When did you know you wanted to write? I grew up in a household where we wrote birthday poems and stories to amuse one another. There was music, there was painting. Our father read aloud to us. Setting down words just to see them play was a natural outcropping of the general household exuberance. I was equally attracted to music, however, and eventually entered a conservatory to become a classical pianist. The urge to write in a more disciplined way overtook me when I married my Indian husband, who presented me with a new culture to parse. Writing was an effective means to do that.
What writers have inspired you, and why? Alice Munro for her wisdom, Tolstoy for how he weaves the social fabric of a time and place into personal drama. The poets Levertov, Merwin, Rich, Emily Dickinson, and Tomaz Salamun. Novelists Kundera, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, Italo Calvino, Arundhati Roy. I respond to anything that ignites the imagination with respect to ideas and I trust the opinion of my body when I read. Does the hair on the back of my neck stand up? Do I get goose bumps? Does the top of my head threaten to blow off? Where did the inspiration come from for this story? Is it at all autobiographical? Only the broad set-up was drawn from my life--American girl marries Hindu Brahmin. The characters and their struggles grew organically out of the story as it developed through several years of revisions. My own truth, being stranger than fiction, wouldn't necessarily have fit in with the themes, motifs, and symbolism of the book. Fictional truth is so much more malleable. When I married my Indian husband, I became fascinated by the dynamics of the Indian “joint-family.” Since an ocean separated me from my new in-laws, I thought I’d explore the “what ifs” in fiction. So I pitted Alice, an American “unsuitable” bride, against Shiva, a traditional Indian mother-in-law and the namesake of a god. Although the set-up of Shiva’s Arms is drawn from my life—American girl finds Brahmin boy with seventeen opinionated relatives-- I am not Alice. She has my long hair and my quirky fashion sense, but her character is influenced by my fictional universe and the demands it makes on her. Even a true story is held hostage to memory and interpretation. When fictional truth wins over nostalgia, the story finds its own voice. I am not Alice, but I know her very well.
What is your experience with Indian culture? Did you visit India/do any research before writing this book? Besides marrying into the culture, which gave me a frame of reference for my husband’s own emotional statelessness, I read many novels by and about Indians, and studied the history, religion, philosophy, customs, and cuisine, particularly that of Kerala Brahmins, the group portrayed in the books. The land of feasts, fasts, and festivals! I even learned to wrap a sari properly, thanks to one old Indian lady who took me into a side room at the Indian Embassy in DC, and wound one around me. I don't remember how she happened to have a spare.
A lot of your works deal with self-exploration, cultural identity, and connections with others that often activate, move, change the first two. What is it about these topics that keep you finding new ways to develop them in your works? One critic said that my true subject is the conflation of the mortal and immortal, and I suppose the exploration of Hindu beliefs in my novels reinforces that – the endless cycle of birth and rebirth. Perhaps my impulse toward connection in my fiction is a primal wish to stave off death. You can’t get much more universal than that, and what’s universal is inexhaustible in a core subject. Look at what Faulkner did with race, for example.
How are you using social media to promote yourself and your writing? Facebook seems to be the most efficient means of promotion right now. I have an author page there as well as a personal page. I pin relevant items on Pinterest. I have an author’s site with a blog for my novel, and share another blog with my sister for collaborations. Posts from the blogs are fed into my Amazon Author Central page, as well as to Good Reads. I also give my poems another whirl in my YouTube channel.
What gives you the right to tell the story of a group you are not part of? I can write about this community because I do not truly belong to it. Being a perpetual outsider, standing in the doorway, is a good place to eavesdrop. As Mr. Faulkner famously said, "I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it." So, I give about as much weight to the new rule demanding one should only write about things one has experienced, as I do the companion demand for likable characters only. We don’t read to find invisible friends; We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “is this a potential friend for me?” but “is this character alive?” This is why I never write with an audience in mind. I find it hobbles my progress into the story. There are false starts, and it takes a steely attitude to ‘kill your darlings’ in order to find the work’s true voice. Didn’t Flannery O’Connor remind us that the novel is an art form, and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it?
Bombay Trilogy is a story that has meaning and message on multiple levels. At what level did you first form your story – symbolism or character/plot driven? The elements all work in tandem, shifting and slippery as they might be. I wanted to explore the stage of life called samsara, the householder stage, so I needed a metaphor to drive that. On such a broad meditation on kinship--who counts as Family, and what do we owe them-- I thought the ache that underscores displacement (immigration, arranged marriage, choosing individuation over cultural roles) would be effective. And I needed people to go back and forth in time to dramatize these themes, so the Sambashivan family was scribbled into being.