I grew up in Calcutta, mostly in my maternal grandparents’
home. I grew up with many aunts, uncles, and cousins around me - that had its
own plusses and minuses. Growing up, I always wanted to write - I was always a
bookworm. But my parents wanted me to pursue a career in science. I never
thought I could get the marks that were needed to get into a course in the
sciences. I also suffered from quite a few things, which at the time I did not
understand, but thanks to my uncle, I got all the treatment and help I needed.
I had bipolar tendencies and anxiety while growing up. This became really acute
during my formative years - while graduating from grade ten and then onward
into my engineering course. I really wanted to study English and then pursue
journalism, but my mother was adamant about me becoming either a doctor or an
engineer.
I ended up studying science. Looking back, I’m grateful to
them for pushing me into science, after all - because I doubt that I would have
achieved all that I have, had I taken up art, as opposed to science. I was
privileged and grew up in a family that could afford my education - I went to
IIT-K and Cornell - and I guess I couldn’t have had any of that if I didn’t
have the economic cushion behind me. Science enabled me to have financial
security and a chance to come to the US far easier than I may have, had I
pursued arts. That said, a part of me feels a bit differently - all said and
done, this is what I do for my day job, but writing is what I really want to
do.
When I was in Cornell, I worked in the same group of
Professor Roald Hoffman. He was my co-advisor. One of the things that’s less
known about him is that he is a poet. He was part of a poetry circle that
included TaslimaNasreen on it. Roald once asked me to help him with translating
Tagore’s poetry - and I refused, because I felt that I didn’t have the literary
prowess to do that. But it always stayed with me. A few things happened in my
life all at once, at the time.
While I was working in Intel in 2012, I became pregnant with
my daughter. 2012 was also the year when the Delhi gang rape incident happened.
Around that time, I went through a bad phase in my life, where I felt that I
was not doing anything for the world beyond me, and that I was being very
selfish in existing and earning and working for myself. I had grown up hearing
that I had to finish all my commitments and then do what I wanted. This is the
constant message to us: achieve all the milestones in the linear way and then
you’ll get time to do what you want. In life, though, you don’t have time to do
what you want - you only get less time.
The sense of urgency had set in, and I decided that I was no
longer going to wait for all the milestones to end. It was only my thought
process that was holding me back. I had to redefine success for myself. I
wasn’t writing because I thought that I was not going to have time - but I
decided that I would just take the plunge and start. I made my peace with that,
and reached out to Roald and told him that I wanted to start writing. That was
where the journey of writing began.
The writer
The engineer in me encouraged me to start by looking up ways
to write on Google. I took on a course at MIT, and began to write my short
stories. In 2014, I wrote a piece and submitted it to the Huffington Post,
feeling frustrated about women’s safety in India. It went viral, and got
requests to write more op-eds. I was invited to contribute to Defiant Dreams -
an anthology of stories by, for, and about women.
I wrote a lot about both, sexual violence and sexism that
happened to me, and about mental illness - including the post-partum depression
that I faced. A lot of friends reached out to me and told me that they thought
I was brave for telling my stories. On some occasions, when my father read my
stories, he reached out to me and apologized to me for some of the things. One
of my mother’s reaction was on my choice to share my age out in public: that
was pretty interesting to me! Jokes aside, my writing has always been and will
always be personal, and will always carry a piece of me.
Writing is a healing process for me. I wrote a piece on
post-partum depression and how I didn’t like myself on the dark days. It took
me an hour to hit submit on that article. However, once I put that out there, I began to feel so much freer, and so much lighter.
It’s not easy, in our lives today, to feel comfortable sharing the darker side
of your life. People tend to feel uncomfortable about responding to the painful
and vulnerable side of another person’s life: but to take that leap of faith
and to tell your story can be very liberating.
When I began writing From
An-Other Land, the immigration situation was not this bad. In 2016, things
started going south with the rise of nationalistic feelings from everywhere.
The book is classified as fiction - but almost every story has a seed of truth
in it. I don’t have a creative process per se - but my process is largely
observation. I observe people a lot. I have high emotional intelligence - which
is not positive all the time, because you become emotional in situations where
it isn’t ideal. I have spent a lot of time observing people around me. Some of
the things I wrote in the book were things I had experienced in my life. I
began to realize that wanting to be an immigrant or wanting to go from point A
to point B is a very natural human want. I also came to understand that you
don’t have to be a bad person to be afraid of change and to be at a loss about
keeping up with that. I don’t tell people to have a particular idea around
immigration or immigrants: I just show how these experiences that we share as
immigrants are largely commonly shared.
The book has opened up room for questions, dialogue, and
sharing. I’m often asked if I would have taken the immigrant’s journey knowing
what I know now. My answer to that is both yes and no. Yes, because living in
another land has opened up my mind and perspectives and this may not have
happened if I hadn’t lived outside India. On the other hand, no, because
immigration permanently splits you and it is very hard to find one identity
again.
