25 year old Guju-Tamil-somehow-Canadian. I like unmicrowaved strawberry pop tarts and 70’s Miles. I’m sad about the Lakers season. I do a lot of things and 1 of the few I do well is write short stories.
unmicrowaved Pop Tarts sounds scary and powerful. can you bring some to the next Recess gathering?
I thought it was a normal thing… I got y’all though.
this is your first published work. how does it feel to have it out in the world?
Very small run of prints, but yes this is the most into the world my writing has been so far. It feels like letting your child go. I assume.
you use a lot of natural elements in your writing. in passing, we’ve discussed the work of Arundhati Roy. can you speak further about your influences and upbringing as a writer.
My mom is an avid reader, and my dad lowkey writes/wrote. So it’s definitely from them. My favourite writers right now are Helen Oyeyemi and Geronimo Stilton.
what are some themes you approached in Chhaya’s Heart and why did you feel the need to explore them?
I started with the setting. That first house we live in. The small one, with a couple families and a lot of uncles. It’s a very fun home for a kid but everyone else’s tryna figure out what to do, where to go. This inevitably brought up the concept of Space: Outer, Physical, Mental, The Accidentally Deliberate Re-Arrangement of Bodies Within, and So On Into. The pattern I noticed was Hierarchy and a corresponding resistance to it at at least the 2 levels of life in the story, one of which is domestic.
The proto-thesis became: the hierarchy of violence in the many definitions of space. For the most part I kept it fairly subtle, 1. because I’m still a rookie writer, and 2. because I’m scared.
thank you, Ajith.
