Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Poetry • Winter 2011 - Blueprint
Because some of them crawled on broken
hands and knees to save me
with their poems.
Because I was only
wretchedness at the edge of an abyss
of fashion magazines, and that
trickle of water down the side of their mountain
into my empty cup, which I refused to drink, they
were offering that to me. Because
I washed my face in their blood. Because
I tossed my hours in their coffins.
Because I was otherwise just dust rising off
a lampshade. My
tatters in rags without them:
A girl blinded by her own hair
riding her bike somewhere—
stupid, dying
for want of what
was written there.
A glittering starvation, forgiven. Willing
to burn their hands for me
to deliver it, burning
while I denied that it was burning.
I was like a child outside a cave of snow
that had collapsed on her fathers.
I laughed, wildly, for a little while.
And then I screamed.
And then I pouted.
Then I grew older, and had to begin
to dig my own pitiful little
hole with a teaspoon to get to them.
Features • Summer 2017
Gaborone is the capital city of Botswana. It resides to the South-East of this small, landlocked country in Southern Africa. Looking at a political map of Botswana might convince you that there does, in fact, exist more than one city or town or village within it. This is not the case. In scientific data sets, we tend to ignore outlier points that don’t align with our line or curve of best fit, and, in a country where almost half of its citizens live within a hundred kilometres of its capital, it is also easy to ignore anything else outside that radius, so we do.
A zebra burns to ashes by the Marina traffic circle.
The University of Botswana was built by cows.
Chickens sang songs in the nighttime.
A goat glittered in the sky.
In the middle of Sir Seretse Khama International Airport, an elephant stands.
Do you like worms?
A zebra burns to ashes by the Marina traffic circle. The circle isn’t too far from Main Mall, and its name stems from its closeness to the biggest public hospital, Princess Marina, where one can spend the whole day waiting to see a doctor. This doesn’t matter to most of us anyway, since the citizen visit to government institutions is the habitual holiday all Batswana are obliged to take. Of course, we all complain about bureaucracy, but the ones who genuinely and seriously complain about it are mostly the wealthy, who say things like how the mediocrity of our civil service is why our labour force is so unproductive, that this is the reason why we’re a third world country. The Marina traffic circle was adorned with ornaments of blue, black and white, the colours of the national flag, in commemoration of our 40th year of independence from the British. One prominent decoration was a steel wire zebra statue, now affectionately called ‘Zebbie’, in memory of its public cremation. Protesters from the University of Botswana set the zebra ablaze because the government once again failed to pay living allowances to its students. Botswana has the second highest level of income inequality in the world. Tertiary education in Botswana is free for those who qualify. Youth unemployment remains above thirty percent. We are considered the ‘success’ story of Africa. Botswana was once one of the poorest countries in the world. Sixty percent of our gross domestic product is reliant on diamond mining. We’re running out of diamonds. Our economic diversification policies include rapidly expanding our tourism sector. Tourists like zebras. A few more zebra-related thoughts: The Zebras are the national football team of Botswana; the zebra is the nation’s flagship animal, most likely chosen because of the co-existence of its black and white stripes, which represent the vastly different racial history we have from neighbouring South Africa (our first president married a white British woman); a zebra was burnt to ashes in the heart of the city that is the heart of the country in a manner reminiscent of the ongoing students protests in South Africa, in which faeces in plastic bags were thrown at the statue of the god of all colonialists, Cecil John Rhodes, which used to stand at the centre of the University of Cape Town. I don’t like South Africa. I feel blacker there than I do in America.
The University of Botswana was built by cows. The story goes like this: in my grandparent’s generation, to fund the local university, families brought a cow with them to where it would be built. At least that’s how I remember the story being told to me. It sounds both beautiful and absurd. I’ve always underestimated the importance of cows. I vaguely remember my mother telling me that my grandfather gave me a cow for my eighteenth birthday. Of course, I didn’t know what to do with it- the cow and my grandfather live past that hundred-kilometre radius outside Gaborone. It’s likely that I’m creating this next vague memory, but I think that the cow was slaughtered and eaten for Christmas or New Year’s or something like that. In high school, the girls I tended to like weren’t Batswana, so I didn’t worry much about the one inevitable day when an uncle or aunt from the village would eventually find me and ask, ‘How many cows will you give us for her?’ With the one Motswana girl that I did like, I used to make jokes about lobola, bride price: ‘Do you think your family will let me pay them in poetry instead of cows?’
Chickens sang songs in the nighttime. During the school holidays, my sister and I were sent to live with our grandparents outside Gaborone and for weeks we would cease to exist. Many of us were often sent off to our respective home villages so that we could spend time with extended family, which is to say to help out on their farms. Luckily, we didn’t have to do much. My grandparents lived in a city, and, even though it was not Gaborone, it still wasn’t a farm. My grandmother still managed to run a small chicken selling business, and every so often two truck-fulls of chickens would arrive with my grandfather to be neck-snapped, plucked, boiled and frozen. There were always a few nights before the big day where tens of my grandmother’s friends would come over to help her, a little community factory of feather-tearing, family-talk chuckling, and wiping off various chicken remains off their gumboots. In their cages the chickens clucked and clucked before the dawn. It did not make for good lullabies. I did not feel particularly sorry for them. They would soon become tasty. Years later, after the last of those holidays, back in Gaborone, where I was once again a being that existed, I would dream my last dream of leaving Botswana. I heard that Americans would ask me if I rode lions to school. They don’t. But I don’t really think to tell them, when they ask what it’s like actually, that even Gaborone, where the first skyscrapers have finally appeared, has chickens occasionally crossing its busiest roads. I did not register them clucking past the traffic lights with my little cheek pressed slimily against the backseat window, my mother reprimanding me for not waking up on time for school. Nor am I sure if I saw the twisting acacia trees with small leaves and pin-prick thorns. I maybe saw grandaunts wearing blue headwraps at the side of the road selling airtime for cell phones. I perhaps saw minibus --no, combi-- drivers wearing bucket hats and chewing toothpicks. I might have been wearing that khaki school uniform. But I do see the chickens now, clucking by the traffic lights.
A goat glittered in the sky. No, this didn’t happen, at least not like that. Every one of us looked at the stars when we were younger. Many too checked their horoscopes. But not many could point up at the night and say that a particular constellation was theirs. I’m a Capricorn. I couldn’t tell which stars were which and I still can’t. Specifically, I couldn’t tell you which stars were which in Francistown, where my grandparents lived; though this is where I remember them, because they came out after we untied the dogs’ leashes from their small houses. It was the same time when friends had to return home, soccer balls put away, last errands to the little shop to buy bread for dinner were made, outside lights switched on. And a little look up before they locked the doors. None of this happened though, because Francistown is not Gaborone, and therefore does not exist, especially on my Facebook timeline, where a zebra burns to ashes by the Marina traffic circle. There was no little look upwards before my grandparents locked the doors. I did not see any goats glittering up there, which are important to us Batswana too. They’re just not as important as cows or chickens.
In the middle of the Gaborone International Airport, an elephant stands. It is a sculpture constructed of many elephant tusks. I don’t remember if the tusks were recovered from poachers, or were taken from the remains of elephants that died of natural causes. It’s pretty big. It helps me resent the airport a bit less, which has been swallowing up my loved ones for a while now: my father (a commercial airline pilot), my sister (a scholarship student), an old lover (there will be no receipt of any cows or poems from me), an almost lover (another scholarship student), my best friend (yet another scholarship student) and now me (just another scholarship student). For most of the year, my mother lives at home by herself in a large double story that was meant to house my whole family. My parents worked hard for it. My sister lived in it for less than a year. I don’t how my mother feels about the elephant statue.
Do you like worms? Mophane worms have stripes, of blue, yellow and orange that seem to vary with each wriggle. When dehydrated, they turn a dark, moody green of sorts and taste like potato chips made out of cashew nuts. I don’t like them in stews, because their yellow insides become mushy instead of powdery, and because the spikes on their skin prick sharper when warm. I mostly ate them when I was with my grandparents; very rarely in Gaborone. My older sister used to watch this show called Fear Factor and my parents watched documentaries of people in Southeast Asian countries. In Fear Factor,young and gleaming Americans face frightening challenges (to win tens of thousands of dollars, always), including a section where participants consume a bowl of cockroaches, earthworms and other critters. In some documentary of some Southeast Asian country, another young, gleaming American tries out deep-fried grasshoppers at a local food stand. With each juicy crunch, we asked ourselves, why would anyone eat something like that? Brian Wilson, the frontman of the Californian surf-rock band The Beach Boys, wrote a song in the sixties during his period of mental instability called ‘Do You Like Worms?’ I’ve been thinking about how weird and whimsical that song title is for a few years now, what a strange dude, but yes, yes, I do like worms, I like them quite a lot actually.
Tsamaya sentle.
Sala sentle.
Ke tla go bona.
Go siame.
“Mooooorrrwaaaa.”
“Mmmmmmooooorrrrrrwaaaaaaaa.”
“MMMOOOOORRRWAAA...”
“MMMMOOOOOOOORRRRRRRWWWWWAAAAAAAAAA.”
Muted lights. A man saunters past a stage-door. His walk is chastened by his work suit. It is tight. He steps up to a coat-rack. Briefly glares at it. Closes his eyes. Breathes. He places his hands to the knot of his tie, breathes. Unties it slowly, lifts the length of it against his neck like a noose, coughs, strangles, breathes. He places it on the coat rack and slowly undresses the rest of himself, breathing still. It takes him an unbearable forever to strip down to his underwear. His breaths sounds like sex, or like a struggle of birth. He then saunters to a wide circle of clothing and fabrics on the stage floor, a brown-plastic washbucket at its centre. The circle cocoons him like a womb. He stares inside the bucket, then grabs a shirt and begins to scrub for a while. After another while, he begins to tell us about himself as the spotlight softens. Morwa. Son. He grew up just on the edge of that hundred-kilometre radius. Sometimes, a particular piece of laundry leads to a monologue memory: He ties a towel to his neck and flies across the circle, screeching with childish glee, ‘I AM SUPERMAN! PFFFFEWWWW! SHHHFFFWWWOOOSSSHHH!’. Or he puts on a flat-cap and swaggers with his hands to his balls while telling us about the girls he hit on when he was in high school, “u no wat im sayin u no wat im saying dawg ya feel me?”. Or he picks up a collared shirt and talks about his father, the perfect archetype of a strong Motswana man. His father takes care of his family. His father caught him watching porn and beat him with a belt. His father’s joy when he was accepted to university in South Africa. His father advice--warnings really-- about leaving home. Pain and suffering comes to those who forget the lessons that their parents taught them. Only fools try to run away from where they are from. Focus on your studies and nothing else. Don’t you dare disappoint our family. The play reaches its climax as Morwa recounts his troubled experience coming to manhood in the South African city of Johannesburg, a much different creature from Gaborone entirely. In Jozi, women eat men alive, guns are legal, drugs easy like candy, money everything. “WHO THE FUCK AM I?” he cries as he splatters his fists into his dirty laundry-water reflection. Morwa. Son. At the end of it all, the actor playing Morwa steps up again to the coat-rack, puts on his suit, nooses his neck into the tie, and walks towards to a free seat in the audience. He sits down, the lights go off, and we applaud. A year later, when I come back home for the summer, the sun is setting and my body slumps on the passenger seat of the actor’s car. The actor used to be my drama teacher in high school. I called him when it hit me that I wouldn’t be giving any cows or poems to that girl’s family. So we drove towards the edge of the hundred-kilometre radius, because it’s nice to not exist sometimes. He talked to me about becoming a man in Botswana; I talked to him about the play. I left home again not too soon afterwards. I did not leave home a man. I don’t remember how the actor said goodbye. There are many ways of saying goodbye in Setswana. Go well. Tsamaya sentle.
A friend of mine once posted on his Timeline, “Botswana is a big Facebook group. Not a country.” This is true. For about two weeks the most important news in the entire nation was whether or not Miss Botswana deserved to have won her crown. Detailed arguments were made in the comments section of her Facebook: her (modest) tattoo should have immediately disqualified her; she publicly said that her favourite food is Japanese instead of traditional Setswana cuisine (the obvious right answer); her suspect answer to the question of how to address youth unemployment, “ESP” (referring to the ‘Economic Stimulus Program’ which nearly the entire population acknowledges as another government failure). Just recently, widely shared sex tapes of underage girls have become the foundations of memes and hashtags. I hope it is obvious that this is not what I mean when I tell Americans that Botswana is far more community-orientated than America. Nevertheless, Botswana follows me even here. Not that I ever wanted to, but I will never be able to say goodbye to it truly and fully. I can only do so half-heartedly, by liking all my Batswana friends’ pictures and statuses while not replying their messages. There are many ways of saying goodbye in Setswana. Remain well. Sala sentle.
The centre of Gaborone is known simply as ‘station’. Every form of public transportation on wheels, from no matter what part of the city or the country, always ends up there. If you climb up to one of the two bridges, preferably the newer one connecting to a freshly opened shopping mall, you can watch the entirety of Gaborone walk and talk in ways that make New York look boring. We all squeeze together into the same combis, tiny minibuses which carry the weight of the city all around it like a frustrating, inefficient circulation system; we always get to where we needed to go later than we needed to get there. The private school kids avoid station because they think it’s shady. It is. But it is also beautiful. Full disclosure: I was a private school kid. My Setswana is so thoroughly mangled by years of neglect that I try to avoid talking aloud at station as much as possible. There’s another bridge a bit further off which some of my competitive debater friends call ‘Sunset Boulevard’. The first time I went there was with them and we argued, we joked, we tried to fix my Setswana (...we had chicken for lunch). This was also the first time I had been to station for more than half an hour without my older sister and after five p.m. It shouldn’t have surprised me that the sunset felt more orange, more purple than through my bedroom window. It shouldn’t have surprised me that it doesn’t do one any good watching sunsets alone in one’s room, that mouths crying open together and teeth gleaming is what really makes a sunset a sunset. Nor should it have surprised me that at the end of this, when the orange and purple of the sky stiffened to a deep blackness, that this memory would stick to me after I long left Gaborone with the word ‘maybe’ in my mouth. Maybe I’ll come back years from now. Maybe. There are many ways of saying goodbye in Setswana. I will see you. Ke tla go bona.
I don’t like diaspora poets. I saw an annoying Twitter post while stalking the girl-who-will-no-longer-receive-cows-or-poems’ profile back when things were good between us. It reads, ‘diaspora poet starter pack buzzwords: tongues, womb, mother, homeland, broken.’ I laughed when I first saw it. How true! So relatable! It becomes increasingly less funny the more that I look over my old poems: ‘I helped them cut off my tongue’; ‘I graduated fresh and bloody from my mother’s womb’; ‘Home is where the heart is but the heart is a broken place’; ‘Diaspora children know not what to do with their dark, dark skin.’ Diaspora poets annoy me because they are always saying goodbye to things. Goodbye to a self that exists only in the homeland. Goodbye to a homeland that will always be more than the self that tries to hold it in its tongue. I am tired of saying goodbye to things. I am tired of saying it to people, to girls, to memories that never existed in the first place because they were not in Gaborone, to various versions of myself that each ask themselves who the fuck they are, and most especially to cows and chickens. And there are so many ways of saying it. At some point the flights become blurs. I’m lying on my bed one night, staring at my bedroom wall from the side of it with my head on a pillow, and then maybe I imagine my face facing some film camera; then the scene shifts, an obvious edit, but my face faces the camera still with the exact same blank expression, just a different background, another country; the bedroom wall a different colour with my same head on another pillow. The memories all the same, not sleeping, still thinking:
A zebra burns to ashes by the Marina traffic circle.
The University of Botswana was built by cows.
Chickens sang songs in the nighttime.
A goat glittered in the sky.
In the middle of Sir Seretse Khama International Airport, an elephant stands.
Do you like worms?
Sala sentle.
Tsamaya sentle.
Ke tla go bona.
There are many ways of saying goodbye in Setswana. It is okay. Go siame.
Poetry • Fall 2018
It’s hot in the middle of the storm. It’s humid
gray. Makes the dust bloat. I can hardly breathe in
it, air moving too fast for me to hold onto, wind’s body
swimming over mine. Like being in a room when all
anyone wants is a little power over you, arms stroking
against heads, black wide glass eyes darting, staying afloat...
In dance class we are told to fall forward–
hurtling our bodies ahead, asking to be caught
by our selves once we get there. What I put forward as
flesh gets pushed back by wind. Our bodies hurtle against
each other, one risen from the sea, one made out
of clay... Power is a series of erasures. You fall into it. You
push against it. It pushes back. The wind is full of coyotes
saying, saying –
Some days, I say, I don’t think of it
at all. I wake up having already been loved
by the entrance of the day, the day that says come out
now. The day that says the earth is your friend and you
have a secret between you– it is your life. You walk out
under the blue carpet of night and see planes migrating
overhead, then a fountain, this magnolia tree, its pink
fisted buds newly unclenched, dormancy beat open,
pushing up against the seed-coat... Here we are,
we did not ask to be woken, though it was not easy,
not safe, we open as oblations on a dark branch,
pink-veined luscious mouths drummed open by rain.
A voice inked with water and wind rises. And the black
loam beneath.
Features • Winter 2017 - Cell
Rana Dasgupta is a British-Indian writer. He lives in Delhi; his 3rd and most recent book Capital is a non-fictional exploration of the Indian capital’s new elite class and their place in the global turbulence of the early 2000s. His second book, the novel Solo, won the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and his first novel, Tokyo Cancelled, has received wide acclaim.
Dasgupta spoke with Fiction Board member Henry Shah ’17 in New Delhi on a hazy day in late August, 2016. Below is a transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity.
ADVOCATE: Can you place this book within your wider work?
DASGUPTA: How can I explain this phase of mine? Reading H.G. Wells is a good example of somebody who has very powerful concepts to describe the world in a mixture of ction and nonfiction. There’s this idea of the writer who is a thinker and essayist and novelist is not very contemporary, but I like it. The novel I’m writing right now builds a lot on the subterranean aspects of Capital. There were a lot of things in Capital I couldn’t write about because I owed some kind of protection to people I interviewed. Their sex lives, their addictions, their dream lives, their intimate things were not things I could write about. And yet as mad as that world was, many of the characters were far madder than I could write about. Some of that goes into fiction, but I think that this back and forth between fiction and nonfiction is a very appropriate response to this time, especially when one is writing of places like Delhi. A lot of one’s duty as a writer is simply documentary because this thing of globalization leaves a lot of people bewildered by the sheer factual basis of the world they’re living in. They are connected to things they have no factual knowledge about. That factual knowledge cannot be all delivered by all CNN. It’s not all statistics. Going out and just writing what people are living is part of the writer’s response to this moment in which the world is becoming strange to itself. At the same time, I think that if we stay with what exists, we can’t engage with what we can imagine. We desperately need to imagine things at the moment. We’re weighed down by what exists, by the certainty that the world is coming to an end.
ADVOCATE: Would you discuss the framing of your book?
DASGUPTA: The epigraph to the book is from Brecht. It refers to a moment in Berlin that seems akin to this moment in Delhi. This story goes back to the 18th century and is the long story of modernity. It is the constant rolling out of the world system. I don’t see this as an “Eastern” story to complicate a “Western” story. It is the maturing and further unfurling of something. It is a book of classical modernism. Marx is very important. Other people have also given a sensibility here, like Baudelaire. The sense of euphoria and horror is the constant modern dichotomy of feeling. In a way, I think it’s the only true feeling of this time, which we see in Goethe, in Nietzsche, in Marx. It’s important to be true to both halves of that feeling. If you are, as the BJP was, blind to the destruction and fallout of the present, you are just mad. If you can’t understand the euphoria and dy- namism and the hope, you are just ungenerous to the grandeur of history. Many things are happening which can’t be reduced to horror. I’m trying to expand myself and go in all directions.
ADVOCATE: Delhi seems to embody your modernist oscillation between euphoria and anxiety. Your interlocutors’ words pulse with fear and buried desire. How did this negotiation of feeling work on a conversation-by-conversation level?
DASGUPTA: It felt like therapy. The most interesting characters I met were men. They were most interesting because they were far more wounded and haunted than the women, who I found had normal responses to the city in many ways. The people on the receiving end of misogyny are sometimes not the ones who can relate it the best. The perpetrators here are the maddest of all. The other thing is, women were talking to each other. The conversations they had with me were not particularly remarkable in their lives. Men had often not said these things before. They were repressed, especially the wealthier, more macho figures. They had no conversations in their lives at all to speak of anxieties, parents, women—except in lurid ways. I had no stake in their performance. I just asked very earnest questions as an outsider about very serious things in life. These became remarkable conversations in their lives. They would even call later and say, ‘can we talk more, there are more things I’ve got to tell you about.’ It did become ambiguous who needed this conversation more, them or the writer.
ADVOCATE: Your portrait of Delhi is rich and expansive, but has a connected thread. Can you describe the thematic or lived unity of these experiences?
DASGUPTA: I don’t think it’s an artificial structure I’ve imposed on this group of people. The traumas of Partition have been focused and intensied over this generation. The energy over which money has been made and the city has been regrouped are pretty mad energies. All other cities are far more hospitable to outsiders than Delhi, which has no even official desire to receive and settle outsiders. They will live in tents for the duration. When the US edition first came out of Capital, they sent out a draft cover. There was a Rolls Royce driving down the street next to a woman selling vegetables. It was kind of comic anyway in its desire to prove easy contrast. It was also clearly in Bombay—the woman on the sidewalk, contrary to what the New York editors thought, was not some kind of pathetic, downtrodden individual. She was a well-dressed, dignied tradeswoman. To a Delhi observer, she looked extremely in command of herself. That same population in Delhi is far more vulnerable and at the mercy of all kinds of violence. You have to understand that this city is very militarized and policed. All these South Delhi neighborhoods have these ‘residents’ welfare associations’ that employ military men. They patrol the streets; their whole drive is to put up more steel between the poor and the wealthy populations. When you see the vehemence of these measures, you know you will see all kinds of intense phobias in the minds of the elite. Many see rape as a punishment on women. The psyche gets out of control. The whole reason I thought to write nonfiction about this time between 2000-2010 was because I knew the truth would be mad. This is really in your world.
ADVOCATE: Many American readers are used to a depiction of India in which poverty and deprivation are foregrounded. Can you speak of your choice to write about India’s middle classes and elite?
DASGUPTA: This idea that India is best and most authentically represented by its poor is very tedious. The suffering of the poor exists on a monumental scale. No attempt to represent it will ever be adequate. At the time I was writing the book, there was an American report about inequality in India. The figures are misleading for all sorts of reasons. But it’s clear that there has been a class who have massively benetted from what has been going on. They’ve maneuvered themselves to a master-like position, where they can easily determine the fate of everyone—the billion-plus. To me, the idea that talking to those people is a betrayal is ridiculous. Who are those people and what kind of world do they want to live in? They’re not the same as American billionaires or Swiss billionaires. They’ve a very different history. The idea that one could be a billionaire is only twenty years old in this country. They are at a different point in the cycle of their country’s history. The postcolonial history inects their ambitions in interesting ways. It’s extremely relevant to talk about them. There are various gradations. We’re talking about a tiny slab within the Indian population, but about wide variation within that slab. The economists can’t document that variation very well, because economists cannot or will not venture far into the illegitimate realms of wealth. The lack of knowledge exists for the middle class. The Indian middle classes want this and want that. Who are these people? None of this is obvious. There’s an idea in the foreign press that we know these people, but I don’t think we do. Materialist, greedy, right wing, et cetera. We wouldn’t tolerate that parody in other countries. We have to be honest and appreciate that we’ve never heard these people speak before. The business press will interview people who can speak a language of stock markets and strategy, but they will not talk to my Nicky Chopra. His money doesn’t show up anywhere.
ADVOCATE: This is your first work of nonfiction. You spoke brieifly earlier about your wide vision for the writer’s role in crafting multiple types of narrative. What kinds of structure and language did you look to deploy when telling these stories?
DASGUPTA: It’s easier and harder than writing a novel. It’s easier because a lot of the material is just given to you. It’s harder because there’s no thread except the city itself. My editors were saying ‘Put more of yourself into the book.’ I wasn’t that interested in myself. The stories spoke for themselves, so it was difficult to structure. I think that for me it was important that it was a novelist’s take. How can a novelist make pronouncements about politics and economics? I think that we know places like this through numbers. That goes for people who live in this place, too. It’s not like we have lived experience of the numerous worlds that make up this city. Our experience, the experience of those living in this city, often boils down to the statistic. In India, these numbers are completely meaningless. In this city, we have people in the highest and lowest indices of every sort. The average tells us nothing about the lived. One had to actually take a novelist’s sensibility. How do people dress? What are they afraid of? What do they drink? How do they decorate their rooms? In these moments of great transition, we wonder how we should feel about the world. There’s a national feeling which has been historically quite predictable and is not. It’s collapsing. We look out at a global space and wonder how we should feel about it. We don’t have many precedents for talking about these feelings. Then I turn to prose. How do we write deeply corrupt societies? We are all corrupt and all complicit but we go on. We still ask ourselves ethical questions. These are weird spaces. It’s important to find the language for that weirdness.
ADVOCATE: Your vivid, even lurid, descriptions of Delhi have been read by some reviewers as an indictment of the present reality in your city.
DASGUPTA: This book is written both for and against this place, for those who live here and those who don’t. The indictment of the city is very clear. My insider indictment is different. I don’t accept the indictment of the outsider—there is a selsh, evil, Indian middle class who wants to keep its resources for itself. I don’t buy this constant conversation that I experience outside of India. ‘Tell us what it feels like to be talking to horrible, selsh people.’ I have no truck with this position. This implies that Indians who are, say, working in an insurance company and sending their kids to private schools have some kind of unique responsibility to the Indian poor which the West doesn’t. The Western middle classes don’t. They can do exactly the same thing with no guilt. This is to take refuge behind things which are just made of paper. The middle classes of the world, not just India, are just selsh. They are concerned with making sure their day’s labor pays for someone else’s several days’ labor. Europe is a gated community in a far more noxious way to the world. I don’t castigate Europeans for that setup. But Indian middle classes are far more conscious of what the global poor look like, and many step out into strange improvised relationships with these seeming others.
ADVOCATE: Bombay has attracted attention as the star player in India’s rise to global prominence. Why Delhi?
DASGUPTA: You were talking about the ways Bombay occupies a place in the American imagination. It’s a hyper-modern version of New York, that’s understandable. It is a city of stars, of nance or corporate families. These are familiar things. The reason why Delhi does not get much attention, but is even more contemporary and uncanny than Bombay, is this question of corruption. The mix of politics and business. I constantly make a Moscow parallel. In order to express things here, one is trying to express ghostly spaces where one doesn’t know what the hell is going on, why that bus shelter got built, who is making money, and what level. The whole city is a scam of some sort. The low and the high come together in interesting ways. We don’t know what the whole story is, but the networks of poor inhabit the bottom and the top. It makes for an incredibly paranoid existence. You know the city is being run in some atrocious way, but you don’t know for what reason. You oscillate between the idea that everyone is a complete idiot and that everyone is a genius in a way you haven’t quite figured out.
Features • Winter 2020 - Feast
*C Pam Zhang is a fiction writer whose stories have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, American Short Fiction, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, How Much of These Hills is Gold, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in April 2020. The Fiction Board caught up with her over email to ask a few questions about writing, revising, and feasting.*
**What is your novel about, and what inspired it? When did you start writing your first draft, and what approach did you take to writing and revising?**
My novel is reimagining of the myth of the American West that centers, instead of white men, two children of immigrants who set out with the body of their dead father. It’s about home, grief, tigers and buffalos, mourning for a ravaged land. The kernel at its heart may be this question: what is it like to live with the visceral reality of a dead body?
I had no intention of writing this novel. I woke up with the first images in my head and exorcised them in the form of a short story. Then I tried to avoid the project because, let’s be honest: why would anyone willingly embark on a novel? It is so long, so thankless, so grueling. You can’t want to write a novel; it must be a need, a hounding.
I wrote my first draft quickly because I believe the goal of any first draft is to produce a heap of utter trash. That’s it. Nothing loftier. That’s the only way you’ll get through it without self-sabotaging by way of perfectionism. When you see your first draft as joyous garbage, it becomes much easier to throw great swathes away in revision, which is the real work of the novel. Probably ten percent of that first draft made it into the final draft; the finished novel is draft maybe, I don’t know, twenty?
**Which books or authors have had the biggest influence on your writing? I’m wondering, for instance, whether the journey your characters take to bury their father is meant to be a spin on *As I Lay Dying*? Are you intentional about situating your work within particular genres (e.g., Asian American literature, immigrant literature, historical fiction, magical realism)?**
I have never read *As I Lay Dying*! In fact I’ve never read Faulkner, or Joyce, or a dozen other writers in the supposed canon, and that’s okay. I mention this only because I used to be ashamed, especially in collegiate settings where I assumed everyone was much more learned than me. I unlearned shame fairly recently. Make your own canon.
I love Marilyn Chin’s *Tales of the Mooncake Vixen* for how she plays with, cannibalizes, thumbs her nose at, mythology. Toni Morrison’s *Beloved* because she is a genius, and makes language and memory ferociously her own. Larry McMurtry’s *Lonesome Dove* for that classic Western epic. Annie Proulx’s *The Shipping News* for language as engine, as joy even when the topic itself is bleak.
Even to this day I get queasy when I see my novel filed under any genre—historical, Asian American, what have you. Genre designations are for readers and marketplaces. They’re not for the writer to consider when writing. They’ll only stifle you if you think about them too early.
**Who are your first readers? Are you friends with other writers? If so, how have you met them?**
I met quite a few of my writing friends online, where we exchange work and also lots of anxiety about writing. Highly recommended to have friends with whom you can be free about your never-ending anxiety.
**When did you start working with your agent and editor? Did anything surprise you about the process of finding and collaborating with them?**
I worked with them very late! Not until I was several drafts into my novel and had polished it as much as I could by myself. The writer Lauren Groff once gave me this excellent advice: if you consider yourself married to your novel, don’t send it out until you’re ready to divorce it. It wasn’t that I thought my novel was perfect when I looked for an agent; it was that I could see a million ways to change it and I no longer had a sense of what change would be for the better or for the worse. I was sick and tired of its stupid face.
I was most surprised by how much I loved being edited. I’d heard before that some writers dislike being edited, and can only conclude that perhaps there are bad editors out there. Both my editor and agent ask questions that force me to think more deeply, rather than give prescriptive feedback. There is a level of foundational trust that they earned at the beginning by speaking about my novel in terms that resonated with me. If anyone ever describes your novel in a way that makes you cringe or gives you pause, that is not your person, no matter how powerful or esteemed.
**The first story I read of yours was “Dad.Me” in McSweeney’s 53, which according to your Twitter “was rejected 38 freakin’ times.” As a writer, how do you deal with rejection? How do you know a story is worth working on and submitting even after it’s been rejected repeatedly?**
I was once told that a writer needs two things: an enormous ego and crippling self-doubt. They’re uneasy partners in this strange writing life. The enormous ego gets you through to the end of projects; the crippling self-doubt helps you edit and be a decent human in the world.
There are plenty of stories I’ve thrown away after a few rejections, or sometimes just a tactful comment from a trusted reader. I kept submitting “Dad.Me” because, quite simply, it moved me every time I read it. Pay attention to when your own work moves you, really moves you—and I don’t mean when it impresses you, or you think you’ve written an especially lyrical metaphor.
**You studied English as an undergrad at Brown. How do you think reading in an academic or critical context differs from reading as a fiction writer? I’ve heard from some writers that studying and analyzing English literature can stifle the creative impulse, whereas other writers find that literary studies and creative writing can be mutually productive. What was your experience?**
There can be great pleasure and satisfaction in an academic paper: the pleasure of articulation. The ability to articulate why you love what you love—or why you hate what you hate—is a tool all people, really, should have.
That said, articulation is a tool for readers and editors; don’t pick it up to write with.
**What kinds of day jobs have you had since graduating from college, and how have they affected your writing or your ability to write?**
I have always had a day job or freelance work. Straight out of college I worked in the San Francisco tech scene full time for about two years, then transitioning to part time. I still do tech work. I grew up in a low-income immigrant family and don’t have a safety net to fall back on. There is no shame in having a career that financially supports you—so many writers have either that or a familial safety net or a romantic partner who pays a greater share of living expenses, and it is criminal that we aren’t more vocal about that.
The hard truth is we do not live in a country that supports artists. Full stop. Support yourself, and be smart about it.
Remember that writing requires both the time to write and the mental freedom to do so. I did not have the latter if I lived in a state of precarity, worried about my next paycheck, how to make rent. Find a balance. Be steely-eyed about what you go into your paying job for, and therefore how much of yourself to put into the job. But it is very possible!
**Finally, an obligatory *FEAST* question —— having lived in thirteen cities across four countries, what are some of your favorite foods and/or eateries that you associate with different places?**
Providence, Rhode Island is cheap deals on buffalo wing deals. Bangkok, Thailand is fried fish from the street, where they get their residual warmth comes from sitting all day under the sun. Union City, California is greasy Chinese food at homestyle restaurants with every item on the menu plastered on the wall. Cambridge, UK is chip butties and Sainbury’s basics.
Poetry • Summer 2020
after Mickalene Thomas
When I look back over my life
on how everything played out
it was I who licked the salt from your pillar
neck. Some days I chose to self-sabotage,
some hours I resembled Orpheus, afraid
we would never walk right up to the sun,
hand-in-hand, my fingers stuck beneath your skirt.
I looked to the hills from whence cometh my help.
I lived in the history of the future where
some of us would not die. When asked to keep on
the straight and narrow, when presented
with the lineup of Tom, Dick, and Harry,
I ducked to enter a pink hole.
When I forgot to mind my head,
God looked over his shoulder.
2026