Summer, 1999. Twelve-year-old Pragya spends her summer holiday with relatives in Calcutta, a muggy city stranded in the last century. Pragya can’t wait to grow up. But she struggles to choose a vocation. Bored by her gossipy relatives, Pragya befriends Maya the maidservant. Maya, fresh from the countryside, is devoted to her family, but harbours dreams of her own. Pragya and Maya rebel against gender and class constraints and bond over their ambitions. Soon, the two girls are ready to run away together and try life on their own terms.
“At Play” is the title story of this collection.
AB: This is my first collection. I simply chose the best among the stories I had available. I’ve been writing short fiction for a few years.
I aimed for variety in theme, setting, and character. The collection’s unifying theme is broad: the experiences of women and girls (and the occasional nonhuman female) in contemporary India. The stories have women grappling with family and friendship, miscarriages and runaway children, love and sex, work and ambition, physical and mental illness, coming of age and aging, and the struggle to make a living.
AB: Just as, for the collection as a whole, I aimed for variety, so, in terms of sequencing these pieces, I aimed for contrast. I alternated longer pieces with shorter ones, darker with lighter.
AB: Getting stuck as a novelist! I spent my teens and twenties working on one epic, unfinished novel after another. I longed to have finished works to put out into the world. So I began writing short fiction in 2019. I’ve published in about 90 magazines so far.
I hadn’t ready very much short fiction before then; now, a good short story collection rivals a novel for my attention as a reader. My favourite of the short fiction writers I’ve discovered are Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, Deborah Eisenberg, and Lydia Davis.
AB: This has changed over time. In my teens, I used to love reading and writing description. Now, I prefer to focus on the story, setting the scene just enough so that the reader can picture what’s going on. In some stories, the setting gets more of the limelight. This is true in “Holiday,” where the characters take a trip to Nepal. This is their first trip abroad. And the mountainous setting causes nausea, which affects the characters’ judgment. So there I give the setting more space.
That said, I love stories that transport me. So I’m aiming now, in most stories, to replace tracts of description with a few precise, vivid details to create immersion.
In literary fiction, character drives plot, and plot reveals character. I have little innate gift for plot; it’s taken me a long while to stumble into an understanding of this precept in mechanical terms. George Saunders identifies causality as perhaps the most important element in a good story. He also discusses pattern variation and escalation in his excellent book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which my friend Anna Mandelbaum recommended to me. Creating a causal chain of events – with, say, two characters locked in an escalating rivalry – is the simple but powerful backbone of a good story. I think it’s rare, though: I can count on one hand the films, for instance, that build a long and solid causal chain. (The Dark Knight does this; so does HBO’s Rome series.)
Most successful short stories tell two stories in one. This layering is something I first structurally identified in Alice Munro’s novelette “Vandals.” This story is structured in two rings, which are both chained and concentric. The outer ring of the story, introduced first, is: a young woman takes her boyfriend to an old friend’s house and trashes it. So you wonder what’s gone wrong with this young woman. Then the story introduces the inner ring: you realise the answer lies in the young woman’s childhood experiences with her old friend and the latter’s boyfriend.
I first used this structure for my speculative/climate fiction short story, “Peace.” In the story’s outer ring, you wonder whether the protagonist will survive the storm. In the inner ring, you realise he doesn’t want to survive. So then you wonder if he will regain his will to live and his connection to humanity. The conflicts in both rings are resolved in the end.
Structure is something I’ve always struggled with. Again, I recommend Saunders’s book on writing and reading for anyone who shares my struggles. I’m also studying Carver’s work. When I read a story of his, I’m always satisfied, but I often struggle to articulate what exactly the story was, the connection between the characters or the events. He eschews conventional plot structures. To me this means his story logic is strong but subtle: the story’s flesh has hidden its bones well.
AB: This, too, has varied over time. As a failed novelist, I’d produce extensive drafts and then try to structure them.
When I began writing short fiction, I was a planner. I wrote increasingly extensive outlines as well as summaries of plot, story, and theme. The extensive outlines led to overlong stories: stories where the causal chain was roundabout or muddied. Also, of course, an overly extensive outline forestalls the joy of discovering as you draft.
Currently, I wait to start drafting a story until I have a fair idea of what a story is about, and where it will begin and end. Ideally, I’d take the shortest causal route from start to finish – but a route that was also surprising and novel. So, I suppose, I’m currently a semi-planner, semi-pantser.
AB: I recently resumed writing poetry after a 20-year-gap. In secondary school I read the Romantic and Elizabethan poets and emulated their styles. Currently, I don’t read poetry, so I don’t know whether and how I’ll keep writing it. I’ve been writing straightforward narrative poems that address similar topics as my short stories. I’ve always wanted to write humour, so I’m trying that in my poetry.
I’ve got several novellas and novels in various stages of drafting or revision. I’ll go back and finish drafting my climate fiction novel in 2026. Climate fiction is a genre I’ve explored with some short stuff. I have several pieces of short climate fiction and speculative fiction in draft or revision. At some point I’ll put aim for a collection of speculative fiction. I prefer to read and write stories where, whatever the genre or setting, the focus remains on how people feel, think, and relate. So my speculative pieces are few and far between.
AB: Yes, my second collection of short stories. Same genre – contemporary realist literary fiction. And a trio or quartet of novellas set during my PhD days. And another trio of novellas about sex, marriage, and treachery in contemporary India.
For now I’m focussing on the collection. I’ll finish it this year. Then the climate fiction novel. Then I’ll finish drafting one set of novellas, then another… And the moment I set down a plan like this, a list of priorities – something lawless in me decides, ‘To hell with the plan. I’ll write what I like, when I like.’
But finishing and publishing this first book has given me a boost of self-confidence. Most importantly, now I know that, however hard it is to buckle down and finish one project at a time, I can do it.
AB: No.
Initially, I’d planned to get myself to do some marketing for my book. I did a few posts on social media. A friend drew up a full social media calendar. I got up one morning, glanced at this proposed scheduled of activities, and wanted to go right back to bed.
Marketing is not fun for me. Marketing would be nonoptional if I were a full-time writer. I’m not. I have a full-time job in climate action. So, for now – having told everyone I know about the book – I’ve decided not to do any more marketing, but to focus on writing. (I interrupted myself while writing this to send everyone I know a follow-up request to read and review the book.)
In my view, writing better stuff, and publishing it in better magazines, is the best means of marketing at my disposal.
Find your copy of the book here.
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