A Story In The Moth

I have a short story, “Sweet” in the Spring 2013 issue of The Moth, an Ireland-based print magazine.

Here’s the first paragraph…

They say that if you dream of the one you long for on a night when you have kept four lotus petals under your pillow, your love has not gone unreciprocated. In the French Quarter I see them, all pale formality and long-stemmed leaning, and smile remembering this. I have no use for the sad dignity of lotuses, not here. Tonight, in the other city, I will sleep alone for the first time in weeks, but this is how it works: while I am here, this is all there is. Nothing exists beyond the periphery of desire.

You can purchase the magazine here.

The Next Big Thing Interview

I was tagged by Christopher Martin, author and editor (of Flycatcher: A Journal of Native Imagination) to participate in this blog meme. “The Next Big Thing”, is meant to find and promote new and in-progress books, by getting their authors to answer a series of questions. [I’ve seen some versions of this meme with one question fewer, but I’ve decided to answer them all]. I’m tagging: poet Monica Mody, who has a new book, Kala Pani, out soon; erotica author and editor Rachel Kramer Bussel, who always has an anthology in progress; and poet Anindita Sengupta, who has just completed her second collection. Looking forward to their interviews; in the meanwhile, here are my answers:

What is the working title of your book?

“The High Priestess Never Marries”. It’s a book of stories, short and long.

What genre does your book fall under?

Fiction. Literary fiction, preferably, with a distinctly feminist leaning. But if I’m realistic, some people will call it chick lit. And that’s okay.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

It was something I used to say to my friends, partly with rue and partly with sardonic pride: “the high priestess never marries”. After a decade of romantic complication, I had begun to see my life through the lense of the pseudo-historical notion (backed up by evidence from the devadasi tradition of South India to the oracles of Greek antiquity, among other cultures), that in order to retain her personal power, the “high priestess” – the free spirit, the maverick – had to disavow social norms expected of other women, such as the security of husband and household. In exchange, she was allowed freedoms, education and individual and political agency that most women did not receive. That was very much how it felt to me, as a woman in the early 21^st century – that it was still a very either/or dichotomy, I could be an alpha female or I could be in a relationship, but not both.

So all the stories fundamentally grapple with the question of whether it is possible to both have love and be free. The story that probably best exemplifies this tussle might be “Afternoon Sex”, in which a woman is utterly devoted to her husband and the institution of marriage, believing both to have saved her life, but some primal part of her nature remains unexpressed and so she has this parallel life, another lover.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Stories of love and its consequences, underpinned by the motifs of sweetness, wildness and greed.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My women friends’ and my own experiences, and some of the cautionary tales that the men we were in love with and whom we thought we wanted to be like turned out to be. Many of us spent a great deal of time in dramatically dysfunctional relationships, often with permeable boundaries and complex power dynamics. Some of them were happy (see “Gigolo Maami”); some of them not (see “Greed and the Gandhi Quartet”). All of them were rich experiences, but what was really interesting were the aftermaths. How it could take a year to admit to oneself that what had taken place was abuse. The bizarre self-flagellation that comes with cheating on someone who claimed infidelity was negligible. The fact that one’s libertine or bohemian ideas don’t exist in a vacuum, but remain subject to the mores of the time and society in which one lives, as well as to human nature. The latent misogyny in heterosexual relationships. The fact that no amount of theory, politics or ideology can save you from being blinded by longing. The consequences, basically.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Although the stories are buoyed by female protagonists, it’s the male characters who’d be really fun to cast. What you have are these wilful, out-of-the-ordinary women who are fatally attracted to these men who are either terrible for them or with whom they are somehow unable to reconcile that love/freedom schism they perceive. So you can imagine: young or old, stupid or cunning, cruel or seemingly benign… they are very sexy men.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I don’t have an agent or a publisher, so far. But the book is still incomplete, and until and unless it is completed I hesitate to go searching. But several of the stories have been published individually. They’ve appeared or are forthcoming in Flycatcher: A Journal of Native Imagination, Hobart, Verity La, Out of Print, Pure Slush, The Moth, Bengal Lights, Elle, Monkeybicycle, Erotique, Rose Red Review and the anthology Baker’s Dozen. One of them received an Elle Fiction Award from Elle Magazine (India) in 2012, another was a winner in this year’s Best of the Net anthology and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Most of the stories were written in about ten months, and what followed has been a fallow period of almost a year. There are only a few stories left that I want to write, but it’s impossible to say when or if that will happen. Also, my own understanding of what I want the book to be is evolving. I’ve already removed several stories from the manuscript, for example. Narrative and emotional cohesion matter to me when putting together a collection, something I’ve done only twice in the past, with a chapbook and a full-length book of poetry. The pieces must feel like they belong together, and add up to more than the sum of their parts.

What other books would you compare yours to within your genre?

Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek for three reasons: its women-centricness is close to mine, its Spanglish inspired my Tanglish, and I love the easy mix of flash fiction and short stories, which The High Priestess Never Marries also has. Pam Houston’s Cowboys Are My Weakness, because those stories deal explicitly with that mixture of toughness and tenderness that independent, but empathic, women have. Gitanjali Kolanad’s very under-rated and graceful Sleeping With Movie Stars, which like my book is set primarily in Madras and also deals with love and lust as morally ambiguous articles. I didn’t think Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her quite fulfilled the premise he put forth in the media about the book – regarding a self-reflective masculinity and accountability in love – but the impetus is not dissimilar from my stories.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Right now, I am at a philosophical crossroads. For most of my life, I really did believe that a complicated woman could not have an uncomplicated love life. I don’t feel that way anymore. I started out writing this book as a way to broach and explore questions about choice, ambiguity and consequence – but as the answers started to come, the easy-breezy, bindaas agency of my protagonists started to look far less easy and far less like agency. I’m working now from a space of doubt, not from a space of deceptively balanced equivocality. So here’s what I have to find a way of reconciling now, and it’s important to me to be able to do so, because I do not wish to write in the absence of integrity, if not clarity: what if the high priestess archetype is also only a reactionary paradigm, or if that model is in fact a way of perpetuating a system by creating a space for exclusion within it? And what if the high priestess wants to marry? Is she then not who she thought she was, or had she only always been limited by the notion?

A Story In Erotique

I have a surrealist noir erotic story, “Sky Clad”, in the new issue of Erotique. Purchase details here.

A Long Story In Hobart – And A Painting

My long story, “Afternoon Sex” is in issue 14 of Hobart.

I know it’s in a print magazine, and perhaps expensive for those of you outside the U.S., but I really hope you will read it. If it helps to convince you, it’s 30 pages long and I really put my heart into writing it. It means a lot to me that it has finally been published.

Hobart runs bonus materials on their website, so I’ve done something a little special for this story. Not only can you read the first page, but I also did a small acrylic painting, “Two Parrots”, to accompany the story. See both, along with the details for purchasing the magazine, here.

Short Fiction In Rose Red Review

I have some short prose, “Sandalwood Moon”, in Rose Red Review. Even though I am taking a long hiatus from writing anything new, this piece matters to me especially because it contains the genesis concept of the manuscript of stories (The High Priestess Never Marries) I hope to finish when I get back to work. See if you can spot it here.

A Story And A Poem In Wasafiri

The new Global Youth Cultures issue of Wasafiri carries a short story and a poem. The story, “In Asterisks, For Action”, is from some years ago, and precedes the themes and narratives of the manuscript I’m finishing (finishing? hmm) now, The High Priestess Never Marries. The poem is called “Chennai – II”. You can find out how to get the magazine here.

A Pushcart Prize Nomination From Flycatcher

I’m delighted to share that my short story, “Nine Postcards From The Pondicherry Border“, which appeared in the inaugural issue of Flycatcher: A Journal of Native Imagination, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. This is my second Pushcart nomination: a poem, “I Will Come Bearing Mangoes” was nominated by Rougarou last year.

Book Review: Nelycinda & Other Stories by Susan Visvanathan

One would think the novella would find more favour in these times of abbreviated attention spans. Less demanding than the novel and meatier than the short story, it is the Goldilocks “just right” of texts. Susan Visvanathan’s “Nelycinda”, at just under a hundred pages, is a stunning novella. Told in twenty short chapters, it makes superb use of the neglected form, with a perfect balance of generosity and restraint. It should have been published as a stand-alone book; instead, Nelycinda & Other Stories becomes just that: one superlative piece of writing in a volume made unnecessarily plump with extras.

The title story is set just 300 years after the birth of Christianity, in a time when the southwest of India was a collision, or a collusion, of Roman, African, Chera, Chinese and other influences. Visvanathan writes about Kerala before it was Kerala with remarkable skill, painting a picture that is as vivid with texture and humanity as it is shorn of pretentiousness. At the centre of the novella is Susa, the wife of a wealthy trader who is frequently, and then seemingly permanently, travelling. At once ambitious and intimate, “Nelycinda” is both historical fiction and the story of one woman’s choices, circumstances and agency.

Not all the remaining stories in this collection are fillers, but the two that immediately succeed “Nelycinda” particularly pale in comparison. In “An Incomplete Travel Diary”, the second longest in the book, a former abused maid and her rich, impotent husband travel to India to adopt a child. In “Shopping in Paris”, both father and son in a family of Martiniquais musicians are obligated to choose between staying at home or travelling for work or love. Neither story compels in language or in mood, nor are their characters well-etched. It’s not progressive to suggest that an author mine a single landscape repeatedly, yet there is such a marked difference when Visvanathan writes about Kerala that it’s difficult not to wonder about her limitations.

A few stories are unmemorable, as when Visvanathan turns her gaze to Malayalis in the Middle East in “Gulf Baby” and “Further Away From Paradise, Returning Home”, or “Allapuzha”, which begins and continues as a short factual essay before suddenly diverting into a fictional introduction. There’s a pointlessness and an absence of grace in their lines, as though the evidently gifted author herself was ambivalent about them.

Still, the book is not without rewards. A trio of linked stories – “Correspondences”, “Pepper Vines Trail My Hair” and “Sludge Without Sun – are catalysed by the beautiful centre piece, in which a woman prophesied to die young maintains only a delicate and bittersweet attachment to the world. The first story comes long before the second, so that we arrive at the connection with delight. The collection ends on a strong note – “Odd Morning”, in which a Malayali American theatre actress leaves a train mid-journey, discomfited by its male passengers, and stays for weeks in a remote village.

Visvanathan is a curiously underrated author, despite her prolific output (Nelycinda & Other Stories is her fifth book of fiction; she is also the author of seven non-fiction works). In the best of her work, there is a lyricism and suppleness in the writing, tethered by deep reflections on history, gender and religion, and a distinction of style that deserves a larger audience. This collection of disparate pieces suffers only from bad curation. This doesn’t detract from the brilliance of the title story or the few persuasive ones. The demoted novella could have had better company, or none at all, but it is still a gem – albeit among a less sparkling assembly.

An edited version appeared in DNA.

 

 

 

A Story In Elle

My short story “Greed and the Gandhi Quartet”, which received a 2012 Elle Fiction Award, has been published in the August issue of ELLE India. Some of the line/section breaks have been edited for space, but I was impressed that my, erm, strong language was retained! The magazine is on stands all over India this month.

Elle Fiction Award 2012

Happy to share that my short story, “Greed and the Gandhi Quartet” has received an Elle Fiction Award 2012 from Elle (India).

The story has not yet been published, but the magazine featured a short genesis of each winner. Here’s a scan of the page that includes mine.

Book Review: Fish In A Dwindling Lake by Ambai (C.S. Lakshmi, trans. Lakshmi Holmström)

On the cover of Fish in a Dwindling Lake is this image: two women, their backs turned, look out onto a body of water. They must, we intuit, be silent. We know this because we know that in the presence of that which moves us, words only come later. This is the same poignance that this collection of eleven stories imbues.

For nearly four decades, Ambai’s writings have stirred her original Tamil readership with their forthright engagement with gender, particularly womanhood. In this, her third collection in English, translated by Lakshmi Holmström, her protagonists are held together by the reiteration of a single notion – “journey”.

Most are aged or aging but remain travellers: pilgrims, commuters, chaperones, vacationers, passengers. As with all voyages, it is encounters with strangers that teach them both about themselves and the world. In “Journey 5” two women holiday in Pondicherry with the intent of drinking wine, and find themselves partaking of a feast in the home of elderly strangers in a de facto relationship. In “Journey 7”, an unsuspecting Nani-Mausi at a train station finds herself escorting a runaway for whom leaving her husband may or may not be a kind of theatrical ritual.

Although others are set in places including Mumbai and Imphal, the most memorable stories evoke a deeply Tamil milieu, both in descriptive ambience and identifiable morality codes. One returns again and again to the stunning opening piece, “Journey 4”, in which a pregnant woman tells a stranger a shocking family secret, standing by the Kanyakumari shore. In, “One Thousand Words, A Life”, pregnant women again are its central characters: the tribulations of giving birth in a village during WWII leads into the heartbreak that “history is made up of so many silences”. In “The Calf That Frolicked In The Hall”, the collection’s third outstanding piece, the literary culture of Tamil Nadu in the ‘70s, when the anger of young men was considered glamorous, is both nostalgized and taken to task.

But the compassion of the author’s voice extends to men, particularly in “Kailasam”, in which thwarted male desire is treated with a complexity that only a feminism that has been steeped in actual human engagement, not just political rhetoric, would allow. Similarly in “Journey 9”, in which a gigolo is subject to brutality by a group of female clients, and washes his wounds in the home of a kindly woman who once declined his services.

The motif of water – still and flowing – emerges often, and evinces a series of nuanced tellings of what it means to inhabit a body that ultimately will return to the elements. A man falls or drowns himself in a well, another in a lake, a woman imagines carrying the tides home in a pot to her beloved, another has a refrigerator that forms mysterious shivalingam ice stalagmites.

Ambai’s work carries such power because it is neither sterile nor sensationalist, both things that writing that takes the body as an axis has the danger of becoming. In Fish in a Dwindling Lake there is a profundity and subtlety that could easily be attributed to age, but more importantly and less facetiously, to empathy. Like the young woman in the indelible “Journey 4”, like the nondescript women on the book’s cover, we simply watch for a long time, too stirred to speak.

An edited version appeared in The Hindustan Times.

A Story In Pure Slush

I’ve got a frivolous, frothy (and hopefully fun) story in Pure Slush‘s India issue called “Gigolo Maami”, and you can read it here.

I also answered their Hue Questionnaire here.

Micro-Fiction (With Music!) at Safety Pin Review

I was holding off on posting this, because there’s another element to being published on Safety Pin Review (i.e. the backs of people’s shirts) but there’s been some delay on that.

Meanwhile, here‘s an itty-bitty story, “Wishing on Stars”, read at intervals throughout this rather cool selection of music on WECI 91.5FM recently.