film has a great energy and is essentially a work of video art. There is also a really cool soundtrack which makes you feel like it's a music video, but it's not, because the interviews are saying some really difficult things about caste, and what it means to put up a statue of Babasaheb outside your house—or even inside your house—and what your landlord will come and say about that, or that your caste gets revealed immediately and how you get treated as soon as your caste is revealed. At the same time, the film is an homage to people who have built these statues of Ambedkar across the city in Bangalore and in various contexts, because it's usually individuals or small communities who do that. It's never the state. The film uses what is seemingly a sort of YouTube aesthetic to make some really powerful comments. It's a really fresh form.

The younger generation today takes ownership of the medium in interesting ways. They discuss social justice issues with full agency using pop culture references which makes the work accessible to many people. The power dynamic inherent to filmmaking is not as stark as it used to be because the medium now is in the hands of everyone.

With Home and Hatred, the filmmakers make a political comment in a very subtle way through cleverly crafting the images of city spaces and the sound of interviews and local radio. The film addresses the political situation in Madhya Pradesh, and points to small acts of violence that exist in the everyday, like someone putting a particular flag or writing something outside your house without your permission. The film makes the viewer think about how such casual actions that people do become ways of instilling fear in anyone who thinks differently.

How was the closing film Badnam Basti received? What were some of the conversations the screening generated?

The film was based on a book [a 1957 novel by Kamleshwar Prasad Saxena, published in English as A Street with 57 Lanes and serialised in the prestigious Hindi literary magazine Hans] and some people had read it and were interested to see how the film had represented it. What was also interesting for people was the trivia around the film. The film was shown around the same time as Mani Kaul’s films. It's quite radically made in that the narrative is very fragmented, choppy, like a puzzle. The narrative is not constructed in a linear fashion. There's not much dialogue. It's only when you get to the end that the penny drops about everything that has been happening in the film. It’s a transgressive film on many levels, not just in terms of its subject and characters who are people living on the periphery of society, but also because there’s a critique of heteronormativity. You also have freeze frames, and this beautiful soundtrack by Vijay Raghav Rao, who did the soundtracks for a lot of the experimental Films Division films of the time. [He also composed the music for Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome.] Harivansh Rai Bachchan wrote a poem for the film. Ghulam Mustafa Khan sang songs. So it was not an outsider film, it was very much within this community of the New Wave at the time. And it was shown abroad.

Recently this film came up through various serendipitous encounters. It was not even listed in the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, which makes you realise that there must be a lot of films that have not been listed in the Encyclopedia, and therefore, have we done the work? How many films have been obscured or lost?

People really enjoyed it because they were discovering this gem, which was forgotten/ lost. But at Experimenta, we are really into doing that. Even with our One Way or Another programme, we showed a lot of historical films. We showed this film called Les Femmes Palestiniennes by Jocelyne Saab, who was a famous filmmaker and journalist. The film is about what happens to women in a context of conflict, and it talks about some of the women who left Palestine to study in Beirut, also looking at women soldiers who were fighting in Palestine. The film ends with referencing torture in prisons in Gaza. It was also a really important way for us to address what's happening now, but not with the images that we are being bombarded with on our screens, but to understand that there's a historical trajectory, and that this conflict didn't just start on October 7, it's been going on for decades. At Experimenta, we do our best to use cinema to address some of the issues of our times.

As compared to 2003, when Experimenta had its first edition, are more people working professionally within the realm of experimental cinema? Is it easier to work within this space now as compared to the early 2000s? Are there more funds coming in?

No, there's no funding. Essentially, experimental film as a practice is a solo practice in the sense that you work with your community. Someone like Payal [Kapadia], who has come out of the experimental film context has opened some doors for people who want to make a feature film that has more abstraction, like her film All We Imagine as Light—which is still narrative, but a little more open in terms of the kind of cinematic experience it offers. I do think that it has been through the work that we have been doing with Experimenta since 2003 that Indian experimental film is known all over the world. Internationally, we've been showing work, but unfortunately the Indian context is overdetermined by the mainstream film industry, so there is little to no support for experimental work here, even though the audiences are pretty large.

Experimental film across the world is always on the margins, but in other spaces there is a relationship to film as an art practice, and there are funding organisations that actually fund art practice. Here, we don't even have art organisations that fund art practice. You have to be in the art industry/ gallery system to actually earn a living. If you don't have funding support for art practice in the first place, how do you then find support for film as an art practice?

Due to the hegemony of the mainstream, recognising diverse forms of moving image work as an art practice is extremely tough. People can only think about film as a mainstream industrial practice embedded in a distribution market. More recently the documentary film context has received some recognition. There is a lot of exposure happening now, but I don't feel that this exposure has translated into support structures and infrastructure, particularly for people to make more formally challenging work. In this realm of experimental film or moving image art practice, you have to fund your own work, find your own resources. There are various ways that people do that. You get grants from abroad or you collaborate with people, or it takes you five years to make a film. Considering the large number of people who are actually making this kind of work, it's tragic that we don't have support for them. And it's really tragic that the only thing that we keep pushing is this idea of scale and having things in the cinemas. Of course, all of us want to go to the cinema, but it can't be only about that. We should all be able to exist simultaneously instead of one vs. the other or at the expense of the other.

Over the past few years there are more and more platforms like Experimenta, and these are driven by communities of people who want to support each other. Sadly, the system of funding and the infrastructure are completely out of sync with the scene on the ground. So that catch-up has to happen. How that's going to happen, I have no idea, especially since we are now in a hyper-capitalist space and everything is about markets and generating wealth. Experimental film is not about the market, it's about community, politics, art, culture. And, to me, the problem is the collusion between culture and capital that is leading to a dark situation in India and across the world.

Back in the day in India, the state funded a lot of pretty radical stuff—films that were critical of the state—because it was about building a better democracy. The state was not insecure of its people. It was open to learning from its people. Unfortunately, we are in another time now where we actually don't want to hear what the people have to say.

My mother-in-law is baffled when she looks at my vanity kit. I have two makeup bags: one filled with lipsticks and the other with essential makeup products. She’s come to terms with my makeup-hoarding habits, but now she’s staring at my large kit brimming with fancy glass bottles, tubes, tubs, and sprays. “It’s skincare, Mummy,” I explain, preemptively addressing her unasked question. The look on her face is a mixture of disbelief and disapproval. “All of this is just for the face?” she asks, as though she can’t comprehend the necessity of applying such an assortment of liquids to one’s visage.

This incident took place two years ago, when I was among the millions of women absorbing skincare advice from social media beauty influencers, now obnoxiously known as ‘skinfluencers’. Who knew there was a specific cream just for the neck? Not me, until I saw a woman online applying it while earnestly warning her audience that the neck ages the fastest. That experience was the start of my deep dive into skincare, where daily scrolling brought a new “must-have” product to my attention.

Influencer marketing has driven a surge in skincare overconsumption, creating a cycle where consumers feel pressured to buy more than they need. There are specialised products for under-eye care because, when you’re not busy developing eye bags from being endlessly ‘skinfluenced’, you need eye creams and patches to combat the effects. But perhaps the most revered skincare advice today is the relentless use and reuse of sunscreen. Our grandmothers could never have imagined a time when we’d be warned that without slathering on S.P.F. 10,000, our fate would be sealed—either looking like a sun-dried raisin or, worse, inviting a legion of malignancies.

And then, of course, we have the celebrated actives: the acids, the masks. Anti-aging. Anti-wrinkle. Anti-anxiety. Anti-common sense. Anti-any-hope-of-keeping-your-mornings-sane.

Historically, skincare focused primarily on maintaining basic hygiene and shielding the skin from environmental damage. But as the beauty industry has grown, it has introduced a multitude of products, each claiming to solve specific issues or deliver impressive results. With the rise of social media, particularly platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, our approach to skincare has shifted significantly. Influencers have emerged as modern-day beauty gurus, dispensing advice, product recommendations, and detailed demonstrations of their routines. The popularity of the 12-step Korean skincare regimen is a prime example of such routines. This trend introduced a new standard, subtly implying that more steps equate to better results—a belief perpetuated by both skincare brands and influencers, leading many to adopt these increasingly complex rituals.

There was a time when I, too, let the Internet convince me that it is important to have a day routine, a night routine, a sunscreen routine, a lip care routine, and a routine for every conceivable skincare need. And the only way to establish these elaborate routines is to invest in products —toners, serums, moisturisers, emulsions, face mists, and a plethora of potions. The more I watched these curated step-by-step rituals, the more products I added to my cart, believing I was one purchase away from perfect skin.

Admittedly, I have tried them all. It felt semi-therapeutic at first, like a ritualistic act of self-care, an indulgence in luxury that promised eternal youth. Spending hundreds of dollars on these products became a self-justified ideology because good things are usually expensive, right? But, as I meticulously curated my collection of serums, creams, and toners, I started to wonder: when did skincare become so complicated, and is all of it really necessary?

As I questioned the necessity of these routines, I also began questioning the economics of skincare. The cost of beauty :  how much are we really spending on these products? And there’s the environmental impact ,  the wastefulness of excessive packaging that is rarely discussed. A whole corner of social media is pushing us to buy stuff just because it’s ‘pretty’. Sure, some brands try to come across as natural and sustainable, but in most cases, it is nothing more than clever marketing ,  a little trick called “greenwashing”.

Behind the incessant promotion of these products lies a deeper concern: is this really about skincare, or is it a symptom of a larger cultural obsession with youth and beauty? In the skincare world, brands market to us gullible men and women, banking on our belief that the more expensive a product is, the better it performs. This belief is not entirely unfounded; research has shown that price often correlates with perceived value and efficacy. But in the labyrinth of skincare, this correlation is often exploited. And here’s the real kicker: the skinfluencers who sell us these dreams often have professional treatments, good lighting, and filters working in their favour. Many don’t disclose their use of cosmetic procedures or editing tools, creating an unattainable standard for their audience.

Beyond packaging, the production of skincare products also has a significant environmental footprint. For instance, the widespread use of palm oil in cosmetics is a leading cause of deforestation, particularly in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, where vast areas of rainforest are cleared to make way for palm oil plantations. Chemical compounds such as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), commonly used in packaging beauty and skincare products like compact cases, caps, and closures, generate a substantial amount of hazardous waste and toxic byproducts.The production processes for these ingredients, as well as the energy-intensive manufacturing and transportation involved in getting products to consumers, contribute to significant greenhouse gas emissions.

Many skincare products contain microplastics that pollute water and harm marine life. It's estimated that 9 out of 10 skincare products have microplastics, releasing about 3,800 tons into the environment each year. With microplastics seeping into oceans, packaging waste piling up in landfills, and natural resources being exploited for ingredients, our beauty routines are leaving a devastating ecological footprint. We have to ask ourselves: is this pursuit of flawless skin actually making us feel better, or is it fuelling unnecessary anxiety about our appearance? From personal experience, I can attest that many of the expensive, highly recommended products I’ve tried—after waiting patiently for results—didn’t deliver. My skin felt smothered by layers of product, looking worse than before. This growing consumerism isn’t about caring for our skin or health; it’s about how we come to value ourselves, how we’re conditioned to constantly seek improvement, and the toll this takes on our pockets and the planet.

The good news is that there’s a growing movement that’s pushing back against this relentless cycle. The rise of “skinimalism” encourages people to pare down their routines, focusing on just a few essential products that are truly effective. Skinimalists advocate for using multi-purpose products—like a moisturiser with S.P.F.—so you can both, simplify your routine and reduce the waste generated. This minimalist mindset is catching on, but what can you do to incorporate it into your life? Start by reviewing the products you own and focus on essentials: a gentle cleanser, moisturiser, and sunscreen. These basics meet most skin needs, and additional products like toners or serums are only necessary for specific concerns, such as acne or eczema.

Zero-waste skincare is on the rise, encouraging the use of products that leave no packaging behind. Support companies making sustainable choices by choosing brands with eco-friendly packaging, like refillable containers or minimal designs. Lastly, dispose of products responsibly. A number of cities in India have recycling programs for cosmetic containers, and some companies offer in-store recycling for empties.

It’s time to wake up and smell the moisturiser. The endless parade of products doesn’t reflect our self-worth. It’s a testament to brilliant marketing and our susceptibility to it. Let’s ditch the 27-step routines and embrace a simpler approach. After all, science supports it, our wallets will thank us, and maybe, just maybe, our skin will finally have a chance to breathe.

As Vera Wandlung awoke one morning from uneasy dreams she found herself transformed from an elegant carapascular insect into a large limbmangled beast. The communal comfort of the wetdark loam that impacted around the nest was present but different. No: it was the same, only her scenting of it had changed. 

Vera opened her eyes and became aware of expansion. Her normally compact and segregimented body had exploded: the six nimblelimbs had vanished, replaced by four ungainly lumberarms. Her sleekit sheenyshell was soft; a horrorskein dotted with grizzle. There were other appendages not priorly present, but so small they didn’t bear fretting about.

And she was bigger. But still occupying the same nestal dimensions. Vera didn’t understand much about the physical properties of space, but she knew a large thing could not be accommodated inside a smaller. And yet it was so, albeit not comfortably, for the new elements of Vera were crushed over each other, poking holes into the nest. One of the longlimbs had broken through a wall and the nubbinygubbins at the end hung over her neighbour’s sleeping body which—Vera observed enviously—was unchanged. She withdrew the protrusion—the movement resulted in strange sensations that pulsepained her entirety—and packed up the hole.

The pulsing continued for several moments. In those moments Vera attempted to account for her experience. She understood that a transformation had taken place but its nature was unclear. There were creatures for whom change was mandated. The butterfly emerged from her silkshell no longer a grub. Moths grew from larvae. Frogs were formerly tadpoles. But for a creature such as Vera, stasis was a species feature.

And this naming of herself: Vera Wandlung. Who was that? Certainly not her or had been. But here was something: it was her now. There was no evidence of this. Still, she knew. Was possessed of a certainty hitherto unfamiliar. Such assurety was unpleasant. She had known her place in the world and this knowledge had been replaced with a kind she neither recognised nor liked.

Vera’s thoughts were caving in on themselves, her mindwalls crumbling. Formerly-lovely loam mushed wetcold against her face, finding its way into newformed crevices, constricting her from within. Her body was possessed of a slow suspicion that dampity and compactedness were neither desirable nor healthy. Vera surged and jagged limberous; pretty in a panic.

A colloidal catastrophe commenced. Columns and pedical forms collapsed. The earth erupted into the above and Vera emerged gasping into harshlight. She spat out grassicular vegetate and choked in dry air as hundreds of sibilantlings scattergoried over her. A wave of disgust flooded her system—which felt pipelike and skeletal—and she whapped, whoppered and shurryscooed them away. Then—lo! Horror!—a loathsome noise occurred. Not a jubilant stridulation, the call of the swarm or the enticement of some ovipositorous other, but a horlastorm: the crack of the Earth at birth. A howling, shrill and cacophonal, emitting from her unmandibles but originating from her unpartitioned lowerings. A rumbling that roared through her body and spouted in the form of something she understood to be a scream. All things were new. Forever unchanged.

Vera rose. She stumbled and flutterfreshed her wings that were not wings, but unseen and uncomfortable ripplings, and assessed herself.

She was nae:
thorax
pincer
antennae
chitinous
exoskeletal
tripartite
trochanter
beauty.

She was aye:
gangly
appendage
flubbly
meat
indoskeleton
rigidity
unbalance
disgust.

The meat was the worst of everything, covered in a series of wrappings; fabric decoratives she might have past-chewed, regurgitated and converted into nest. Vera identified these as shoes, stockings, skirt…

Many things previously understood were becoming abstract memories. Countless things never even approximately conceived were unaccountably fully-formed and real. Amongst an influx of ideas Vera understood that she was: a mess, dirty and late. She brushed herself down and ran from the burrow, the hillock, the scrub of land that abutted the greenscape, towards the greyscale of the near distance which became understood by her as being roads, streets and offices…

Some internal antennae guided her to a building whose doors opened on her approach. A worker (the word security neologised) barred her way until a series of cognitive clicks prompted her to reach into a pocket (but what was that?) for her ID (which was also?). An entire world coalesced. Inroads into sense were made. That person was Debbie and could be relied upon. That person was Joanne and could not be trusted. That person was Dennis and was just ugh… How did she even know anyone?

Vera felt homesick and vertiginous. The ID card had her photo on it, but the face that stared at her—dead-eyed and molten—was not one she wanted to see. The person she knew to be Debbie came over brightish and eased. Vera followed her. Debbie chittered about any number of people places and things that Vera couldn’t get a grasp on. It didn’t matter. Here, at least, was a friend.

She followed Debbie to the elevator—a fun old-new word—and rose to the fifteenth floor where Debbie pushed her out, laughing. Vera stumbled to a cluster of cubicles where light failed to fall. Here was vestigial comfort. Lackadaisical creepers clung to felt-a-fabricked walls. A squeakerchair stood next to a desk whose legs were taped up. The desk hosted a keyboard and monitor covered in a plastic hood.

Vera wasn’t immediately cognisant of what she was supposed to do, but do something she did, because her name was embossed on a nameplate, along with a photograph of a meatpink creature and two awful-looking bugs. Were they hers? Presumably. Why else would the photo be there? When previously the thing she’d been, there were no offspring, and her role was defined. Here was ambiguity at best. After her name a legend read: Clerk to the Mezzanine, signifying nothing.

She sat down, neolimbs and mechanics creaking. No one paid her any attention, even in her smudgesoiled clothes. Thus the day went.

Vera, where’s that report. Vera, will you type this up. Vera, are youin this meeting. Vera, can you cover the lines. Vera, can you work late this evening, this week, this weekend… None of the requests had questioning intonaics. It wasn’t so far removed from the colony, but for the undersimmering of angreaic repression she could feel formicing inside. When she got up to take her break she half-expected to see a puddle of acid pooling in the pleather.

Lunch was another thing altogether. Still adjusting to her limbs, Vera had to navigate the hierarchy of an eating space whose rules and delineations were unspoken-yet-intuitive. Unpossessed of the lessons, she staggered from table to table, first sitting with a group of directors, then with the typing pool, then with a group of visiting executives, ending up finally in the preparation area with the kitchen crew, who at least didn’t give her the stink-eye. Eating wet slop slab, Vera experienced a sensation not previously felt and for which she knew no name. It was hard to articulate. The closest she could approach was an absence of presence, as if there was some unpierceable membrane around her. She gave it a name of her own: einisolash.

As she sat at the table, surrounded and alone, a tiny creature (a bugglebear?) ran across the floor, limbs chitterskittering. It skimmed the tiles and dabbled in the grout before stopping at Vera’s foot. She looked at it and felt that in some way, if not in reality, it looked at her. Was she known to it? Was it known to she? Dead seconds elapsed, during which time Vera observed with dispassionate interest that her foot was rising in order to come down. She wavered and her sole hovered a shadow over the bugglebear, which, sensing a reprieve, scurried to the crumbcorners of the kitchen. Vera felt stomachsick and diseased. The kitchen crew harried her away, her illish paloured skin a hazard to good health.

After lunch, Debbie visited and made small talk: deadlines, holidays, redundancy. Vera smiled and nodded, understanding that this was all that was required. As Debbie left, Vera longed to reach out, to grab her armish protrusion, to allow their ganglers to connect, but another understanding occurred: that this was unacceptable, not protocol, ne pas de rigeur. What was acceptable, she feelered, was quietude, headdownedness and work. Elements of these were familiar enough for her to exist in small comfort, until the end of the day, which was, she furtherfeelered, when the slowbodies rose and swarmed toward the elevators.

Vera waited until the lights went out. In the dark, with the creepers, nostalgia bloomed. The internal antennae she was becoming unwillingly accustomed to oriented her home, not to nestal comforts, but to a brickshack, the thought of which caused her pain. After navigating an underground labyrinth that was not unpleasant, she surfaced in a landscape of plastibeige. A muted, orderly world—again, not so bad—but in which she felt strange and unwelcome.

Outside the brickshack she peered through a window. Inside was the meatpink creature, paler and without the photograph’s idiot grin. He was shouting at one of the awful-looking bugs (understandable) who had committed some unseen infraction. The other half of the pair was playing with a doll. Although, on closer inspection, Vera saw that it was actually another bug bred from the same cloth. Also hers? Why then, was it not in the photograph? Probably too disgusting to be documented.

Vera thought, decided, and fled…

…back through the labyrinth, to the greyscale and greenscapes, now shorn of sunlight and draped in crespuculence. But where now home? This patch of grass, for example: was this it? A scent trail she picked up tapered off at a pile of dead leaves. She kicked them aside but found only rotting wood and fox scat. Vera gagged. Not so long ago, tramping bodily through a whole trail of such shit wouldn’t have bothered her, but that memory was dissipating at a rate that was dizzying as it was terrifying. She ran deep into the trees, in a manner that occurred to her as being hither and thither. The knowledge of this phrase, her impossible recall of these words, along with their madcap random implication, brought up a bile that she spat onto the ground. It hissenfizzled and she did not recognise it. But the fell tree upon the zigguratish logs up ahead? Yes. The dribbling brook, formerly a great impassable river? For certain. Here was knowness. Creature-comfort.

Vera furrowed hard, unearthing old instincts, until she found her colony. But—aye! o! aye!—she’d outgrown the nest. The chaos of the morning lay in crumbles.

Her homehomehomehomehome. The construction of a new fortification had commenced. Already it looked in good health. She loomed over and peered inside. The colony was at rest. Vera desired to be too. She lay on the ground, her head at the entrance. Down and below the colony reverbed, alert to attack. The first line gathered. Another followed. They ran over Vera, not recognising her as their own—even as she squeamed and swatted and called to them by name (a meaningless series of noises) begging to be readmitted to the soil—biting, stinging and formicing the aggressor, who—in the final stages of metamorphosis—rolled over, crushing former-friends and ex-of-kin, and—in a desperate attempt to quell what she knew would be a relentless defence of their territory—drew back her meaty lumberarm and smushed it into the nest, again and again, drawing soil, hemolymph and plasmic carapace, before laying down and rolling away, certain intrepidous individuals hanging on, skewering her, chowing down with mandibles sharp until she gave in, until she surrendered, until such time as she was no longer a threat. Like a pest in need of extermination. A verminous thing. Like a bug.

In a 2019 lecture for The London Review of Books, American writer Patricia Lockwood revealed that she began keeping a diary to track her experience of using the Internet; she describes her interest not as academic but to interrogate how the Internet made her think differently. For the rest of the lecture, Lockwood read out from her diary, describing events from her life, subcultures she stumbled upon, questioning specific online terminology, eventually building up to that very lecture but mediating this entire journey through her use of Twitter. Lockwood is among the crop of writers who, in the late 2010s, became interested in how the internet blurs lines between truth and fiction, an experience that she would explore in the form of a novel, dubbed one of the first of its kind, an Internet Novel.

What is an Internet Novel? Broadly, a novel that considers the Internet or smartphone as central to its plot. Several such books have emerged globally in the 2020s—No One is Talking About This (2021) by Patricia Lockwood, I’m a Fan (2022) by Sheena Patel, Several People Are Typing (2021) by Calvin Kasulke. These books also stand out with the way they treat form, often written in short bursts of prose. The first half of No One is Talking About This features a healthy balance between tweets and prose. I’m a Fan is written in chapters not larger than a long Instagram caption, a platform the narrator is obsessed with. Several People Are Typing is written in the form of a Slack chat. The experience of reading these novels, on the level of form, mirrors the fragmented experience of browsing the internet or indeed, as in my case, the experience of reading while being addicted to the Internet.

The 2010s have been India’s Internet decade. The first half of the decade saw the rise of Internet platforms targeting the urban elite: shopping online on Flipkart or Myntra, ordering food on Swiggy, taxis on Ola, groceries on BigBasket or Grofers. In 2016, the dynamics of Indian Internet usage changed dramatically. Mukesh Ambani’s new telephone network, Reliance Jio, was launched with a staggering deal: 4GB of internet everyday, for free. Rival data providers were forced to lower their prices to compete. The result was this: in six months, India became the highest data consuming market in the world.

It was only a matter of time until the Internet became a prominent participant in recent Indian fiction. Tanuj Solanki makes judicious use of emails, texts, and Tinder in The Machine is Learning (2020), Prayaag Akbar’s short story The Twenty-Sixth Giant (2018) is mediated primarily through SMS texts, Devika Rege’s Quarterlife (2023) paints a picture of the buildup to the 2014 election through YouTube sketch comedy videos.

Three titles from the recent past interact deeply with the landscape of the Indian Internet. In Nisha Susan’s short story collection The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories (2020), several short stories bristle with the ubiquitousness of the internet. In the titular story, the protagonist and her friend make a list of all the men they’ve slept with, a sex atlas, when they realise they could make an online portal with more information on all these men: whether they were still single, if they had cheated on their partners, where they were currently; they, however, never end up creating this portal. The most prominently online story in the collection is 'Gentle Reader', where a newly commissioned novelist struggles to make headway into her draft and spirals into a Twitter addiction: “‘At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction’”, the narrator ponders this correspondence between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her novelist friend Mary Russell Mitford, before remarking, “But that was because Liz and Mary didn't have Twitter”. What makes this collection stand out is Susan’s use of the Internet not just as a marker for contemporariness but also as nostalgia: in 'The Singer and the Prince', the protagonist trawls through Orkut and stumbles across a fake account of Jagjit Singh having an argument with a fake account of Lata Mangeshkar.

In another recent title, A Burning (2020) by Megha Majumdar, Facebook is the catalyst of the plot. Jivan, a Muslim woman who works at a nearby store, witnesses a mob setting fire to a train, killing hundreds of people. She uploads a video of the incident to Facebook the next day, attracting multiple comments. Jivan gets sucked into an argument where she questions the purpose of the police and compares the government to a terrorist state. A few days later she is arrested and accused of chatting with a terrorist recruiter on Facebook. A Burning provides an interesting account of the reach that social media and indeed Facebook has in India, not just among the urban elite but also the country’s working classes.

In Aravind Jayan’s Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors (2022), the Internet features in multiple dimensions. A sex tape of the unnamed narrator’s older brother Sreenath leaks on a porn website and goes viral. This news spreads rapidly through WhatsApp, and within no time, the narrator’s entire neighbourhood knows. The family is ashamed, and this is where the drama kicks off, with Sreenath moving away from home. Jayan adeptly navigates through the sensibilities of multiple generations of Indians in the book: the narrator and Sree are slick operators on WhatsApp, Tinder, Facebook and torrents; their parents are slower and clunkier with their smartphones. Their father, at one point, asks a policeman if he can remove the leaked video from the Internet, to which he is told that the Internet is not a fridge where he can put things in and take them out whenever he pleases. Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors announces its arrival as an intergenerational Internet novel in India.

While the penetration of the Internet beyond just urban centres in India has become a marker of the country's modernity, its wide reach has also made it a site for disinformation, propaganda, and policing. Hate speech targeting minorities has been so rampantly spread, unchecked, on platforms such as WhatsApp, that researchers consider it as the primary site where mob violence is incited. Internal reports at Facebook suggested that religiously inflammatory content was at a 300% increase in the buildup to the Delhi pogrom in 2020. The Indian State also recognises the power the Internet has to mobilise support and dissent, and resorts to censorship to prevent this—India has had more recent Internet shutdowns than any other democracy.

When thinking about the Indian Internet Novel, it is essential to keep this context in mind. In 2012, a young woman in Palghar, Maharashtra, was arrested for a Facebook post questioning the Police’s decision to shut the city of Mumbai down after the death of politician Bal Thackeray. Her friend was arrested for liking this post. A Google search for ‘Arrested for Facebook post India’ shows many such examples over the years since. In this light, Jivan’s arrest over a Facebook post in A Burning takes a grander cultural significance—not only is the Internet Novel in India an experiment with contemporary form, but also a sign of a difficult political moment.

While the narrator in Nisha Susan’s 'The Singer and the Prince' enjoys an argument on Orkut between a fake Jagjit Singh and a fake Lata Mangeshkar, mimicking celebrities has had severe consequences in the recent past: in 2016, the comedian Tanmay Bhat was investigated by the Mumbai Police for making a video on Snapchat with a face filter of Lata Mangeshkar. In 'Gentle Reader',the experience of the narrator being bombarded with abuse on Twitter is the reality of many Indian women on the platform—the journalist Rana Ayyub, for instance, tweeted in 2022 about receiving 26,000 tweets in one month that were threatening death or sexual abuse. Unlike their western counterparts whose Internet fiction is a response to a larger ideological shift, there are very tangible, material consequences faced by writers posting on the Internet in India.

Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors also examines how moral panics translate in the age of the Internet. Indian popular culture is no stranger to the trope of the leaked pornographic clip. The Delhi Public School MMS Scandal of 2004, where an explicit clip of two students was leaked and auctioned on portals online became the subject of a moral panic across the country. Multiple Bollywood films like Dev D (2009) and Love Sex Aur Dhoka (2010) were loosely based on the incident. Teen Couple poses the question of how such a scandal would unfold in the smartphone era, where data is cheap and WhatsApp is the hotbed of unverified information. It is a deft study of how the ideas of tradition and morality are deceptively warped tightly to ideas of progress and indeed the Indian Internet.

In a decade where the Internet has transformed life in India, the form of the novel is catching up, both in its conception and as a reaction. Over the course of this decade, the Internet will only penetrate further in India; and along with it, many such cracks and crevices that show the ugly direction democracy in the country is headed toward.

In such an India, it remains to be seen how Internet fiction shapes up. While at the level of plot, Indian Internet fiction grapples with the reality of the Internet in India, one of the salient stylistic features of the Internet Novel is notably absent: the fragmented style of writing. Will we see more novelists move towards this experimental style, where the Internet becomes the novel, and the novel becomes the Internet? Or will there continue to be restraint, to maintain clear demarcations between the two, possibly a decision to prolong the shelf-life of the novel considering the fast-changing landscape of the Internet where platforms look dramatically different every three years. Perhaps there is a resonance with Lauren Oyler’s narrator’s remark in her Internet Novel Fake Accounts (2021): “If I wanted a book that resembled Twitter, I wouldn’t write a book; I would just spend even more time on Twitter.”

Irrespective of which way the stylistic direction swings, considering the sociopolitical conditions in the country and the emergence of novelists who have come of age in the age of the Internet, it is apparent that this should be the decade of India’s Internet Novel. Will it be?

A man tends to his flock of clouds. A beehive’s queen finds herself threatened by members of her royal court. A woman sees messages in the murmurations of starlings. Gigi Ganguly’s Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World is a collection of twenty-two short stories that explore the natural world in all its weirdness and beauty, celebrating its strength while also reminding us of its fragility. Set everywhere from forests to the ocean to outer space, these stories are by turn laugh-out-loud funny, tender, and often completely surprising. A follow-up to Ganguly’s novella, One Arm Shorter Than The Other, Biopeculiar is a delightful read for fans of the fantastical as well as newcomers to the genre. It is the first book published in Westland’s new speculative fiction imprint, IF, a first-of-its-kind endeavour in Indian publishing. Gigi Ganguly spoke with Helter Skelter about the inspirations for her short story collection, her love of wordplay, and treating nature with respect.  How did Biopeculiar come together? Did you conceive of it as a collection right from the start? I was in Ireland for my Master’s in creative writing in 2018, and I stayed there for a year or two. I wrote my novella [One Arm Shorter Than The Other] over there. I came back home because of the pandemic. My family has a house in the Himalayas, and we were there while I was waiting for the novella to get published. So, in 2022, I started writing stories. In the beginning, I didn’t really have a theme in mind, about nature or animals, but I was surrounded by nature everywhere---there were so many birds all the time, and then there were the neighbourhood dogs. I heard stories about the tigers that used to live there, or there would be things that our neighbours said. For example, the idea for my story ‘Cocoon’ came from something that someone said. Once I had maybe four or five stories with me, I realised that there was a pattern of nature. I have a background in geography---I did my bachelor’s in that, and I’ve always loved clouds and climatology. So I knew I had to have a story about clouds, because I love them! I’d pick up ideas, I’d notice something in an article or in a book, and eventually I came up with ideas for these twenty-two stories. How do you approach writing short stories? How is the process different from writing a novel or novella? I actually find it easier to write shorter stories than the longer forms. Even in the novella, the first half was three interconnected short stories. I feel comfortable knowing that there is a very short start and an ending---the whole journey is quite short, and I have to fit in everything in it. I know that more than the beginning, the ending has to be really good. The kind of short stories that I like are ones where it’s not necessary for there to be a resolution---it can be slightly open-ended, but you should feel like you’ve seen everything there. Some of the stories in this collection are laugh-out-loud funny, and some of them (like ‘A Year (Not Quite) Alone In An Alien Wilderness’) are very moving. Was that balance something that you were working towards consciously? Or was it more organic? It was more organic. I didn’t really think that I should balance the collection as a whole, with serious and weird or funny stories. It just happened. For example, the dolphin story [‘Hats and Other Coverings’]---from the first time I read Waiting For Godot, I’ve always wanted to write a story that was basically just a back and forth between two characters. In my story, the two dolphins are doing that, and the three incidents that happen in the story, with killer whales, an argonaut, and a crab, are things that I actually read about online. Killer whales will actually toss salmon up in the air and put them on their heads. I realised that I could bring all these things together and make this very weird story, which doesn’t really have a message or anything, but it’s just fun. Of course, with other stories, I took a different tone. For example, in ‘Polarspeak’, even though there is a supernatural element, I still wanted there to be a slightly serious tone, because it is about the survival of one animal species. So I approached each story individually, and I just let it flow. What was your process of research like for the book? Some of it arose from conversations or aspects of nature you were already interested in, but did it require any research beyond that? Some stories came to me because there was this title in my head. For example, ‘Ceaselessly Sea Follows’---I just like the way it sounds, and it took me a while to understand how to approach it. In the end, I realised it’s best if I take the point-of-view of the sea itself and make it about rising sea levels, about tsunamis and environmental disaster. There were some stories like that, where I already knew what I wanted to do, and I wouldn’t say I did much research because I’ve already read quite a few articles about the topic and I knew the emotion I wanted it to have. There were other stories that needed more research, like ‘Call For Kelp.’ I knew that whenever a bomb is tested, the local human population as well as the animal population are affected. And while the human population is relocated, we can’t be 100% sure about the animal population. There must be so many small animals who get killed in the process. There was this podcast by a wildlife expert who was talking about this bomb-testing site somewhere in the U.S., where they actually relocated the otters. I read somewhere else about the importance of kelp, and the relationship between otters and kelp and sea urchins. I wanted to bring that into the story. Most of the stories come from articles I happened to read, or podcasts I happened to listen to, or something someone would say. It’s only during editing that I would check---am I writing the right thing? In ‘Head In The Clouds’, there’s something about when the milk teeth disappear---I wasn’t quite sure about that. These technical aspects I did research, but the rest was stuff that I had already read about and got the story idea from. There’s very efficient worldbuilding in your book. In ‘A Year (Not Quite) Alone In An Alien Wilderness’, in the first two paragraphs, you’ve set up everything about who the character is, what the world looks like in this future, and how it works. How do you approach world-building in these very short stories? For this, I think I’d like to thank the years I spent as a journalist, because you’re taught that the first paragraph should tell you what the rest of the story is about. I think I learned it from there, that you should introduce, but also give a background to things. Since it’s a short story, you can’t just keep explaining and giving background all the time. Another thing I learned from reading so many novels, and when I was at the University of Limerick, is that if there are two or three characters, you can introduce background through the dialogue. This can be done in a way that it feels natural---maybe one of them doesn’t know something, and the other one knows. But again, it can’t be too much; it has to be natural. So that’s something that I keep in mind.

"The kind of short stories that I like are ones where it’s not necessary for there to be a resolution."

One of the things that is so fun about your book is how you play with phrases and idioms. The idea that the phrase ‘murder of crows’ could lead to a police procedural set among birds; the phrase ‘queen bee’ inspiring a royal court setting populated by bees; even ‘barking up the wrong tree’ forms the basis for one story. Were these fun to play with? That’s one of the things I enjoy the most---coming up with a title like ‘Barking Up the Wrong Tree’ and figuring out how I can make a story out of it. I love coming up with those terms, like ‘Call for Kelp’, as well. I think there were three or four other stories where I came up with these inventions, but I had to make sure that they didn’t sound all the same. I wanted them to be separate. That was something to keep in mind. With ‘Corvid Inspector’, I just happened upon the fact that the [crow] family is called corvid, and I thought that just sounded so cool. If we just say “C.I.”, like Corvid Inspector, it sounds so official, like a real thing. While I was writing the dialogue at the first funeral [in the story], I realised that a group of crows is called “a murder of crows”, and when I looked up what a group of ravens are called, I think it’s an unkindness---and that’s such a soap drama dialogue to say back to someone. I had to add that. With the bee story [‘A Storm of Stings’], I wanted a title inspired by Game of Thrones, and I realised the bee society and their enmity with hornets would be a really good setup. When people talk or write about nature there can be a tendency to overly romanticise it. But your book looks at nature in so many different ways. In some places we are taking on the perspectives of animals; in others, we take the perspectives of humans, where we’re not sure if the natural element is trustworthy. In other stories, like ‘Corvid Inspector’, animals are anthropomorphised. All these things coexist in your book. How did you approach how you wanted to write about nature, which is sometimes talked of as a monolith? I’ve grown up with dogs my entire life, and I’ve got two cats right now. When you live with pets, after a point, you don’t really look at them as dogs or cats. You look at them as their own individual beings. I think it might have something to do with that, because I’ve always understood them to be their own individuals with their own characteristics, and their own completely different personalities and quirks. That’s how I approach all the animal characters, for sure, in the entire book. For example, in ‘Moss’, in the beginning, you might feel as if maybe the moss is evil. I wanted that---I wanted to show that if we are suddenly out in an unknown forest, we’ll feel scared for a moment, because it’s the unknown for us, but once we get used to things, once we understand each other, it’s really not that bad. And there is harmony. So that’s what I wanted to show, the harmony. Even though we might think that we are the superior race on Earth, and maybe we are in some ways, it’s not right to think that it’s just our planet. It’s everyone’s planet. That’s why I wanted to approach it like that. I'd also like to mention Vesper Flights by Helen MacDonald, which is a book of essays. I really loved how she approached nature writing in those essays, because she was inserting her own experiences, her own feelings, into it. I’m not really a nonfiction person, but I love those essays, because you could feel that she loves nature, she loves animals, she loves birds. I wouldn’t say it was an inspiration for me, but maybe it was at the back of my mind, knowing that you can write about nature in such a way.  Like with Vesper Flights, were there other writers or influences as you were writing these stories? With Vesper Flights, I’ve just realised it[s influence on me] today, right now, but it must have been there at the back of my mind while writing! Also, Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck. You think of John Steinbeck, and you think, serious, like Grapes of Wrath. But when you read Travels with Charley, you realise that the man was so funny, and he loved animals, especially his dog, Charley. He basically journeys across America, I think in the ‘60s. They go to the Redwoods, and there’s this section where John Steinbeck wants his dog to pee on a Redwood tree, this huge, massive tree, but his dog will not pee… I don’t remember what happens in the end, but there are so many of those funny moments. There’s also a section where he talks about people who infantilise dogs, people who say, “Oh, they’re so cute,” and he says, “Dogs should be respected.” He’s very serious about that; he’s treating his dog like an individual, like a separate person, in a sense. So that, again, must have been at the back of my mind. If we talk of short stories as a form, Ted Chiang is someone that I really love. His stories are amazing. They might not be about nature, but I like the way he frames stories. ‘Story Of Your Life’, which Arrival, the movie, is based on, is to me the best short story ever written. He captures your attention, and he inserts such emotions that you will cry at certain points. There is some humour as well. I also love the fact that the main character is a linguist---you don’t really come across linguists; if it’s an alien invasion story, it’s usually the military which is at the forefront. Just as an inspiration for writing short stories in general, I think Chiang someone that I really look up to. Biopeculiar is the first book in the new speculative fiction imprint from Westland, IF. What was your journey to publishing with Westland? How do you feel about your book being the first in this brand new imprint? Thefact that my book is the first one is the most amazing thing ever! Sci-fi and speculative fiction are more of an American thing---that’s the major market. In India, publishers might publish speculative fiction once in a while, but there’s no dedicated imprint like this. I’m extremely happy. Karthika [V.K.] and Ajitha [G.S.], my editor---they’re both really good. I don’t have an agent---once I was ready with the collection, I basically emailed everyone. Around that time, I was nominated for the Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards in the novella category, so I think that might have helped me. I just sent out that email and Karthika asked me to send out the full manuscript. That’s just how it happened. Tell me about how the covert art for Biopeculiarcame together. I actually had a Pinterest board just for book covers. I had sent that to the publisher, saying that these were the kinds of things I like. Bhavya is the one who illustrated the cover, and she came up with three or four options. When we saw this one, we thought, “This is amazing, we have to go with this one!” Incidentally, I realised later on that this cover has a teal colour, as does my novella. So it was meant to be. What is your writing process like? Do you have a daily writing practice? I do try to wake up really early, around 6-ish, and write before office hours. Once office is over, you don’t want to look at the laptop again! So on weekdays that’s the time, and on weekends, if I’m not watching K-dramas or Monk, I try to find some time to write. I do write short stories once in a while, because I have a bank of maybe forty short story ideas. But I want to tackle a novel first. I feel like because I’ve done a novella and a collection, I should do a novel now, and then I’ll come back to short stories again. Right now, I’m working on a novel which is going to be about artificial intelligence and consciousness, and it’s going to be super futuristic. I don’t want to say which T.V. show, but one of the chapters is inspired by one of my favourite shows. Once it comes out, people will be able to tell which one it is. Another chapter is inspired by the landlady I had in Ireland, who had a dog. I grew up in Delhi-N.C.R., and every kid in Delhi-N.C.R. will go to the science museum at some point, so I wanted to include that in a chapter, so that is also somewhere there. The rest of it is me thinking what would make sense in the future---in the present day, what are the most important things in India, and how would that evolve in the future?

Think back to a moment when you made a split-second decision. What if you had chosen differently? What if you could rewrite your life? In Dharini Bhaskar’s Like Being Alive Twice, we explore this possibility through two diverging timelines---the life that Poppy actually leads, and the life she could have, if only she walked through a different doorway. Like Being Alive Twice is the story of one relationship, between Poppy and Tariq, across years, and in two parallel stories. We meet these characters again and again, as situations and circumstances change depending on the choices they make. Their story takes place against the backdrop of a speculative but recognisable world---one where access to spaces is surveilled, limited, and controlled depending on an opaque point system, where a clear and devastating division is slowly developing amongst sections of the population. In a world of walls, Bhaskar zeroes in on the possibilities offered by open doors. Dharini Bhaskar spoke to Helter Skelter about her love for poetry, the reverberating effects of a microsecond, and how privilege structures the world we live in.  Your new novel, Like Being Alive Twice, and your first novel, These Our Bodies Possessed By Light, both have titles that you've taken from poetry. Tell us about how you arrived at the title for this book and your relationship with poetry. Poems and poets are referenced so much in your work. Poetry is my first love. In another life, I would be a poet, but it's not meant for this life, because presently, I'm too much in awe of the form---if I even think of writing poetry, my body's reduced to a tremor. So there's no question of attempting poetry, but I read it, and I worship it. I have poets on my altar. It was necessary for me to borrow titles from poems that spoke to me, and somewhere along the way, if the reader of prose finds his way to poetry, I'm only too happy. Poetry needs more readers, and if prose is the gateway to poetry, so be it. My hope is that when you read anything that I write, you'll find your way to a bookshop, and you pick up a collection of poetry. I was very conscious about choosing fragments of poetry for the titles. About the second book: the title [Like Being Alive Twice] draws from Linda Gregg, who features in the book at various points. One of the thoughts motivating me, besides the fact that I really love Linda Gregg’s poetry, was that for readers of poetry, sooner or later, we all find our way to a poet named Jack Gilbert. He’s a giant, really, in the space of contemporary English poetry. And because Jack mentions Linda, a woman he had a long relationship with, in various poems, we stumble into Linda Gregg’s poetry, and then we start reading her. So somewhere along the way, Linda’s biography becomes an extension of Jack’s, and Jack is the doorway through which we access Linda Gregg. My thought was, what would it be like if we accessed Jack Gilbert through Linda Gregg? What if his biography became an extension of hers? I will never know what that's like for me, because, like so many others, my doorway was Jack Gilbert. But if there are people out there who haven't read either, I hope that they read Linda Gregg first, and perhaps through her, find a way to Jack Gilbert. Maybe the way they read their poetry will shift because the access has shifted. More than anything else, I wanted Linda Gregg to have an identity and a space of her own, without in any way diminishing her association with Jack Gilbert, because clearly that was a very productive and very rich association, artistically. At the same time, I wanted her to have a voice and an identity of her own. I was very conscious of the fact that I wanted to pull the title out of one of her poems. I love that you mentioned doorways, because that’s my next question. The first image in your book, for readers, is the image of these two doors and the alternate lives they lead to. For you, what was your starting point for the story? What did you start with? Something that is true for my last book, and equally true for this book---and I don't know if this will always be a pattern, but for now it seems to be---is that I find a word I can wed myself to. And then, like a beehive, everything clusters around that word. For the first book, the word was Scheherazade---a woman who spun fiction to keep herself alive. For this book, the word was Poppy. It so happens that in my house I have this photograph, of a broken-down, crumbling wall. From this wall, you see flowers emerging, and these flowers are poppies. I was there when the photographer took the picture, on a remote island in Greece where nobody lived, where there was a completely broken-down wall, with these bright red flowers emerging, and it is beautiful. But what also struck me was how poppies seemed to emerge in these spaces that are either desolate or torn. It reminded me of a poem, 'In Flanders Fields', where the poet talks about a war zone and a battlefield, and you have rivers of blood flowing everywhere, and in the midst of this, you have poppies. As men walk over the earth, the seeds that are lying dormant on the surface, and the sun and the rain do the work, and you have poppies emerging as flowers. Besides the sound of the word itself, I found the word very rich in symbolism, because what it seemed to speak was death, destruction, darkness, mayhem, all of that---but it also spoke of possibility. The idea of possibility, I think, is seminal to this book. When I speak of doorways, when I speak of paths that life can lead us down, or paths we missed, a lot of it is about possibility and whether we allowed a certain possibility space to grow. A poppy, the flower itself, was symbolic of that. As a natural, logical step, I decided to name the protagonist Poppy---her name is Priyamvada, but everyone calls her Poppy, and her mother has an intimate association with the word as well, as we later find out. So that was the word around which everything clustered.

"The idea of possibility, I think, is seminal to this book."

In both your novels, there's a major emphasis placed on split-second decisions, and how much they can change your life, and also reverberate through communities, and through generations. What draws you to that? I think the idea of time is so central to fiction, and how we play with it. We can play with it in a linear manner, and we can chronicle things. The novel allows you to chronicle things across the space of a year, two years, a decade, longer. But equally, I find that if we flip it over, the novel can also make a moment last across 600 pages if we so desire. For me, it's the moment in its smallest fragment that I find most exciting, more than the vast expanse. I'm equally intrigued by the moment as a nanosecond, and I want to know what it can do. I think it is Joan Didion who said “life changes in the instant, the smallest instant”… I'm misquoting her slightly, but something along those lines. That has always been something that speaks very deeply to me, that little moment, and how everything could change in that singular incident. Up until the point where the timelines diverge, there is a shared backstory to both timelines in your book, and then we read alternating chapters from the two possible timelines. How did you approach structuring your book? When I started writing the book, it was very clear to me that I want to look at things annually. Something driving me was the desire to see if the story could be rewritten. I wanted to see if a story set in a certain year, say seven years ago, could be rewritten such that things and situations would alter dramatically for the protagonist, and for the people in her life. The gap of a year gave me enough space to look at things from a certain degree of distance, yet also trap a moment. The intention always is to trap a moment, but I also wanted some breathing room between moments. A span of a year gave me that breathing space. So I started with seven years ago, and then moved on to six years ago, and so on. In each of these chapters, the time span isn’t very large---there is a moment that is in focus. It then spreads outward, but there’s always a moment that is the driving point of every chapter. I think these are the moments that interest me, the microseconds, the minute, these are the things that interest me more than the entire span of 365 days. So I'd always start with a moment and then build outward from there, while keeping a gap of a year. Once that was clear structurally, I could alternate chapters and I could build and rebuild. My intention and desire was to see where this would take me---whether rebuilding in some way would shift destiny, or whether it wouldn’t. That was definitely one of the questions driving me forward. I had no answers. When I started writing the book, I didn't even know where the story would take me. I wanted to see where it would go. I was curious. So I let the story lead me.

"The novel allows you to chronicle things across the space of a year, two years, a decade, longer. But equally, I find that if we flip it over, the novel can also make a moment last across 600 pages if we so desire."

Some things are common across both experiences, both timelines. In one timeline, Poppy has read Fitzgerald, and in the other she didn't read This Side of Paradise. There are some people that recur across both timelines, but they're interacted with differently. How did you think about which elements would be central to the story, in both timelines, and how the way that the characters interacted with them would depend on the choices they made earlier? I think the characters were central for me, and so I did know that I would keep referencing them across---Poppy’s mum, Tariq’s mum, and so on. For me, these were seminal figures in the book, even if they didn't have very much to say---their presence was important. I made it a point to have them weave in and out of almost all the chapters; that was a very conscious decision. The conversations they had, based on the choices they made at various points, were also central. Apart from that, I did try and weave in a bit of Linda Gregg at various points, because I felt like she was a shadow figure in the narrative. She needed to be there. There were motifs I kept trying to play with, like, for instance, light in general. Besides that I did have Fitzgerald and his partner Zelda, and I wanted them to weave in and out as well. Their choices, of course, were markedly different at various points, because circumstances shifted based on the reality that we followed. My desire was to see where this would take us. When we finally reach the last chapter, do the choices we make dramatically alter the denouement, or not? That was something that did intrigue me. I let the story tell me where I would find myself, and where the characters would find themselves.  In other interviews, you've spoken about how this novel doesn’t feel dystopian to you, and I agree, in that the world we live in is already dystopian---a lot of what you're doing is taking what's happened or happening in the world around us just a little bit further. In your novel, there is a large emphasis on architectural spaces, on living spaces, and in urban planning. I was interested in why you chose that focus. Thank you for pointing that out! It was something that I did want to dwell on. Especially in our larger cities, increasingly, we have cloistered spaces for people, places that are cut off---the gated communities that we know of, that a lot of us live in, that a lot of us have friends in. At the end of the day, they are gated---they are places that allow a certain amount of influx, but for limited times for specific purposes, and then the gates are up again. We have a world, increasingly, that's walled in, and we have people living within the walls. And then we have people living outside the walls, and outside the walls, again, we have more segregation, we have more class distinctions, we have other kinds of walls that crop up. This by no means is a dystopia that I have tried to build, because it is what we are living in right now. We possibly don't even notice it all that much, because it's become so much a part of our lived reality---it's who we are, it's what we've become, and we accept it. We live with it, and we make peace with it.

"We have a world, increasingly, that's walled in, and we have people living within the walls. And then we have people living outside the walls, and outside the walls, again, we have more segregation, we have more class distinctions, we have other kinds of walls that crop up."

It's not a new phenomenon, because it's been happening for over a decade now, if not longer. This is something that I did want to play with, as well as the idea of access: to what extent do we have access to these spaces, who has access to these spaces, and on what grounds do we decide the rules of access. If you want to rent a house today, even in today's world, in the country that we live in today, there are lots of restrictions that are unspoken---or ones that are spoken of in a veiled manner, and sometimes not even veiled. The fact that if you are a single woman, it's so much harder; if you belong to a certain caste or a certain community or a certain religious identity, if you belong to a certain state, again, it's so much harder. So there is the whole question of who these spaces cater to, who has access to them, and to what extent we have enabled our systems to work this way, either through our silence or by being part of it. These were questions that did interest me. Inevitably, it spilled into the fact that the characters weave in and out of certain housing spaces based on the choices available to them, or the lack of choices available to them. You spoke of how sometimes things are allowed to happen because of our complicity. A lot of the characters in your book belong to a certain class and interact with the world in a certain way because of their status in society. At the same time, Poppy's mother mentions that in a surveillance state, whatever happens, women are going to be at the short end of the stick. The space that Poppy and her mother occupy in society was very interesting to me in how you explored both gender and class. I was convinced that I did want to dwell on privilege; I did want to have the characters come from a space of a relative degree of privilege. When you come from a space of privilege, the concerns you have can be very different from, say, the concerns of someone who doesn't come with the same degree of privilege. What also interested me was how privilege often makes you very blind to what's going on around you, and it also makes you a bit too sure that you will not be impacted. You believe that you are safe because of your privilege; you believe that you can fend off the goings-on around you because of your privilege. There's a certain degree of security, maybe even smugness, that comes with it. I felt that to a large extent Poppy's mother was indicative of that. Poppy also, in her own way, comes from a similar place until things work against her. I feel that that is something that needed to be spoken about, about how when you come from a space of privilege, you’d think that people would have the willingness to speak up and speak out, but in fact, the very opposite happens: privilege makes you smug. You refuse to speak because you believe that you are unassailable, that you will be untouched by whatever's happening. Of course, it's an illusion, it's entirely false. That’s something that the novel wished to explore along the way.

"Privilege makes you smug."

The other thing that Poppy's mother does mention, and I think she's quite aware of this, is that women have to shrink their lives---when the tide turns, inevitably, it's women who will be impacted. I found that quite perceptive of her, given her tendency to block off everything that's happening and instead concern herself with her own immediate existence. But I did feel that it was an important point to make, and I did feel that both Poppy and her had to come to grips with this. The fact that women's lives will be impacted the moment you have a force that is far-right, that is fascist, that is oppressive, is well-known; I'm not the first person to speak of it. There is a lot of literature on this, history stands testimony to it. I did want to bring it into my novel, because, especially today, so many leaders of the far-right, in Europe especially, are women, and they quote Simone De Beauvoir, they speak of feminism. So there is a tendency to believe that others will be impacted, but not women, and not women who come from a certain degree of privilege. What I did want to foreground was that feminism and the far right can't coexist---they're actually antithetical to each other. At the end of the day, what is feminism? Feminism is an awareness that our stories as women are linked, that there isn't a hierarchy, that each of us has a story that's as valid as the others. The moment we have a rhetoric that suggests that a certain way of life is superior, or a certain kind of feminism is superior to every other, we are alienating a lot of women, and it becomes anti-feminist rhetoric. I did want to highlight the fact that increasingly, there is a tendency to believe that the far right will not hurt women. No, it's women who will be impacted, and typically, what will get impacted is their reproductive rights. That's where it begins. It doesn't end there, but it certainly begins there.  Your book delves into literature and art quite significantly. At one point, a character suggests that “A book is a self-contained thing” and Poppy responds, “Of course not, it springs out of the writer’s life---always.” Is that something you believe? Personally, I actually sit a bit on the fence here! I think I’ve shifted politics here periodically. There have been times where I feel very strongly that a book springs out of a writer’s life, and therefore I feel very offended if I find out details of a writer’s life that don’t sit well with. The other part of me also believes very strongly that writing or art has a life of its own, and all writing can’t possibly spring from biography or autobiography, and therefore we have to detach the writer’s life and all his misdoings from his work (and god knows most writers have a history of many misdoings!). So there is a part of me that believes that very strongly, and there is another part of me that does believe that we have to be human beings of a certain caliber if we are to create art that is worthwhile and worthy. I’m still pulled in two directions and I don’t quite know where I stand yet, but I did find Poppy’s clarity about the issue---that writing always springs out of the writer’s life and therefore you can’t possibly read a writer if you don’t agree with the life choices he has made---I found that very reassuring, that she was this clear about it, because I’m not! I love the play with patterns and colours on the book cover. What was the cover design process like? I fell in love with the cover when I saw it. The artist, the visualiser, the person that put it all together is [Ahlawat] Gunjan. Gunjan and I have a long history of being colleagues in publishing. I’ve always loved how passionate he is about design and art, and when my first novel was out, he had predicted that he’d be designing the next cover. I’d laughed it off---I told him then it was wishful thinking, because we don’t really know if I’m writing a next book, and we don’t know if that book will go to Penguin (because he works at Penguin now). And the next thing I know, I did write another book, and as it happened it went to Penguin, and as it happened he was working there! I call him a prophet figure, because when he says something, it happens. He has such a keen visual eye, and he played with the idea of multiple narratives and possibilities through brushstrokes, which I found so compelling and so beautiful. It would have been really easy for an artist to create a cover for this book that was entirely bleak and colourless, but he chose to play with colour because he felt that the idea of possibilities, I suppose, allowed for that. I love the way he played with the concepts embedded within the book to create this. Did your experience working in publishing change or influence your approach to writing novels? I think being an editor gave me a toolbox. I spent over a decade in publishing, and I still have a toe in the publishing world as a freelancer. What has been invaluable is the experience I’ve had with authors and with manuscripts, working on them and watching them grow, and learning how to work with text in a manner that is at once firm and gentle. I think that’s what editing asks for---a certain degree of gentleness, but also a certain degree of firmness. It’s a very fine balance. What those 10 years gave me was the ability to keep working at that skill. When my own book had to be worked on, I had a ready toolbox that I could dip into. To that extent it’s been invaluable, not so much in the writing process, but in the post-writing process.

"There is a tendency today to view the editor as this stop-and-go signal, who either greenlights a book or doesn’t. My experience across both sides of the process has been that the editor is the book’s biggest champion."

There is a tendency today to view the editor as this stop-and-go signal, who either greenlights a book or doesn’t. My experience across both sides of the process has been that the editor is the book’s biggest champion. God knows most writers have huge moments of self-doubt and uncertainty---it’s the editor who stands by you, it’s the editor who allows a book to reach its full potential, it’s the editor who makes the book what it can be. So what it has also given me is the perspective to approach the editor with a certain degree of reverence, because without her this book wouldn’t be.

[The window for submissions is now closed.]Helter Skelter is a proud partner of the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. The Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize celebrates the best of new short fiction from around the world. In addition to cash awards and writing retreats, Prize-winning and shortlisted authors have the opportunity to be published in multiple print and online journals, and have their work presented to literary agents in multiple countries. For the 2024 Desperate Literature Prize, interested authors must submit their work for consideration before 30 April 2024. Each writer may submit up to five pieces of writing for consideration. The submission fees are €20 for the first entry, and €10 for every additional entry. As a partner publication, this year, Helter Skelter is offering fully sponsored entries to the prize for five Indian writers. To apply for a sponsored entry via Helter Skelter, please email your work to write@helterskelter.in on or before 30 April 2024. [The window for submissions is now closed.] - Email us your work using the subject line 'Desperate Literature Prize 2024'. - Submissions must be in English. - Submissions must be made as email attachments in PDF format (carrying no mention of the author’s name). - Submissions that carry an author name (in the PDF file) will not be considered. - Submissions must be previously unpublished works of up to 2,000 words. - Entrants must be individuals over 18 years of age and not a company or organization. - Entrants (for the purpose of this sponsored entry process) must be Indian citizens. - Entrants may submit more than one story (up to five), but please note that multiple stories must be submitted together. - Translations are accepted. Entrants may be the original author or the translator of the piece, but must have permission to submit and the rights for both pieces, and must be willing to provide proof of both, if necessary. Neither the translation nor the original story may have been published previously. Cash prizes will be shared between translator and original author (where possible). Please click here to view all the eligibility and submission criteria before submitting your work. Five entries will be selected by the Helter Skelter team and nominated—at no cost to the entrant—for the Desperate Literature Prize 2024. 

About Desperate LiteratureDesperate Literature is a joint project between Craig Walzer, Corey Eastwood, Charlotte Delattre, and Terry Craven. Between them they own Atlantis Books in Santorini, Greece, Book Thug Nation, and Human Relations in Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.A. Desperate Literature strives to be a space where good literature serves as a vehicle for dynamic cultural, linguistic and social exchange between Madrilenos, extranjeros and travelers from around the world. In this spirit we look forward to hosting readings, meetings, gallery shows, lectures, and more.

In Tashan Mehta’s Mad Sisters of Esi, islands are alive, memories are dimensions we can navigate, and the universe is a sea on which ships of discovery sail. Two sisters---Laleh and Myung---live within the whale of babel, which houses unimaginable worlds. But Myung wants to leave. Her journey leads her to other islands, inhabited by friends, foes, and ghosts, and to the story of another pair of sisters whose lives intertwine with hers in stunning ways. Mad Sisters of Esi is the newest instalment in Mehta’s wildly imaginative writing, following her debut novel, The Liar’s Weave. Combining expansive cosmic wonders with the careful, real power of human relationships, Mad Sisters reminds us of the strength of bonds between people, the power of stories and myths, and the wonder of the natural world. Tashan Mehta spoke with Helter Skelter about looking at the world through fresh eyes, talking to her past self, and the process of building new worlds from the ground up.  Your debut novel, The Liar’s Weave, was a fantasy novel that was anchored to the real world. In Mad Sisters of Esi, you’ve built an entire universe from scratch. What was that process like? There was a question in the process of writing Mad Sisters---how wild do I go? For a long time, I fought it. I tried to put it back into the real world to the best of my ability. I think I got to a point where I couldn’t do wildness well enough within the confines of reality. You can see that in The Liar’s Weave as well---this desperate attempt to make something new from the bones of the old. So I decided to just go with it. To be honest, it’s entirely what the idea wanted. It needed a whole universe that was made entirely for it. I tried to argue with it, but this is the direction it needed to go. Mad Sisters of Esi was just me talking to my imagination a lot. When you build a universe, it’s not just worlds you make up. It’s also complex histories, fairytales, and fables. What kind of research did that take? What was the process of worldbuilding like for you? It took a very long time to write this book: five years, twenty-four drafts, and five different versions. The generative power of endlessly writing it managed to throw up enough histories and enough myths. Non-humans are very integral to this book, so I was also trying really hard to understand, what does non-human language look like? I read an absolutely beautiful theoretical book called How Forests Think [by Eduardo Kohn]. There was a lot of trying to understand how forests think, and trying to get into non-human ways of thinking. There was also a lot of analysis of fairytales---trying to get to the heart of what myths can do, what histories can do, and what happens when they morph. Mad Sisters of Esi cares so deeply about the interpersonal and the personal. It was really important to me to take the cosmic and squeeze it down into this tiny little space. Histories matter so much to human beings. It matters so much where we come from, the stories we tell about ourselves and our families, how we even narrate ourselves to others. It was fascinating to do this larger worldbuilding and knit it back into the very tiny conversations we have everyday, as families and as people. Did you do have a larger sense of the universe than the reader is exposed to in Mad Sisters? Was there a lot that you wrote that didn’t end up in the book? Yes, but that was largely because I assumed it would end up in the book! In my very last edit with my publisher, I took out a whole academic essay---a 6,000 word academic essay on madness. It just didn’t work with the pacing of the novel. I’ve replaced it now with something else, but I remember it cracked my heart open to pull it out. I always worked with the assumption that whatever I wrote would be in the book. I never world-built independently. My style of worldbuilding is very much inspired by M. John Harrison’s style of worldbuilding, where he talks about the generative power of language. You don’t build the world and then place your characters in it; you discover the world as you write. You see what language throws up, and what it tells you. While writing Mad Sisters, just calling the universe the ‘Black Sea’ made such a difference for me. It meant that it felt adventurous, it took me back to quests and stories that I absolutely loved. It got me excited. I needed to feel like we were going through uncharted territory. I needed to feel like the ships were the old-fashioned sail ships that I read about in fairytale books. It's so interesting how the language you use works for the readers, but is also integral for you, the writer, to place yourself in the story. I kept looking at what language can do to dissolve our boundaries of how we see the world and how we encounter it. Basically, I made it up as I went along.

"It’s so interesting how the language you use works for the readers, but is also integral for you, the writer, to place yourself in the story."

Why did you zero in on a whale, of all the structures or animals you could have chosen? It was originally a tower: the Tower of Babel, very much inspired by the story. As non-humans gradually became more and more important to the story, I realised that it would have to be a sentient being. A tower reminds you of something man-made, even if it’s thinking and talking. I wanted to sidestep the centrality that we often give ourselves in narratives. A whale felt far more evocative of the adventure stories I read, like ones of people caught in the belly of a whale. There’s a lot of echoes of me going back to my childhood self, taking what she loved and putting that same imagery into the book. I thought it was interesting, in the context of the story of the Tower of Babel, the idea of these sisters sharing a common language and then ending up scattered across the universe in a way. How did you come to that story? One of the biggest preoccupations of Mad Sisters of Esi was asking myself different ways of seeing. What is it like to look from various different angles? I used different ontological stances to try and get that in there---diaries, first-person, third-person, dreams. The whale of babel is a massive physical manifestation of what it is like to have these numerous different ways of seeing. Myung and Laleh are raised on a language and on a way of viewing the world that is not familiar to us. They were raised by the context around them that is essentially just chaotic, and mad in many different ways. What happens if you start with two characters that don’t talk the same language as we do? What does that do to their interactions with the wider world? While I was reading Mad Sisters, I was reminded of a line from the 2018 film Annihilation. It’s about characters encountering an alien intelligence that many see as being an evil, destructive force. One character reframes it, though---instead of seeing its actions as destruction, she sees it as “making something new”. I kept thinking of that as I read your book. Why did you decide to write about worlds that were so alive, reactive, and constantly changing? One of the concepts I adored in university was creative destruction: this concept of creating and destroying consistently, and how destroying something is not the end, it’s only the beginning of something new. I absolutely adored that idea. As human beings, it’s really hard to look that in the eye. It’s really hard to grapple with something we find stable and beautiful being broken up around us and morphing into something else. I’ve seen that in interpersonal relationships---you grow apart, you grow different, and then you have to try and find a way to grow back towards each other. For me, all of these worlds being alive was a crucial reminder that things are larger than us. You can view it from the lens of “they’re trying to kill me,” but they’re just doing their thing. You’re not central to their narrative at all. What you see as destruction from one angle is just change from another angle. What you see as cruelty from one angle is just people operating on a different path that you can’t understand. I found that really interesting, the angles in which you can look through something.  There’s a moment in Mad Sisters where someone describes an island, Ojda, as being a developing island, growing from a “helpless baby” to a “tantrum-throwing toddler”. I found that so fascinating, that view of time that decentralises the one person that’s living on the island, who is actually tiny in the context of this massive span of time. I found that deeply, deeply interesting! I read a book called Timefulness [by Marcia Bjornerud] that talks about how human beings are deeply inadequate to solve the problems of climate change we’ve created, because we don’t have the right perspective of time. The time perspective is billions of years, and we’ve got about a hundred. It’s like a mayfly trying to write the history of the human race – it’s just not going to work out! There’s a really beautiful poem that says “I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars”---I think that’s just absolutely gorgeous. That was really interesting to me, the dissonance of time you’re consistently encountering when you live in these large cosmic worlds. They are working on scales you cannot possibly imagine. There is a point in Mad Sisters in which a character has to confront her smallness: how tiny she is in the vastness of the universe, and how petrifying that is. Time is malleable in Mad Sisters. Characters are haunted by the ghosts of their futures, for example. The book also features a place called the Museum of Collective Memory, which connects sound to the visual, and the structure is described as being “made of song”. How did you approach time, space, and sound in your book? I approached time and space in similar ways I approached it in The Liar’s Weave, in that it doesn’t really exist! They’re constructs we’ve made in order to survive the chaos around us. And if it’s a construct, then you can play with it. And if you can play with it, you can have a lot of fun with it. Throughout my life, I think about talking to my past self or talking to my future self. It’s incredibly powerful, because of how they see. In my early twenties, I made a list of things that I thought would be a sacrifice, that would be the worst thing in the universe to ever happen to me. Now, all of those things have happened, and I chose every single one of them. It’s interesting how much you’ve changed! Playing around with time allows you to deal with that dissonance of self---that movement of self, watching how you unfold across time.

"Time and space are constructs we’ve made in order to survive the chaos around us. And if it’s a construct, then you can play with it. And if you can play with it, you can have a lot of fun with it."

With sound, I always feel like a little bit of a cheat, because I stole the idea from my partner. I’m awful with sound: I listen to the same pop songs, I can’t hold a tune. But he’s madly in love with sound. We got together when I started this book, and the way he talked about sound was one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard. It was like it was alive; like it moved, like you could see it move through his body. I still couldn’t feel it myself, but I fell a little bit in love with the concept of it. It was so interesting to step away from the visual and have sound be front and centre in the Museum of Collective Memory. Both your books place sibling relationships in the centre. In Mad Sisters, especially, there are several dimensions you explore outside of a traditional sibling relationship; bonds forged by blood, by choice, by parental decisions. What draws you to that relationship? I think it’s one of the richest relationships you can have in your life. You start off with them---if you’re the younger sister, they’re already there. You grow up with them, and you didn’t choose them. They are family. But they’re also friends. They understand at a level your parents cannot, because they’re encountering the same world you’re encountering at the same point in time, whereas your parents lived it at a different point in time. I find the depth of that really rich. I also find with siblings, comparisons abound. You’re defined in relation to each other. How interesting it is to have this reflection you didn’t choose and you didn’t ask for! Nobody wants to be the reflection of each other, but you are. How do you navigate that? Once I started digging a little deeper into that wealth of emotion, I started thinking, what does this look like if we complicate it? What does it look like if we take it through different angles? How does that bond hold up? How do you re-forge or re-understand it? Later in the book, there are sibling relationships that fall apart because one has been unable to change, while the other needs to change. It’s so rich. As a writer, all you’re doing is you’re sitting there and thinking to yourself, what is interesting? What is thorny and complex and knitted together in me, and what do I need to press and pull apart very slowly? I think sibling relationships are just a bottomless fountain for me that I can always go back to. Were there differences in your approach and your process in writing The Liar’s Weave and Mad Sisters of Esi? They were absolute apples and oranges! With The Liar’s Weave, I’d just come out of Warwick University, and I had a very strong idea of what it meant to write well. I love that book so much, but I wish I was a little bit wilder with it. I think it got put into boxes because I came with that idea. It was a lot of giving myself permission, a lot of thoughts like “I can’t do this, I’m not allowed”, and consistently negotiating that. It’s such a testimony to the strength of the core idea and the brothers’ relationship in The Liar’s Weave that it shines through despite all that nervousness. What happened with Mad Sisters is I reached a point where I thought, you know what, nobody knows what they’re doing. There is no “am I allowed” or “am I not allowed”---they are all making it up. It is all one big, grand con. How do I approach this, then, with the same perspective of an explorer? How do I approach this with the perspective of someone who treats her idea with the respect that it deserves, and as something separate from her that is using her as a medium to get onto the page? It took five years because I was teaching myself again how to listen. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. It was daunting. That first draft is so different from the final draft---you can see how my brain, and my approach to language and ideas and structure are changing in each draft. The final product is just an expression of “this is not the right way to write a book, but this was the only way to write this book.”

"It is all one big, grand con."

One of the biggest concerns for me---and I think this is going to be true for every book I write---is you stop being the person at some point that can write the book, and so at some point, you start writing against a deadline. The clock is running out. You’re going to change very soon, and you can’t re-access the idea when that happens. You have to get it on the page. I wrote the semi-final draft in two months---that was just a race against time. I knew once that clock turned over I wouldn’t be the same person. I always feel like the book is always already there. All your rewriting is just trying to become the right person to write the book. It’s trying to redo your brain so that you’re thinking in the right way to access the heart of the book. Your writing in Mad Sisters of Esi has been compared to non-fantasy writers like Calvino and Ferrante. How do you think of your writing in relation to other works that aren’t necessarily in the genre you’re being marketed as? Were there works you looked at specifically for inspiration? A lot of [internal] conversations that I have when I write my books are with literary authors. They are with Ann Patchett, or Lauren Groff, or Sally Rooney---how they use voice, or what they do with interpersonal relationships. I have thought about just doing a full literary book. But I just can’t keep magic out of it! I’ve come to the conclusion that the way in which I see the world involves magic to that degree, so it has to be there front and centre. But the dialogues I’m having are with writers who are traditionally marketed as literary---and I want to emphasise “marketed as”, because some of them are very much writing fantasy. Cloud Atlas is a fantasy novel. It is just marketed as literary.

"I think sibling relationships are a bottomless fountain for me that I can always go back to."

A big conversation I was having for Mad Sisters was with Calvino. Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium was extremely formative for how I was writing, and Invisible Cities was a huge influence. He showed me how you can take the imagination, squeeze it down, and layer it beneath the language. Then you can just lift the language so that the whole thing is light. I don’t know how he’s done it! Every single one of those tiny cities [in Invisible Cities] is a universe, essentially. It gave me the permission to say, I don’t need to write a trilogy, or nine books, or expand this universe, or give you maps. A paragraph can be a universe. Your brain is going to do all the imagining for me, and that’s fantastic. I believe so much of a book is in the voice. If you can find the right voice, then you’re fine. Calvino helped me get there. I was also going through phases where I was reading a lot of female authors---Lauren Groff’s Matrix, Ann Patchett. I was reading a lot of women that were looking in a way that I found really beautiful. The way that they took that perspective and knitted it into language is a huge skill, and I found that was what I wanted to have a conversation with in this fantasy world. How can I do that kind of personal and interpersonal relationships in the large cosmic universes of Invisible Cities? That was sort of the construction of Mad Sisters. No spoilers, but The Liar’s Weave and Mad Sisters of Esi both end on a bittersweet note. You’re not afraid to lean into a sad or tragic moment, but you also keep it full of hope. How do you approach endings in your writing? I think in both cases, the ending was actually written last. In The Liar’s Weave, when I wrote the last chapter, I didn’t know what was going to happen, and with Mad Sisters as well, I sort of stumbled across the ending. It ended at various different points, and I kept going until I found that perfect balance of tragedy and hope. It’s exactly what we were talking about earlier, about endings being beginnings. If you knit both of those things together, then they’re both tragic and they’re both hopeful. I’m just really interested in that. I’m interested in books that don’t tie up necessarily, and leave that crack open for more. One of the most beautiful things that a book could do is inspire a reader to imagine further, inspire them enough, and allow them to live in the world enough so that their imagination wakes up. In both books, the idea of endings and beginnings knitted together make it tragic and hopeful. It’s complicated! Everything’s complicated, so it’s nice to end at a complicated place.

Four defining moments in India’s past and present weave together in Siddhartha Deb’s The Light at the End of the World, an expansive, sweeping novel of fever dreams and buried truths. Real-world history bleeds into the speculative as we follow its characters back in time. In a near-future apocalyptic Delhi, Bibi, a former journalist, tracks a history of conspiracies that involve detention centres, alien wrecks, and human experimentation. In 1984 Bhopal, an assassin follows his victim across Union Carbide’s factory grounds, employed by a mysterious patron. In 1947 Calcutta, a veterinary student believes he is building a machine that can bring hope to his city. And in the Himalayas in 1859, a troop of British soldiers on the heels of an anti-colonial rebel discover strangeness beyond their wildest imagination. In The Light at the End of the World, individuals come up against the weight of oppressive regimes and organisations. Playing with genre boundaries, and peppered with motifs that reappear like recurring dreams, this is a vivid, unforgettable read; a reminder both of how our modern world got to where it is, and of what the novel itself can do. Siddhartha Deb spoke to Helter Skelter about structuring his novel, the ethics of writing about real-world incidents, and how the fantastic can illuminate the real.  When writing the novel, did you begin with a section in particular, or did you conceptualise the whole narrative right from the start? I didn’t conceptualise the whole book in the beginning. It started with the Calcutta section, and with the main character, Das, failing to pass his riding test. And then the other novellas showed up. At a certain point, it became clear to me that I wanted to put the whole thing into a larger book, and that they had to connect in some way. I did connect them---it’s very, very light, it’s very below the surface. I think a lot of reviewers have really struggled with that. The connections are there, but they’re kind of hidden. It started with the Calcutta section. I knew it was set in the Partition and yet it was not a “typical” Partition novella. It wasn’t going to be realist completely—even though it was about the violence and the famine, there were these slightly speculative elements in it. I knew that was going to be a thread in all the stories, that they were going to start quite realistically, in very grounded historical moments, and then move into a speculative direction.     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); I’m glad you brought up the hidden connections, because there are so many of them---it made the novel feel like a sort of puzzle box. There are thematic relationships between the novellas, but there are also lots of little details that connect them. How did you go about weaving the stories together in these subtle ways? It took a long time to write, but I think that’s the pleasure of a big novel, that you get the time to go back and rethink the connections. It was meant to be quite a rich novel. I like the fact that you said “puzzle”---I think one of the playful elements behind it was the puzzle aspect of it. There is the puzzle poem that operates in the Bibi section, but it’s also true of how all the different pieces play with each other, fit together. At a certain point it became clear to me that the Agha Shahid Ali poem that I use [‘I Dream It Is Afternoon When I Return to Delhi’] was going to be a connecting puzzle piece. It was part of the joy of discovery, of the book, of the stories, of the characters, of the times, and what they’re doing. A lot of the time, I had to wait for the connections to come to me. That is the pleasure of writing a big novel over a long period of time. People talk a lot about the difficulties, which exist, but one of the joys is these connections need time to emerge from the subconscious into the narrative. There is a kind of tradition of this kind of playful fiction outside the Anglo-American tradition. I feel a bit sad that Indian writing in English seems to be really dominated by the very narrow Anglo-American tradition. There is the very playful Cortazar’s Hopscotch, OuLiPo, Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. You’re playing with stories---that’s one of the joys of storytelling! How long did it take you to write the book? It was basically written over seven summers, so people say seven years, but it’s not like I was writing for 12 months [of the year]. I have a full-time teaching job, I was doing a lot of journalism, I have life to live! So it was mostly written when I was not teaching. I write and revise constantly, so I would finish the draft of one of the novellas, and then I would be polishing and revising that while beginning the next one. It’s like you’re stacking boxes, building a tower. And then you go back again, because you’re looking for the connections.  A lot of your book takes from real-world historical incidents. How did you approach writing these alternate histories? For me, alternate histories are very appealing, as a reader and as a writer, because I think it allows us to do things with history, with reality, that we can’t do strictly in realism. It also allows us a certain kind of freedom that we may not feel in a certain kind of political moment, with authoritarianism and climate change and violence. Even in our everyday lives, you can feel very constricted, you can feel very trapped. So alternate history is a way of breaking through that as a writer---exploding that, and looking for possibilities.

"Alternative histories allow us a certain kind of freedom that we may not feel in a certain kind of political moment, with authoritarianism and climate change and violence."

You also draw inspiration from other places, like with the book Roadside Picnic, which features a forbidden area called the Zone that is populated with strange artefacts and has strange effects on the people who encounter it. How did that influence find a place in your novel? It was the film first, actually---it was Tarkovsky’s Stalker [which was adapted from Roadside Picnic]. Twenty years ago, maybe, I was watching Stalker, and within twenty minutes I said, “This is about Bhopal. This is about Union Carbide.” I’d been there as a reporter on the 30^th anniversary, I had walked around, and I said, “This is like the Union Carbide factory grounds.” Clearly, that stayed in my head for more than a decade. The idea of the Zone became a very compelling motif. It’s there in the Bhopal section, ‘Claustropolis’, but it also shows up in ‘The Line of Faith', the 1859 section. It was almost like a virus of stories and motifs replicating itself. It was happening tome---I was following it as a writer. Not to give away too much to the reader, but that is one of the connecting threads through all the novellas---what is happening with the Zone, and what is happening with the supposedly “alien” artefacts found in the subcontinent.     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); How did you approach fictionalising these real incidents without trivialising them, and staying true to the tragedy of the incidents? I did question the ethics of fictionalising 1984. Should I do it? Is it right to put a speculative aspect to something that is very real and horrifying enough in its reality? And then I thought, I’ve written about it in nonfiction, I’ve written about it in completely realist, empirical detail. It’s there in the opening of The Beautiful and the Damned, where I’m meeting Abdul Jabbar and the other activists. But nobody reads it! It’s completely forgotten. It’s still forgotten. There is no HBO show called Bhopal. There will never be an HBO show called Bhopal. If you google 'Bhopal.com', the first website you will get is Dow Chemical’s website, because they have bought the domain name. Even in India, people don’t know about it---people don’t care about it. There was a kind of anger in me. Why was it forgotten? Are there fifteen books and movies on Bhopal? Why not? Why are we so bad at understanding our own history? And does that have something to do with what is going on in the present?

"There is no HBO show called 'Bhopal'. There will never be an HBO show called 'Bhopal'."

So I gave myself permission. I said, I have written about it in nonfiction. No one gives a damn about it. It’s not that long ago! And yet everybody knows Chernobyl and Fukushima. So I gave myself permission. I am trying to bring it out into the world. I’m trying to make it not-forgotten. And if I have to use the speculative and the fictional aspect to do it, it is allowed. I do remember one conversation I had with Abdul Jabbar before he died. He said, “Aap kya likh rahe ab?” [“What are you writing now?”] I told Jabbar a rambling version of this story I’m writing. I thought he’d be quite critical, because he’s an activist---he’d given his entire life to this. He said, “No, ye bahut achcha kahaani hai, aap likhiye” [“This is a very good story, you write it”]. That made me very happy. Some of it came out of the reporting. Everybody in Bhopal said it was a conspiracy. The rich people would say it was a conspiracy by the poor and by Muslims, because this happened in the Old City, where there’s a large number of Muslim people. A lot of the people who died were very poor---Hindu and Muslim both, but they were very poor. Union Carbide itself said it was a conspiracy, which I have researched as a journalist and which I inserted into fiction---they first said it was done by “Sikh terrorists”, quote unquote, and next they said it was the workers. This is all documented. The poor people who had suffered also said it was a conspiracy, but they said it was done deliberately, as an experiment by the Americans. So I thought, what if I were to write a novella where it is maybe an experiment, and maybe both by the Indian and American governments? Why not? So that’s how reality bleeds into fiction. When the [COVID-19] pandemic happened in India, and there were these scenes of mass exodus from cities forced upon people by the government, it brought to memory both the Partition and Bhopal, which are both in my novel. I think there is a way in which we compulsively repeat certain tragedies, certain kinds of violence. I think the novel is trying to grapple with that, by putting them in conversation with each other. How did it feel to have the book released post-COVID? That was a bit strange, because I had just finished it in February 2020, before COVID happened. And it was such a terrible idea---I didn’t know that in March, the next month, there would be an entire year to sit at home and work on the book! There is a virus in the book that was written before COVID-19—what they call the China flu—and there are these masks that people wear in Delhi. So it was very creepy to see COVID showing up in reality, after I’d written about something like COVID in the novel. It was very creepy, similarly, to have the novel come out in New York this June. People were saying they were triggered by the descriptions of the air pollution in Delhi because the sky was yellow from the pollution, from the forest fires. It’s very eerie, but that is in some sense what the novel is also deliberately trying to look at. It’s trying to look at the eerie and the weird, which are deliberate words that I deliberately use. What seems fantastic is real, and what is real seems fantastic. To me, in today’s India, the kind of violence against minorities we have is real, but it seems fantastic. Climate change is real, but it seems fantastic. COVID is real, but it seems fantastic. That is one of the things that the novel is playing with---blurring the lines between the real and the speculative.

"I think there is a way in which we compulsively repeat certain tragedies, certain kinds of violence. I think the novel is trying to grapple with that, by putting them in conversation with each other."

I’m actually curious what you think of genre, because I’ve seen your novel described as magic realism and I’m not sure I agree with that. I’d describe it more as weird fiction---it reminded me of people like China Mieville, Jeff VanderMeer, David Lynch. You’re absolutely right, that’s what this book is influenced by in many ways. They are interested in blurring the lines between the real and the fantastic, in order to get at the real. In that sense they are a continuation of the surrealists. The novel is completely in conversation with that. I think that people think about novels in this really boring way that’s all about families, and one of the things the novel is not about is “the Indian family”. I have written about it myself, but with this book I wanted to get away from that. I loved this moment [from the book tour] in Calcutta, when Sandip Roy, the writer, was interviewing me. He said, “Your characters dream of each other.” I said yes, they do! It’s not a logical connection, but it is one of the connections that the novel is interested in. They don’t know each other, they’re not connected by family, they are across different times and places, but they do dream of each other. And that is what I mean by the weird that I am interested in. It is very much a very productive strand of writing, particularly in thinking about today’s political violence and climate change. Amitav Ghosh has written about this, that the realist novel is poorly equipped, in some ways, to deal with the fantastic nature of climate change or COVID or mass violence. So genre, for me, is a very productive way to look at reality. The weird, the speculative, the counterfactual, the alternate history, all these are very much in the novel.     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Sometimes it's a little bit sad that I think older people---people of my generation---don’t see it as serious literature. They say, “There’s a gangster in the novel, there’s a crime plot, there’s a ghost, so it can’t really be serious literature.” It seems so disconnected, both from a lot of the writing [mentioned before] but also our folk stories---they are filled with aspects of the weird and the speculative! There is very much the influence of reading---I love China Mieville, I loved the new Jeff VanderMeer novel, and David Lynch is a huge influence on me. But there’s also the ghost stories that I grew up with, in the Northeast and Bengal, which are really ways of talking about the famine, and talking about colonialism. They seem to be children’s stories, but then you think about it---why are all the villages empty in these stories? What has happened to all these people? It stays with you. You realise they’re basically talking about the famine, where millions of people died. It’s there in folk literature, in folk songs, and it’s also there in the genre fiction. I think these are both very alive influences. I love them as a reader, and so as a writer I wanted to do a book that would be as much fun.

"Genre, for me, is a very productive way to look at reality. The weird, the speculative, the counterfactual, the alternate history, all these are very much in the novel."

One of the connections that shows up through your book is a kind of alive architecture. Characters often find themselves in physical spaces that appear to be constantly moving, bewildering, and hard to navigate. I was wondering how you like to approach physical space in your writing. Physical spaces are very interesting to me because they are tremendously oppressive, especially under modernity and colonialism. And this continues today: if you think about the kind of “re-building” that is happening in India, and how it is meant to oppress, to make you feel bad. It’s not even just about India---if you look at airports nowadays, they are very, very disturbing places. They want to make you shop. There’s this anxiety about the security lines. Spaces are connected to modernity, and they have been connected to the novel, to the film, to psychoanalysis, which are also modern ways of responding to space. I think one of the connecting threads in the novel is that there is an oppressive institutional space---a hospital, or a palace, or a factory, or a detention centre. In a way, they kind of bleed into each other---they are kind of the same place in different places in time. If you go into a hospital, even a modern hospital, they are just such disturbing places. If you had decided to make people as anxious and as unhappy as possible, you could not have chosen a better space for this. It is producing sadness, and anxiety, and grief. So I’m very interested in architecture, and the novel is trying to grapple with that: what happens to the human soul, the human body, in these spaces?

"I teach fiction, and sometimes a student says “this is so difficult”, and I say that’s totally okay, but that’s not a reason not to read it."

Another physical space that recurs through your novel is the museum. In each novella, a character encounters some kind of museum or collection. I think Bibi describes the museum as a space where “separate streams of time have collided”. I was wondering what the idea of the museum means to you. It’s interesting how it started showing up in a lot of the novellas. In Bhopal, it shows up as the outdoor museum, what he calls the National Collection of Man. Then there is the Dolls Museum in Delhi, which is a really fantastic, weird space---and it exists in reality! And there’s the Calcutta museum, which plays quite a bit of a role in the ‘Paranoir’ section. I think collecting is a colonial obsession. It’s a way of showing your dominion over the world. The Western colonial powers did it initially, but even in the postcolonial it has continued. It’s a way of showing your domination over everything---over landscape, over people, over animals, over lives. And so they become these very strange spaces. They are supposedly built on rationality, or science, or art---for good things---but they become very uncanny spaces, because if you think about it, what does it mean to just remove something from its context and just put it there? It’s plunder! It’s about conquest. Museums are built off stolen objects. Supposedly, you go there and then get educated. And it’s really bizarre, because there are these different conflicting modes of looking at the world that get crystallised in a museum. The Koh-i-Noor diamond, why does it sit on the Queen or King of England? Even in the postcolonial project, the Indian project, like the National Collection of Man, I find it quite strange that there is a Konyak Naga hut in Bhopal. Bhopal has its own rich indigenous people and tradition. It’s this obsession of collecting things from within our boundaries. They’re very uncanny spaces to me, where things can happen beyond what is intended, which is supposedly education.  In the novel, some of the objects are almost on the verge of coming alive. They’re not just objects to be collected. I’m interested in that uncanny, speculative element. The horror genre uses this all the time---you bring a mummy to the museum, and then the mummy comes alive! But I’m trying to take it a little more seriously and with more empathy. They are not monsters to be conquered. They have already been conquered. The idea of the monster or the “alien” or the “other” is different for me in the novel. In Lovecraft, the alien is the source of cosmic horror. But what if the alien is the source of cosmic hope? I wonder what you think about novels that are challenging to the reader. Your novel doesn’t give away all the answers, and it doesn’t try to explain everything. How do you feel about novels that are ‘difficult’? I didn’t realise my novel would be so challenging for some readers! I teach fiction, and sometimes a student says “this is so difficult”, and I say that’s totally okay, but that’s not a reason not to read it. It might be interesting even if it’s difficult. I think there’s a kind of Netflixisation of novels that has happened. I quite like cheesy stuff---I love Money Heist and Squid Game, I’m a great fan of these things, But recently, I’ve noticed, when I look at Netflix, it doesn’t matter whether I’m seeing a trailer for something set in Korea, or India, or the U.S.---they all look the same. The narrative moves at the same pace, the filming is the same; even though the characters are ethnically different, the stories are the same. I think there’s a kind of homogenisation of the novel as well, and I find that very disturbing. I think stories are meant to be different and strange and sometimes not make sense, but also be fun and do new things. I’m always puzzled by people who say “this doesn’t make sense”, because things that don’t make sense can also be very interesting! When I was meeting readers and booksellers, I felt very enthusiastic and rejuvenated; I felt quite hopeful. On the one hand there is this real, closed corporate culture; on the other hand, booksellers and readers are imaginative, innovative, and adventurous. To say something is difficult is also to say it’s an adventure. I do sometimes think readers are more adventurous than publishers give them credit for.

"Books about America can be about the world. Why can’t a book about India be about the world?"

Have you seen a difference in the way U.S. and Indian readers have received your book? There is a difference between U.S. reviewers and Indian reviewers, and between U.S. readers and Indian readers. U.S. reviewers have been very positive---they’ve been puzzled, but they’ve been positive. They’re also connecting it with other strands---Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, and Octavia Butler---other literary fiction that also plays with genre. Sometimes Indian reviewers are very caught up with the idea of India. It is about India, but it is also about the world, which is part of the project of the novel. Books about America can be about the world. Why can’t a book about India be about the world? All readers create their own book, because reading is a creative act, so every reader is reading a slightly different novel. That’s true of all really good books. I think it’s only true of the really dull books that everybody is reading the same novel. The U.S. readers seem more sensitive to the climate change aspects, and the fantastic elements, which is not an unproductive way of reading. Sometimes for Indians, it’s too close to what is happening---which it is. People say, “There’s a moon landing in your novel!” And I say, no, there’s no moon landing. There’s a Mars landing in my novel---and it’s a piloted Mars mission. Reality hasn’t caught up yet!

In Praveena Shivram’s debut novel, Karuppu, the land of the dead is a shifting, moving spiral, presided over by Yama, lord of the dead. But Yama is missing, and in his absence, chaos reigns. A prophecy comes to light, and two children from vastly different worlds become caught up in it---Karuthamma, a young girl who grew up on earth, and Sigappi, an intersex child who lives in the underworld. Karuppu is a whirlwind of memories and dreams, where the past and the present interweave and boundaries are porous and malleable. At the centre of it all is the unforgettable figure of Karuppu. Taking inspiration from characters from mythology, Praveena Shivram builds an entirely original world in Karuppu, a fantasy novel marked by its fluidity. In conversation with Helter Skelter, she speaks about approaching stories and characters on their own terms, using fantasy and myth to reflect human relationships, and the importance of not succumbing to a binary mode of thinking.  I’m curious about how you see the audience of the novel, because this is published in Zubaan’s young adult imprint. Is that something you thought about when you wrote it? I never wrote it as young adult at all. The publishers took a call on marketing this as a young adult book, partly because the character is fourteen years old. But also, Urvashi [Butalia, of Zubaan Books] is somebody who redefines the publishing space so much, and Zubaan as a publishing house really works hard to not succumb to market trends. They really look at the list they’re creating for, say, ten years down the line. How is it going to change the literary landscape? Who are the people who should be published? I love the fact that Zubaan is constantly asking these questions, constantly looking at what is a “bestseller”. Do you look at a bestseller as something that’s happening now, or is it a bestseller if it stays for twenty years? Very deep and insightful questions. It was very heartwarming to be in that space, and really feels good that I’m one of their writers. It’s nice to be part of that process, even in the smallest way possible.     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Urvashi has always said that the best YA books are those that straddle both the adult and the YA space. The lines blur. It doesn’t have to be only young adults reading it---even adults should be able to read it, and vice versa. And that’s probably why they pegged it as YA. But when I wrote it, I didn’t have a fourteen-year-old in mind. It was really nice to read a YA book that doesn’t feel like it’s talking down to its audience. That’s true, because YA should not be doing that. I think when you start writing a story, if you become very conscious of your audience, you will compromise on the story. That’s not something you should do. I don’t think you should even worry about which market is going to read your book when you’re writing it. I think that comes much later, and there are other things that play into those decisions. You can’t really cater to that. You cater only to the story.

"I don’t think you should even worry about which market is going to read your book when you’re writing it. You can’t really cater to that. You cater only to the story."

The blurb of the book specifies that this is not a retelling of Indian mythology, but a reimagining. How did you approach that? How did you decide what to take in and what to make up? I never set out to retell a mythological story. It started with Karuppu. When I was young, there was this serial on Doordarshan, before the time of cable. It was called Vidathu Karuppu. It was this horror series, which talked about supernatural things, like being possessed… so that ‘Karuppu’ word came to me from there. And it was called Marmadesam, the world of secrets. That’s the title of the serial. So that was my starting point. And because Karuppu belonged to the world of the dead, Yama came in. That was the natural transition for me. When I read up, I found out that one of the Vedas has this story of Yama and Yami, which says that they were the first mortals on earth. I picked that up from there, and the rest of it is just totally made up. There is no mythological proof to any of this. I call it a reimagining, not a retelling, because when you look at it from a character’s perspective---if I just look at Yama as a character, and I go into an emotional space of Yama, then automatically I will stay true to that emotional graph. And when you stay true to the emotional graph, you cannot stay true to the mythological part of the story. It has to be one or the other. If I was going to retell a myth, I would not have looked at the emotional graph at all. But because this was a deeply emotional story, with everyone being impacted by each other, everyone completely caught up in this web of lies. The whole space was so human, really, that it couldn’t have stayed true to a mythological retelling. That is why I said it was a reimagining.  What possibilities did you see in the space of mythology that drew you to it? I wasn’t ever really drawn to the mythology of it at all---I was only interested to look at Yama as a character. Then I wondered, what happens to Yami? Nobody talks about her after that. What would she have gone through as the twin who’s left behind? Everything was really connected to really human emotions and very human frailties. How does that impact a person? Even the whole idea of one not being separated from the other is a representation of human relationships; the whole power dynamic between people. How do I look at the other? How does the other look at me? How much power do I have over the other? How much power does that person have over me? How much of it is circumstantial, how much of it is manipulation? So many things happen in that space. Yama and Yami gave me the perfect rich fertile ground on which I could talk about all of this.     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); I was conscious of one thing: all of my stories, any of my fiction, somehow become very Tamil in nature. My characters are Tamil, my world is very Tamil. I don’t feel the need to explain anything to anyone---which is why I don’t explain the words either in the book. I don’t feel the need to explain how to pronounce Chezhian, you pronounce it however you want. Or even Karuppu. I think that’s something that comes into whatever I write. And I loved how Nitya, who’s the designer at Zubaan, even did the chapter heads with Tamil words. It’s very beautifully done. There’s a lot of fluidity in your book---on multiple levels, between characters, bodies, gender, light and dark, right and wrong, past and present. What drew you to write such a non-black-and-white world? I think it’s just how I look at life in general. If I don’t have fluid spaces between me and another solid body, then there is no flow of life. This fluidity has to be there for my solidity to exist, and the other way around. They have to complement each other at all times. The format of each character telling the story helped me keep it fluid---you have specific perspectives and specific voices telling you the same story but in different ways, because they are all each flowing in a different way. Every character, every emotion, every interaction remains in that fluid space.

"All of my stories somehow become very Tamil in nature. My characters are Tamil, my world is very Tamil. I don’t feel the need to explain anything to anyone."

This was not done consciously. It’s how I look at life in general, and that seeped into the story itself. It is obviously meant to be in the grey space, because I’m dealing with the world of the dead. Ironically it's called Karuppu, and the second book was going to be called Sigappan. I was trying to challenge this black-and-white version of how you look at the world, and how that actually doesn’t exist. Everything exists only in the grey space. I think it’s also part of any story that I write. How I look at characters is also how I surrender to them. In surrendering to them, I also surrender to their fluidity, and allow myself to flow into that space. If I don’t do that, I will not be able to understand or hear or see or smell those characters, and if I can’t hear, see, smell them, I can’t write them. There is this almost symbiotic relationship that I have with the story, with the characters, because I do see them as living beings. I don’t discount it as “fiction”. It’s not. It’s a lot to do with life. I define fiction as another way to look at reality. It does not make it any less real than what I consider reality right now. Just because I’m here in the physical does not discount Karuppu in the physical. I’m not a part of that world. I got the gift to talk about that world, but that’s it. I can’t enter that space, as much as Karuppu can’t enter my space. It's so interesting that these weren’t conscious choices, because your examination of boundaries and boundary-crossing and binaries is there at every level in Karuppu, especially with gender, like with Sigappi. There’s so much talk about appropriation---“you can’t talk about something if you haven’t lived it”---and I don’t necessarily agree with it. Maybe that’s because I look at my characters’ world and that space very differently. I actually erase myself and go into that world and then write. So there is no ‘Pra’ really existing at that moment, there’s only the character. There’s only Sigappi at that moment, not Praveena’s version of what Sigappi is. I did talk a lot about it with my publisher, because there were some lines that we thought wouldn’t be politically correct, and maybe people would misinterpret or misunderstand it. I don’t want to be politically correct, because in Sigappi’s world, this “political correctness” does not exist. It is my world’s existence and not hers. It was a risk I was happy to take, because I don’t want to be untrue to that space, or to her. I do want that confusion that she went through to be there, because it’s natural for that confusion to be there. There is no vocabulary for her to talk about it, there is no agency for her to talk about it. What drew you to write an intersex character specifically? I think that was again dependent on the story. I was imagining if this were to happen, in a world where constructs of love and physical touch and desire and lust don’t exist, what could the baby possibly be? Who could the baby possibly be? Maybe it could be an intersex child, because in the world of the gods, you do have these intersex bodies that exist. It’s not a spectacle, it’s not an anomaly, like how it’s become a spectacle for us in this world. It also served the central plot very well, because you know a girl has to be there, but you don’t know which girl---because they don’t even accept this one as a girl. And that is not because of the politics of our world, but the politics of their world, where they don’t want this prophecy to be on her. Here the story is actually of acceptance. If you look at it from our lens, then your understanding is going to be very warped. But if you remove that lens and look at it just in that world, then it’s quite natural that all of this would happen. Again, I had to do a lot of reading up, I spoke to a lot of people. I think my only nod to it from this world to that world was the chapter where she says “You better change it to Sigappi right now” [this is in response to the chapter being titled “Sigappan”, the male name she does not choose to go by]. That was my only way to say, okay, I’m acknowledging it, but that’s it. After that, Praveena is gone. Then it’s just the story.

"How I look at characters is also how I surrender to them. In surrendering to them, I also surrender to their fluidity, and allow myself to flow into that space."

I’m interested in your style of writing, in that everyone is speaking very casually, and sometimes to the reader, like in that moment you mentioned. For me, that brought up the idea of oral traditions---there’s all these very natural digressions in the characters’ perspectives. The choice to have it in first-person was from the beginning. First-person allows me to rely more on the character and less on the narrator. If there were digressions, I could actually use that to my advantage. Each one was telling the story a certain way, so by the end of it you’re wondering, which version should I actually look at? Which is the thread that I should follow? Whose version is the real version? All those things come into play, which again serves this whole idea of fluidity.     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); When you’re actually living life, you can say I’ll look at something a certain way and that is true to me. But somebody else may look at something differently and it may not be the same. I’m not talking about a truth, I’m just talking about the way I look at that one truth--- how I look at it is what matters. It’s almost like that Kurosawa movie, Rashomon. There’s also a Wilkie Collins book called The Moonstone, which is the first time I came across the idea of a single story, but where everyone has different perspectives and you have no idea which one it is, finally. So that is an interesting device for me when I’m telling this particular story, because everything is so different. I was wondering, how do I access that world? Do I access it as somebody sitting on the outside, and having a character walk me through it? Or can I just not worry so much about “am I telling this story, am I the writer, am I the one with the craft”? Can I put that aside, and then just simply enter the world through the characters? Enter it in all honesty and with complete trust that they will see it through, or I’ll be able to see it through them? That was something I found interesting and it helped me tell the story, because I allowed them to say it. It was not so much me. I know it’s me, but it’s not.

"There are these moments of sudden objectivity, where you can put yourself outside, look at yourself, and then come back. I really wanted to mimic that in some sense, where I’ve pulled you so deep into a story and then I take you out again."

Your book has such a variety and range of different spaces you draw quotes and references from for your epigraphs. There’s also these song interludes called 'Karma Chameleon', talking about the story itself. How did you decide to include these quotes and interludes? What drew you to bring quotes from, for example, Simon & Garfunkel and Orhan Pamuk together in the book? I wanted those interludes and little quotes over there to suspend that world for a bit, and still be able to look at it from the outside. This play of in and out is also true of how you live. You’re constantly looking at yourself from the outside, and you’re living it. You have these moments when you’re in the middle of an argument and you just feel like you’re watching yourself arguing and thinking “What am I doing?” There are these moments of sudden objectivity, where you can put yourself outside, look at yourself, and then come back. I really wanted to mimic that in some sense, where I’ve pulled you so deep into a story and then I take you out again. So this whole dance of the inside and the outside was really what those quotes and the 'Karma Chameleon' interludes are doing.

Those are popular culture references: 'Karma Chameleon', Simon & Garfunkel, Orhan Pamuk, Raúl Zurita, all of them contemporary and belonging to this world, which adds one more layer. I’m constantly making you aware that you don’t belong to that world, but you’re getting a moment to see what it is like. But you have to come out. There’s no way that you can live there. How would you like people to approach your book? I hope that all readers read it with kindness, and open-mindedness, and not get very caught up in the politics of our world---with willing suspension of disbelief, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge said. If you can do that and read the book, that would be the best way to experience Karuppu.

Tejaswini Apte-Rahm’s debut novel, The Secret of More, is an ode to an India that has been relegated to the past. It is the picture of an India bustling with activity and insatiable hunger, and almost all of its characters hunger for more. This intensity of passion and ambition is further electrified due to the setting of the novel, 19th century Bombay. The sights, sounds and smells of the textile industry, the movie industry, and the chawls teeming with life inundate the pages of Apte-Rahm’s novel. It is summer in Bombay; the year is 1899. This is where we meet Tatya, the protagonist of the novel, a 17-year-old boy with limitless dreams. The novel takes us through Tatya’s life as he navigates the blurring lines between his hard-earned practical returns in the textile distribution industry and his desire for more, a temptation that frequently contradicts his practicality. We witness Tatya’s changing family, his marriage to Radha, his children growing into young adults, his discovery of love, and his robust contribution to the silent film industry. This movement in Tatya’s life is parallel to India's emergence from the dark days of being a colony to an independent country. At the beating heart of the novel is this silent negotiation between what we have and what we desire. In Apte-Rahm’s capable hands, this tension turns tender and the dance of desire becomes poetry.

 The Secret of More is a work of historical fiction and its writer is someone who has meticulously excavated these truths from countless narratives and oral histories that she has been handed down. “All of these characters are true. They are consolidated and composed of real life experiences. Historians have fact. Authors have imagination,” she said, strong in her belief that historical fiction is materialized at the “realm of feasibility”, where fact and fiction conspire together to breathe life into forgotten things. Read on for an exclusive interview with the author--- The novel uses sensory details very deftly to transport us back to colonial India. What do you think are the essentialising aspects of sights, sounds, and smells in storytelling? How did you weave these details into your creation of a vivid 1900s Mumbai? Quite early on in the process of writing my novel, I started taking a cinematic view of my fictional world. I think I initially did this without being conscious of it. There was a desire to see my characters move through an immersive and detailed landscape of early 20^th century Bombay as if I was watching the action on a giant cinemascope screen. I usually visualise a scene in vivid detail, as if I am watching a film. And then I write down what I see. The layout of a room, and the placement of objects, furnishings and people in the room. The way the scene is lit up is important---is it sunlight streaming in through a window, or is it lamp-light? If the sunlight is streaming in, then is it through a lattice, or a gauzy curtain, or simply a block of sunshine blazing in unfettered? If the scene is lamp-lit, then where is the oil lamp placed? Why is it in that specific spot, and who has placed it there? Could I perhaps move that lamp so that it adds value to the narrative or the visual drama in the scene? I also started placing myself within the scene as a close observer of what is going on. And when you are in a scene, you realise that all five senses are in play---sight, sound, smell, taste, and tactile sensations on your skin---and you have to pay attention to all of them. For example, the quality of the sunlight will depend on the time of day. And the time of day will determine the sounds that are coming in through the open window (the clacking sounds from a typing institute in the morning, or noisy school children going home in the afternoon). The time of day will also determine the sounds and smells in the house (the crisp sound of onions being sliced to prepare an afternoon snack, and the smell as they go into hot oil), and the smells floating in from outside (the late night smell of a raat-rani tree). And finally, the feel of the day on your skin (a prickly, sweaty afternoon, or a cooling evening). While this is how I visualise a scene, it does not mean, of course, that each scene has to be described in terms of all five senses. That would be an unbearable drag. When writing a scene, you just need to choose the one or two details that imply all the other details, and make the scene come alive. But it’s crucial that I know all those other details; that I know much more about the scene than what I write down. That wider knowledge contributes towards creating a vivid sensory world on the page.     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Your novel has centred the complex and rich culinary history that Mumbai has been a confluence of in its plot. It has uncountable descriptions for daily household items to luxurious and festive meals. How did your research lead you there? And why was food so important in your storytelling? During my research, I realised that so much of the food I take for granted today, even within the confines of daily home food, would have been unknown or alien in a traditional Koknastha Brahmin context. The family in my novel, the Abhyankars, are from that very specific community of Brahmins. And at that time there was very little, if any, cross-pollination of food culture if you were an orthodox family. So I had to be very careful about what food they cook and eat in the novel. For example, something as ordinary as batatawada would have been unknown in a traditional kitchen. One has to ask why there was no culinary cross-pollination, especially in a cosmopolitan, rapidly modernising city like Bombay. And then you realise it was not just the food, but the entire way of life that was rather insular, most especially for the womenfolk. The menfolk might mingle with a diversity of people through their working day, and come across various customs and behaviours. But women were not supposed to go out of the house unless there was a very specific reason like visiting the temple, or attending a haldi-kunku. There were no casual outings like going to spend time with friends. You were not supposed to eat anything unless it was cooked by a Brahmin. With such orthodoxy comes limited exposure. And it was the women with this kind of limited exposure who were running the kitchens. So it is no surprise then that the food coming out of those kitchens was absolutely traditional. I took most of my cues from conversations I had with various family members, especially the older women who had first-hand memories of growing up in a very traditional household where the food cooked was exclusively Koknastha Brahmin fare. No outside food was tolerated in the house. In later years, if at all some bread was bought, it was not allowed into the kitchen, and had to be left on a table outside. Food acquired huge importance when I wrote from the female characters’ point of view, because it was central to the rhythm of women’s lives. Preparing fresh food daily, or dry foodstuffs for storage, or other essentials like tooth-powder and hair cleansers---it is astonishing, seen with a modern lens, the extent to which things had to be made at home, whether it was grinding and cleaning salt, or making tooth-powder out of almond husk, charcoal and camphor. The preparation of these essential items, so often dependent on the seasons, was a part of the rhythm of those women’s lives in a very visceral way. For instance, before the onset of the monsoon you had to have a four-month stock of chilli powder ready because once the rains began there was no way to sun-dry the chillies. Various seasons and festivals were also defined by food in a way that does not necessarily happen today, when most things can be bought or prepared year-round. Sometimes as a researcher you strike gold---and that is what happened when someone sent me two historic manuals for women---essentially go-to guides for housewives in the early 20^th century, written in Marathi. One was written in 1914 and the other in 1934, and their scope is enormous. The instructions cover everything from daily meals to festive meals, to sweeping the courtyard, to cleaning the oil lamps, to heating up hot water for a bath, and so much more. These manuals helped enormously in building the world of my novel.  In your acknowledgements, you write that this novel is inspired by your research into the life of your great-grandfather. Tell us about how the story materialised from its conception to its final shape. I was working on writing a biography of my great-grandfather. I did extensive historical research for it, because I wanted to understand his life within the social and business contexts of the time. The research included visiting libraries as well as doing hours of oral interviews with older family members. The more I uncovered about his life, the more fascinating it became. Having arrived in Bombay with not much in his pockets, he made his fortune in textiles as the selling agent for Kohinoor Mills, and then became a financier and producer of Dadasaheb Phalke’s films, and one of the founders of the Hindustan Film Company, and later opened a sugar factory. It also became increasingly clear to me that he had lived in an incredibly dynamic era of Bombay’s history. That is where the inspiration for this novel comes from---I wanted to write a novel about a migrant in Bombay who finds success in the textile industry and the silent film industry, and how he and his family navigate their way through a city that is undergoing a rapid transition from the traditional to the modern. However, the novel is entirely fictitious: my great-grandfather’s life and times were simply a leaping-off point for the novel. The characters, their motivations, their decisions and relationships were all elements that I imagined and which evolved during the course of writing the novel. I started by writing the beginning and the end. I have no idea where the impetus to do this came from; it just happened. I knew how the novel should begin. I wanted to immediately establish the wider landscape of the city and the vastness of the sea, and within that I wanted to zoom into the specific situation that my character finds himself in---alone in a large mansion, the floor carpeted with ripe mangoes, having just lost his wife. These opening paragraphs became the prologue. And shortly after that I wrote the end of the novel. As soon as I had written it, I knew this was exactly how it had to be---the pacing felt right, and I felt comfortable with the narrative voice, which I then adopted for the rest of the book. Writing the end so early on provided me with a road map - I knew the direction in which the story needed to go, what the final destination was. Having said that, I was fully open to changing the end if needed. But luckily, like a homing pigeon, I made it back to where I’d started from!

"I started by writing the beginning and the end. I have no idea where the impetus to do this came from; it just happened."

This being your debut novel, what were the most challenging and formative aspects of representing history in fiction that you have experienced embarking on this journey? I found that there were two main challenges in representing history in fiction. You could call them potential traps to be avoided at all costs. Firstly, as a writer you have to ensure that you don’t bring your own modern sensibilities into play, when writing from the viewpoint of your characters. Ideas of fairness, right and wrong, what was socially acceptable to say and do, ideas of love and what makes for a ‘good’ marriage, were different in that era. To a large extent, you have to set your own modern notions aside and not fall into the trap of putting your own contemporary views into the dialogues and thoughts of your fictional historical characters. You have to stay true to the history for authentic voices to emerge in your narrative. For example, there is a scene in which Radha is planning a haldi-kunku (which is a women’s-only event) in their new apartment. Her husband, Tatya, suggests that she also invite the wives of two of his business associates from Mulji Jetha Market. To which she says, but they are not Brahmins like us, how can we have people of other castes enter our home? He responds by saying, I don’t want to force anything on you, but remember that I mix with non-Brahmins all day. It is the nature of business, and you see that no harm has come to us by my doing so. Finally, Radha hits upon the idea of having the haldi-kunku on the terrace, so that ‘people of other castes’ will not enter their home. Though I personally find Radha’s views unacceptable, I had to write this scene with restraint. It would have been all too easy to show Tatya as being irritated at her views, or pushing her to accept his own views. And then the scene would have lost its authenticity. For Radha to accept other castes in her home would have been a very radical thing in that era, whereas her character is extremely traditional. Nor is Tatya a reformist or activist, to want to chide his wife or lecture her. And therefore all he does is make a mild suggestion that she change her ways. Finally, having the event on the terrace, so that she can invite the wives of his business associates, is a compromise on her part. In fact, this is often how social change comes about within families and in wider society---not in one revolutionary moment, but in small incremental changes and compromises over the years.     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Secondly, it can often be tempting to use well-known historical events as ‘markers’ within the novel, to refer to them in order to show your reader where you are at in the timeline of the country’s history. Not only is this a lazy style of writing, but it is jarring for the reader as well. I wanted historical events to come into the narrative only when it directly affected the lives of the characters. For example, I have referred to the Jalianwala Bagh massacre because it directly leads to the nationalist feeling that makes Tatya’s first film a hit. If I simply mention the massacre because I want to signal to the reader that it is the year 1919, this becomes a rupture in the narrative.

"This is often how social change comes about within families and in wider society---not in one revolutionary moment, but in small incremental changes and compromises over the years."

In our own times too, we experience momentous national or world events mainly in the way they affect our daily lives, whether in the rising cost of living, or our personal freedoms, or the way we consume media. Our individual lives reflect what is going on in the world. Similarly, I wanted to focus on the day-to-day aspects of that era, where my characters’ lives suggest the sweep of history, rather than historical events suggesting what my characters’ lives are like at a given moment. You have built Tatya to be a flawed character and his narrative arc is handled with terrific sensitivity. Even when we cannot forgive him for his missteps, we understand his drive and desire, and in the end, we sympathise with him. What made you choose to tell the story through the eyes of such a protagonist?

You may have noticed that there is no villain in my novel. Of course, lots of villainous characters do exist in real life, but most commonly when things go wrong it is not because of a true-blue villain, but because of the character flaws of people in our lives, or our own flaws. Such flaws lead people to make decisions which can sometimes make a bad situation worse---or alienate friends, or disrupt sincere communication, or make people behave in a selfish, insensitive manner. In this regard, a novel which inspired me was Bleak House by Charles Dickens. I was struck by how the true villain in that novel is the legal system that sucks people into its clutches and has the potential to destroy lives and relationships. Though Bleak House has a cast of deeply flawed characters, we can, to varying degrees, sympathise with them, or at least understand their motivations. Some are, of course, hateful, but they are not necessarily villains. I only realised this at the end of Bleak House, and I was stunned at the ease with which Dickens has guided us through hundreds of pages and a raft of characters with all the ups and downs in their lives, without laying the blame at the feet of any one person. The only villain is circumstance and the legal system. Similarly, I wanted to give a realistic structure to The Secret of More and people it with characters who you can engage with on their own terms, like Tatya, who you can comprehend and relate to, despite his flaws and missteps. You delve deep into the history of textile mills and silent films, both are businesses that Tatya manages and writes his success story with. What made you choose these two trades as Tatya’s bedrock? Tell us about their dynamic role in shaping Mumbai. The early 20^th century was a period of great commercial and social dynamism in Bombay. Both the textile and film industries are central to the history and identity of the city. They have formed a commercial backbone for the city, and created the fabric of the Mumbai we see today. So it was fascinating to go back into those early years and imagine what the pioneers of these industries would have done. In 1899, when my novel begins, the textile industry was already booming. It was Bombay’s most important industry, and it shaped the city’s fortunes. It was the only large-scale employer of labour in the city at the time. During the early 20^th century, Bombay’s mills accounted for 50% of the spinning and weaving capacity of India. During the First World War there was a further boom in Indian textiles---fortunes were made because no cloth could come to India from British mills, since cloth production and ships were diverted towards the war effort. At this point, the mills that made cloth in India found their prices skyrocketing. It is on the wave of these booming decades that my character, Tatya, makes his mark at Mulji Jetha Market in Bombay, the largest wholesale textile market in Asia. The textile industry profoundly shaped the city in terms of its landscape, politics and cultural make-up. And it continues to shape the city today, in the guise of mills turned into malls. It is in this context of commercial dynamism, and the availability of working capital, that Bombay’s silent film industry emerged. Needless to say, the film industry has been central to Bombay, not only in terms of its economic importance, but also in terms of its cultural significance. It has been key to creating a certain mythology of Bombay, as the place where dreams can come true. And it attracted a diversity of people from the creative arts to take up residence in Bombay. This context leads to so many narrative possibilities, so many stories to tell about the vitality of the city and its people. That is why I focused on this era, and on the textile and film industries. There are different representations of femininity exhibited by women belonging to very different classes and social backgrounds in your novel. All of them try to find stability and freedom in their very limited positions. Tell me about the process of writing these women and how you established these differences without pitting them against each other. The differences in the women are mainly generational. The way I wrote the female characters was to make each of them a creature of her time. There is Mai, a shaven-headed widow. Her daughter is Radha, who marries Tatya. And Radha’s daughter is Durga, born with a lame foot and arm. Each of them builds on the experiences and freedoms hard-won by the previous generation. Mai submits to the restrictions and suffering imposed on her as a widow---there is little else she can do---but within those restrictions she doesn’t see why she should be neither seen nor heard simply because she is a widow. She insists that her young daughter Radha read the newspaper and practise mental arithmetic because she senses that Radha must arm herself with something more than what Mai had, something that might help her get ahead in the future. In an era when female illiteracy was common, Radha is later well-regarded among the other women in her chawl, who often come to her with letters or newspapers to read out. Radha, in her turn, is consumed by fear that her daughter Durga will remain unmarried due to her disability, and is unrelenting in imparting to Durga the domestic knowledge she will need to find a good match and be the perfect housewife. But despite her misgivings about educating girls beyond a certain age, she lets Durga remain in school longer than is advisable in terms of her marital prospects. While Mai and Radha are mostly content to find whatever freedoms they can within the constraints of tradition, it is Durga who finds herself navigating her way through an era of rapid modernisation, and who really itches to spread her wings and fly. Each woman makes decisions that open up the world a little more for her daughter, for the next generation of women, with more freedoms and more knowledge than was previously accessible. The changes are small and incremental, but add up to something significant when seen across generations.     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); The importance of these incremental, generational changes was an essential and moving discovery for me as I wrote the novel,  because it brought home to me that as women, we stand on the shoulders of the women who came before us, and their hard-won freedoms. These freedoms are not to be taken lightly, however much we might take them for granted today. It is not that long ago---very much within living memory---that girls were married off at the age of 12, and were withdrawn from education because it would ruin their marital prospects. The fourth important female character is Kamal, the actress. She operates in an entirely different social sphere, having grown up within a theatre company. Uniquely, she has the freedoms that none of the women in the orthodox sphere have, and yet she is constrained by the social stigma attached to her profession. I enjoyed creating the character of Kamal because she is made up of a composite of real characters, and is based on the experience of women in the early film industry. I want to delve into the dynamic between Radha and Durga. While Radha is content with the ritualisation of her household chores, Durga, like Tatya, hungers for more. Explain to us the approaches that you took into building this complicated dynamic between the two. The one thing that defines Radha’s relationship with her daughter is a fierce love, coupled with a terrible fear that her daughter will remain unmarried due to her disability, and remain in a sort of twilight zone for the rest of her life. Radha is introduced to a whole new side of Bombay when, as the family fortunes improve, they move from their Brahmin chawl to a cosmopolitan apartment block in 1917. She is amazed to see that there is a Chinese dentist on the first floor of the building, and is astonished that her neighbour, the footloose Mrs. Kanhere, gaily goes off on picnics with her family, invites British women home for tea, and regularly participates in a sewing circle. Radha marvels at the busy, alien energy of the city which has escaped her notice before, but she is rather alarmed at all this newness and retreats back to her family.

"As women, we stand on the shoulders of the women who came before us, and their hard-won freedoms. These freedoms are not to be taken lightly, however much we might take them for granted today. It is not that long ago—very much within living memory—that girls were married off at the age of 12, and were withdrawn from education because it would ruin their marital prospects."

When Durga, on the other hand, is unexpectedly drawn into the world of the beautiful and sophisticated princess Geetanjali Raje in 1930, she does not retreat from this alien world, but is fascinated by the possibilities opened up by women’s education and travel. She is a creature of her time and place---she has not been transplanted into the city from a village, like her mother was, but has been born and brought up in Bombay. She desperately wants to continue her education and learn English, while her mother eventually insists she be withdrawn from school. It is these differences between mother and daughter that play off each other in creating conflicts and compromises, pushing the plot forward and developing their character arcs through the narrative. More than anything else, their relationship is a loving and trusting one. This was an important factor for me in developing their parallel tracks: conflict within a family need not automatically mean a lack of love or trust. Tatya and Sharad are very different from each other. While Tatya’s desires are materialistic, Sharad’s desires have more to do with his own fulfillment. Ultimately, both of them fail to voice their desires in different aspects of their lives. What were your approaches going into crafting their desires and making them unable to fulfill them? A key element in the relationship between Tatya and Sharad is the lack of open and honest communication. I have seen this often in many families, where men (unlike women) often don’t speak openly to each other. They don’t have ‘heart-to-heart’ conversations with other men, the way they do with the women in their lives, whether it is daughters, aunts, or sisters. It is usually all-important to respect the patriarch of the family, which, in practice, means that a son will hesitate to express dissent, or tell his father what he really feels or desires. If it is common even now, you can imagine what it must have been like a hundred years ago when the rules of behaviour were iron-clad. So that was my primary approach in crafting their relationship. Tatya’s disappointment with Sharad stems from his lack of understanding of what his son really wants, while Sharad has to keep his own ambitions cloaked under a veneer of politeness and respect. Again, there is no lack of love between them, but, as Tatya says, there is a missing link in the bridge between them, a gap which is always just a little too wide to step over.

"Conflict within a family need not automatically mean a lack of love or trust."

I don’t necessarily agree with the view that Tatya’s desires are materialistic while Sharad’s are more to do with his own fulfillment. Both men, in the end, want to fulfil the desires of their souls. Tatya feels most fulfilled when making a success of his businesses, he feels satisfied only when he is, as he says, kicking footballs in several directions all at once, and then running after them with all his might. He has the drive and the ambition to do this, gaining unimaginable wealth along the way. Sharad, on the other hand, feels most fulfilled when he excels at sports. He enthusiastically talks to his mother about his college cricket tournaments, and also tells her that tennis is a sport that fills him with joy. These are things he would never dare to tell his father, and nor is he allowed the space to pursue those dreams. Both men want more, but their definition of ‘more’ is different. What projects are you planning or currently working on? I would like to work on fiction set in contemporary times, which does not require too much research. The research that went into The Secret of More was enormous, not to mention the continual cross-referencing and fact-checking in the course of writing and editing it. So I’d like to take a break from that kind of intensive research process. Having said that, I am a researcher at heart, so it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if I were to jump straight back into research for my next book. I’d also like to write another book for the Kalpavriksh Environment Action Group, an NGO which has published a wonderful list of children’s educational books, many of which have been shortlisted or won awards. The Poop Book!, which I co-wrote in 2018 with Sujatha Padmanabhan, has had a tremendous response from children, parents and teachers. So it would be great to once again contribute to Kalpavriksh’s education programme with another book.