Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
Hi there. I was born and raised in India and have called the United States my second continent for the last thirty years. Wherever I’ve lived, I have generally turned to books for answers to life’s big and small questions. My short stories have been published in OyeDrum, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, Storyscape Journal, Raising Mothers, The Bacon Review, The Bangalore Review and Ozone Park Journal. I was first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest (2017-2018), a finalist for the Fourth River Folio Contest for Prose Prize (2018), long-listed for the Disquiet International Literary Prize (2019 and 2020), and a finalist for the Reynolds-Price International Women’s Literary Award (2019). Love’s Garden is my first novel, forthcoming on October 27, 2020. I am working on a second novel titled Homeland Blues. I live outside Houston with my family and two marmalade cats.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
It is 1898. India is ruled by the British, and India’s women are ruled by British masters as well as Indian men. A desperate young widow sacrifices her firstborn child to save herself from ultimate dishonor. She marries a stranger, but her damaged second family pays dearly for this Faustian bargain. Then, an extraordinary atonement, strange liaisons in politics and love — spanning the two world wars and the Indian independence movement — help her descendants heal from this traumatic private history. Love’s Garden demonstrates the strength, resilience, and unbreakable spirit of mothers and daughters navigating layers of oppression, all while the sun is not-so-peacefully setting on British India. The greatest inspiration for Love’s Garden has been stories — half told, half untold — of women of my own family going back to the nineteenth century and the Indian independence movement in Bengal. Also greatly inspiring is the love and respect I feel for my unsung foremothers.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I write in bed sometimes!! Get some good work done there!
What authors, or books have influenced you?
So many. Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Mahashweta Debi, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Leni Zumas, Johanna Sinisalo, Octavia Butler, Jeffrey Colvin, Johannes Ananyuru, Chimamanda Adichie, Jennifer Wisner-Kelly, George Eliot…..
What are you working on now?
Homeland Blues is my new novel. It tells the story of a South Asian woman in the US forced to face her internalized racism when her husband’s unexplained disappearance and presumed death compel her to take the measure of her Indian-American or ‘Desi’ community’s loyalty and support, and to choose between them and an ambiguous but powerful feeling of kinship with a bisexual African-American man and immigrants facing deportation in Trump’s America. It’s a story of multi-tentacled hate but also of the love we must find to empathize with the stranger we have always been taught to fear. Delving into critical contemporary issues of race and immigration, Homeland Blues comes straight from the heart of marginalized and under-represented lives.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Don’t let anyone stall you
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Read, read, read
What are you reading now?
Johannes Anunuryu’s A Storm Blew in From Paradise and Jennifer Wisner-Kelly’s Stone Skimmers
What’s next for you as a writer?
A lot more writing, I think. I hope.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Jane Eyre, The Home and the World, War and Peace, all of Ibsen
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