9.20 Karan Mahajan on Writing Entitled Men Who Live Without Consequence

If your family has ever felt like a soap opera you can't escape, this episode is for you. 

For the finale of Season 9, Tara sits down with Karan Mahajan to discuss The Complex, a sweeping family saga set in Delhi across the 1980s and 90s. Through the rise and fall of the Chopra family, they unpack the emotional realities of marriage, the loneliness of immigration, family expectations, male inadequacy, and the uncomfortable question of how personal disappointments can evolve into political resentments.

What happens when a marriage becomes the defining factor in a woman's future? And how do family loyalties survive affairs, betrayals, and decades of silence?

Karan also talks about playing with the line between fact and fiction from the very first page, opening the novel with a supposedly "found" 100,000-word manuscript by the mysterious Mohit Chopra. Together, they explore how fictional families can help us understand real historical moments, from immigration and the Emergency's aftermath to the rise of Hindu nationalism.

Karan takes us behind the scenes of a novel that took nearly a decade to reach readers: from a 500-page draft during the early months of COVID to separating himself from the characters before editing. Finally, he shares the advice he gives his students at Brown: write in conversation with your unconscious and never lose that sense of childish wonder that made you want to tell stories in the first place. 

Press play to tune out of your family drama and into the Chopra family's.

Books mentioned in this episode: 

1. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak by Jamil Jan Kochai

Applications for The Bound Publishing Course 2026 are now open.

The Bound Publishing Course is a 3-month intensive course on book, magazine, and digital publishing. Through live sessions, workshops, and industry-facing projects, participants gain practical publishing skills and exposure to careers across the industry.

• Cohort size: 50 seats
• First round of acceptances: 15th June 2026
• Applications are reviewed on a rolling bas

‘Books and Beyond with Bound’ is the podcast where Tara Khandelwal and Michelle D’costa uncover how their books reflect the realities of our lives and society today. Find out what drives India’s finest authors: from personal experiences to jugaad research methods, insecurities to publishing journeys. Created by Bound, a storytelling company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social media platforms. 

Transcript

1:28

Yes, the men all feel inadequate. I mean, I'm kind of curious why I'm always, it would be interesting to write a man who felt at peace with himself. Maybe I should try it for the next book. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the 20th and final episode of Books and We're on season nine. And it's been a great season. We've spoken about mythology, politics, love, internet, brain rot, ghosts, publishing, food, genuinely everything. So if you've had fun listening to these conversations, then please hit the follow button on Spotify and Apple podcasts. And also there's an author you'd want me to interview next season, DM me on Instagram and bound India. I'm always talking your recommendations. But let's get into today's episode. So today's episode covers a great big Indian family and every family has at least one person who everyone talks about in whispers or maybe not whispers. You know that uncle who says crazy things at weddings or the grand aunt who remembers every scandal, or the person everyone complains about, but nobody cuts off. Big Indian families are strange ecosystems. And today's book takes all of that and turns the volume all the way up. I'm going to be speaking to Karan Mahajan, who's written a new book, The Complex. I really liked his previous book as well. And this book follows a Chopra family across decades, countries, political shifts, secrets, marriage, motherhood, and eventually murder. But what I love most beneath all of the drama is it's a deeply human book. I loved all the characters, and especially the women, I felt coming from a male authors particularly feel layered and real. So everybody's carrying a history in this novel, everybody's sort of interconnected. And it's really a story about the rise and fall of families in Delhi. And this is Karan's first novel in almost 10 years since his previous book, Association of Small Bombs, which I've been waiting for this book. So when I found out about it, because I really liked the previous one, picked it up almost immediately. So very excited to have you here today. Thank you. What a superb introduction. Okay, thank you. But before we get into the story, you know, I really like the intro, because in the intro, you open the novel, and you say that this manuscript was left to you by a man named Mohit Chopra, who made you his literary executor. And it was a 100,000 page draft, and you have sort of fine tuned it. And I thought it was a very playful, but unsettling way to begin the novel, because I immediately thought, okay, you know, what's the line between fiction and fact? So what made you frame the novel in this way? Well, luckily, I should say, I say in the intro, it's 100,000 words, not 100,000 pages, because that is a task no one would be able to take on. But to me, exactly what you just mentioned was important, this playful line between fact and fiction, that the novel is occupying, and that I wanted to signal for the reader right at the beginning, because, you know, I did this thing in The Association of Small Bombs, I did this in this book, which is that I take fictional people and often put them into real political events or real moments of history. And there's something interesting that emerges from that, like some feeling that the reader has that, oh, this might have actually happened, which is, I think, an important feeling actually to produce sometimes. But I also wanted at the very beginning, to orient the reader and say, okay, this is something that is going to come up again and again in the novel. Yeah, because I really did think, okay, maybe this Mohit Chopra actually, you know, exists. And it could, I mean, he could exist given sort of, you know, the kind of story that we've seen, because the story is very relatable in many ways of many, you know, families that we probably have seen. But I have to say that Geeta is my favorite character in the book. She's the daughter-in-law, and she is married into the Chopra family. She's married to the nephew of the patriarch, S.P. Chopra. His name is Sachin. And she's sort of, you know, pressured a little by her uncle-in-law, Lakshman. And, but she sort of like keeps it a little bit secret. And there's a lot of, like she's constantly negotiating almost impossible emotional terrain. She doesn't have a child, her marriage, trauma of sexual violence, expectations. So could you talk a little bit about starting off the novel with her point of view, and about building her inner life? And I would say that impossible emotional terrain is perhaps a good description also of the kind of terrain I'm interested in, in fiction, which is that how do people operate at the extremities? Because we know that people deal with huge feelings, but actually have to continue their day-to-day existence, right? So Geeta, who you talked about, for me was the moral anchor of the novel, and also the character that started off this novel. Because I didn't actually think it would be a novel about this big family living in a semi-joint fashion in a complex in North Delhi. I thought it's mostly going to be the story of this woman, Geeta, who has married into a big family. But she's essentially, she's moved to the U.S. following her husband, Sachin Chopra, who is the grandnephew of the patriarch, S.P. Chopra. And, you know, she's an educated woman, she's intelligent, but she's unable to find a professional foothold in the U.S. of the 1970s, unlike the foothold she had in India working as an editor. And she and her husband are unable to conceive. They wanted to start a family, but they can't. So all the ways in which she could have become integrated or more assimilated into American life, or have a system of meaning in the U.S. that is on par with the system of meaning she left behind in Delhi, don't exist. And so she starts longing for India and to move back to Delhi. And when she moves back, or when she comes back for a trip, actually, in 1980, she, you know, suffers essentially an assault at the of this uncle, uncle-in-law, Lakshman Chopra. And so suddenly Delhi, this place that she loves, is also somewhat unsafe for her, right? Her husband's family becomes an unsafe space. And so she's suspended between these two worlds. So for me, that's what made her such a compelling character, is that how do you deal with two different places that you can't settle into? And what is the mentality of an immigrant who goes back and forth between those two places? Because, you know, I know you studied abroad too. Immigration is not linear. A lot of people move to a place, they come back and visit their homes, they return to the new place, and each time they change just a little bit. And it's very difficult actually to record or to even understand what that change is. And it's quite different from if you move to a place, let's say you move to America, and you never went back to India for 30 years, right? That's a different experience. So Geeta set off the novel, and then through Geeta's eyes, we start to enter into the world of the complex. And then the complex itself becomes the centerpiece of the novel. How did the evolution happen from saying, okay, I may be wanting to write just about Geeta to writing about the complex? And why did you choose this family or this particular topic to explore? Yeah, I mean, this is the part of writing fiction that is so mysterious, right? Your instincts lead you into directions that you hadn't quite expected. So for me, what I hadn't expected is that I would have this character, Lakshman Chopra, show up, who, you know, is a repulsive character in many ways, right? We see him trying to be this kind of dada in the family, even though he's the youngest son, and is something of a failure. And he's, you know, Chaudhary-like guy pushing people around, pressuring the women, being predatory. But then, at some point, I just became curious. I said, I said to myself, okay, I'm painting this person as this kind of villain, which in some ways, he is the antagonist of the novel. But what is actually making him tick? Like, what, why is he acting this way? What are the social forces around him? And also, it struck me that Lakshman Chopra is partly acting this way, because he perceives himself as being powerless. It's not actually true. But he thinks, you know, I haven't achieved the greatness of my father. And also, my business is failing. I am not super respected in society. Therefore, my only way is to dominate the women in the family through this patriarchal structure. So I started writing from his perspective. And then of course, I started to see that a character like him was an amazing way to start describing the Punjabi Delhi of the 1970s and 80s, just because he's interacting with so many different parts of that society. He's always on the move. And this is true of, I think, characters who are sort of antagonists and villains, is that one big advantage they have in a narrative is that they're always doing things. They're not, as far as I'm concerned, they're not conflicted the way someone like Geeta is, who is thinking, am I hurting someone now? Am I hurting myself? Am I making the right decision? Lakshman just does things. And so entering him became then a way to talk about all these other things, like what was the disappointment of the 1980s compared to the promise of the 1940s with the independence movement? What was the end of the mixed economy like? What did it feel like? What was the relationship between people who had stayed in India versus their relatives who went abroad? What was the longing for the imported items from the West versus the resentment of the West? So it becomes so complicated when you start bringing in these things. Yeah, and I like the juxtaposition of Lakshman and Sachin and Geeta. Sachin is Geeta's husband, because they are living this kind of like, you know, idyllic life from the outside in America, because Sachin has a stable job and he's literally designing the plastic bottles for ketchup, which I found very interesting. And they're suspended between two countries. And then, you know, obviously, the thing with Lakshman happens to Geeta, and she kind of goes back to the US and she's dealing with it. And she's not even told Sachin. And then Lakshman and his wife come for a visit. So I really like the scenes in which, you know, Lakshman and his wife Archana come to the US to visit Sachin and Geeta. Because in India, Lakshman is such a larger than life character. But in the US, he's diminished, you know, in this big house that Sachin and Geeta live in. And Sachin's job, all of those things, and he doesn't really have that much going for him. So when you take him out of that context, I found it very, very fun and interesting. And also then Geeta is kind of has upper hand there, where she has a job, she's out of the house, she's sort of like a modern woman, and he has no hold over her. So I really like the juxtaposition between those two families. Can you speak more about that? That's such a good reading of that section, again, because that is really what I intended. But also the other thing I intended was that, you know, it is a big novel, it's 450 pages or 400 pages. But actually, the focus is quite tight, like most of the scenes are about Lakshman or Geeta or their interactions, right? Like we don't go that far. So this is one very interesting, pressured situation that the novel develops is that Geeta has suffered this assault at the hands of Lakshman. She can't tell anyone because this is the 1980s. And there's no real recourse for her. She realizes that if she tells people, she might get blamed for what happened. And she's familiar with stories of women to whom that has happened. And then to make things worse, Lakshman and Archana, his wife, come to the US because of course, back then, and especially even now, like when you come to the US, you're going to stay with your relatives, right? There's no question, especially if you have one relative in the US. So they come and stay. And that was some of my favorite stuff to write. Because one other thing I was trying to describe, which is complicated to put into fiction, without boring the reader is that I think a lot of immigration is very boring. Also, there's a lot of striving and of course, like work and even someone like is engaged with this work. But of course, like you've lost all this cultural fluency and knowledge, like in a place like India, even this is even true of me as an immigrant at this point, like, when I come back to Delhi, I'm engaged by every part of the landscape, I have an emotional connection to it. Whereas here, I still after many years feel like a complete stranger, I don't feel any emotions for the strip malls or for the buildings. And so the perverse thing about the section is that even though they're having kind of a bad time with these relatives, and there's a lot of tension, it's actually a little more interesting than if they were on their own, living a kind of boring life where she can't express things. And so that leads Gita to take certain actions, which actually are not positive actions. But they're interesting, because she is someone who suffered a trauma and is trying to find a way to make meaning if it and to get over it. But of course, what she ends up doing, and I won't give this away, leads to a fracture or damage in her own marriage, which then becomes another engine in the novel. Yeah. So through all of these sort of, you know, interactions, we have we spoke about Lakshman, Sachin and Gita, we also have Bridge and Karishma. So Bridge is Sachin's brother, and Karishma is his wife. And then Bridge and Lakshman end up starting a business together. And there's all of these sort of like, you know, love triangles, affairs going on, rumors, etc. And each member of the family has a very interesting relationship with the other. There's also Lakshman's sister Vibha, who has her own backstory. So tell me a little bit about you know, what you wanted to show with all of these characters and different types of relationships with each other? What was a larger theme that you were trying to showcase? Well, one of them was, again, what you pointed out, which is just to show the different nuances and shades of relationships that exist, that there is not a stable system of meaning that, you know, a nephew and an uncle might have a relationship, two cousins might have a different kind of relationship, so on and so forth. But in this case, because this family has not achieved the kind of success it wanted to, especially the sons, many of them are striving and trying to start new enterprises, right? And often, they're going into business with other family members. So I definitely thought that actually, in retrospect, many of the businesses that are started are almost marriages between men. It's almost like, you know, you have Lakshman having this interaction with Geeta, which is very negative, then he has an affair with Karishma. But on the other hand, Lakshman is also starting a business with Brij. Later on, Sachin starts a business with his friend and moves back to India. And these are actually as fraught in some ways, or have the same kind of silences that the marriages themselves have, or the affairs themselves have. And, you know, I think when the introduction used the word ecosystem, that's when the novel started to feel really alive, because you realize that they are constantly changing their relationships to each other in the process. And not just that, that the women also working in the businesses themselves, you know, they might be starting their own small enterprises. And Vibha, who you mentioned, to me was one of the most interesting characters in the novel. And one of my favorite sections to write is a section about her divorce in London, because she is actually quite an intelligent woman, she doesn't live in the complex, because the sisters don't live in the complex. And she cares a lot about the family name, because she feels also that she's sort of failed in her own life. But unfortunately, despite having suffered at the hands of a man herself in the past, she becomes a kind of tool of the patriarchy, where she covers up for her brothers, especially Lakshman, because she doesn't want shame to come upon the family. That breaks at some point a little bit. But it was important to show that, you know, many women were also involved in upholding that structure. Yeah, even, even Lakshman's wife, Archana, even though Lakshman and Karishma having an affair, and obviously, she knows about it, because all of all three of them are working in the same office together. And even though Lakshman and Karishma try to be discreet, it's kind of obvious to, you know, almost everyone in the family. She never says anything, she never confronts him, and she continues the facade, which I also found, you know, very interesting, as well. So I think that, yeah, the women definitely were complicit. And I love Vibha's whole sojourn in London, because it just, a lot of this book is also about dashed hopes, you know, and Vibha was so hopeful as a young bride, and she thought she was going to escape this family, and she's going to live a new life in London. And then this guy completely turned out to be, you know, a fraud in some sort of way, and betrayed her trust. And then she had to come back and, and all of those things, and she had to get back into the fold of the family. So I found that actually very heartbreaking. As I mentioned, I love the women's stories a lot in the book. Yeah. I find the Vibha section very heartbreaking as well. Even as you were talking, I was remembering writing those sections. And, you know, that entire backstory for her was one of those rare moments of writing where the whole section, I think, emerged in one sitting. And I remember feeling, oh, I've really expressed something in miniature that I'm trying to express in the novel as a whole, which is this thing, you know, you said dashed hopes, also the loneliness of immigration, how much you have, you're dependent suddenly on one man, if you're a woman who's moving for her husband, because that man is your entryway into the world, especially if you are not going out to work. And if that person who's supposed to be your anchor is a fraud, then you have a very different experience, obviously. And there's a great deal of instability. And again, shame associated with, you know, how did I fall victim to this trick? Because in this case, you know, it's, he ends up having a British wife already. And, you know, I've heard these stories over the years. And I thought, it'd be interesting to see what it would be like. But I think the thing that really emerges in that section, which to me, also speaks to how I write is that there's a part in which she is suffering so much, that she's thinking about the opinions of all these other people, she's thinking about the point of view of the British wife, of her husband, of her father, and then she realizes I'm in so much pain that I can't actually be myself, I have to be everyone else. And sometimes I think that is my writing technique is that like, I need to enter into all these other minds. Because in some ways, you know, I, myself as a human being was formed at the nexus of so many consciousnesses, if that's a word. And I'm always trying to figure out where my sliver of consciousness emerges, like in a narrow alley between all these other consciousness is to come up with the word. Yeah. And you also mentioned that, obviously, you know, you've been living in the US for a long time, and you teach at Brown, and you're an immigrant as well. And I could almost sort of tell that there were flavors of you in these immigrant characters that I found very interesting as well. But coming back to Lakshman, you know, what was also interesting is that over time, and he's not at all like this in the beginning of the book, but he gets radicalized into this right wing nationalist figure, where actually wasn't even interested in those politics to begin with. And so I just wonder, you know, I kept wondering how much the changing political climate in India today also for you shaped him as a character while you were writing this. So can you tell me a little bit about, you know, why the decision to involve this character into politics and what you wanted to show through that? Yeah, you know, all the characters in this novel feel displaced in some ways, right? So obviously, the Gita and Vibha are displaced in a very obvious way, they've moved abroad, they've run into trouble in their marriages. Lakshman feels displaced historically, he feels that, you know, the path of greatness set down by my father, who had been the RBI governor, who had been involved in drafting the constitution, that path has forked somewhere, and I'm no longer on that path. And he is desperately trying to understand why, and he wants to get back on it. And of course, like many other people, he reaches for a politics of resentment. Oh, it's because the West is putting us down. It's because Muslims and Mughals and the British did all these things to our country, our country hasn't found utterance as a nation. But obviously, a lot of those things, those thoughts, were inflected by the things that are happening now. I think that we live in, I'm living in the US right now, and I spent some time in India, both these countries are in the grip of very strong right wing nationalist movements. And I think what's really compelling and strange, of course, is that when you look at the 80s, the BJP was not a force. I mean, I fictionalized it into something called the TPP, because it's not quite the BJP. But, you know, if you look at it historically, after the 84 elections after Indira Gandhi's death, the BJP got like two or three seats, right? It was like almost finished as a party. And so it's important to remember that what seems inevitable now was not necessarily inevitable. And a few minor things happened that changed the course of history. And Lakshman, as you pointed out, is a opportunist at first. He thinks, okay, I'm making these bombs, Ayurvedic bombs, these shakhas of the RSS equivalent are a good place to sell them, because they'll be a natural market for them. And he starts getting to meet people who are involved in grassroots Hindu nationalism. And at first, again, he's just trying to go in this direction, because his own entry into Congress has been blocked by a brother of his who's an MLA, because the brother is trying to hold on to his own position. But then what I really wanted to and which is very important, you use the word radicalized, is that the moment when he goes from being an opportunist to being an ideologue, and that actually does happen, when actually, for him, the decimation of the party, after the Indira Gandhi assassination and the elections, becomes a kind of rallying cry that, oh, you know, it turns out Hindus have been really suppressed in this country, he starts to feel, but what he's really saying is, I am suppressed, because I haven't done well, right, this kind of merging of the private and the public. That's something novels can do really well. And then you start to see that he really adopts this ideology and becomes more and more involved in the way the party is going to progress towards the first Rath Yatra. Yeah, it's almost sort of like what's lacking in him, you know, he's trying to make up for. So what would you say, because he's such a terrifying character, you know, we know what he's done to Geeta, the affair between him and Karishma, you know, I just feel always that it was consensual. But I always felt really bad for this character for Karishma, because I felt she was also a very broken person, and she didn't have much going on. And for her almost, the affair seemed like a way to gain power, in a way to align herself with someone who she thought was powerful, but she didn't have any power in her marriage with Bridge, who was Sachin's brother, because Bridge kind of was a failing businessman until they started that business together with Lakshman. And he didn't really have much going on. And there wasn't much going on in their marriage. And, you know, she didn't identify so much, she was a mother, but she didn't identify so much as a mother, she always was seeking more. So this was a way for her to sort of have that outlet. But I always felt a little bad for character. So tell me a little bit more about a character. And would you say there's any redeeming qualities that Lakshman has? Well, to answer your last question, first, does Lakshman have redeeming qualities? I'm not entirely sure. But I think he's relatable, is what I would say is that he understands on some level, how to interact with different kinds of people. He is warm towards family members who are on the same level as him or who have power over him. You know, he's willing to do that bidding. So and and he's, he's active, right? He's the kind of person who will go out and say, okay, this needs to be done, that needs to be done. So maybe those are redeeming. And we see a different part of him emerge in the affair with Karishma, which is a part of him that is a little more tender and desperate for love. Basically, like many of the characters in this novel, they are desperate for connection and affection, and they can't find it. But of course, we see with Lakshman that, you know, he has this political growth that is very negative. And later on, he returns to becoming his the worst version of himself when his own power is confronted. Karishma to me is probably my favorite of the characters in the novel. Actually, you know, I love writing Gita, but that was difficult to write. Karishma came relatively easily. And I think it is because she is very clear eyed and also somewhat depressed. And almost nihilistic, where she realizes, like, I think she even says this, this family was just another portal she had to pass through. She lived death words, that she is this, she has no illusions as to what is going to happen from this affair, or that her life is going to bloom into something amazing. But she at the same time is a human being, she is in a bad marriage. She recognizes that Lakshman has certain qualities that he actually is a potentially could be a famous politician, he is a political animal. And that, you know, she, she, I think I make it clearly, subtly, I say she, she gets physical pleasure out of their relationship. She also, I think, feels that there is some connection beyond just power, and so on. The connection of kind of mutual recognition that people who can see themselves clearly like Lakshman also knows that he's not he's a good for nothing. His father used to call him, you know, the biggest idiot in the family, basically. And so it was really interesting to write of a relationship. I mean, that's, that's really, again, another thing that fiction can do, which, which I really want to do with my novels, is to show relationships that you haven't seen before. So like, I don't, I don't think I had seen a relationship like this depicted, which is that often you'll hear of like someone who's a pretty bad person, like someone who's been metooed even, but they're like, there's someone with them now, or there was someone who was with them for 20 years. Like, what was that relationship like? Were there actually qualities that the person had? Because they're not all evil. Even if you've done something really bad, you might actually have some redeeming qualities. And what is it like to be that woman? Like, so I think I was able to get into some of that with this novel, but also to show how that relationship can unravel. Yeah, I think the maybe the only marriage that had a happy ending in the book was Geeta and Sachin's, even though the middle there, I thought that, yeah, they wouldn't last because a lot happens to upend that marriage as well. But they do find equilibrium in the end, even though they don't have children. And you know, they're living in the US, they're kind of estranged, and they come back, they have a whole arc where they come back and they readjust. So yeah, I did like that at least one of the marriages had a happy ending. But the portrayal of marriage was interesting, and sometimes bleak also, I think. I hate to, I hate to say this, but it definitely is an anti-marriage book. I realized that. But to tell you the truth, I mean, you know, I don't know how you feel. But sadly, I think most of the marriages I've witnessed in my life of people in the older generations, but also of my generation have not necessarily been happy marriages. I mean, I find it a very perplexing institution, actually, on some levels that continues despite its many obvious failures, like, and I don't know that there's any answer to this or there's any real alternative either. Because clearly, like, you know, polyamorous relationships or polygamy of different kinds, the polyandry, those things haven't worked either. But there's a way in which the marriages of the 70s and 80s felt bleaker, probably because divorce was not necessarily an option. And there's so much that would hinge on the luck of who you married, right? Because that person colors your day to day existence. So I feel a lot of like grief and tragedy when I when I think back on some of the marriages I've witnessed. I mean, I wish I had a positive view of it. I mean, I don't know how you feel. What your thoughts on that? No, I agree. I think that especially for women, who you marry was make or break in that generation. And even obviously, the generation before that, because I see it with my own grand, grand mom and her sisters. And it really is about sort of, you know, the person they married, that person made their life what it is today, which is very different than, you know, in our generation or my generation, where you have women have a lot more agency, and your life is not so dependent on this one decision that isn't even sometimes made by you, but is imposed on you. So I think you you did portray that very well. And then within those confines, these women like Karishma, Archana, they're trying to, you know, do their own businesses, or they have affairs or they're trying in their own way to find a foothold, but they are very much sort of constrained by the time. And I think that novel that the novel is a really good portrayal of that. And it's also interesting that, you know, it also moves through the micro, but it also as you know, a lot of interviews, you talked about how it moves to the macro, which is the major political movements in India, the anti Sikh violence of 1984, caste reservation protests, we spoke about Hindu nationalism, all of these macro events that are also happening to this family and how this family is participating in in them as well. So what was your research process, you know, for writing this book? I know a lot of it would have been sort of like the imagination of the characters and all of those things. But for the political stuff, how did you weave that in? And what was the research? Yeah, the research for these novels is endless, as far as I'm concerned. And actually, in some ways, the most pleasing part of writing, because obviously not writing yet, you're just reading, because I always think that even if a novel I write is an abject failure, or you know, it doesn't get off the ground, I would have improved and, and as a human being and learn something. So yeah, the process is, you know, you start, let's say I have a big section on the Mandal Commission. And obviously, it's very tightly focused on the family, not on every aspect of the protests that happened in Delhi. But for something like that, you know, you read a history book, then you realize, okay, I'm not actually getting much from here, I'm getting a kind of surface level understanding of it, I'm understanding what the key political players were doing, but what was it like to be a college student at the time, then you go and find people who were college students. And so I talked to a lot of people in Delhi, many of them were now on the left, but had unthinkingly participated in these anti reservation protests, who were embarrassed by it. But also, that's interesting, why were they all participating in it, then you look at the news reports, because that's one great thing with the internet is now it's so much easier to go into the archives of the Times of India or the Hindu, I just would read day to day what was happening, you figure out what, what are the key figures doing now I went and talked to certain people, like I went and talked to Arun Shourie, who had been covering it at the time for a newspaper, right. And those people have certain memories. And from everything that you start developing a kind of 360 degree picture. And I think that thing is true, which they say, which is that, you know, you've done enough research, when you start seeing the same things again, and again, in talking to people, you, you realize, okay, I've, I've started covering a lot of this ground. And then you kind of put it all away. And you just let your imagination pick the details that it wants to pick. And that creates a kind of canvas that has the emotions of the novel imbued in it. Right. And, you know, it's been a decade since your last novel. So is the complex something that you've been working on for the last 10 years? Or have there been other projects that didn't take off? And what has been your writing process to finish this novel? God, it's so inefficient, the writing process. I would say that in 2018, in 2019, I did a lot of the research for this novel. And then, actually, in 2020, I wrote a lot of it, I wrote like a big first draft 500-600 pages. You know, it was that immediate lockdown period, where there was a lot of time suddenly. And, you know, I hate to say this, but like, you could almost enjoy the solitude at that time before it became a life sentence. And especially people you knew weren't terribly sick, right? I had actually gotten COVID. I was the first person in Brown to get COVID. So I shut the university down three days early. So I'd also already had COVID. So I probably felt the kind of relief that I had survived. I wrote a lot. But then after that, it took several years of a lot of introspection, a lot of patience to figure out what parts weren't working, what needed to be cut, what threads needed to be improved. And honestly, that was very difficult. Because when you have this many characters and that much material, you're also attached to it. Like that's part of the ego part of the writing process, right? Which I'm sure listeners will be familiar with, which is that you write something, you're like, this is genius. I'm amazing. But it takes like a while, you have to really step away from it and forget that you wrote it to be like, oh, actually, that was bad. Like, I should just get rid of it. So that took time. So I would say by 2023, I'd finished more or less a close last draft, and I'd sold it to my publishers. But then I took another, it took a while for my editors to give me edits, I decided to make bigger edits, I really wanted to improve aspects of the Geeta and Sachin story, especially. Because that was more complicated, as you pointed out, because it's actually like a decent marriage, not a great marriage, but one which is kind of realistic, where there's miscommunication, but fundamentally, the two people want to connect and they love each other. So how do you portray that without it becoming boring or lacking drama, because you also need drama. And then during that time, I did start writing several other like 2022 onwards, like I've been working on several other books, which are still in the very early stages. But I think that was a good thing. Because I one piece of advice I would give to other people who are trying to write is work on several things at once. Because then if you get stuck, you have something else to go to. And I wish I'd done that earlier in the writing of this book. Because speaking of marriage, this kind of monogamy can be very difficult with a piece of fiction. Yeah. And were there any sort of like, because the book has so many characters, right? And each character has their own complicated history in our life. Were there any characters that were there in the book that you had to cut out? So, you know, there's, there was a lot more about the character Cindy, who... I like her a lot, actually. Cindy is almost like a counterpoint to some of the lives of the other women, because she is, you know, her actual name is Simran Preet, but she's gone to the US, she's got a very successful professional career. She has decided in a way that's slightly, you know, slightly pseudo, I would say to become completely American, go by Cindy and calling her husband, who's Vir, calling him Val. But she, you know, is a very vivacious person. And she has a very strong sense of self, and kind of is trying to cut through the crap, essentially, in a very American way. There was much more of a friendship with Geeta. But then, you know, I kind of went on for a while. There was, at one point, there was a character who was Sachin's mother, who actually ended up not having in the novel, who comes also to the US to help them various things. There were, I think that was actually it. And there was maybe a couple more of the brothers and sisters in the Chopra complex who had been mentioned in passing, maybe in a few paragraphs. So essentially, I kept trying to winnow it down to make it tighter and tighter, so that eventually, it's a story of Geeta and Lakshman, and the way they are linked by this violation, and the way their lives diverge and converge. Yeah, I did like Cindy a lot, because she's kind of, yeah, the juxtaposition against Geeta. And, you know, she tells her husband, hey, stop romanticizing India, we're American now. And she also has an American accent. So she represents a certain type of immigrant, which I found enduring and funny. Another scene that's coming to my mind is when Sachin moves back to India, and he sets up a business with his friend and his friend then ghosts him, which I found really actually very sad and very heartbreaking. Because again, it's about that dashed hope and what you said about men starting businesses together. And because Sachin is such a bad taskmaster and such a bad employer that his friend decides that he can't work with him. And there's a lot about Sachin and work actually, because he's just never satisfied with his work, even though he's seemingly doing well at the company that he works in, in America, he's designing these plastic bottles, he never feels like he's enough, he never feels like he's doing enough. I think a lot of the men in the book have that feeling where they feel inadequate, compared to within themselves, and also compared to the patriarch, who is this god like larger than life figure. I kept, I kept wondering, what, what did the patriarch also think that he was inadequate? When he was sort of alive? No, again, thank you for I mean, honestly, like such a precise understanding of the things the book was doing. Because yes, the men all feel inadequate. I mean, I'm kind of curious why I'm always I will be interesting to write a man who felt at peace with himself. Maybe I should try it for the next book. But at least in this case, yes, it's externalized. It's not like they're they're selfish. It's just that they have low self esteem. They have low self esteem, with regards to SP Chopra. And actually, I don't think that SP Chopra felt that way. And I think partly it is because in the novel, he's portrayed as someone about whom there was zero expectations, like he had the kind of strange childhood, his he didn't come from a family where there was an established legacy of greatness in politics. So because he's the first, I think there is a sense of freedom that the first one has. I mean, obviously, he must have had lots of struggles, and I don't really get into that. But you just get the sense that he was carried along by these tides of history, and he wrote them successfully. Sachin is very dissatisfied with his work. I mean, I think on some level, he enjoys the work in the US that he does for this company making this ketchup bottle, but he has a kind of a he's dislocated because his marriage isn't doing okay. But then he also feels this thing of which I think immigrants feel especially people who grew up privileged in India, which is like, why am I not helping my country? You know, it educated me, I should be doing something here. But it was also very important to show, you know, I didn't want it to be that all the poor, the NRIs are the ones who are having a tough time. It's actually like, when they come back, Sachin is behaving quite badly with his employees, because he has become this kind of brash, direct American. And there's this feeling of like, oh, suddenly, even Gita thinks, oh, did I actually also behave like an ugly American when I came back and I didn't realize it. So I wanted that to be those moments where the narrative is looking around itself to make it clear that like, it's always great. It's the and you know, then you can look back at the scene where Gita is at the wedding, where she meets Lakshman, where she is kind of saying like, oh, you should give me money for the Ray-Bans I bought you. She's joking. But you can see why it might rub someone the wrong way in India when they're feeling deprived, right? So it was, it was, this is why like, it took so long to write is like, I wanted all those minor things to have meaning. Yeah. I think also like sort of the men feeling inadequate. It is a thing of I've seen with fathers and sons, you know, when you have a and especially with men in particular, because they place these expectations on them, that they then have to live up to where their father is this larger than life patriarch. And, you know, and you just can't sort of, and you see it playing out actually over and over again, like even Abhishek Bachchan and Havitab Bachchan, you just can't live up to the legend. And I think that's something that a lot of these men are dealing with it. Surprisingly, the women, I feel though they're very confined and they're not, as in they're constrained by their circumstance. I don't, I didn't sense that they had low self-esteem in the way that the men did. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think like, you know, what you're touching on is the one subject that I'm very interested in and I've always written about is male entitlement, because I do think that is also at the heart of nationalism is not, it's one thing to feel inadequate. Okay. Many people feel inadequate. We all do. And it's okay to feel that, right? The problem is when you feel inadequate and you feel entitled to greatness. I mean, I think that's the problem with these nationalist movements is that it's okay to say India is a wonderful country that has many problems, right? That we have a great culture, but the culture has problems as well. It becomes, but the issue is that nationalists, Hindu nationalists, for example, will say, no, actually we're the greatest on earth and we need to be greater than everyone else because our ancestors were the greatest. We have the greatest philosophy. We invented the airplane in 2000 BC. I mean, that becomes this kind of thing of why do you need that? Because you're feeling inadequate. So you're now pounding on your chest out of a sense of entitlement, right? Like no one is entitled to greatness, but I think that's, so the women in this case are, they might have issues, but they aren't, none of them have that kind of, you know, bitter pride, except maybe Vibha has it a little bit. Yeah, that's true. Inadequacy plus entitlement. Yeah. They're not, yeah, they don't have that. I agree. And they're more likable in a way than the male characters, even though you obviously feel pity for the male characters. So you teach creative writing at Brown University, which is one of the best universities in the world. So what kind of advice do you give your creative writing students? What's the one piece of advice that you keep going back to? Don't do it. No, that's not true. I mean, I think I do say to them, like, you have to really be obsessed with writing in order to pursue this career because it is a very difficult career emotionally. There's a lot of years of struggle of not earning as much money as people move on into more remunerative fields. But that's a kind of general advice. But the main, I would say like the main thrust of my teaching and the way I read their work is that I really feel you have to write in consonance with your unconscious. You have to let your writing go in the direction it wants to go, follow the energy of your own writing. Because in the end, people are not reading for technique. They're not even always reading for character of a sentence. They're reading for a kind of energy that is pulsing through the writing, that kind of authentic feeling. And you have to feel it yourself if the reader is going to feel it. And so yes, learning all the techniques like this is how dialogue should be written. This is how characters should be described is important. But holding on to that first impulse is in some ways the most important thing. And how do you balance the two things? And I think this, of course, is what happens with every profession where you maybe have to go through some years of apprenticeship where you're learning the techniques, and then you start feeling really free within the constraints. And you can come back to that place of childish wonder and joy. So that's one thing I really talk about. Yeah, that does make sense. Because at the end of the day, it's like what's the difference between us and AI, right? I know everybody's talking about it, but AI has the techniques, but it may not have that instinct and that impulse and the thing that makes human creativity so interesting. I know I'd ask myself, you know, if there's a really great book, which is very interesting, and exactly of my alien is written by AI, would I pick it up? No, I don't think I'd ever pick it up, personally, because it's it's not about that for me. Like I want to know about the person who's written and I want to know because I want to know what makes them tick. Like I knew it, you know, I didn't know much about you, I knew that you're an immigrant, I knew that. So I also wondered about the author who's writing the book and what they are thinking when they are writing the book. And why are they putting these themes? Why are they writing about these men in this way? Or why are they writing about the immigration experience in this way? And I think that's what makes it interesting. Yeah. Well, to bring it back to what you had opened the interview with this question of why is that this author's note, where, you know, I say, I received this manuscript in the drafts folder of Mohit Chopra's email, some of it is also that thing of wanting to bring the notion of the author into the text, because that's something that's always like a shadow understanding we have of any piece of fiction or even nonfiction read, which is that we're aware it's written by an individual. And we are always sort of wondering what is the relationship between the individual's own life and the events in the text, because you always think, okay, some parts must be autobiographical, some parts are not. So I also wanted to play with that, to bring that up right away, and to acknowledge that this is a kind of interest that the reader also has. Okay, yeah, that's, that's really cool. I don't think I've seen many authors do that, and acknowledge that, because otherwise, you don't want to break the fourth wall, obviously, unless you know, you do it in a way that's really appealing, you want the reader to be in the story. So how have you changed as a novelist between this novel and your last novel? I think that I've gotten better, hopefully. But the way I've really changed is that I've become a lot more patient, I think that I mean, this was a hard one lesson, which is that there were certain things with the complex that I needed to improve and fix. And the only way I could do them was with time, with distance. So I'd say that's one thing. And then the other is, I really feel that I think partly because I was dealing with so many different types of people in this novel, women, men of a different generation, children, I really have this feeling now of freedom, where like, I think that I can enter into the perspective of any character if I spend enough time researching them and thinking about them. And that's a good feeling, because there is a movement in fiction right now, which I don't love, which is that you can only write about your own experience, or, you know, obviously, you want to be careful about the line of appropriation and not but this feeling of a joint humanity is a really nice feeling to have as a human being. And I like holding on to that feeling. That's amazing that yeah, that confidence that comes with mastery. So what is one book that you would recommend to all your creative writing students or any listeners out there? Do you mean a book that is about teach about writing? No, no, just like a novel? Well, I'll recommend a short story collection by this writer, Jamil Jaan Kochai. I don't know if you've read him, Afghan American writer, amazing, very funny, very surreal. His short story collection, The Haunting of Haji Hotak, I would recommend wholeheartedly. I could teach it quite often. Just an amazing talent and kind of like Rushdie does this very funny thing with language where it is written, partly in like a kind of Sacramento slang, because that's where Jamil is from. And then partly in the voice of a quite pious Muslim, like all the characters are pious, but also like, you know, using swear words and stuff. And so the effect is really unusual. And of course, he really gets into the trauma of first and second generation Afghani immigrants to America and what they've carried back with them from Afghanistan. So that's what I would recommend. Yeah, sounds really good. I'll check it out as well. So yeah, so, you know, congrats on this novel. And this novel explores 70s and 80s in Delhi. So what is your next book going to be about? Do you have any idea? Sadly, I seem to be going further into the past. I mean, I have I'm working on several things. But one of them is definitely about Sikh immigrants coming to Canada in the 1900s. So I've been researching that. In fact, I'd gone to Canada several times for this, but once also to report on the Sikh community in present day Surrey and what has happened in that community after the killing of Hadeeb Singh Najjar. And then I'm trying to also write about the life of an Ismaili woman who comes from Kenya to America, again, in the 70s and 80s. So I think what I'm trying to do, the sense I get is that I'm trying to develop almost like a prehistory of migrations for myself so I can eventually write about like the experience of someone like myself. But that seems like it can be it'll be 2050 when I write about 2001 the way I'm going. Yeah. Yeah. So but like, what makes you interested in sort of what made you interested in the 70s and 80s for this novel? For this novel, I think a quite straightforward reason, which is that I'm born in 1984. And those immediate years right before you're born and right after you're born are very powerful for fiction writers, because you have a vague sense of what you know what the atmosphere was but you don't really know why people were behaving the way they were. And so you have a curiosity and a natural interest. Okay, school was closed for two weeks during these protests in 1990. But okay, but why was my family member or why was a family friend lying in front of a bus to protest reservations? Like, why was he so activated by this? Or why, you know, what was it like for Delhi Punjabi families right after the emergency? How were they talking about it? And so I even say things like, you know, there's a Arjun at one point says, Oh, actually, emergency was a good thing. Everything was working, right. So people had like very mixed opinions, like, especially when you're a middle class, more privileged person. So capturing those things is why I think I was writing about that period. And of course, the pre history of the rise of Hindu nationalism as well. Yeah. Thank you for this incredible conversation. I really love the book and I like the scale of it. And I also liked how emotionally observant it is. And I love family stories. So when I found out about the premise of this book, I immediately picked it up. And for my listeners, here's a question. What is one thing your family does that drives you absolutely insane, but secretly would make you emotional if it disappeared? Tell me in the comments. And thanks. Thanks for listening. And maybe I can write a story about one of those. Oh, yeah. Thank you so much, Tara. Thank you.